The top five London Book Fair deals

From a Paul McCartney biography to Bill Browder's high-profile account of crossing the Kremlin, here is the business getting UK publishers excited at 2013's event
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London Book Fair 2013
Big books business ... the London Book Fair 2013 at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre in London. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

Biography: Paul McCartney by Philip Norman

After John Lennon and Mick Jagger, Philip Norman returns to the Fab Four with an authorised biography of Paul McCartney. The author acknowledges the "worldwide obsession" with the Beatles, but points out that the band split up more than 40 years ago: "longer than John Lennon's lifetime". He promises to weigh up McCartney's huge post-Beatles output with the same care and fairness he applied to Lennon's much smaller one, adding that "the story of how he's managed to remain a recognisably human being after half a century of world adulation promises to be fascinating". The biography is due to be published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 2015.

• Red Notice by Bill Browder

Described by his agent, Patrick Walsh, as a "sort of Liar's Poker" for the new Russia, this memoir gives Bill Browder's account of how he made billions in Russia and fell foul of the Kremlin. According to Walsh, Browder's companies were "basically stolen by a bunch of dodgy Russians", and after he had launched legal proceedings against them his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in police custody in 2009. "This book is about how Bill has identified the 60 people involved in the scam and the murder of Magnitsky, and tried to shut down the rest of the world to them." Red Notice has already been sold in more than 12 countries for "good six-figure sums", and is due to be published in the UK by Transworld in 2014.

• Outrages by Naomi Wolf

Naomi Wolf follows Vagina with an examination of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act – the first law to ban the sale of obscene materials. According to Lennie Goodings, publisher of Virago, the suggestion that in 1857 "bad girls, smut and perversion were essentially invented in the eyes of the law is both a fascinating story and, crucially, an important way of understanding how we arrived at our ideas of normalcy and deviancy – ideas which are with us to this day". Virago is due to publish Outrages in 2016.

• A History of Waterloo by Bernard Cornwell

The historical novelist Bernard Cornwell, who has written over 20 novels telling the story of a soldier in the Napoleonic wars since 1980, turns to non-fiction with an account of the battle of Waterloo. According to the Bookseller it will be published in time to mark the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's defeat in 2015.

• Singing from the Floor by JP Bean

Jarvis Cocker's first acquisition as an editor-at-large for Faber is an oral history of folk clubs – a book which according to Cocker came via the "slightly dubious" route of an encounter the former Pulp guitarist Richard Hawley had with a man in a pub. JP Bean tells the story of the folk revival of the 1950s and 60s, "not an easy task", added Cocker, "especially when the events in question took place many years ago and may have involved the consumption of alcohol". Singing from the Floor is due in April 2014.

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