Book excerpt: Bluff-body wakes play an important role in many fluid dynamics problems and engineering applications. This book gives and up-to-date account of recent results obtained in the study of bluff-body wakes. Experimental, theoretical and numerical approaches are all comprehensively covered and compared. Topics of particular interest include hydrodynamic instability analyses, three-dimensional pattern formation problems, flow control methods, bifurcation analyses, numerical simulations and turbulence modelling. The main originality of thisvolume is that recent conceptual advances made to describe nonlinear phenomena in general are put to the test on a classical problem in fundamental fluid mechanics, namely the wake structure generated behind a bluff object.