Readings.com.au: English Fiction

The Old Devils

Winner of the Booker Prize.

Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one main ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when they are joined by professional Welshman Alun Weaver (CBE) and his wife, Rhiannon. Reviews

'A brilliant novel - It is sadly comic and comically sad' - Anthony Burgess 'A great storyteller, although he was much more than a storyteller' - Keith Waterhouse 'He was a genuine comic writer, probably the best after P. G. Wodehouse... He had a lasting influence and was a very good novelist.' - John Mortimer

London Fields

The narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life. . . all Samson has to do is to write it as it happens. Taking a small pocket of time and a richly diverse part of London, Martin Amis dissects the nature of a society as it hurtles towards the millennium.

Behind The Scenes At The Museum

Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but he was all that was left. She really wanted to be Vivien Leigh, swept off to America by a romantic hero. But here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patricia aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby... Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day at the end of the 19th century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, to the startling, witty and memorable events of Ruby's own life.

Pride And Prejudice

When Elizabeth first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; while he struggles to remain indifferent to her good looks and lovely mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austin shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle class life.

This edition includes a new chronology, additional suggestions for further reading and the original Penguin Classics introduction by Tony Tanner.

Empire Of The Sun

Based on J. G. Ballard"s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy"s life in Japanese–occupied wartime Shanghai – a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

Rooted as it is in the author's own disturbing experience of war in own time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.

Sportswriter

Frank Bascombe has a younger girlfriend and a job as a sportswriter. To many men of his age, thirty-eight, this would be a cause for optimism, yet Frank feels the pull of his inner despair and especially of his recent losses - his preferred career has ended, his wife has divorced him, and a tragic accident took his elder son. In the course of this Easter weekend, Frank will lose all the remnants of his familiar life, though he will emerge heroic with spirits soaring. This is a magnificent novel that propelled Richard Ford into the first rank of American writers.

Darkmans

If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV"s infamous court jester, whose favourite pastime was to burn people alive – for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII"s physician, who kindly wrote John Scogin"s biography? Or could it be a tiny Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of – uh – salad? Or a beautiful, bulimic harpy with ridiculously weak bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier?

"Darkmans" is a very modern book, set in Ashford (a ridiculously modern town), about two very old–fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It"s also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark – quite unspeakable – into its ear.

"Darkmans" is the third of Nicola Barker"s visionary narratives of the Thames Gateway. Following on from "Wide Open" (winner Dublin IMPAC award 2000) and "Behindlings" it confirms Nicola Barker as one of Britain"s most original and exciting literary talents.

G: A Novel

This novel centres on G, who seems impervious to everything around him. His interests are purely sexual, his crowning ideal fulfilment. Yet, in the end this is enough for the politics of desire to expose the criminal politics of oppression.

Remember Me

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Jane Eyre

Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit – which prove necessary when she finds a position as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving the man she loves? A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre (1847) dazzled and shocked readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom.

Playing With The Grown Ups

Kitty’s mother, Marina, is both utterly beguiling and terrifyingly embarrassing, and more often than not Kitty can only gaze on her antics with awe and toe-curling trepidation. But as Kitty grows up it becomes clear that perhaps Marina isn’t the most exemplary of parents, and that sometimes a girl might have to put herself first. Sophie Dahl writes with a keen eye, a warm heart and wonderful lyricism about a coming-of-age that’s quite unlike any other.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals, but as a conscientious but far from fanatical soldier, whose main aim is to have a peaceful war, he proves in time to be civilised, humourous - and a consummate musician. When the local doctor's daughter's letters to her fiance go unanswered, the working of the eternal triangle seems inevitable. But can this fragile love survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender?

On Love: A Novel

The best-selling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Art of Travel revisits his utterly charming debut novel, On Love. The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a ParisLondon flight, and by the time they've reached the luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair, watery green eyes, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, and her views on Heidegger's Being and Time -- but he hates her taste in shoes. Plotting the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through a fit of anhedonia -- defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness -- and finally through the terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away, On Love is filled with profound observations and useful diagrams, examining for all of us the pain and exhilaration of love.

Wuthering Heights

Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance is now visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.

In this edition, a new preface by Lucasta Miller, author of The Bronte Myth, looks at the ways in which the novel has been interpreted, from Charlotte Bronte onwards. This compliments Pauline Nestor's introduction, which discusses changing critical receptions of the novel, as well as Emily Bronte's influences and background.

Clockwork Orange

Fifteen-year-old Alex doesn't just like ultra-violence - he also enjoys rape, drugs and Beethoven's 9th. He and his gang rampage through a dystopian future, hunting for terrible thrills. But when Alex finds himself at the mercy of the state and subject to the ministrations of Dr Brodsky, the government psychologist, he finds that fun is no longer the order of the day... The basis for one of the most notorious films ever made, A Clockwork Orange is both a virtuoso performance from an electrifying prose stylist and a serious exploration of the morality of free will.
'I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language... a very funny book.'
William S. Burroughs

Possession: A Romance

Winner of the Booker Prize.

Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets.Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.

Black Venus

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Nights At The Circus

'Angela Carter has influenced a whole generation of fellow writers towards dream worlds of baroque splendour, fairy tale horror, and visions of the alienated wreckage of a future world. In Nights at the Circus she has invented a new, raunchy, raucous, Cockney voice for her heroine Fevvers, taking us back into a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety' The Times.

On The Black Hill

ON THE BLACK HILL is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the 20th century. In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

Man Who Was Thursday

A group of anarchists are under surveillance by Scotland Yard in Chesterton’s hugely popular metaphysical thriller. The Supreme Anarchists Council is dedicated to overthrowing the world order. To keep their identities a secret, each of them has been named a day of the week. Gabriel Syme, an eccentric poet, is recruited by Scotland Yard to infiltrate the group. He tracks down the six men and manages to win a place on the council. But in a bizarre and surreal twist of events, Syme realises that five of the six members are not at all what they seem …

Woman In White

Marian and her sister Laura live a quiet life under their uncle's guardianship until Laura's marriage to Sir Percival Glyde. Sir Percival is a man of many secrets - is one of them connected to the strange appearances of a young woman dressed all in white? And what does his charismatic friend, Count Fosco, with his pet white mice running in and out of his brightly coloured waistcoat, have to do with it all? Marian and the girls' drawing master, Walter, have to turn detective in order to work out what is going on, and to protect Laura from a fatal plot.

Woman In White

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collin's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel ands its serialisation history.

Continent

Jim Crace's acclaimed debut novel explores an imaginary continent, subtly different from any in the world we know. Its landscapes, wildlife, customs and communities are alien, even frightening - but the continent's inhabitants are nonetheless disarmingly familiar, known to us through their loves, their hopes, and their struggles to make sense of life. On its first publication over 20 years ago, this captivating novel marked the arrival of one of the most imaginative minds at work: a writer capable of transporting his readers to a strange and wonderful landscape while revealing the humanity within the mirage.

In The Fold

The Hanburys of Egypt Hill are the last word in bohemian living - or so they like to think. Their parties are famous, their relationships confusing, their bravado immense. To Michael, a young student arriving at the house on the hill for Caris Hanbury's eighteenth birthday party, they represent the prospect of relief from the strictures of conformity, and of an enfolding exuberance to which he feels irresistibly attracted.

As an adult, Michael finds his own version of the Hanburys. The Alexanders are a wealthy, artistic family for whom moral abandon is almost a point of honour, and their fractious daughter Rebecca is now Michael's wife. While Rebecca struggles with questions of identity and self-expression, Michael becomes increasingly preoccupied with the idea of virtue. Why is his life with Rebecca and their son Hamish so destructive and tumultuous? How has his existence become so tarnished, so without principle?

When Michael is invited to spend a week with the Hanburys on Egypt Hill his illusions are startlingly confounded. The hill is being spoiled by development; the family are riven by jealousy and deceit; and as the days pass the rotten core of the Hanbury myth is gradually disclosed.

Robinson Crusoe

The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is washed up on a desert island. In his journal he chronicles his daily battle to stay alive, as he conquers isolation, fashions shelter and clothes, first encounters another human being and fights off cannibals and mutineers. With Robinson Crusoe, Defoe wrote what is regarded as the first English novel, and created one of the most popular and enduring myths in literature. Written in an age of exploration and enterprise, it has been variously interpreted as an embodiment of British imperialist values, as a portrayal of 'natural man' or as a moral fable. But above all it is a brilliant narrative, depicting Crusoe's transformation from terrified survivor to self-sufficient master of his island.

This edition contains a full chronology of Defoe's life and times, explanatory notes, glossary and a critical introduction discussing Robinson Crusoe as a pioneering work of modern psychological realism.

Great Expectations

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor - these form a series of events that change the orphaned Pip's life forever, and he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman. Dickens's haunting late novel depicts Pip's education and development through adversity as he discovers the true nature of his 'great expectations'.

This definitive edition uses the text from the first published edition of 1861. It includes a map of Kent in the early nineteenth century, and appendices on Dickens's original ending and his working notes, giving readers an illuminating glimpse into the mind of a great novelist at work.

Millstone

At a time when illegitimacy is taboo, Rosamund is pregnant after her only sexual encounter. Despite her independence and academic brilliance, she is naive and unworldly and her choices are terrifying. But in the perfection and helplessness of her baby she finds a love she has never known before.

Birth Of Venus

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the altar of the family chapel in their Florentine Palazzo. A child of the Renaissance with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by his talent. As Medici Florence is threatened by the hellfire of the monk Savonarola, the painter and his dazzling art exert an ever more powerful and erotic pull.

Middlemarch

George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.

This edition uses the text of the second edition of 1874. In her introduction, Rosemary Ashton, biographer of George Eliot, discusses themes of change in Middlemarch, and examines the novel as an imaginative embodiment of Eliot's humanist beliefs.

Stark

Stark is a secret consortium with more money than God, and the social conscience of a dog on a croquet lawn. What's more, it knows the Earth is dying. Deep in Western Australia where the Aboriginals used to milk the trees, a planet-sized plot is taking shape. Some green freaks pick up the scent: a pommie poseur; a brain-fried Vietnam vet; Aboriginals who have lost their land. not much against a conspiracy that controls society. But EcoAction isn't in society: it just lives in the same place, along with the cockroaches. If you're facing the richest and most disgusting scheme in history, you have to do more than stick up two fingers and say 'peace'.

Birdsong

Set before and during the Great War, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experience of the war itself.

Eyre Affair Thursday Next Book One

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Bridget Jones Diary

In the course of the year recorded in Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget confides her hopes, her dreams, and her monstrously fluctuating poundage, not to mention her consumption of 5277 cigarettes and "Fat units 3457 (approx.) (hideous in every way)." In 365 days, she gains 74 pounds. On the other hand, she loses 72! There is also the unspoken New Year's resolution--the quest for the right man.

A dazzling urban satire of modern human relations? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?

Tom Jones

Tom Jones, born a foundling, grown into a gallant and irresistible hero, romps through the English countryside getting himself into all kinds of trouble through his good nature and eye for the ladies. Betrayed by jealous relatives, Tom is exiled from home and must undergo a variety of trials and adventures in his quest to be reunited with his one true love and redeem himself in the eyes of society.

One of the cleverest and funniest novels ever written, Tom Jones is Henry Fielding's greatest achievement.

Offshore

An attractive new-cover reissue of Penelope Fitzgerald’s award-winning comic novel. Offshore is a dry, genuinely funny novel, set among the houseboat community which rises and falls with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither. Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom all the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can’t get him back; her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. She feels drawn to Richard, the ex-RNVR city man whose converted minesweeper dominates the Reach. Is he sexually attractive because he can fold maps the right way? With this and other questions waiting to be answered, Offshore offers a delightful glimpse of the workings of an eccentric community.

Golden Child

A re-issue of Penelope Fitzgerald's first novel.

The Golden Child is a classically plotted mystery centred around the arrival of the 'Golden Child' at a London museum. Whilst the new exhibit lures thousands of curious spectators, it also becomes th sinister focus in a web of intrigue and murder

The Golden Child shows how Fitzgerald's distinctive wit and humour, and her sense of the absurd, were present at thevery beginning of her career. It shows, as always, how acutely perceptive of human nature she is, how understanding and how forgiving. It is also, perhaps more than any other of her books, a minor comic masterpiece.

For Your Eyes Only

Sudden emergencies and beautiful girls who aren't quite what they seem and are the stock-in-trade of James Bond. And when 007 is on the case there's only one thing you can be sure of – the result will be thrilling. And whether he's dealing with the assassination of a Cuban thug in America, the destruction of an international heroin ring, or sudden death in the Seychelles, Bond gets the job done. In his own suave and unmistakable style.

Last King Of Scotland Film Tie In

In an incredible twist of fate, a Scottish doctor (James McAvoy) on a Ugandan medical mission becomes irreversibly entangled with one of the world's most barbaric figures: Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker). Impressed by Dr. Garrigan's brazen attitude in a moment of crisis, the newly self-appointed Ugandan President Amin hand picks him as his personal physician and closest confidante. Though Garrigan is at first flattered and fascinated by his new position, he soon awakens to Amin's savagery - and his own complicity in it. Horror and betrayal ensue as Garrigan tries to right his wrongs and escape Uganda alive.

Good Soldier A Tale Of Passion

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Young Hornblower Omnibus

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Mr Midshipman Hornblower

1793, the eve of the Napoleonic Wars, and Midshipman Horatio Hornblower receives his first command . . . As a seventeen-year-old with a touch of sea sickness, young Horatio Hornblower hardly cuts a dash in His Majesty's navy. Yet from the moment he is ordered to board a French merchant ship in the Bay of Biscay and take command of crew and cargo, he proves his seafaring mettle on the waves. With a character-forming duel, several chases and some strange tavern encounters, the young Hornblower is soon forged into a formidable man of the sea. This is the first of eleven books chronicling the nautical adventures of C. S. Forester's inimitable hero, Horatio Hornblower.

Passage to India

When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rouses violent passions among both the British and their Indian subjects. A masterly portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India compellingly depicts the fate of individuals caught between the great political and cultural conflicts of the modern world.

Diary Of An Ordinary Woman

Margaret Forster presents the 'edited' diary of a woman, born in 1901, whose life spans the twentieth century. On the eve of the Great War, Millicent King begins to keep her journal and vividly records the dramas of everyday life in a family touched by war, tragedy, and money troubles. From bohemian London to Rome in the 1920s her story moves on to social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London. Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives from WWI to Greenham Common and beyond. A triumph of resolution and evocation, this is a beautifully observed story of an ordinary woman's life- a narrative where every word rings true.

The Magus

On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games-John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, THE MAGUS is a cerebral feast.

Tin Men

Michael Frayn’s first, and now classic novel, was the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.

Why not programme computers to take over the really dull jobs that human beings have to do? At the William Morris Institute of Automaton Research they are doing just that in order that mankind will be free to take care of the really stimulating and demanding tasks of living today, such as the impending visit of Her Majesty the Queen to open its new wing . . .

Forsyte Saga Volume One The Man Of Property In Chancery To Let

The Forsyte Saga is the first part of John Galsworthy's magnificent, well-loved Forsyte Chronicles, which trace the changing fortunes of the wealthy Forsyte dynasty through fifty years of material triumph and emotional disaster. The Forsyte Saga begins as the nineteenth century is drawing to a close, and the upper-middle classes, with their property and propriety, are becoming a dying section of society. The Forsytes are blind to this fact, clinging to their conventions and 'brilliant respectability'. As dignified Soames Forsyte struggles to uphold the old moral code, his wife Irene's extraordinary beauty causes even more disruption. The bitter feud between them comes to split the Forsyte family for two generations.

Old Filth

Filth, in his heyday, was an international lawyer with a practice in the Far East. Now, only the oldest QCs and Silks can remember that his nickname stood for Failed In London Try Hong Kong.

Long ago, Old Filth was a Raj orphan - one of the many young children sent 'home' from the East to be fostered and educated in England. Jane Gardam's new novel tells his story, from his birth in what was then Malaya to the extremities of his old age. In so doing, she not only encapsulates a whole period from the glory days of the British Empire, through the Second World War, to the present and beyond, but also illuminates the complexities of the character known variously as Eddie, The Judge, Fevvers, Filth, Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy and Sir Edward Feather.

North and South

When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. This is intensified by her tempestuous relationship with the mill owner and self-made man John Thornton, as their fierce opposition over his treatment of his employees masks a deeper attraction. In North and South,Elizabeth Gaskell skilfully fused individual feeling with social concern, and in Margaret Hale created on of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.

In her introduction, Patricia Ingham examines geographical, economic and class differences, and male and female roles in North and South. This edition also includes a list for further reading, notes and a glossary.

The White Family

The Whites are an ordinary British family: love, hatred, sex and death hold them together, and tear them apart. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Alfred White, a London park keeper, still rules his home with fierce conviction and inarticulate tenderness. May, his clever, passive wife, loves Alfred but conspires against him. Their three children are no longer close; the successful elder son, Darren, has escaped to the USA. But when Alfred collapses on duty, beautiful, childless Shirley, who lives with Leroy, a black social-worker, is brought face to face with Alfred's younger son Dirk, who hates and fears all black people. The scene is set for violence. In the end Alfred and May are forced to make a climactic decision: does justice matter more than kinship? This ambitious, ground-breaking novel takes on the taboo subject of racial hatred as it looks for the roots of violence within the family and within British society.

Cold Comfort Farm

When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doomed Starkadders: cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken wickedness; Amos, preaching fire and damnation; their sons, lustful Seth and despairing Reuben; child of nature Elfine; and crazed old Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last twenty years. But Flora loves nothing better than to organize other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand. A hilarious and merciless parody of rural melodramas, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is one of the best-loved comic novels of all time.

Dolls House

A very special story about the secret lives of dolls and the children who love them – now reissued with stunning illustrations by Christian Birmingham.

Tottie is a loving little wooden doll who lives with her family in a shoebox. The doll family are owned by two sisters, Emily and Charlotte, and are very happy, except for one thing: they long for a proper home. To their delight, their wish comes true when Emily and Charlotte fix up a Victorian dolls house – just for them. It's perfect. But then a new arrival starts to wreak havoc in the dolls house. For Marchpane might be a wonderfully beautiful doll, but she is also terribly cruel. And she always gets her own way...

I Claudius

Despised for his weakness and regarded by his family as little more than a stammering fool, the nobleman Claudius quietly survives the intrigues, bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the imperial Roman dynasties. In I, Claudius he watches from the sidelines to record the reigns of its emperors: from the wise Augustus and his villainous wife Livia to the sadistic Tiberius and the insane excesses of Caligula. Written in the form of Claudius' autobiography, this is the first part of Robert Graves's brilliant account of the madness and debauchery of ancient Rome, and stands as one of the most celebrated, gripping historical novels ever written.

Other Woman

Ellie and Dan are living proof that opposites attract.

He always follows instructions and she throws the manual away. He loves sports whereas Ellie's allergic to any form of exercise. Ellie doesn't have a mother. And Dan does – a mother who wants to take over . . . EVERYTHING.

At first Ellie is thrilled to have Linda as her 'adopted' mother and to be a part of the close, loving Cooper family. But when she and Dan decide to get married and wedding plans progress, she starts to wonder: is it normal for Linda and Dan to speak on the phone twice a day? How on earth do they come to be having a reception with Chilean bloody seabass and humongous bloody white ribbons tied everywhere when all she wanted was a quiet registry office?

Is Ellie marrying Dan . . . OR HIS MOTHER?

The Quiet American

Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious 'Third Force'. As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch. But even as he intervenes he wonders why: for the sake of politics, or for love.

The Other Boleyn Girl

Politics and passion are inextricably bound together in this compelling drama. The Boleyn family is keen to rise through the ranks of society, and what better way to attract the attention of the most powerful in the land than to place their most beautiful young woman at court? But Mary becomes the king's mistress at a time of change. He needs his personal pleasures, but he also needs an heir.

The unthinkable happens and the course of English history is irrevocably changed. For the women at the heart of the storm, they have only one weapon; and when it's no longer enough to be the mistress, Mary must groom her younger sister in the ways of the king. What happens next is common knowledge but here it is told in a way we've never heard it before, with all of Philippa Gregory's characteristic perceptiveness, backed by meticulous research and superb storytelling skills.

Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time

Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour's lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets- for both Christopher and the rest of his family.

King Solomons Mines

When a young explorer goes missing, a search party sets out after him but soon find themselves on the most dangerous journey of their lives, in Haggard’s classic adventure tale. In Haggard’s most celebrated and enchanting novel, the reader is taken on a perilous journey into a region of uncharted Africa, led by fortune hunter Allan Quatermain, in search of a young explorer who went missing while on a quest for the fabled King Solomon’s diamond mines. Aided only by an ancient map drawn in blood and finding themselves caught up in the middle of a tribal war, the men hold little hope of returning home alive …

Carhullan Army

The state of the nation has changed. With much of the country now underwater, assets and weapons seized by the government - itself run by the sinister Authority - and war raging in South America and China, life in Britain is unrecognisable. Most appallingly, in this world of scant resources and hard industrial labour, the Authority insist all women should be fitted with contraceptive devices.

In The Carhullan Army, Sister, as she is known, delivers her story from the confines of a prison cell. She tells of her attempts to escape this repressive world and her journey to join the commune of women at Carhullan, a group living as 'unofficials' in a fortified farm beyond the most remote Cumbrian fells. The journey is a challenge, but arrival is only the beginning of her struggle.

A testament to the triumph of the individual in dire circumstances, and a novel of extraordinary imagination, range and emotional complexity, The Carhullan Army has the visionary intensity and quality of great dystopian fiction.

Far From The Madding Crowd

Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her confident presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted Shepard Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and when tragedy ensues, the stability of the whole community is threatened. The first of his works set in Wessex, Thomas Hardy's novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships.

This edition, based on Hardy's original 1874 manuscript, is the complete novel he never saw published, and restores its full candour and innovation. Rosemarie Morgan's introduction discusses the history of its publication, and the Biblical and classical allusions that permeate the novel.

The Go-Between

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy’s awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

The Line Of Beauty

Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Starting at the moment The Swimming-Pool Library ended, The Line of Beauty traces the further history of a decade of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, it is a major work by one of the finest writers in the English language. In the summer of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Tory MP Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby - whom Nick had idolised at Oxford - and Catherine, always standing at a critical angle to the family and its assumptions and ambitions. As the Thatcher boom-years unfold, Nick, an innocent in the worlds of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of the glamorous family he is entangled with.

High Fidelity

Reading High Fidelity is like listening to a great single. You know it's wonderful from the minute it goes on, and soon as it's over you want to hear it again because it makes you feel young, and grown-up, and puts a stupid grin on your face all at the same time. If this book was a record, we would be calling it an instant classic. Because that's what it is' Suzanne Moore, Guardian

'Leaves you believing not only in the redemptive power of music but above all the redemptive power of love. Funny and wise, sweet and true Mick Brown, Independent

Brave New World

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress.

Mr Norris Changes Trains

First published in 1933, Mr Norris Changes Trains portrays a series of encounters in Berlin in the early thirties between the narrator, William Bradshaw, and the camp and mildly sinister Mr Norris. Piquantly evocative of the atmosphere in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, it is a novel that has achieved the status of a modern classic, combining a vivid depiction of people and places with the forcefulness of an ironic political parable.

The Making Of Henry

One day, out of the blue, Henry Nagel inherits a sumptuous apartment in St John's Wood. Divine intervention? Or his late father's love nest? Henry doesn't know, but he is glad to escape the North. After nearly sixty years of angry disappointment, Henry's life is about to change. Not that the ghosts of Henry's past are prepared to disappear without a struggle - his old school-friend and rival Osmond 'Hovis' Belkin, currently enjoying success in Hollywood, his tragic great aunt Marghanita for whom Henry once entertained a dangerous passion, and his father Izzi, upholsterer turned illusionist, fire-eater and origamist, whose shade Henry interrogates relentlessly. But the present clamours as loudly as the past. His dyspeptic neighbour Lachlan wants his sympathy, Lachlan's sloppy red setter, Angus, wants a walk, and Moira, the waitress with the crooked smile and custard hair, seems to want him. Kicking and screaming every inch of the way, Henry realises he might finally be falling in love.

Dancing With Eva

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Debt To Pleasure

Through descriptions of food and cooking, this novel draws the reader into a world of murder and art. Narrated by Tarquin, an ironist, epicurean and a snob, this novel is constructed around a series of seasonal menus, which unfold his autobiography.

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband's gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find a true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley's Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships.

A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian

When their recently widowed father announces he plans to remarry, sisters Vera and Nadezhda realise they must put aside a lifetime of feuding in order to save him. His new love is a voluptuous gold-digger from the Ukraine half his age, with a proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, who stops at nothing in her single minded pursuit of the luxury Western lifestyle she dreams of. But the old man, too, is pursuing his eccentric dreams – and writing a history of tractors in Ukrainian.

A wise, tender and deeply funny novel about families, the healing of old wounds, the trials and consolations of old age and – really – about the legacy of Europe's history over the last fifty years.

Hospital

The end of the world doesn't come with a bang or a whimper, but with the chukka-chukka of a helicopter coming into land . . .

WELCOME TO HOSPITAL!

Hospital is about blue murder and saving lives, having sex and surgery, falling in love and falling from a great height, crazy voodoo and hypnotic surveillance - it's about the last days and the first days. And the Rubber Nurse knows you've been very naughty and is going to teach you a well-deserved lesson.

It's the story of a lost boy wandering the corridors of a strange, antiseptic building, looking and hoping for a chance to get home. And also of a man who won't wake up despite the best efforts of the hospital staff - and while he sleeps, a threatening darkness settles over everything . . .

Author Author

Framed by a dramatic and moving account of Henry James's last illness, Author, Author begins in the early 1880s, describing James's friendship with the genial Punch artist, George Du Maurier, and his intimate but problematic relationship with fellow American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. At the end of the decade Henry, worried by the failure of his books to sell, resolves to achieve fame and fortune as a playwright while Du Maurier diversifies into writing novels. The consequences that ensue mingle comedy, irony, pathos, and suspense. As Du Maurier's novel Trilby becomes the bestseller of the century, Henry anxiously awaits the opening night of his make-or-break play, Guy Domville. This event, on January 5, 1895, and its complex sequel form the climax to Lodge's absorbing novel. Thronged with vividly drawn characters, some of them with famous names, Author, Author presents a fascinating panorama of literary and theatrical life in late Victorian England.

Beyond Black

Alison Hart is a medium by trade: dead people talk to her, and she talks back. With her flat–eyed, flint–hearted sidekick, Colette, she tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital road, passing on messages from dead ancestors: 'Granny says she likes your new kitchen units.'

Alison's ability to communicate with spirits is a torment rather than a gift. Behind her plump, smiling and bland public persona is a desperate woman. She knows that the next life holds terrors that she must conceal from her clients. Her days and nights are haunted by the men she knew in her childhood, the thugs and petty criminals who preyed upon her hopeless, addled mother, Emmie. They infiltrate her house, her body and her soul; the more she tries to be rid of them, the stronger and nastier they become.

The Razor's Edge

Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brillant characters - his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.

Rebecca

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ...Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers ...Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity.

Atonement

This may be Ian McEwan's finest work. On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen- year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Nominated for the Booker Prize, this is another profound and disturbing work from a brilliant writer.

Ghostwritten

An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas-attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz-buff in Tokyo? A Mongolian gangster, a redundant English spy in Petersburg with a knack for forging masterpieces, a despondent ‘zookeeper’, a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a late night New York DJ whose hard-boiled scepticism has been his undoing all also have stories to tell. Add to this saxophones and causality, Buddha, cherry blossoms, island cities, a mind unhooked from memory, the Trans Siberian express, hidden narratives of the new world’s order, circles and roulette in London, Baggins the Tarantula and a quantum computer born one century ahead of its time. All elements are interconnected and each character must play their part as they are caught up in the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

Love In A Cold Climate

Nancy Mitford's brilliantly witty, irreverent stories of the upper classes in pre-war London and Paris conjure up a world of glamour, gossip and decadence. In The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing, her extraordinary heroines deal with armies of hilariously eccentric relatives, the excitement of love and passion, and the thrills of the social Season. But beneath the glittering surfaces and perfectly timed comic dialogue, Nancy Mitford's novels are also touching hymns to a lost era and to the brevity of life and love.
'Very funny... inimitable and irresistible... one of the most individual, beguiling and creative users of English this century.' Philip Hensher

Rumpole Rests His Case

When your life at the Bar has been as rich as Rumpole's, the past is best avoided - who knows what might have happened to ex-defendants? Still, it keeps intruding on the present. When Rumpole takes a break in the country, he's sure he's met the local squire before. And that pantomime dame at the Tufnell Park Empire seems familiar . . .

Of course, some things - Pommeroy's Wine Bar, She Who Must Be Obeyed - never changed anyway. But now, for the first time, Rumpole appears for an asylum seeker at the Appeals Tribunal, and - horror of horrors - his chambers have become a smoke-free zone. Could it all be too much for Rumpole? Might he have to hang up his wig for good?

Labyrinth

When Dr Alice Tanner discovers two skeletons during an archaeological dig in southern France, she unearths a link with a horrific and brutal past. But it's not just the sight of the shattered bones that makes her uneasy; there's an overwhelming sense of evil in the tomb that Alice finds hard to shake off, even in the bright French sunshine. Puzzled by the words carved inside the chamber, Alice has an uneasy feeling that she has disturbed something which was meant to remain hidden ... Eight hundred years ago, on the night before a brutal civil war ripped apart Languedoc, three books were entrusted to Alais, a young herbalist and healer. Although she cannot understand the symbols and diagrams the books contain, Alais knows her destiny lies in protecting their secret, at all costs. Skilfully blending the lives of two women divided by centuries but united by a common destiny, Labyrinth is a powerful story steeped in the atmosphere and history of southern France.

Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is some 3,500 years old and is the longest poem in existence. It is one of the founding epics of Indian culture, yet is also a highly dramatic and enthralling story. It centres around a royal family who are at war with each other, and is filled with heroism, bloodshed, satanic hates and intrigue, gods, heavenly cities and vivid, super-human characters. Its often violent narrative also encompasses philosophy, history and cosmology, and contains the Bhagavad Gita, the masterly spiritual discussion between Krishna and the prince Arjuna which forms the cornerstone of the Hindu religion. R. K. Narayan's brilliant shortened prose interpretation of this monumental, cosmic drama is one of his finest achievements, and brings all the excitement and depth of this great Indian epic to life.

Master And Commander

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O'Brian's now famous Aubrey-Maturin novels and establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship's surgeon and an intelligence agent. Master and Commander contains all the action and excitement of a great historical novel. But it alo displays the qualities which have put O'Brian so far ahead of any of his competitors, including his depiction of the detail of life aboard a Nelsonic man-of-war, of weapons, food, conversation and ambience, of the landscape and of the sea. O' Brian's portrayal of each of these is faultless and the sense of period throughout is acute.

Animal Farm

It is the history of a revolution that went wrong – and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine,' wrote Orwell for the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945. Orwell wrote the novel at the end of 1943, but it almost remained unpublished. Its savage attack on Stalin, at that time Britain's ally, led to the book being refused by publisher after publisher. Orwell's simple, tragic fable, telling what happens when the animals drive out Mr Jones and attempt to run the farm themselves, has since become a world famous classic.
'It is the book for everyone and Everyman, its brightness undimmed after fifty years.
Ruth Rendell, Daily Telegraph

Playing Away

Connie has been happily married for a year. She's just met John Harding. Imagine the sexiest man you can think of. He's a walking stag weekend. He's a funny, disrespectful, fast, confident, irreverent pub crawl. He is also completely unscrupulous. He's about to destroy Connie's peace of mind, her grand plan for living happily ever after with her gentle, loving husband Luke. What will happen if her husband finds out? What will happen if he doesn't? Connie doesn't know the answers... yet. It's against the rules. It's the closest thing you'll get to an affair, without actually having one.

The Gormenghast Trilogy

Enter the world of Gormenghast... Gormanghast is the vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. Gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old ritual, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation and murder -a world suggested in a tour-de-force that ranks as one of this century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

Dance To The Music Of Time Spring V1

This twelve-volume sequence traces a colorful group of English acquaintances across a span of many years from 1914 to 1971. The slowly developing narrative centers around life's poignant encounters between friends and lovers who later drift apart and yet keep reencountering each other over numerous unfolding decades as they move through the vicissitudes of marriage, work, aging, and ultimately death.

The Persian Boy

THE PERSIAN BOY tells the story of the climactic last seven years of Alexander the Great's life through the eyes of his lover, Bagoas. Abducted and gelded as a boy, Bagoas was sold as a courtesan to King Darius of Persia, but found freedom with Alexander after the Macedon army conquered his homeland. Taken as an attendant into Alexander's household, the beautiful young eunuch becomes the great general's lover and their relationship sustains Alexander as he survives assassination plots, the demands of two foreign wives, a mutinous army, and his own ferocious temper.

Kim

Kim is Rudyard Kipling's great, epic adventure classic, and a magnificent evocation of India at the time of the Raj. Orphan 'sahib' and bazaar-boy, Kim lives on his wits. His chameleon's talent for disguise draws him into the Great Game – British Intelligence in India – and on a mission to thwart foreign agents on the North-West Frontier. Kim's travels coincide with the quest of his friend, the Tibetan lama, who is seeking redemption form the Wheel of Life. They are the heroes of an adventure crammed with incident and humour, alive with the hustle, bustle, life and opulence of India's exotic landscape, overlaid by the uneasy presence of the British Raj.

Book Of Dave

What if a demented London cabbie called Dave Rudman wrote a book to his estranged son to give him some fatherly advice? What if that book was buried in Hampstead and hundreds of years later, when rising sea levels have put London underwater, spawned a religion? What if one man decided to question life according to Dave? And what if Dave had indeed made a mistake?

Shuttling between the recent past and a far-off future where England is terribly altered, The Book of Dave is a strange and troubling mirror held up to our times: disturbing, satirizing and vilifying who and what we think we are.

The Dancer Upstairs

Can be read on its own or as a sequel to The Vision of Elena Silves. A chance encounter with Colonel Rejas provides the key to a story that Latin America correspondent John Dyer, has been following for 12 years, a story which details the progress of a manhunt alive with terror and longing. This novel explores one of the most astonishing stories in the whole history of twentieth-century terrorism. Colonel Rejas was the policeman charged with the task of capturing the Peruvian guerilla leader Ezequiel, but having been dismissed he found the burden of silence and secrecy too heavy. On meeting Dyer, a foreign correspondent, he is moved to relate the tortuous progress of the manhunt for the first time.

The Thirteenth Tale

Vida Winter, a bestselling yet reclusive novelist, has created many outlandish life histories for herself, all of them invention. Now old and ailing, at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. Her letter to biographer Margaret Lea - a woman with secrets of her own - is a summons.

Vida's tale is one of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family: the beautiful and wilful Isabelle and the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling, but as a biographer she deals in fact not fiction and she doesn't trust Vida's account. As she begins her researches, two parallel stories unfold. Join Margaret as she begins her journey to the truth - hers, as well as Vida's.

Wilt In Nowhere

Brilliantly written and bitingly funny, Tom Sharpe's indefatigable hero is pitted against the vices of an aristocratic pervert, the merciless greed of a politician's wife and the seedy underbelly of Britain's medical facilities, deftly exposing the farcical realities of small-town England and America.

Frankenstein

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

Based on the third edition of 1831, this text contains all the revisions Mary Shelley made to her story, as well as her 1831 introduction and Percy Bysshe Shelley's preface to the first edition. It also includes as appendices a select collation of the texts of 1818 and 1831 together with 'A Fragment' by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori's 'The Vampyre: A Tale'.

White Teeth

One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing – among many other things – with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.

Sentimental Journey

When Yorick, the roving narrator of Sterne's innovative final novel, sets off for France on a whim, he produces no ordinary travelogue. Jolting along in his coach from Calais, through Paris, and on towards the Italian border, the amiable parson is blithely unconcerned by famous views or monuments, but he engages us with tales of his encounters with all manner of people, from counts and noblewomen to beggars and chambermaids. And as drama piles upon drama, anecdote, flirtation and digression, Yorick's destination takes second place to an exhilarating voyage of emotional and erotic exploration. Interweaving sharp wit with warm humour, irony with sentiment, A Sentimental Journey paints a captivating picture of an Englishman's adventures abroad.

Raw Shark Texts

Here's a secret: just the idea that Clio Aames is real and in the world makes me ache.

A man wakes in terror, choking for air, in the unfamiliar bedroom of an empty house. He has no memories and no sense of his own identity. The licence in his wallet tells him his name is Eric Sanderson.

Letters and parcels arrive in careful sequence, signed: the first Eric Sanderson. He accumulates a set of instructions for negotiating this unknown and obscurely dangerous life. He reads his own past... and there is Clio, who was loved – by him? – and who died. His dreams fill with the memory of loss.

Then the attacks begin.

And now, armed with his survival manual and accompanied by a cat called Ian, Eric will set off to find out what it is that's trying to hunt him down and destroy him.

The Raw Shark Texts is a psychological thriller, a haunting love story and an epic quest laced with absurdist wit. Funny, unexpectedly moving and utterly gripping, this will be the left-field hit of the year.

Saville

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Waterland

In the 25 years since its first publication, Waterland has established itself one of the classics of the 20th century.

Music And Silence

In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish Court to join King Christian IV's Royal Orchestra. From the moment when he realises that the musicians perform in a freezing cellar underneath the royal apartments, Peter Claire understand that he's come to a place where the opposing states of light and dark, good and evil, are waging war to the death. Designated the King's 'Angel' because of his good looks, he finds himself falling in love with the young woman who is the companion of the King's adulterous and estranged wife, Kirsten. With his loyalties fatally divided between duty and passion, how can Peter Claire find the path that will realise his hopes and save his soul?

Barchester Towers

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Other Peoples Children

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Ruby In Her Navel

The Court of King Roger in Twelfth century Sicily simmers with the volatile passions of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Latins and Greeks. Among them, a young Norman called Thurstan Beauchamp finds employment under Yusuf, a Muslim who holds the Christian king's purse strings.

But while Thurstan wishes to be made a Knight, he has little taste for courtly intrigues and instead divides his time between the divine – in the shape of childhood sweetheart Lady Alicia – and the delightful: the sensuous and exotic dancer Nesrin.

However, in his pursuit of love and knighthood, Thurstan has yet to appreciate that he may also be a pawn in a far more deadly game . . .

Miss Garnet's Angel

Miss Garnet's Angel is a voyage of discovery, a novel of Venice but also a rich story of the explosive possibilities of change in all of us at any time.

Julia Garnet is a teacher. Just retired, she is left a legacy which she uses by leaving her orderly life, and going to live - in winter - in an apartment in Venice. It's beauty, it's secret corners and treasures, and it's people overwhelm a lifetime of reserve and caution. Above all she's touched by the all prevalent spirit of the Angel, Raphael.

Twinned with her journey is that of Tobias. The father, growing old and blind, is determined that his son, accompanied by an appropriate companion, should recover the family debt and allow his father to die in peace. The traveller, masquerading as a merchant - by common legend - is Raphael.

The two stories interweave with parents and landladies, restorers and priests, American tourists and ancient travellers abounding.

The whole is an enormously satisfying journey of the spirit, and Julia Garnet is a character to treasure.

Brideshead Revisited

Charles Ryder, a lonely student at Oxford, is captivated by the outrageous and decadent Sebastian Flyte. Invited to Brideshead, Sebastian's magnificent family home, Charles welcomes the attentions of its eccentric, aristocratic inhabitants, gradually becoming infatuated with them and the life of privilege they inhabit - in particular, with Sebastian's remote sister, Julia. But he gradually comes to recognize his spiritual and social distance from them, eventually discovering a world where duty and desire, faith and happiness are in conflict.

Spa Decameron

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The War Of The Worlds

The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common in London. At first, naive locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat-ray, as terrifying tentacled invaders emerge. Soon the whole of human civilisation is under threat, as powerful Martians build gigantic killing machines, destroy all in their path with black gas and burning rays, and feast on the warm blood of trapped, still-living human prey. The forces of the Earth, however, may prove harder to beat than they at first appear.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

The is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God’s elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days’ ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.

To The Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives, give the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.