Jeff Abbott A turbo-charged thriller about a young man who discovers his whole life has been a lie.

Chinua Achebe

Peter Ackroyd In this novel the light and the dark sides of 19th-century London flow into each other, attracting the attention of famous names such as Marx and Gissing, but also of less well-known characters, who play a significant role in a tale that is a mixture of fable, adventure and Gothic comedy.

Douglas Adams Summer 2005 finally sees the release of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie from Touchstone Pictures”. Stars include Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent, Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox, Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast, supercool hip-hop artist Mos Def as Ford Prefect and the gorgeous Zooey Deschanel as Trillian. Completely new characters were developed specially for the film by Douglas Adams before his death and will be played by John Malkovich and Anna Chancellor. Pan’s tie-in edition of this cult classic will include substantial extras from Executive Producer, Robbie Stamp: exclusive cast interviews, stories and photographs from the set.

Douglas Adams Life, the Universe and Everything: The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Part Three In consequence of a number of stunning catastrophes, Arthur Dent is surprised to find himself living in a hideously miserable cave on prehistoric Earth. However, just as he thinks that things cannot get possibly worse, they suddenly do. He discovers that the Galaxy is not only mind-boggingly big and bewildering but also that most of the things that happen in it are staggeringly unfair. VOLUME THREE IN THE TRILOGY OF FIVE

Douglas Adams Just when Arthur Dent`s sense of reality is at its most clouded, he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. He finds her in the last place in the Universe in which he would expect to find anything at all, but which 3,976,000,000 people will find oddly familiar. They go in search of God`s Final Message to His Creation and, in a dramatic break with tradition, actually find it. This is volume four in the Trilogy of five.

Douglas Adams When all questions of space, time, matter and the nature of being have been resolved, only one question remains - "Where shall we have dinner?" "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" provides the ultimate gastronomic experience, and for once there is no morning after to worry about. This is volume two in the Trilogy of five.

Richard Adams A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for over thirty years, Richard Adams's Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.

Aravind Adiga Winning the Man Booker prize is something that most authors dream of, although — ironically — the reputation of the prize itself was under siege a few years ago. Books that won the award were acquiring a reputation of being difficult and inaccessible, but those days appear to be over — and unarguable proof may be found in the 2008 winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Apart from its considerable literary merit, the novel is the most compelling of pageturners (in the old-fashioned sense of that phrase) and offers a picture of modern India that is as evocative as it is unflattering. The protagonist, too, is drawn in the most masterly of fashion.

Balram Halwai, the eponymous ‘white tiger’, is a diminutive, overweight ex-teashop worker who now earns his living as a chauffeur. But this is only one side of his protean personality; he deals in confidence scams, over-ambitious business promotions (built on the shakiest of foundations) and enjoys approaching life with a philosophical turn of mind. But is Balram also a murderer? We learn the answer as we devour these 500 odd pages. Born into an impoverished family, Balram is removed from school by his parents in order to earn money in a thankless job: shop employee. He is forced into banal, mind-numbing work. But Balram dreams of escaping — and a chance arises when a well-heeled village landlord takes him on as a chauffeur for his son (although the duties involve transporting the latter's wife and two Pomeranian dogs). From the rich new perspective offered to him in this more interesting job, Balram discovers New Delhi, and a vision of the city changes his life forever. His learning curve is very steep, and he quickly comes to believe that the way to the top is by the most expedient means. And if that involves committing the odd crime of violence, he persuades himself that this is what successful people must do.

The story of the amoral protagonist at the centre of this fascinating narrative is, of course, what keeps the reader comprehensively gripped, but perhaps the real achievement of the book is in its picture of two Indias: the bleak, soul-destroying poverty of village life and the glittering prizes to be found in the big city. The book cleverly avoids fulfilling any of the expectations a potential reader might have — except that of instructing and entertaining. The White Tiger will have many readers anxious to see what Adiga will do next. —Barry Forshaw

Aeschylus, W. B. Stanford In the "Oresteia" - the only trilogy in Greek drama which survives from antiquity - Aeschylus took as his subject the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. Moving from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, its spirit of struggle and regeneration is eternal.

Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis First published in 1954, this novel tells the story of Jim Dixon - lower middle-class anti-hero - charting his social gaffes, cultural philistinism, inept relationships and crawling to superiors. The author's other books include "The Old Devils", which won the 1986 Booker Prize.

Martin Amis It was summer 1970 - a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends.

A. Mannette Ansay Oprah Book Club® Selection, November 1999, Vinegar Hill is an appropriate address for the characters who populate A. Manette Ansay's novel of the same name. After all, when Ellen Grier and her family return to the rural hamlet of Holly's Field, Wisconsin, it's not exactly a happy homecoming. Her husband, James, has been laid off from his job in Illinois. And for the moment, the family has moved in with Ellen's in-laws, Fritz and Mary-Margaret, an unhappy pair who dislike their daughter-in-law almost as much as they despise each other:

The first time Ellen sat at this table she was 20 years old, bright-cheeked after a spring afternoon spent walking along the lakefront with James, planning their upcoming wedding. It was 1959 and she was eager to make a good impression. She didn't know then that Mary-Margaret disliked her, that she was considered Jimmy's mistake.

Thirteen years later, in 1972, Ellen is back at the table with no escape in sight. Both she and her husband do find work. Yet James seems to settle a tad too easily into his old life, and shows no interest in finding a place of their own. Even worse, his job takes him away from home for weeks at a time, leaving Ellen to cope with her abusive in-laws.

In Vinegar Hill Ansay paints a searing portrait of the Midwest's dark side, of a rural culture infected with despair and ruled over by an unforgiving God. Yet she does hold out a grain of hope, too. Just as Ellen seems permanently entangled in familial desperation, she makes a surprising discovery about James's long-dead grandmother—a woman whose rebellious spirit inspires Ellen to rescue herself and her loved ones from the impinging darkness. This late-breaking redemption doesn't cancel out the preceding unhappiness: Vinegar Hill remains a tough, uncompromising tale, one that requires some fortitude to read. But those with the heart for it will be rewarded with fine, spare prose and a hopeful ending. —Alix Wilber, Amazon.com

Aristophanes The plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In "The Birds", two frustrated Athenians join the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds'. "The Knights" is a venomous satire on Cleon, a prominent Athenian demagogue, while "The Assembly Women" deals with the battle of the sexes as the women of Athens infiltrate the all-male Assembly in disguise. The lengthy conflict with Sparta is the subject of "Peace", inspired by the hope of a settlement in 421 BC, and "Wealth" reflects on the economic catastrophe that hit Athens after the war.

Jake Arnott Looks at the underbelly of life in the 90s.

Kate Atkinson On a peat and heather island off the west coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother Nora take refuge in the large mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. But strange things are happening. Why is Effie being followed? Is someone killing the old people? And where is the mysterious yellow dog?

Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, has never felt at home in Cambridge, and has a failed marriage to prove it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, he attempts to unravel three case histories and begins to realise that everything is connected.

Kate Atkinson Once it had been the great forest of Lythe. And here, lived the Fairfaxes, visited once by the great Gloriana herself. But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed. The Fairfaxes have dwindled too. But Isobel Fairfax knows about the past. She is waiting for the return of her mother whose disappearance is part of the mystery.

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood A decade and a half has passed since Grace was locked up, at the age of 16, for the cold-blooded murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper/lover Nancy Montgomery. Her alleged accomplice, James McDermot, was hanged in 1843. Dr Simon Jordan attempts to uncover the truth.

Beryl Bainbridge Beryl Bainbridge seems drawn to disaster. First she tackled the Unfortunate Scott expedition to the South Pole in The Birthday Boys; later (but emphatically pre-DiCaprio) came the sinking of the Titanic, in Every Man for Himself. Now, in her third historical novel (and her 16th overall), she takes on the Crimean War, and the result is a slim, gripping volume with all of the doomed intensity of the Light Brigade's charge—but, thankfully, without the Tennysonian bombast. "Some pictures," a character confides, "would only cause alarm to ordinary folk." There's a warning concealed here, and one that easily disturbed readers would do well to heed: Master Georgie is intense, disturbing, revelatory—and not always pretty to look at.

Bainbridge's narrative circles around the enigmatic figure of George Hardy, a surgeon, amateur photographer, alcoholic, and repressed homosexual who counters the dissipation of his prosperous Liverpool life by heading for the Crimean Peninsula in 1854. His journey and subsequent tour of duty are told in three very different voices: Myrtle, an orphan whose lifelong loyalty to her "Master Georgie" becomes an overriding obsession; Pompey Jones, street urchin, fire-eater, photographer, and George's sometime lover; and Dr. Potter, George's scholarly brother-in-law, whose retreat from the war's carnage and into books takes on a tinge of madness.

United by a sudden death in a Liverpool brothel in 1846, these characters plumb the curious workings of love, war, class, and fate. In between, Bainbridge frames an unforgettable series of tableaux morts: a dying soldier, one lens of his glasses "fractured into a spider's web"; a decapitated leg, toes "poking through the shreds of a cavalry boot"; two dead men "on their knees, facing one another, propped up by the pat-a-cake thrust of their hands." Glimpsed as if sideways and then passed over in language that is as understated as it is lovely, these are images that sear into the brain. Master Georgie is full of such moments, horrors painted with an exquisite brush. —Mary Park

Beryl Bainbridge A novel about one family's experiences in the Crimean War. When the Battle of Inkerman was over, five survivors were assembled in front of a camera. A sixth figure - Master Georgie - added symmetry to the group. In the distance a young woman circled round and round like a bird above a robbed nest.

Michael Baker

J. G. Ballard J.G. Ballard — author of 'Crash' and 'Empire of the Sun' — explores the dangers of extremism in ecology and feminism in this highly acclaimed modern fable.

Iain Banks

Iain Banks

Iain Banks By the author of 'The Wasp Factory' and 'Walking on Glass', this book is set in Japan and on the Panama Canal. It concerns a world famous Japanese cellist, who refuses to fly, and as a result finds herself involved in the ominous realm of global 'realpolitik'.

Iain Banks Isis Whit is a member of the 'Elect of God', a religious cult based near Stirling. When her cousin Morag renounces her faith, it falls to Isis to venture out into the techno-ridden barreness of nineties Britain to save her. But Morag has embraced the ways of the 'unsaved' with surprising vigour.

Iain Banks Kate Telman is a senior executive officer in The Business, a powerful and massively discreet transglobal organisation. Financially transparent, internally democratic and disavowing conventional familial inheritance, the character of The Business seems, even to Kate, to be vague to the point of invisibility. It possesses, allegedly, a book of Leonardo cartoons, several sets of Crown Jewels and wants to buy its own State in order to acquire a seat at the United Nations. Kate's job is to keep abreast of current technological developments and her global reach encompasses Silicon Valley, a ranch in Nebraska, the firm's secretive Swiss headquarters, and a remote Himalayan principality. In the course of her journey Kate must peel away layers of emotional insulation and the assumptions of a lifetime. She must learn to keep her world at arm's length. To take control, she has to do The Business.

Iain Banks Iain Banks' daring new novel opens in a loft apartment in the East End, in a former factory due to be knocked down in a few days. Ken Nott is a devoutly contrarian vaguely left-wing radio shock-jock living in London. After a wedding breakfast people start dropping fruits from a balcony on to a deserted carpark ten storeys below, then they start dropping other things; an old TV that doesn't work, a blown loudspeaker, beanbags, other unwanted furniture...Then they get carried away and start dropping things that are still working, while wrecking the rest of the apartment. But mobile phones start ringing and they're told to turn on a TV, because a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Centre. At ease with the volatility of modernity, Iain Banks is also our most accomplished literary writer of narrative-driven adventure stories that never ignore the injustices and moral conundrums of the real world. His new novel, set in contemporary London, displays the trademark dark wit, buoyancy and momentum of his finest work. It will be one of the most important novels of 2002.

Iain Banks COMPLICITY n. 1. the fact of being an accomplice, esp. in a criminal act

Local journalist Cameron Colley writes articles that are idealistic, from the viewpoint of the underdog. A twisted serial killer seems to have the same MO — he commits brutal murders on behalf of the underdog. As the two stories begin to merge, Cameron finds himself inextricably and inexplicably implicated by the killer.

When the arms dealer whom Cameron plans to expose is found literally "disarmed" before Cameron can even put pen to paper and the brewery chief, loathed by Cameron, who sold out at the expense of his workers finds himself permanently unemployable, the police become convinced of Cameron's guilt, as do half his friends and colleagues, forcing Cameron to employ all his investigative skills to find the real killer and his motive.

Iain Banks

John Banville Winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize

A.L. Barker

A.L. Barker

Pat Barker Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. As Nick watches, Geordie starts to relive the horrors surrounding his brother's death and his own terrible experiences during the WWI. Meanwhile, Nick and his wife Fran are trying to unite their fractious young family, despite the discovery of a Victorian drawing revealing the tragic history of their house.

Emily Barr

Emily Barr The perfect couple. The perfect French farmhouse. Plan A is the perfect life. But then there's the other...

Sally Beauman From Sally Beauman, the bestselling author of DESTINY, comes the superbly daring and completely captivating companion to one of the best-loved novels in the English language. 'A masterly piece of literary resurrection' Penny Perrick, Sunday Times

Samuel Beckett

Lauren Belfer Louisa Barrett is the headmistress of Macaulay School for Girls in Buffalo, New York, at the turn of the century. A passionate, highly intelligent woman, she remains unmarried but welcomes the general misconception that she is in a relationship with the radical, outspoken Francesca Coatsworthy. The husband of Louisa's late best friend is the head of the hydroelectric power project at Niagra Falls. He is turning water into light and trying to persuade the conservationists that diverting water from the Falls will not ruin its beauty. When one of the chief engineers disappears through a hole in the ice and racist graffiti appears on the town walls, Louisa is unwillingly drawn into the drama around the Falls. But Louisa has a secret and one she must protect at all costs. The layers of intrigue build to a revelatory climax. This is a compelling tale brilliantly told. Louisa Barrett is a heroine in the style of Elizabeth Bennett, headstrong, loveable and convincing as an amateur sleuth. A gripping, literary thriller. —Hannah Griffiths

Peter Benchley

David Benioff The long-awaited new novel by the critically-acclaimed author of THE 25TH HOUR and one of Hollywood's brightest screenwriting stars.

Alan Bennett First published in the London Review of Books in 1996, TheClothes They Stood Up In takes the reader into familiar Bennett territory. Maurice and Rosemary Ransome are a typically dissatisfied, middle-aged, middle-class couple, childless and emotionally withdrawn. "They had no children and but for Mozart would probably have split up years ago. Mr Ransome always took a bath when he came home from work and then he had his supper. After supper he took another bath, this time in Mozart". However, one night, after returning from a performance of Cosi fanTutte, bath, supper, Mozart and everything disappeared. "There is a limit to what burglars can take: they seldom take easy chairs, for example, and even more seldom settees. These burglars did. They took everything".

What unfolds is a brilliant account of the ways in which the lives of the Ransomes are subtly but profoundly changed forever, as Rosemary discovers the joys of shopping at the local Pakistani shop and the limits of counselling, and Maurice fantasises about new CD equipment with which to listen to Mozart. However, just as life begins to return to normal, a letter arrives which throws new light on the Ransome's extraordinary burglary. Beautifully observed and written with a masterly economy of style, Bennett's story packs an enormous amount into just over 100 pages, and has not one but two delicious stings in its tail. —Jerry Brotton

Alan Bennett Features none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advisers. The consequence is surprising, mildly shocking and funny.

Benni, Stefano

E. F. Benson

John Berendt

John Berger

Louis de Bernieres When war is declared and the outside world intrudes, the twin scourges of religion and nationalism lead to forced marches and massacres, and the peaceful fabric of life is destroyed. Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty, and Ibrahim the Goatherd who has courted her since infancy are but two of the many casualties.

Ambrose Bierce

Mark Billingham * He kills because he's afraid not to ... how scared does that make you? * A sensational new thriller from the author of the bestselling SLEEPYHEAD

Mark Billingham The fifth DI Tom Thorne novel from Britain's hottest new talent, set in the heart of London.

Maeve Binchy

Judy Blume In the summer of 1977, Victoria Leonard's world changed forever—when Caitlin Somers chose her as a friend. Dazzling, reckless Caitlin welcomed Vix into the heart of her sprawling, eccentric family, opening doors to a world of unimaginable privilege, sweeping her away to vacations on Martha's Vineyard, a magical, wind-blown island where two friends became summer sisters. . . .

Now, years later, Vix is working in New York City. Caitlin is getting married on the Vineyard. And the early magic of their long, complicated friendship has faded. But Caitlin has begged Vix to come to her wedding, to be her maid of honor. And Vix knows that she will go—for the friend whose casual betrayals she remembers all too well. Because Vix wants to understand what happened during that last shattering summer. And, after all these years, she needs to know why her best friend—her summer sister—still has the power to break her heart....

Giovanni Boccaccio A new translation of the fourteenth-century tales recounted by young citizens of Florence who have fled the city to escape the plague.

Hilary Bonner

Sam Bourne The new, brilliantly high-concept religious conspiracy-theory thriller from the author of 'The Righteous Men', set against the backdrop of the world's bitterest conflict.

Malcolm Bradbury Contains works from thirty-four of Britain's contemporary writers. This book includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, and stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo.

Malcolm Bradbury Francis Jay, a nineties person, embarks on a quest to find one of the greatest philosophers and thinkers of the modern age, the elusive Dr Bazlo Criminale. From European congress to congress, from woman to woman, from muse to muse he pursues the doctor, while the truth is slowly revealed.

Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan

Richard. BRAUTIGAN

Emily Bronte

Christopher Brookmyre Another fast talking, fast action thriller by the author of QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING, winner of the 1996 Critics' First Blood Award.

Christopher Brookmyre The occasion: high school reunion. The place: an oil rig converted into a tourist resort. The outcome: carnage.

Christopher Brookmyre A robbery in Glasgow might not seem an unusual background for a crime novel - until it's put into the hands of Britain's leading satirist ...

Christy Brown

Dan Brown

Rosellen Brown

Judy Budnitz Try not to get too attached to the characters in this collection of short stories. Some are easy to keep at arm's length—monstrous women with chins rolling down their throats, hooded hijackers or scarred children with rank breath. But others are more endearing, stealing up to you with their intimacies, lingering in your memory long after you've moved on. The man in the shabby zip-up dog suit who blinks longingly in the hope of getting some scraps; the son who is persuaded to donate his heart to his mother (it's only "a little bit of flesh" after all); the seven-year-old girl in red overalls, smelling of childhood and sweet milk.

If Judy Budnitz's stories have a hallmark, it is the inevitable nudging towards a "glorious, disastrous, unexpected turn". Set in an America of one-traffic-light towns, these stories follow the downtrodden and explore how they fall off the edge. But you want to know what happened next, what went wrong. Did he leave her? Did she leave him? Did she lie to him, cheat on him... You want her to slip up, don't you? She doesn't seem real to you yet; she's too perfect. You want to see her make a mistake... Often there is something darkly delicious about this—for just as Budnitz knows how to navigate between the sinister and the funny, she knows when to leave you stranded, squirming half-cocked and when to release the tension with sharp one-liners. Flying Leap is Judy Budnitz's first collection of short stories, published to great acclaim in the States (it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year). It comes to us after the publication of her first novel, If I Told You Once, which was short-listed for the Orange Prize 2000. —Jane Honey

Mikhail Bulgakov A new translation of Bulgakov's novel which also includes a commentary and afterword that provide new insights into the subtext of the novel.

Gordon Burn

William Burroughs

Tim Burton Twenty-three illustrated gothic tales from the dark corridors of the imagination of the creative genius behind Batman, Edward Scissorhands and Big Fish. Burton's lovingly lurid illustrations evoke both the sweetness and tragedy of a cast of gruesomely sympathetic children - hopeful, yet hapless beings.

Italo Calvino This collection of playful, deadly fables is populated with waifs and strays, a gluttonous thief and a mischievous gardener. The grimly comic story "The Argentine Ant" moved Gore Vidal to declare 'if this is not a masterpiece of twentieth-century prose writing, I cannot think of anything better'.

Andrea Camilleri Montalbano returns for another delicious mystery

Anthony Capella 'A delicious book — funny, foodie and romantic. The definitive Roman romantic comedy' Richard Curtis

Peter Carey

Caleb Carr

John le Carre

John le Carré There were those who feared that the end of the Cold War would deal a fatal blow to the creativity of many first-rate thriller writers who specialised in this territory. In the case of John le Carré, this would have meant the loss of not only Britain's finest thriller writer, but a serious novelist of quite as much literary gravitas as any of his mainstream contemporaries. Certainly, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold remains as utterly compelling today as when it was written, whereas such post-Cold War le Carré themes as financial double dealing seemed to inspire him less than the world of shifting identity he had dealt in so skilfully. But with The Constant Gardener, we have the author once again firing on all cylinders. The characterisation is as elegant and expressive as ever, the prose as limpid and forceful. But, most of all, le Carré has found a theme quite as pregnant as any he has handled in the past: the malign, deceptively ameliorative world of global pharmaceuticals. In the new novel, the customary themes of betrayal and danger are explored in a narrative that exerts a total grip throughout its considerable length. His protagonist, Justin Quayle, is an unreflective British diplomat whose job in the British High Commission in Nairobi suggests one of Graham Greene's dispossessed protagonists trying to survive in the sultry corruption of foreign climates. President Arap Moi's Kenya is a country in the grip of AIDS, while political machinations maintain a deadly status quo. When Quayle's wife (who has taken more interest in what is happening around her than her husband) is killed, his investigation of her murder leads him into a murky web of exploitation involving Kenyan greed and a major pharmaceutical company eager to promote its "wonder cure" for tuberculosis. As Quayle looks deeper into the company which his wife had been investigating, all he has carefully built around him begins to crumble. The steady accumulation of tension and rigorous delineation of character is emblematic of le Carré at his finest, and it is a tremendous pleasure to find the author so resolutely back on form, fired with a real sense of anger at the duplicity of the modern world:"Specious, unadulterated, pompous Foreign Office bullshit, if you want its full name—trade isn't making the poor rich. Profits don't buy reforms. They buy corrupt government officials and Swiss bank accounts". —Barry Forshaw

Angela Carter

Michael Chabon Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from the author 'Wonder Boys'. 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' is a heart-wrenching story of escape, love and comic-book heroes set in Prague, New York and the Arctic.

Raymond Chandler

G. K. Chesterton, Kingsley Amis

Tracy Chevalier The Dutch painter Vermeer has remained one of the great enigmas of 17th-century Dutch art. While little is known of his personal life, his extraordinary paintings of natural and domestic life, with their subtle play of light and colour, have come to define the Dutch Golden Age. The mysterious portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has fascinated art historians for centuries, and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.

Girl with a Pearl Earring centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. The appointment of the quiet, perceptive heroine of the novel, the servant Griet, gradually throws the household into turmoil as Vermeer and Griet become increasingly intimate, an increasingly tense situation that culminates in her working for Vermeer as his assistant, and ultimately sitting for him as a model. Chevalier deliberately cultivates a limpid, painstakingly observed style in homage to Vermeer, and the complex domestic tensions of the Vermeer household are vividly evoked, from the jealous, vain, young wife to the wise, taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic, but Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist in its tail. Chevalier acknowledges her debt to Simon Schama's classic study of the Dutch Golden Age, The Embarrassment of Riches, and the novel comes hard on the heels of Deborah Moggach's similar tale of domestic intrigue behind the easel of 17th-century Dutch painting, Tulip Fever.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a fascinating piece of speculative historical fiction, but how much more can novelists extract from the Dutch Golden Age? —Jerry Brotton

Kate Chopin

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie What's better than Agatha Christie? Thirteen Agatha Christies

A baker's dozen of fiendishly-told tales in which indomitable sleuth Miss Jane Marple plays host to some of the most clever crimes-and criminals.

Agatha Christie A bit of adventure and quick cash is all that good-natured drifter Anthony Cade is looking for when he accepts a messenger job from an old friend. It sounds so simple: deliver the provocative memoirs of a recently deceased European count to a London publisher. But the parcel holds ore than scandalous royal secrets. It contains a stash of letters that suggest blackmail—and lead to the murder of a stranger who's been shadowing Anthony's every move. Discovering the dead man's identity means retracing his steps—to the rambling estate of Chimneys where darker secrets, and deadlier threats, await anyone who dares to enter.

Agatha Christie A selection of mysteries, some light-hearted, some romantic, some very deadly! Twelve tantalizing cases! the curious disappearance of Lord Listerdale; a newlywed's fear of her ex-fiance; a strange encounter on a train; a domestic murder investigation; a wild man's sudden personality change; a retired inspector's hunt for a murderess; a young woman's impersonation of a duchess; a necklace hidden in a basket of cherries; a mystery writer's arrest for murder; an astonishing marriage proposal; a soprano's hatred for a baritone; the case of the rajah's emerald. All have one thing in common: the skilful hand of Agatha Christie.

Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot was invited to the Hollow to tea, but found a murder waiting for him instead.

The victim—an extraordinarily vital, emotionally complex doctor—was the last person anyone expected to see lying dead by the pool. And his meek, befuddled wife was the last person anyone would expect to see standing over him with a gun. Did she really shoot her husband? Or is she merely a second victim in a brilliantly planned plot by a daring, cunning murderer?

To find the answers, Poirot delves deep into the character of the victim and those in his sphere, sorting through colorful personalities and tangled emotions. But in doing so, he finds himself thwarted by a person who he calls "one of the best antagonists that I have ever had."

Agatha Christie The Leonides are one big happy family living in a sprawling, ramshackle mansion. That is until the head of the household, Aristide, is murdered with a fatal barbiturate injection.

Suspicion naturally falls on the old man’s young widow, fifty years his junior. But the murderer has reckoned without the tenacity of Charles Hayward, fiancÉ of the late millionaire’s granddaughter.

Agatha Christie Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Then, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with a drug overdose.

But the evening post brought Roger one last fatal scrap of information. Unfortunately, before he could finish reading the letter, he was stabbed to death.

Agatha Christie An old-fashioned London hotel is not quite as reputable as it makes out to be.…

When Miss Marple comes up from the country for a holiday in London, she finds what she’s looking for at Bertram’s Hotel: traditional decor, impeccable service, and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly polished veneer. Yet, not even Miss Marple can foresee the violent chain of events set in motion when an eccentric guest makes his way to the airport on the wrong day.…

Agatha Christie The first Miss Marple mystery, one which tests all her powers of observation and deduction.

“Anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe,” declared the parson, brandishing a carving knife above a joint of roast beef, “would be doing the world at large a favor!”

It was a careless remark for a man of the cloth. And one which was to come back and haunt the clergyman just a few hours later—when the Colonel is found shot dead in the clergyman’s study. But as Miss Marple soon discovers, the whole village seems to have had a motive to kill Colonel Protheroe.

Agatha Christie From seat No. 9, Hercule Poirot was ideally placed to observe his fellow air passengers. Over to his right sat a pretty young woman, clearly infatuated with the man opposite; ahead, in seat No. 13, sat a countess with a poorly concealed cocaine habit; across the gangway in seat No. 8, a detective writer was being troubled by an aggressive wasp. What Poirot did not yet realize was that behind him, in seat No. 2, sat the slumped, lifeless body of a woman.

Agatha Christie Luke Fitzwilliam does not believe Miss Pinkerton’s wild allegation that a multiple murderer is at work in the quiet English village of Wychwood and that her local doctor is next in line.

But within hours, Miss Pinkerton has been killed in a hit-and-run car accident. Mere coincidence? Luke is inclined to think so—until he reads in the Times of the unexpected demise of Wychwood’s Dr. Humbleby.…

Agatha Christie Sir Charles Cartwright should have known better than to allow thirteen guests to sit down for dinner. For at the end of the evening one of them is dead—choked by a cocktail that contained no trace of poison.

Predictable, says Hercule Poirot, the great detective. But entirely unpredictable is that he can find absolutely no motive for murder.…

Agatha Christie When an elderly priest is murdered, the killer searches the victim so roughly that his already ragged cassock is torn in the process. What was the killer looking for? And what had a dying woman confided to the priest on her deathbed only hours earlier?

Mark Easterbrook and his sidekick Ginger Corrigan are determined to find out. Maybe the three women who run The Pale Horse public house, and who are rumored to practice the “Dark Arts,” can provide some answers?

Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Nicolas Roeg Don't Look Now was filmed in 1973 and based around a Daphne Du Maurier novel. Directed by Nicolas Roeg, it has lost none of its chill: like Kubrick's The Shining, its dazzling use of juxtaposition, colour, sound and editing make it a seductive experience in cinematic terror, whose aftershock lingers in daydreams and nightmares, filling you with uncertainty and dread even after its horrific climax. Donald Sutherland plays John Baxter, an architect, Julie Christie his wife: a well-to-do couple whose young daughter drowns while out playing. Cut to Venice, out of season, where the couple encounter a pair of sisters, one of whom claims psychic powers and to have communicated with their dead daughter. The subsequent plot is as labyrinthine as the back streets of the city itself, down which Baxter spots a diminutive and elusive red-coated figure akin to his daughter, before being drawn into an almost unbearable finale. Don't Look Now is a Gothic masterpiece, with its melange of gore, mystery, ecstasy, the supernatural and above all grief, while the city of Venice itself—which thanks to Roeg and his team seems to breathe like a dark, sinister living organism throughout the movie—deserves a credit in its own right. Not just a magnificent drama but an advanced feat of cinema. —David Stubbs

Marcus Clarke

Chris Cleave The stunning new novel from the author of INCENDIARY

Harlan Coben Elizabeth was taken from David one night, tortured, killed and abandoned by the serial murderer known as KillRoy; he was left for dead. Eight years later, he gets an e-mail which leads him to a camera feed, and sees her standing on a street corner looking at him. And suddenly he is on the run, accused of her murder and of others, dependent on the whim of a violent pusher whose child's life he saved. Harlan Coben's new thriller Tell No One is a terrifying kinetic novel of abuse of power, false accusation and the things that go wrong with the most careful of schemes. David Beck is a memorable character—a dedicated doctor whose mourning for his wife has gradually become itself a sort of paralysis, but who has a surprising resilience under stress; he has not got much going for him in the terrible situations in which he finds himself, but he makes ingenious use of what he has got. This is an intelligent thriller in which we get to watch suspect, police and some very unpleasant heavies chase each other around in impressively convoluted circles. Coben is one of the best multiple-bluffers in the business. —Roz Kaveney

Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben Like Harlan Coben's other recent novels of suspense, The Innocent starts in the green suburbs of New Jersey and takes us off into the dark heart of the secrets and lies that often lie at the centre of American life. Matt has rebuilt his life after a brawl that left him serving four years hard time for manslaughter. He has clawed back some of the dreams of his young manhood—in particular, Olivia, the girl he met once, dreamed of and then found again. Now someone is sending him phone images of Olivia, in a blonde wig, with another man... Local cop Loren is trying to find out who smothered a teacher at the local convent, and why the dead nun had breast implants; over-the-hill stripper Kimmy is visited by the daughter of a long-dead friend...

This is a plot as well constructed as a good watch, yet as unpredictable as a fairground ride, but what gives Coben's books their unique quality is the fact that his writing always has heart. We care about even the most minor and venal of his characters, because Coben knows that often, what divides heroism from crime is the consequences of one bad day. —-Roz Kaveney

Liza Cody A year ago, Eva Wylie was the biggest, meanest, ugliest female wrestler to disgrace the ring. Her name was on posters. People recognized her on the street. But having been barred from the ring, she's back at the bottom, reduced to guarding rich people's cars and dreaming of yesterday's triumphs.

Jonathan Coe

Paulo Coelho 'The Alchemist' is a global phenomenon, selling over 30 million copies worldwide. This exciting new edition includes exclusive content, such as a new forward to the book by the author, an interview with Paulo Coelho, and much more, providing an in-depth look at this much-loved title.

J M Coetzee Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded.

jenny colgan

Wilkie Collins, John Sutherland

James Conan It is 1893 and Anna Zemeckis, a young New Yorker, goes missing in America's most dangerous city: Chicago. Emily Strauss, a reporter from the 'New York World', is given a treacherous assignment: to find out what happened to Anna. Alone in a dangerous world, she faces a near-impossible task. And, she soon discovers, a powerful enemy.

michael connelly

Michael Connelly The 'best crime writer in the world' (GQ) delivers his first legal thriller - a blistering tale about a cynical defence attorney whose one remaining spark of integrity may cost him his life.

John Connolly Bestselling author John Connolly turns his unique imagination to the ancient tradition of legend and fairytale in this engrossing novel about the loss of innocence and the enduring power of story in our lives.

Peter Cook Peter Cook may have had problems that prevented him ever fully achieving all that his comic genius was capable of, but that side of the writer and comedian is not the point of Tragically, I Was an Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook, which is a quite marvellous anthology of the man's writings.

Cook's reputation has continued to flourish since his death, and many consider him (along with Spike Milligan) one of the greatest comic writers this country has produced. Although his public face was always the quaffing, sardonic commentator, he was, in fact, a writer who simply never stopped creating new sketches and articles for both public consumption and his own satisfaction. Many of these pieces have not been published before, and many have only been broadcast once. This collection brings together many high spots of Cook's career: from his early success with Beyond the Fringe (and his initial meetings with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore) to his time as an éminence grise behind the magazine Private Eye.

Needless to say, all the marvellous EL Whisty monologues are here, as well as classic Pete and Dud routines, and even the more scabrous collaborations between Cook and Moore as the foul-mouthed Derek and Clive. The fact that Cook's Milligan-like drawings complement the text makes this a truly cherishable volume. —Barry Forshaw

Edmund Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper

Jilly Cooper

Alan Coren

Alan Coren

Patricia Cornwell A serial killer is on the loose in Richmond, Virginia. Three women have died, brutalised and strangled in their own bedrooms. There is no pattern: the killer appears to strikes at random - but always early on Saturday mornings. So when Dr Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner, is awakened at 2.33 am, she knows the news is bad: there is a fourth victim. And she fears now for those that will follow unless she can dig up new forensic evidence to aid the police. But not everyone is pleased to see a woman in this powerful job. Someone may even want to ruin her career and reputation...

Patricia Cornwell A cargo ship arriving at Richmond, Virginia's Deep Water Terminal from Belgium is discovered to be transporting a locked, sealed container holding the decomposed remains of a stowaway. Scarpetta's post mortem reveals no cause of death or ID and sets her on a mission that could ruin her career.

Noel Coward

Josephine Cox On a fateful night in 1860, Thadius Grady realizes too late that he has made a grave mistake. In blind faith, he has put himself and his daughter Emma at the mercy of his sister and her conniving husband, Caleb Crowther—for he has entrusted to them his entire fortune and the daughter he adores. With his dying breath he pleads to see his daughter one last time, but Caleb's heart is made of stone. But Caleb lives in fear of the past, for how did Emma's mother mysteriously die? And what made Thadius and Caleb hate the river people so intensely? History seems likely to repeat itself when Emma falls helplessly in love with Marlow Tanner, a young bargee. For Marlow and Emma, it is an impossible love—a love made in Heaven, but which could carry them both to Hell!

Michael Cox Early Buzz From Amazon.co.uk Top Reviewers
We queried our top 100 reviewers and asked them to read The Meaning of Night and share their thoughts. We've included these early reviews below in the order they were received. For the sake of space, we've only included a brief excerpt of each reviewer's response, but each review is available for reading in its entirety by clicking the "Read the review" link. Enjoy!
John Chippindale: "After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper . . ."
If the opening sentence of this book does not demand the attention of the reader, I don’t know what will. If you never pick up another book, you must read this one." Read John Chippindale’s review

Budge Burgess: "With 600 pages of narrative, Latin chapter headings, literary and scholarly allusions, compendious footnotes, and the conceit that this is, indeed, a Victorian testament bequeathed to posterity by its hero and consequently written in an approximation of mid-19th century style, this is a weighty tome, and one which suffers from its art." Read Budge Burgess’s review

David Bryson: " It takes skill to recreate the atmosphere convincingly in the 21st century, and Michael Cox, biographer and editor of the great ghost-story writer M R James, seems to me never to hit a wrong note." Read David Bryson’s review

Kona: "This is an exciting read, full of period details and charm. Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction." Read Kona’s review

Russell Clarke: "Goes against the flow of the usual revenge motif in culture and art and is all the more poignant and compulsive for it. A highly recommended read." Read Russell Clarke’s review

Andrew Butterfield: "I’m not usually a fan of this genre, and didn’t expect too much of The Meaning of Night, but I must confess I was drawn into the story and helped along by the easy yet literary writing style."Read Andrew Butterfield's review

N. C. Samaniego: "The story itself is ingenious, building hopes of a satisfactory outcome, and the unexpected final twist prepares for a dramatic showdown." Read N. C. Samaniego’s review

Bruce Loveitt: "If you love the 19th century....the times and the literature of the period....you will love this book. It is both exciting and touching, appealing to both the intellect and the heart. A winner." Read Bruce Loveitt’s review

Peter Kenney: "The story is marked by clever twists and the writing is excellent. I recommend this book without reservation to any reader who likes a fascinating tale packed with intrigue, romance and robust characters." Read Peter Kenney’s review

Samantha Banwell: "Although not a fan of this book, I cannot help but admire its descriptive detail of Victorian England." Read Samantha Banwell’s review

M. J Leonard: "Meticulously researched, forbiddingly atmospheric and also remarkably secretive, Cox writes with a sharp eye for period detail. The novel is a strange and heady brew of social convention, the desolation of a lonely, half-mad man and the restrictions of a society who continually refuses to acknowledge him.!" Read M.J. Leonard’s review

Amanda Richards: "This is a big book, a huge book, a massive tome – it is one of those books that would cause grievous bodily harm if dropped upon the unsuspecting foot. But don’t let that deter you – from the first confession to the final gripping chapter you’ll find yourself a tad reluctant to place your bookmark between the pages, even when the midnight hour has ticked away and a new work day is approaching in mere hours." Read Amanda Richard’s review

Anders P. Jensen: "The occationally odd names of people and places may seem a bit too cute at first (Phoebus Rainsford Daunt?!), and I haven't read all of the ‘editor's notes’, but Cox is easily forgiven, because he can write." Read Anders P. Jensen’s review

A. Skudder: "Nearly everything I would like to say about this book would involve giving away something, and a great deal of the enjoyment of the story is in experiencing the sudden changes of direction without warning, right the way up to the very brave ending. If you want to know what that ending is and why it is so brave you will have to read it yourself, but you are unlikely to regret it." Read A. Skudder’s review

Daniel Jolley: "If you harbor the slightest appreciation for the unparalleled power and beauty of the written word, you will want to immerse yourself in the pages of The Meaning of Night." Read Daniel Jolley's review

Themis-Athena: "It reportedly took a tragedy in Michael Cox's life to transform an unfinished manuscript begun thirty years earlier into a novel finally and deservedly now making its way into print. I very much hope it won't take another tragedy (or another thirty years) for his next book to be published." Read Themis-Athena’s review

The Fragrant Wookiee: "An intriguing novel which will completely immerse you in its twisting subtleties and which you will be very glad you decided to give a try. I know I was.." Read the Fragrant Wookiee’s review

Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton Thomas Sanders' world collapses in just 24 hours - he is passed over for promotion, his new woman boss comes on to him during a drink after work, then, the next morning, he learns that she has accused him of sexually harassing her. She demands his transfer, thereby threatening to cut him off from the millions he would have made.

Roald Dahl A book of ghost stories.

Roald Dahl This title covers storties including: "The Visor", "The Great Switcheroo", "The Last Act", and "Bitch".

Roald Dahl This work features stories including: "Death of an Old Man", "An African story", "A Piece of Cake", "Madame Rosette", "Katina", "Yesterday was Beautiful", "They Shall not Grow", "Beware of the Dog", "Only This", and "Someone Like You".

Roald Dahl Roald Dahl's first-ever novel presents the scurrilous memoirs of that delightful old reprobate from "Switch Bitch", Oswald Hendryks Cornelius - connoisseur, bon vivant, collector of spiders, scorpions, odd walking sticks, lover of opera, expert on Chinese porcelain, and without doubt the greatest fornicator of all time. In this delightful picaresque story, it is revealed how Uncle Oswald first achieved great wealth - all thanks to the Sundance blister beetle, which when ground to powder has the most electrifying aphrodisiac qualities. It is 1919 - armed with the powder and aided by the beautiful amoral Yasmin how comely, Oswald begins an audacious commercial enterprise which involves seducing the most famous men in Europe - from crowded heads to Bernard Shaw and Marcel Proust.

Roald Dahl Roald Dahl turns his pen to anything, twisting everyday life into powerful, and sometimes terrifying fantasies, including: turtles, fingersmiths, 'The Mildenhall, Treasure', and even a man who can see with his eyes closed.

Roald Dahl These eighteen tales of the macabre show Dahl's dark brilliance as a short-story writer. They are wicked (as an old man attracts the attentions of those more interested in his skin than his wellbeing), shocking (as distasteful bets are made - a daughter's hand on the identity of a glass of claret, a finger risked for a Cadillac) and blackly humorous (as a cuckolded husband receives a chance to take his revenge out on his wife's neck). "Someone Like You" is as devilishly ingenious and suspenseful as writing gets.

Richard Dalby

Andrew Davidson A young man is fighting for his life. Into his room walks a bewitching woman who believes she can save him. Their journey will have you believing in the impossible. A Richard and Judy Best Read 2009 pick.

Andrew Davies

Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies Around a mysterious death is woven a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived trilogy of novels: "Fifth Business", often described as Robertson Davies' finest novel; "The Manticore", and "World of Wonders". Luring the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history and magic, "The Deptford Trilogy" provides an exhilarating antidote to a world from where 'the fear and dread and splendour of wonder have been banished. 'His books will be recognized with the very best works of this century' - "The New York Times" Book Review.

Janice Deaner

Michael Dibdin A teacher of English as a foreign language moves to Oxford after several years abroad. His adulterous affair with a friend's wife leads first to the death of the friend, then to the death of the wife, and finally to the death of his boss. By the author of 'Vendetta' and 'Ratking'.

Michael Dibdin In the fifth of the Aurelio Zen crime series, Zen finds himself in Naples, in disgrace - and having the time of his life. Corrupt politicians, shady business men and eminent mafiosi are disappearing off the streets at an alarming rate, but Zen's commitment to his work is at an all-time low.

Michael Dibdin An Aurelio Zen mystery. Zen returns to his native Venice to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy American resident, but soon learns that, amid the hazy light and shifting waters of the lagoon, nothing is what it seems.

Michael Dibdin After his adventures in 'Cosi Fan Tutti', Aurelio Zen finds himself back in Rome, sneezing in a damp wine cellar and being given another unorthodox assignment - to release the jailed scion of an important wine-growing family.

Michael Dibdin Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. From the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia to take over a kidnapping case involving one of Italy's most powerful families. Gold Dagger Award winner.

Michael Dibdin Oscar Burolo was the kind of big-shot who thought he could control everything. Inside his Sardinian mansion, everything was recorded on close-circuit TV - even his own violent death. An impossible case for Inspector Zen, who first appeared in 'Ratking', winner of a CWA Gold Dagger.

Philip K. Dick In this sardonically funny gem of speculative fiction, Philip K. Dick creates a novel that manages to be simultaneously unpredictable and perversely logical.

Poor Pete Garden has just lost Berkeley. He's also lost his wife, but he'll get a new one as soon as he rolls a three. It's all part of the rules of Bluff, the game that's become a blinding obsession for the last inhabitants of the planet Earth. But the rules are about to change—drastically and terminally—because Pete Garden will be playing his next game against an opponent who isn't even human, for stakes that are a lot higher than Berkeley.

Philip K. Dick Imagine the world if the Allies had lost the Second World War. This book trips the switches of our minds with a vision of the world as it might have been: the African continent virtually wiped out, the Mediterranean drained to make farmland, and, the United States divided between the Japanese and the Nazis.

Charles Dickens HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times!' Set before and during the French Revolution in the cities of Paris and London, A Tale of Two Cities tells the story of Dr Manette's release from imprisonment in the Bastille and his reunion with daughter, Lucie. A French aristocrat Darnay and English lawyer Carton compete in their love for Lucie and the ensuing tale plays out against the menacing backdrop of the French Revolution and the shadow of the guillotine.

William Diehl

Stephen Dobyns

Jennifer Donnelly An astounding novel about a girls coming-of-age inter-woven with a real life murder that rocked turn-of-the-century America. Winner of the 2004 Carnegie Medal.

F.M. Dostoevsky A novel built out of a series of dramatic scenes that illuminate eternal conflicts at the heart of human existence: most especially our desire for self-expression and self-fulfilment, as against the constraints of morality and human laws.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Roddy Doyle Tells the story of ten-year-old Paddy Clarke, who sees everything but understands less and less.

Christophe Dufosse When a teacher is found dead, having apparently committed suicide, his friend Pierre Hoffman takes over class 4F and finds himself responsible for a group of strangely subdued, well-behaved and yet menacing pupils. Over the weeks that follow, he receives a series of signals that cause him to question the circumstances of his colleague's suicide.

Sarah Dunant * The latest novel from the bestselling author of THE BIRTH OF VENUS and IN THE COMPANY OF THE COURTESAN, out now in paperback

Colin Dunne

David Ebershoff Jordan returns from California to Utah to visit his mother in jail. As a teenager he was expelled from his family and religious community, a secretive Mormon offshoot sect. Now his father has been found shot dead in front of his computer, and one of his many wives - Jordan's mother - is accused of the crime.

Umberto Eco

Kim Edwards The night Dr David Henry delivers his wife's twins is a night that will haunt five lives for ever. For though David's son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down's syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only time will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse.

Thomas Eidson

Alice Thomas Ellis

Ben Elton The war on drugs has been lost, but for want of the courage to face that fact, the whole world is rapidly becoming one vast criminal network. From the Groucho Club toilets to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, we are all partners in crime and this story takes us through the landscape it has created.

Ben Elton Flanders, June 1917, a British officer is shot dead, killed not by German fire, but while recuperating from shell shock well behind the lines. This novel presents a historical drama, and explores some fundamental questions such as: What is murder? What is justice in the face of daily slaughter?

Shusaku Endo

Laura Esquivel Relates the bizarre history of the all-female De La Garza family. Tita, the youngest daughter of the house, has been forbidden to marry, condemned by Mexican tradition to look after her mother until she dies. But Tita falls in love with Pedro, and he is seduced by the magical food she cooks.

Janet Evanovich A work of adventure and comedy.

Nomi Eve These days the term "multi-generational novel" conjures up something flabby and cliché ridden, which makes it all the more refreshing that Nomi Eve brings so much verve, warmth and imagination to the genre in her debut novel. Eve shows off a range of talents here—she adroitly weaves 150 years of Jewish and Israeli history into the lives of her characters; she is alive to the intersections of legend, magic and everyday reality; she has an intimate knowledge of the business of grafting and growing fruit trees. But her gift for conjuring up the pleasures of the senses is the finest of all. It's difficult to think of a writer since Colette who has so revelled in the language of smells, tastes, textures, and exquisite sexuality.

The novel opens in 1837 when Esther Herschell, the beautiful granddaughter of the chief rabbi of the British Empire, marries the learned eastern European Rabbi Yochanan Schine, and the young couple takes up residence in a "half-grand, half-decrepit" house in Jerusalem. Within paragraphs Esther embarks on a delirious love affair with a handsome young baker and Yochanan finds out about it, which mysteriously only heightens the married couple's pleasure in each other. So commences a narrative driven by sexual undercurrents, unexpected emotional reactions and the spell of Jerusalem with its "twists, turns, bakers and twin arcane whispers of piety and perversity."

Eve moves the family stories along briskly, and in the twinkling of an eye World War I has broken out, and Avra Schine, Esther and Yochanan's light-fingered granddaughter, is stealing bullets from the Turkish Army to supply daring Jewish spies. Avra bears handsome, blue-eyed identical twin sons, Moshe and Zohar, who come of age during the years of struggle and tragedy that preceded Israeli independence. As the generations revolve, Eve filters the terrible saga of mid-20th century Jewish history through the lives of the Schine/Sepher family—their marriages and deaths, dreams and desires, and the orchard that anchors each generation to the town of Petach Tikvah.

Nomi Eve has drunk deep from the wells of South American magic realists like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende and Yiddish fabulists and folk writers like Shalom Aleichem and IB Singer. But never do her teachers and masters overpower her own voice, a voice at once clear and resonant, earthy and ethereal. The Family Orchard is not a perfect work of art—but then perfection is not really the point here. It is, however, a deeply moving and highly accomplished novel, and an astonishingly impressive debut. —David Laskin, Amazon.com

Sheridan Le Fanu

J.G. Farrell 'For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece' NEW STATESMAN

William Faulkner, David Minter The text of this Norton Critical Edition is that of the corrected edition scrupulously prepared by Noel Polk, whose textual note precedes the text. David Minter’s annotations are designed to assist the reader with obscure words and allusions."Backgrounds" begins with the appendix Faulkner wrote in 1945 and sometimes referred to as another telling of The Sound and the Fury and includes a selection of Faulkner’s letters, excerpts from two Faulkner interviews, a memoir by Faulknerís friend Ben Wasson, and both versions of Faulkner's 1933 introduction to the novel. "Cultural and Historical Contexts" presents four different perspectives on the place of the American South in history. Taken together, these works—by C. Vann Woodward, Richard H. King, Carolyn Porter, and Robert Penn Warren—provide the reader with valuable contexts for understanding the novel. "Criticism" includes seventeen essays on The Sound and the Fury that collectively trace changes in the way we have viewed this novel over the last four decades. The critics are Jean-Paul Sartre, Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, Olga W. Vickery, Cleanth Brooks, Michael Millgate, John T. Irwin, Myra Jehlen, Donald M. Kartiganer, David Minter, Warwick Wadlington, John T. Matthews, Thadious M. Davis, Wesley Morris and Barbara Alverson Morris, Minrose C. Gwin, André Bleikasten, and Philip M. Weinstein. A revised Selected Bibliography is also included.

Sebastian Faulks Faulks has collected the best fiction about war in the 20th century. This anthology includes stories by Erich Maria Remarque, Pat Barker, Isaac Babel, Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Boll, Norman Mailer, J.G. Ballard, Tim O'Brien, Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernieres.

Sebastian Faulks Set before and during the great war, this work captures the drama of that era on both a national and a 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 to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself.

Sebastian Faulks Mike Engleby says things that others dare not even think. In the 1970s, he is a university student, having survived a 'traditional' school. A man devoid of scruple or self-pity, Engleby provides an account of English education. Yet, beneath the disturbing surface of his observations lies an unfolding mystery of gripping power.

Joshua Ferris

Helen Fielding Bridget Jones wants to have it all - and once she's given up smoking and got down to 8st 7 she will. Based on Helen Fielding's diary in the Independent newspaper, this is a novel about a year in the life of a single girl on an optimistic but doomed quest for self-improvement and Inner Poise. First published in 1996.

Henry Fielding, Sheridan Baker The Second Edition of this Norton Critical Edition of Fielding’s great novel reprints the definitive fourth edition text (1749, dated 1750), "Carefully revis’d and corrected/By Henry Fielding, Esq;", the last in his lifetime.The novel is fully annotated for undergraduate readers and is accompanied by a Textual Appendix and a map depicting Tom’s route to London.

As in the previous edition, "Contemporary Reactions" by such noteworthy commentators as Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, and the Hill sisters provide rich historical context.

"Criticism" is a collection of fourteen interpretations of the novel spanning the years 1826–1990 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Forsyth, Kenneth Rexroth, R. S. Crane, John Preston, William Empson, Wayne C. Booth, Martin Battestin, Maaja A. Stewart, Eleanor N. Hutchens, Sean Shesgreen, Frederick W. Hilles, and Sheridan Baker.

A new Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.

F Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald A fascinating study in self-satire that brings to life the Hollywood years of F. Scott Fitzgerald

The setting: Hollywood: the character: Pat Hobby, a down-and-out screenwriter trying to break back into show business, but having better luck getting into bars. Written between 1939 and 1940, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was working for Universal Studios, the seventeen Pat Hobby stories were first published in Esquire magazine and present a bitterly humorous portrait of a once-successful writer who becomes a forgotten hack on a Hollywood lot. "This was not art" Pat Hobby often said, "this was an industry" where whom "you sat with at lunch was more important than what you dictated in your office."

The Pat Hobby sequence, as Arnold Gingrich writes in his introduction, is Fitzgerald's "last word from his last home, for much of what he felt about Hollywood and about himself permeated these stories."

F. Scott Fitzgerald F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness.

In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture.

Tender Is the Night is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald's novels; it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true. This account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife's derangement and a lifestyle that gnaws away at his sense of moral values offers an authorial cri de coeur, while Dick Diver's downward spiral into alcoholic dissolution is an eerie portent of Fitzgerald's own fate.

F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into Tender Is the Night, and the novel's lack of commercial success upon its initial publication in 1934 shattered him. He would die six years later without having published another novel, and without knowing that Tender Is the Night would come to be seen as perhaps its author's most poignant masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan's words, it raised him to the heights of "a modern Orpheus."

F. Scott Fitzgerald The exemplary novel of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgeralds' third book, The Great Gatsby (1925), stands as the supreme achievement of his career. T. S. Eliot read it three times and saw it as the "first step" American fiction had taken since Henry James; H. L. Mencken praised "the charm and beauty of the writing," as well as Fitzgerald's sharp social sense; and Thomas Wolfe hailed it as Fitzgerald's "best work" thus far. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when, The New York Times remarked, "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s that resonates with the power of myth. A novel of lyrical beauty yet brutal realism, of magic, romance, and mysticism, The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

This is the definitive, textually accurate edition of The Great Gatsby, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and authorized by the estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first edition of The Great Gatsby contained many errors resulting from Fitzgerald's extensive revisions and a rushed production schedule, and subsequent editions introduced further departures from the author's intentions. This critical edition draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, along with Fitzgerald's later revisions and corrections, to restore the text to its original form. It is The Great Gatsby as Fitzgerald intended it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach. Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character.

F. Scott Fitzgerald ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP

Published when he was twenty-three years old, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, established him as the golden boy of the dawning Jazz Age. As a chronicle of youth, no other literary work remains as revealing—or as bitingly relevant.

THIS ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES:

• A concise introduction that gives the reader important background information

• A chronology of the author’s life and work

• A timeline of significant events that provides the book’s historical context

• An outline of key themes and plot points to guide the reader’s own interpretations

• Detailed explanatory notes

• Critical analysis and modern perspectives on the work

• Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction

• A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader’s experience

Simon & Schuster Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world’s finest books to their full potential.

F. Scott Fitzgerald This collection chronicles the fiction and non fiction classics by the greatest writers the world has ever known. The inclusion of both popular as well as overlooked pieces is pivotal to providing a broad and representative collection of classic works.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson A mysterious woman stands and smiles at Monroe Stahr, the last of the great Hollywood princes. Enchanted by one another, they begin a passionate but hopeless love affair.

F.Scott Fitzgerald

Fannie Flagg A novel spanning late 1940s small-town America and the New York media world of the 1970s, by the author of FRIED GREEN TOMATOES AT THE WHISTLESTOP CAFE. It tells the story of a television interviewer with emotional and drink problems who was abandoned as a teenager by her mother.

Fannie Flagg A novel, both funny and macabre, which ties in with the film of the same name, starring Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates.

James Fleming

Leah Fleming

Susan Fletcher With the death of a mother and the abduction of a young girl, Susan Fletcher has written a vividly beautiful novel about the innocence and terror of childhood.

Jonathan Safran Foer The simplest thing would be to describe Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish-American—who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer—travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex) and a flatulent mongrel bitch, named Sammy Davis JR JR. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains and Latka from the US television series Taxi. (Sentences such as "It is mammoth honour for me write for a writer, especially when he is American writer, like Ernest Hemingway"; "It is bad and popular habit for people in Ukraine to take things without asking" are the norm.) Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by "Safran Foer"—a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the Shetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.

If all this sounds a little daunting don't be put off; Safran Foer is an extremely funny as well as intelligent writer. Admittedly he has an annoying habit of capitalising great chunks of text, but minor typographical nuances are easy to ignore in a book that combines some of the best Jewish folk yarns since Isaac Bashevis Singer with a quite heartbreaking meditation on love, friendship and loss. —Travis Elborough

E M Forster Lucy Honeychurch, a young woman, is travelling abroad for the first time with her cousin Charlotte. On her return to England, in her relationships with her cousin, the unconventional Emersons and her supercilious fiance Cecil, Lucy is torn between lingering Victorian proprieties and the spontaneous promptings of her heart.

Alan Dean Foster In the years after first contact, humans and the intelligent insect like Thranx agree to a tentative sharing of ideas and cultures despite the ingrained repulsion they have yet to overcome. Thus, a slow, lengthy process of limited contact begins.

Yet they never plan for a chance meeting between a misfit artist and a petty thief. Desvendapur is a talented Thranx poet who is bored with his life and needs new inspiration for his work. Venturing beyond the familiar, Desvendapur runs into Cheelo Montoya, a small-time criminal with big dreams of making a fast buck. Together they will embark upon a journey that will forever change their beliefs, their futures, and their worlds . . .

Alan Dean Foster Chosen by Science Fiction Chronicle as One of the Best Books of the Year

Bestselling author Alan Dean Foster has written an exciting Humanx Commonwealth adventure that delves deeper into the fragile early years when humans made first contact in this unforgettable world . . .

In the second half of the twenty-fourth century, diplomatic relations proceed cautiously between thranx and humans. But the insectlike beings are nearly forgotten with the sudden discovery of an ideal planet to colonize–Argus V–and the startling appearance of a new race of space-faring aliens. People are dazzled by the beautiful, glamorous pitar. Then tragedy strikes.

The entire human population on Argus V is brutally slaughtered. Not a single clue remains to identify the unseen executioners. But from a tiny inner moon of Argus V comes a faint signal. On that insignificant chunk of rubble lies the key to the crime–setting in motion a cataclysmic chain of events with deadly consequences for thranx, pitar, and human alike. For their worlds will be changed forever by a colossal battle that is their future and their destiny . . .

Karen Joy Fowler

Dick Francis Valentine, a dying old man, makes his last confession to a friend, Thomas Lyon, mistaking him for a priest. Wild horses wouldn't drag from a priest the secrets of the confessional, but then film director Thomas is no priest. Should he tell what he knows from the confession?

Charles Frazier Charles Frazier's debut novel, Cold Mountain, is the story of a very long walk. In the waning months of the Civil War, a wounded Confederate veteran named Inman gets up from his hospital bed and begins the long journey back to his home in the remote hills of North Carolina. Along the way he meets rogues and outlaws, Good Samaritans and vigilantes, people who help and others who hinder, but through it all Inman's aim is true: his one goal is to return to Cold Mountain and to Ada, the woman he left behind. The object of his affection, meanwhile, has problems of her own. Raised in the rarified air of Charleston society, Ada was brought to the backwoods of Cold Mountain by her father, a preacher who came to the country for his health. Even after her father's death, Ada remains there, partly to wait for Inman, but partly because she senses her destiny lies not in the city but in the North Carolina Blue Ridge.

Cold Mountain is the story of two parallel journeys: Inman's physical trek across the American landscape and Ada's internal odyssey toward an understanding of herself. What makes Frazier's novel so satisfying is the depth of detail surrounding both journeys. Frazier based this story on family history, and in the characters of Inman and Ada he has paid a rich compliment to their historical counterparts. Cold Mountain is, quite simply, a wonderful book.

Nicci French Land of the Living is the latest thriller from the husband-and-wife team of journalist Nicci Gerrard and writer Sean French. They have produced (as Nicci French) several first-rate novels of psychological suspense, such as The Red Room, Beneath the Skinand Killing Me Softly.

Land of the Living is possibly their most assured outing yet, with all the carefully crafted plotting and assiduous characterisation that has distinguished their earlier work. The basic situation is intense and immediate: Abbie Devereux wakes up and finds herself hooded and bound, with no idea of how she ended up in this terrifying state. She is tended to by a man she never sees: a man who makes the promise that he will eventually kill her "like the others". Abbie is forced to re-examine aspects of her identity, her career and the dying relationship she had with her boyfriend. The struggle for survival is physical and mental. If French's compelling novel owes more than a little to John Fowles' masterpiece The Collector, it is none the worse for that. And the delineation of extreme mental states has all the disturbing assurance of Patricia Highsmith. —Barry Forshaw

Nicci French You remember an idyllic childhood. But your memory is deceitful. And possibly deadly...When a skeleton is unearthed in the Martellos' garden, Jane Martello is shocked to learn it's that of her childhood friend, Natalie, who went missing twenty-five years ago. Encouraged by a therapist to recover lost memories, Jane hopes to find out what really took place when she was a child - and what happened to Natalie. But in learning the truth about hers and Natalie's past, is Jane putting her own future at terrible risk?

Nicci French You open your home and your heart to a victim. But your house is anything but safe...Samantha Laschen is a doctor specialising in post-traumatic stress disorder. She's moved to the coast to escape her problems and to be alone with her young daughter. But now the police want her to take in Fiona Mackenzie, a girl whose parents have been savagely murdered. Yet by allowing Fiona in, Sam is exposing herself - and her daughter - to risks she couldn't possibly have imagined...

Kinky Friedman

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry

Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman

Damon Galgut

Xingjian Gao Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2000. Part travel diary, part philosophy, part love story, 'Soul Mountain' is an elegant, unforgettable novel that journeys deep into the heart of modern-day China. In 1982 Chinese playwright, novelist and artist Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer, the very disease that had killed his father. For six weeks Gao inhabited a transcendental state of imminent death, treating himself to the finest foods he could afford while spending time reading in an old graveyard in the Beijing suburbs. But a secondary examination revealed there was no cancer — he had won a 'reprieve from death' and had been thrown back into the world of the living. Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing. He travelled first to the ancient forests of central China and from there to the east coast, passing through eight provinces and seven nature reserves, a journey of fifteen thousand kilometres over a period of five months. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is 'Soul Mountain'. Interwoven into this picaresque journey are myriad stories and countless memorable characters — from venerable Daoist masters and Buddhist monks and nuns to mythical Wild Men; deadly Qichun snakes to farting buses. Conventions are challenged, preconceptions are thwarted and the human condition, with all its foibles and triumphs, is laid bare.

Tim Gautreaux

Tess Gerritsen Top Ten bestselling author Tess Gerritsen expands the scope of her landscape of terror in a thoroughly menacing new thriller. A brilliantly compulsive page-turner from the author of The Surgeon.

B.M. Gill

Robert Goddard A thriller about a history graduate who goes to Madeira to investigate the mysterious fall from grace of a politician 70 years earlier, and finds that people still want the truth to remain hidden.

Johann Goethe Visiting an idyllic German village, Werther, a sensitive young man, falls in love with sweet-natured Lotte. Though he realizes that Lotte is to marry Albert, he is unable to subdue his passion and his infatuation torments him to the point of despair.

Glen David Gold A dazzling debut, a gripping, panoramic novel of magic and science, love and death set in 1920s America

William Golding Golding's best-known novel is the story of a group of boys who, after a plane crash, set up a fragile community on a previously uninhabited island. As memories of home recede and the blood from frenzied pig-hunts arouses them, the boys' childish fear turns into something deeper and more primitive.

William Goldman Starting out as a boy in the Catskills, Corky develops into a brilliant and famous magician whose long-hidden secret and expert skills attract dark forces intent on destroying him.

Ivor Gould

Gunter Grass

Robert Graves A work of historical fiction which recreates the life and times of Emperor Claudius, who lived from 10 BC to AD 41, a time when poisoning, blasphemy, treachery, incest and unnatural vice were commonplace. From the author of CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE MESSALINA.

Robert Graves

Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray

Gael Greene

Graham Greene A collection of short stories by the author of "Brighton Rock", "The Quiet American", "The Power and the Glory" and "Our Man in Havana".

Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Philippa Gregory A contemporary psychological thriller in the style of Ruth Rendell, from one of today's most versatile and compelling storytellers. It was easy for Elizabeth. She married the man she loved, bore him two children and made a home for him which was the envy of their friends. It was harder for Ruth. She married Elizabeth's son and then found that, somehow, she could never quite measure up! Isolation, deceit and betrayal fill the gaps between the two individual women and between their different worlds. In this complex thriller, Philippa Gregory deploys all her insight into what women want and what women fear, as Ruth confronts the shifting borders of her own sanity. Laying bare the comfortable conventions of rural England, this spine-tingling novel pulses with suspense until the whiplash double-twist of the denouement.

Kate Grenville William Thornhill is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. They arrive in this harsh land that they cannot understand and which feels like a death sentence.

Nicholas Griffin

John Grisham Two Supreme Court Justices are dead. Brilliant, beautiful and ambitious, New Orleans legal student Darby Shaw little realises that her speculative brief will penetrate to the highest levels of power in Washington and cause shockwaves there - shockwaves that will see her boyfriend atomised in a bomb blast.

James E. Gunn A classic of science fiction, this book predicted and inspired the creation of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)—the organization dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. A tale of contact with alien life hailed by leaders of SETI organizations and today's leading science fiction authors as hugely influential, the story appeals to both science fiction readers and the hundreds of thousands of members of various SETI organizations. This replaces 034530036X.

Mark Haddon At 57, George Hall is settling down to a retirement. Then Katie, his daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her brother Jamie observes that Ray has 'strangler's hands'. This book features a portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely. It also talks about the people who fall apart and come together as a family.

Matt Haig A reworking of 'Henry IV Part II, this is the story of the Hunter family: Adam, a teacher, his wife Kate, and their children Hal, seventeen, and Charlotte, thirteen. And Prince, their black Labrador. It's Prince who is the narrator and protagonist of this tale.

Peter Haining When comedy enters the world of fantasy, anything can happen - and it usually does in the inventive hands of such brilliant writers as Terry Pratchett, Tom Sharpe and Spike Milligan, all of whom are featured in this uproarious new collection. Following on from the spectacular success of THE WIZARDS OF ODD and THE FLYING SORCERERS, KNIGHTS OF MADNESS presents fantasy at its most comic in a collection of SF, heroic romance and crime. With Terry Pratchett creating mayhem on the Hollywood freeway and Peter S. Beagle running riot with a New Yorker who just happens to be a werewolf; with manic knights, crazed astronauts and bungling criminals, here are stories that rollick from hilarity to absurdity, from satire to the bizarre, in a glorious melange of wit and imaginative genius.

Mohsin Hamid In the wake of September 11, Changez, a Pakistani man in Manhattan, finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.

James Hamilton-Paterson Gerald Samper, an effete Englishman and ghostwriter for celebrities, lives on a hilltop in Tuscany. His idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, a vulgar woman from the Soviet Republic. The neighbours' lives disastrously intertwine as the English obsession with Tuscany is satirized.

Thomas Hardy Jude Fawley's hopes of a university education are lost when he is trapped into marrying the earthy Arabella, who later abandons him. Moving to the town of Christminster where he finds work as a stonemason, Jude meets and falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead, a sensitive, freethinking 'New Woman'.

Helen Harris

Jane Harris An attempt to escape her past makes Bessy Buckley take a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella. Bessy is puzzled by her employer's increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts. It seems that Arabella has a few secrets of her own.

Robert Harris

Robert Harris Certain thriller writers burst upon the scene with considerable impact: Forsyth with The Day of the Jackal, Cruz Smith with Gorky Park and Robert Harris with the masterly Fatherland. Interestingly, of these three authors, by far the most consistent has been Harris, and his new novel, Pompeii is in some ways his most audacious offering yet, a brilliantly orchestrated thriller-cum-historical recreation that plays outrageous tricks with the reader's expectations.

As in the equally adroit Enigma, Harris takes a familiar historical event (there, the celebrated code-breakers at Bletchley Park, here the volcanic obliteration of an Italian city in AD79) and seamlessly weaves a characteristically labyrinthine plot in and around the existing facts. But that's not all he does here: few novelists who (unlike Harris) make a speciality of ancient history for their setting pull off the sense of period quite as impressively as the author does here. As the famous catastrophe approaches, we are pleasurably immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of the Ancient World, each detail conjured with jaw-dropping verisimilitude.

Harris's protagonist is the engineer Marcus Attilius, placed in charge of the massive aqueduct that services the teeming masses living in and around the Bay of Naples. Despite the pride he takes in his job, Marcus has pressing concerns: his predecessor in the job has mysteriously vanished, and another task is handed to Marcus by the scholar Pliny: he is to undertake crucial repairs to the aqueduct near Pompeii, the city in the shadow of the restless Mount Vesuvius. And as Marcus faces several problems—all life threatening—an event approaches that will make all his concerns seem petty.

Other writers have placed narratives in the shadow of this most famous of volcanic cataclysms, but Harris triumphantly ensures that his characters' individual dramas are not dwarfed by implacable nature; Marcus is a vividly drawn hero: complex, conflicted and a canny synthesis of modern and ancient mindsets. Some may wish that Harris might return to something closer to our time in his next novel, but few who take this trip into a dangerous past will be able to resist Harris's spellbinding historical saga. —Barry Forshaw

Robert Harris, S. J. Bolton, Susan Hill, Joseph Finder readers digest select editions. 4 books in one.

Thomas Harris

Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck. He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him. Hannibal's uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful wife.

Thomas Harris Seven years have passed since Dr Hannibal Lecter escaped from custody, seven years since FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling interviewed him in a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. The doctor is still at large, but Starling has never forgotten her encounters with Dr Lecter.

Harry Harrison In the vastness of space, the crimes just get bigger and Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is the biggest criminal of them all. He can con humans, aliens and any number of robots time after time. Jim is so slippery that all the inter-galactic cops can do is make him one of their own.

M.John Harrison

Josephine Hart

John Harvey

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Frank Herbert With millions of copies sold worldwide, Frank Herbert's magnificent Dune novels stand among the major achievements of the human imagination as one of the most significant sagas in the history of literary science fiction.

Dune Messiah continues the story of Paul Atreides, better known-and feared-as the man christened Muad'Dib. As Emperor of the Known Universe, he possesses more power than a single man was ever meant to wield. Worshipped as a religious icon by the fanatical Fremens, Paul faces the enmity of the political houses he displaced when he assumed the throne-and a conspiracy conducted within his own sphere of influence.

And even as House Atreides begins to crumble around him from the machinations of his enemies, the true threat to Paul comes to his lover, Chani, and the unborn heir to his family's dynasty.

Hermann HESSE

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse

Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen

Susan Hill

Susan Hill The vengeful ghost of Rebecca, Maxim's first wife, continues to cast its long shadow over Maxim and the second Mrs de Winter. Back in England after an absence of over 10 years, it seems as if happiness will at last be theirs. But the de Winters still have to reckon with 2 hate-consumed figures they once knew - both of whom have very long memories.

Victoria Hislop The acclaimed million-copy number one bestseller

Victoria Hislop

Russell Hoban "A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy.... Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and — this matters most — intensely ponderable." — Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review

"This is what literature is meant to be." — Anthony Burgess

"Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style.... The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." — Anthony Thwaite, Observer

"Extraordinary... Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." — Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

"Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." — John Leonard, The New York Times

"Highly enjoyable... An intriguing plot... Ferociously inventive." — Walter Clemons, Newsweek

"Astounding... Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." — Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan

"An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' — Paul Gray, Time

Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state — and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture — rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.

Alice Hoffman Alice Hoffman's Blue Diary is a gripping tale of good and evil, of ordinary families whose lives are wrenched apart by death. It questions whether you can ever really know anyone, even members of your immediate family you have known all your life, and whether you would be able to find it in your heart to forgive someone you love and respect when they are accused of a crime so terrible that it smashes your whole world to pieces.

Jorie and Ethan Ford are a golden couple blessed with an 11-year-old son, Collie, living a decent, quiet life in small-town Massachusetts. Ethan is a pillar of the community—a handsome, good man, whose life revolves around his family, his work as a carpenter and his roles as volunteer fireman and Little League coach. Since he first walked into her home-town, her life and her bed 13 years before, Jorie has never lost the feeling that she is special, singled out by fate to live a charmed life with a man she still desires and a son she adores. And then, on a glorious Monday morning in June, Jorie's fate turns and her life as she knows it is changed. One wonders whether the hand of fate will offer her any kind of salvation and if she can come to terms with the unimaginable.

Kat Williams, Collie's next-door neighbour and best friend is mature beyond her years. In her short life, she has had to cope with the loss of her father, a distant mother and a sister who attracts, and dispenses with, boyfriends as flies to a light, but who has taken to self-mutilation to heal her numbness. Is Kat the only one who can instinctively feel when something, or someone, is wrong? Charlotte, Jorie's best friend since childhood, knows when something is amiss, but her own terrible losses and lack of self-worth cause her to mistrust her feelings and internalise blame.

In the pages of this (relatively) short novel, Ms Hoffman manages to cover the singular emotions involved in so many different relationships—from parental, marital, sibling, friendship and even criminal-victim. The writing demonstrates enormous intelligence and endless compassion, an ability to cut through the sharp edges of humanity and look deep into a person's soul. In spite of its dark, disturbing theme, Blue Diary is an inspiring story of the enduring spirit of human love. Carey Green

Alice Hoffman With a sense of place that is uncanny, and vividly real characters whose lives don't run smooth and whose stories loop together across space and time, this is work from a favourite novelist.

Homer, E.V. Rieu "The Iliad" is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilisation - an epic poem without rival in the literature of the world, and the cornerstone of Western culture. The story of the "Iliad" centres on the critical events in the last year of the Trojan War, which lead to Achilleus' killing of Hektor and determine the fate of Troy. But Homer's theme is not simply war or heroism. With compassion and humanity, he presents a universal and tragic view of the world, of human life lived under the shadow of suffering and death, set against a vast and largely unpitying divine background. "The Iliad" is the first of the great tragedies.

Homer, H. Rieu The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon - Odysseus must test his bravery and native cunning to the full if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.

Janette Turner Hospital

Ted Hughes Hughes's three contributions to the anthology "After Ovid" an accurate account of the original so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. This volume continues the project, with 24 passages including the stories of Phaeton, Actaon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne and Midas.

Victor Hugo

Barry Humphries

Gregg Hurwitz A gripping new thriller that asks: how can you prove yourself innocent when your own mind is playing tricks on you?

Catherine Ryan Hyde Mitch is a 25-year-old with commitment issues. Leonard is a five-year-old kid with asthma and vision problems, who captivates everyone he meets. Pearl is Leonard's teenage mother, who's trying to hide a violent secret from her past. Life has given Pearl every reason to mistrust people, but circumstances force her to trust her neighbour, Mitch.

Elisabeth Hyde

Greg Iles The disturbing new thriller from the king of southern gothic.

John Irving While reporting a story from India, New York journalist Patrick Wallingford inadvertently becomes his own headline when his left hand is eaten by a lion. In Boston, a renowned surgeon eagerly awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant. But what if the donor’s widow demands visitation rights with the hand? In answering this unexpected question, John Irving has written a novel that is by turns brilliantly comic and emotionally moving, offering a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change.

John Irving

John Irving Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is both extraordinary and terrifying.

John Irving 'One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole awoke to the sound of lovemaking - it was coming from her parents' bedroom'. This title tells the story of Ruth Cole.

Kazuo Ishiguro "... I've worked hard over the years to check the spread of crime and evil wherever it has manifested itself." Christopher Banks, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, When We Were Orphans, has dedicated his life to detective work but behind his successes lies one unsolved mystery: the disappearance of his parents when he was a small boy living in the International Settlement in Shanghai. Moving between England and China in the inter-war period, the book, encompassing the turbulence and political anxieties of the time and the crumbling certainties of a Britain deeply involved in the opium trade in the East, centres on Banks's idealistic need to make sense of the world through the small victories of detection and his need to understand finally what happened to his mother and father.

This new novel, however, is the deliberate antithesis of the classic English detective story—the hermetic country-house worlds of Agatha Christie, the classic "locked room" puzzles in which order and sanity is restored at the story's end. Ishiguro mimics the functional style and clipped speech patterns of the genre, ironising its reliance on melodrama and stereotype, while developing a narrative of subtlety, great emotional depth, and political and cultural acuity: what we get is a negative image of classic detective fiction, in which the solved crimes are mentioned in passing and the real mystery is played out in the psychology of the detective himself. The act of detection, Ishiguro suggests, is one we all perform on our own past, struggling to marshal clues and evidence whilst trying to construct the story of ourselves; the one mystery Banks seems unable to solve is his own.

If Ishiguro's concerns as a writer remain broadly the same as in previous novels such as his Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day—the complexities, instability and elusiveness of memory, dramatised through a first-person narrator—this new book shows how flexible and powerful the form has become for him. Banks' quest is both deeply personal and resonantly emblematic of us all:

...for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.

When We Were Orphans is an astonishing book, rich and profound on many levels, and one that will live clearly in the memory of all who read it. —Burhan Tufail

Peter James

Kerry Jamieson

Jerome K. Jerome, Geoffrey Harvey This volume stands as the only available critical edition of two of the most popular classics in English literature. Three Men in a Boat describes a comic expedition by middle-class Victorians up the Thames to Oxford, providing along the way brilliant snap-shots of London's playground in the late 1880s. In Three Men on the Bummel, the three Englishmen escape from the claustrophobia of suburban life some ten years later to go on a cycling tour in the Black Forest of Germany.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

James Joyce

Franz Kafka

Douglas Kennedy

Douglas Kennedy

Marian Keyes Unlike the rest of her family, Maggie Walsh has always done everything right. At thirty-three she has a proper job, is happily married to Garv and never puts a foot wrong. So why does she make a bolt for Hollywood and her best friend, Emily?

Omar Khayyam

Barbara Kingsolver Born in the US and reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. Making himself useful in the household of the famed Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution.

Stieg Larsson Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder - and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family

Stieg Larsson The second instalment in the Millennium Trilogy sees Lisbeth Salander wanted for murder while Blomkvist tries desperately to clear her name.

Stieg Larsson Salander is plotting her revenge - against the man who tried to kill her, and against the government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. But it's not going to be easy, as she's in Intensive Care under close supervision.

Mary Lawson This slow-burning story is set in the rural 'badlands' of Northern Ontario, where tragedy and hardship are mirrored in the landscape. It is a universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harboured and driven underground.

E (R L Megroz, ed) Lear

Harper Lee

Janice Y. K. Lee Ambitious, exotic, and a classic book club read, 'The Piano Teacher' is a combination of 'Tenko' meets 'The Remains of the Day'.

Judith Lennox

Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard

Primo Levi

Primo Levi A fabulous, funny novel narrated by a multi-talented storyteller

Andrea Levy In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving, multi-award winning novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a lightness of touch and a generosity of spirit that challenges and uplifts the reader.

Marina Lewycka Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside feuding to save their engineer father from gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of wealth. But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths secrets and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget.

David Lodge When Vic Wilcox, MD of Pringle's engineering works, meets English lecturer Dr Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head on. But, in time, both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds - and about themselves.

Lesley Lokko Three girls in search of a missing piece of their lives; three girls who will change their worlds to find it ...

Alison Lurie Ghostly hauntings, both literal and metaphorical, are the subject of this delightful Halloween treat by one of America's wittiest and most literate novelists. An irresistible blend of realism, satire and fantasy, each story is delightfully spooky and satisfying.

Jim Lynch

Shena Mackay Set in the small English village of Stonebridge, the Orchard on Fire tells the story of eight-year-old April Harlency's coming-of-age in a place where the charm of the local landscape contrasts sharply with the predjuices and vagaries of the adult world. When April encounters the red-haired, energetic Ruby Richards, the two girls become fast friends. Together, they abandon the physical and mental abuse forced on them by adults in their lives and transform an abandoned railway car in an orchard into their secret hideaway, an idyllic camp of shared dreams.

Thomas Mann

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Yann Martel One boy, one boat, one tiger...

J. Wallis Martin J Wallis Martin's first two books singled her out as a new mistress of the psychological thriller, and The Long Close Callis a worthy successor, with its tale of a man pushed to the edge by new stress and old demons. McLaughlan was not always the high-flier of London's Flying Squad; once he was a disturbed small boy whose brother had mysteriously disappeared and whose father was one of the most notorious armed robbers of the sixties. When he kills the son of one of today's brutal criminal dynasties, his life is on the line—his son is abducted and he knows that to give himself up will mean slow torture rather than mere death. It is time to appeal to both his fathers—the ageing cop who befriended the family and the violent old man who deserted them; but both old men have questions of their own to ask... Tricksy in its flashes back and forward, spectacular in its understanding of stress and what it does to people, this is a powerful thriller with a nasty sense of irony and a bitter command of internal police politics and paranoia. —Roz Kaveney

Allan Massie

John Matthews How does a new thriller writer carve out a name for himself in an overcrowded field? With Past Imperfect, Matthews shows that he is already a novelist of real accomplishment. Spanning three decades and moving between France, America and England with a slew of forensic, medical and psychiatric evidence to keep the reader irresistibly gripped, Matthews sets his narrative in motion with a car accident in California that has deadly consequences for two boys left fighting for their lives. French detective Dominic Fornier (a character owing not a little to Simenon) finds himself pulled out of the sluggish rural backwaters he is used to in order to unearth the clues that lie in a young boy's psyche. And the blackmail and political intrigue that Fornier encounters are no less intimidating than the ruthless killer determined to ensure that his identity is not disclosed. The exhilarating, picaresque sweep of Matthews' plot needs to be held together with a strong protagonist and with the laconic Fornier, Matthews has created just such a hero. If at times, one may feel the changing of gears between the legal and forensic aspects of the piece, this hardly matters. The delineation of each country is accomplished with dash and verve, and if (at 500 pages) this is a lengthy read, few will find their attention straying at any point. —Barry Forshaw

W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham

Daphne Du Maurier

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy A vivid, thrilling and visceral novel that portrays a time when drug agents and hit men rule the land, reissued to coincide with the UK film release of The Road

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Begins on a windy summer's day in the Chilterns when the calm, organised life of Joe Rose is shattered by a ballooning accident. What happens is shocking and tragic, but strangely inco-sequential. The consequences come after, for that fatal accident brings Joe together briefly, with Jed Parry. Unknown to Rose, something passes between them.

Ian McEwan Ian McEwan s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.

On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia s childhood friend. But Briony s incomplete grasp of adult motives together with her precocious literary gifts brings about a crime that will change all their lives. As it follows that crime s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.

Ian McEwan Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children's books, takes his three-year-old daughter on a routine Saturday morning trip to the supermarket. While waiting in line, his attention is distracted and his daughter is kidnapped. From there, Lewis spirals into bereavement that has effects on his relationship with his wife, his psyche and time itself.

Ian McEwan In a hotel overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come. This book presents the story that tells how the course of life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Hilary McKay

Andy McNab

Pascal Mercier Raimund Gregorius is a mild-mannered, middle-aged professor of ancient languages. One morning, as he is teaching, he is seized by a restlessness that drives him to abandon his classroom then and there - shocking his students, and surprising even himself.

Anne Michaels

Henry Miller

Ian Miller

Mark Mills A haunting tale of murder, love and innocence lost set in post-war Tuscany from the award winning author of 'The Whaleboat House'.

Rohinton Mistry Set in mid-1970s India, a subtle and compelling narrative about four unlikely characters who come together in circumstances no one could have foreseen soon after the government declares a 'State of Internal Emergency'. It is a breathtaking achievement: panoramic yet humane, intensely political yet rich with local delight.

Margaret Mitchell First published in 1936, this book is a historical novel set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Civil War. It tells the love story of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

Michael Moorcock

Kate Morton Within its four walls lay a secret that would last a lifetime

Kate Morton The haunting second novel from the author of the No.1 bestseller, The House at Riverton

Iris Murdoch

Nora Naish

R. K. Narayan Love gets in the way of progress when Raman, a sign painter, meets Daisy, who wishes to bring birth control to the city of Malgudi.

David Nicholls 'A wonderful, wonderful book: wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad. The best British social novel since Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!' The Times

Audrey Niffenegger This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty.

Darian North

Wendy Northcutt 180 true stories to make you glad to be alive, taken from one of the best-known and most frequently accessed web sites.

Flann O'Brien

Flann O'Brien

Joseph O'Connor Tragedy is a word too often used. Nevertheless, in Star of the Sea Joseph O'Connor manages to achieve a real sense of the tragic, as personal dramas of the most distressing kind play themselves out against the background of the Irish potato famine and the almost equal nightmare of the mass emigration that it caused. As passengers die of starvation and disease in steerage, a drama of adultery, inadvertent incest and inherited disease plays itself out in first class. O'Connor raises, and does not attempt definitively to answer, real questions about responsibility and choice.

Bankrupt aristocrat Meredith is emigrating, pursued by the hatred of his tenants and the memory of his mad-hero father. His children's nurse, Mary, has memories of lost love to torment her, as well as of the husband and child who died of hunger. And the ballad singer Mulvey has both his monstrous past and the certain promise that he will be tortured to death by the Liable Men should he not kill Meredith. This is a kaleidoscopic novel, whose events are seen in many idioms, from many points of view—it is a rich novel that knows that there are limits to the sense that can be made of history. —Roz Kaveney

John O'Farrell Michael Adams shares a flat with three other men in their late twenties. Days are spent lying in bed, playing computer games and occasionally doing a bit of work. And then, when he feels like it, he crosses the river and goes back to his unsuspecting wife and children.

Maggie O'Farrell A compulsive and haunting tale of the passion, betrayal, sensuality and ambiguity at the heart of shifting metropolitan lives

Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell Once read, never forgotten: the heartstopping debut that launched bestselling author Maggie O'Farrell on her literary career

Maggie O'Farrell The unforgettable new novel from bestselling author Maggie O'Farrell

Ardal O'Hanlon

Joseph O'Neill In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal.

Joyce Carol Oates A superb collection of crime and mystery stories from one of America's literary giants

Julie Orringer Dives into the private world of childhood and immerses us in its fears and longings. The joyous friendships and the bitter sibling battles, the parents that row and the boys that won't dance with you.

George Orwell

Jefferson Parker Atmospheric, complex and intelligent psychological suspense from the bestselling author of The Blue Hour and Red Light

David Peace And as the summer moves remorselessly towards the bonfires of Jubilee Night, the killings accelerate and it seems as if Bob Fraser the half decent copper and the burnt-out hack Jack Whitehead are the only men who suspect or care that there may be more than one killer at large.

Mervyn Peake Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which Titus Groan, is lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons, and his subjects, according to age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. He must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder and his longing for a life beyond the castle walls.

Iain Pears An art critic journeys to a remote island off Brittany to sit for a portrait painted by an old friend, a gifted but tormented artist living in self-imposed exile. The painter recalls their years of friendship, the gift of the critic's patronage, and his callous betrayals. As he struggles to capture the character of the man, as well as his image, on canvas, it becomes clear that there is much more than a portrait at stake...

Tim Pears

Georges Perec

Chris Petit First published in 1999 by Pan Macmillan and published in 2000 in Pan Books, this is Chris Petit's second novel after 'The Psalm Killer'. Cover image is a still from The Falconer, copyright Chris Petit, Iain Sinclair. Storyline: 'Did you close my eyes? I often wonder what happened. If it was you who found me and was I still beautiful?...Or do you never think of me at all? Am I just the past to you? And if you are thinking, "She can't come back," don't bet on it.' McMahon, an ageing rock star, has started receiving letters-yearning, obsessive letters from a girl called Leah containing information that only she could know. But Leah is dead and has been for a long time, so who is writing the letters? Tough city cop Youselli is hired to track down the mystery of Leah, fighting resistance from McMahon himself who doesn't seem to want to remember and from others who seem to have reasons for wanting to forget. In no time he is drawn into a surreal world of crazy love and dangerous obsession. This is a powerful, chilling novel about people on the road to self-destruction...

Peter Pezzelli In this delightful, moving debut novel, Peter Pezzelli brings to life the earthy sensuality of Tuscany— the smell of just-baked bread wafting through the village piazza; the shopkeepers sweeping the sidewalks under the warm, early morning sun; groups of

Graham Phillips Few know that the face on the famous death mask of Tutankhamen is not his at all. This book reveals an historical mystery which overturns Ancient Egyptian chronology, and also provides evidence that the Parting of the Red Sea and Plagues of Egypt in the Bible are accounts of actual events.

Robert Phillips

DBC Pierre Fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble, and it has something to do with the recent massacre of 16 students at his high school. Soon, the quirky backwater of Martirio, barbecue capital of Texas, is flooded with wannabe CNN hacks, eager for a scapegoat.

Plutarch, Ian Scott-Kilvert Nine Greek biographies illustrate the rise and fall of Athens, from the legendary days of Theseus, the city's founder, through Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, and Alcibiades, to the razing of its walls by Lysander.

Edgar Allan Poe Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe's extraordinary Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction and have also created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. As well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this new selection places the most popular - "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; and "The Purloined Letter" - alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays and political satires.

Charles T. Powers

Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett THE COMPANY BUILDS PLANETS. Kin Arad is a high-ranking official of the Company. After twenty-one decades of living, and with the help of memory surgery, she is at the top of her profession. Discovering two of her employees have placed a fossilized plesiosaur in the wrong stratum, not to mention the fact it is holding a placard which reads, 'End Nuclear Testing Now', doesn't dismay the woman who built a mountain range in the shape of her initials during her own high-spirited youth. But then came discovery of something which did intrigue Kin Arad. A flat earth was something new...First published in 1981, Strata is an early exploration of the idea that was to become the bestselling Discworld series.

Terry Pratchett Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant idiot. Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place which might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks completely different. It plays by different rules. Certainly it refuses to succumb to the quaint notion that universes are ruled by pure logic and the harmony of numbers. But just because the Disc is different doesn't mean that some things don't stay the same. Its very existence is about to be threatened by a strange new blight: the arrival of the first tourist, upon whose survival rests the peace and prosperity of the land. But if the person charged with maintaining that survival in the face of robbers, mercenaries and, well, Death is a spectacularly inept wizard, a little logic might turn out to be a very good idea..."The Colour of Magic" is the first novel in Terry Pratchett's acclaimed Discworld series, which has become one of the most popular and celebrated sequences in English literature.

E. Annie Proulx

Mario Puzo

Daniel Quinn The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man  in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local  newspaper from a teacher looking for serious  pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned  office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling  delicately on a slender branch. "You are the  teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am  the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is  a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story  to tell, one that no other human being has ever  heard. It is a story that extends backward and  forward over the lifespan of the earth from the birth  of time to a future there is still time save.  Like all great teachers, Ishmael refuses to make the  lesson easy; he demands the final illumination to  come from within ourselves. Is it man's destiny  to rule the world? Or is it a higher destiny  possible for him— one more wonderful than he has ever  imagined?

Karen Quinn Having lost her high-powered Wall Street job, her husband and her plush Park Avenue apartment in one afternoon, Ivy Ames emerges broken but unbowed. The newly-single mother-of-two picks herself up, dusts herself down and reinvents herself as a private school admissions adviser whose well-heeled clients will do (literally) anything to get their children into the A-list schools. Thus begins a fast-paced and very funny rom com as Ivy's bid to support her family and regain her self-esteem becomes a tale of modern-day reinvention - and unexpected romance.

Hugh C. Rae

Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin

Ruth Rendell The award-winning author and acclaimed mistress of suspense delves deeply into the heart of a family to uncover the circumstances that lead to murder more than thirty years ago. The story of a family's long-buried secret past is revealed—and the deadly consequences. Mystery Guild Selection. Doubleday Alternate.

Ruth Rendell Two young girls disappear then return home unharmed some days later. Chief Inspector Wexford is concerned about a paedophile who has recently been released back into the community but he cannot foresee the series of serious crimes waiting to happen.

Ruth Rendell

Arturo Perez Reverte The fifth novel from the much acclaimed Spanish literary magician Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Nautical Chart, is (the subtitle tells us) "a novel of adventure", and this vivid and colourful tale of lost treasure, love and betrayal on the high seas is a work that conjures the shade of past masters of nautical adventure. Conrad, Melville and Stevenson are in this heady brew, but not one of those masters ever produced something quite as rich and strange as Pérez-Reverte's utterly individual narrative—although it certainly won't be to every taste.

A beautiful woman named Tánger Soto is at the centre of The Nautical Chart. Nearly 230 years after it went to the bottom, Tánger has uncovered the location of a brigantine called the Dei Gloria, a significant ship of the Jesuit brethren's fleet sunk by pirates in the 17th century. Working for the Naval Museum in Madrid, she keeps her discovery clandestine until she is able to enlist the aid of the laconic seaman Manuel Coy at a maritime auction in Barcelona. He is persuaded to join her on a wild treasure hunt off the southern coast of Spain, fully aware that this is much more than a simple search-and-recover mission, and that Tánger is as full of secrets as the sunken vessel they are tracking down. Coy is a suspended sailor with nothing to do, a mariner without a ship. Tánger utilises her singular manipulative skills with men and her expertise with documents, atlases, and nautical maps to chart the search for the lost treasure. Coy is bewitched by his fiercely determined companion, and before long finds himself falling in love. Along with El Piloto, the canny old man of the sea whose sailboat they chart, they head into perilous seas that promise fortune—or death.

The plotting of this mélange of mystery, love and betrayal is an ever-surprising crossbreed between the adventure tale and the literary novel, constantly (and delightfully) wrong-footing the reader at every turn. Pérez-Reverte utilises his experience as a television journalist who has reported on some of the world's most dangerous crises to ensure that the reader's pulse is often racing, but (as in such earlier novels as The Seville Communion and The Fencing Master it's his powerfully evocative prose that commands our attention. —Barry Forshaw

Mordecai Richler The struggles of a pushy (but engaging) young Jew to make something of his life, mostly at the expense of those around him. The author also wrote "Cocksure".

Ann Victoria Roberts Continuing the story of the historical novel "Louisa Elliot", this is a tale of lost innocence, family conflict and an overwhelming but impossible love.

Michelle Roberts

Bruce Robinson Thomas Penman is the acclaimed autobiographical debut novel by Oscar-winning screenwriter Bruce Robinson, the author of "Withnail and I". This is the story of a dysfunctional family. It is about a boy and his grandpa, life and death, sex and hate, dog's meat and cancer. It is also about pornography, enemas, Morse codes, puberty, secrets, God and loathing. It is also about love.

peter robinson

Peter Robinson Two masked men walk mild mannered accountant, Keith Rothwell, out of his farmhouse and clinically blow him away with a shotgun. Clearly a professional hit - but no one could believe that a man like Keith could be murdered. Chief Inspector Alan Banks discovers Rothwell's secret life.

Peter Robinson 'If you haven't caught up with Peter Robinson already, now is the time to start.' - "Independent Sunday". One foggy night, Deborah Harrison is found lying in the churchyard behind St Mary's, Eastvale. She has been strangled with the strap of her own school satchel. But Deborah was no typical sixteen-year-old. Her father was a powerful financier who moved in the highest echelons of industry, defence and classified information. And Deborah, it seemed, enjoyed keeping secrets of her own...With his colleague Detective Constable Susan Gray, Inspector Alan Banks moves among the many suspects, guilty of crimes large and small. And as he does so, plenty of sordid secrets and some deadly lies begin to emerge...'The novels of Peter Robinson are chilling evocative, deeply nuanced works of art'. - Dennis Lehane.

Peter Robinson 'A writer at the very height of his powers' - Ian Rankin. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks has reached a turning point. With his wife now living with another man in London and his career in the doldrums thanks to Chief Constable Riddle, it is time to ring the changes. Perhaps a move to the National Crime Squad? Perhaps a second chance with Sandra? But then late one night, he is summoned to Riddle's house - and his plans take a surprising new turn. For the Chief Constable's sixteen-year-old daughter Emily has run away and for once Riddle wants Banks to use his unorthodox methods to find her without fuss.

Peter Robinson A Peeping Tom is frightening the women of Eastvale; two glue-sniffing young thugs are breaking into homes and robbing people; and, an old woman may or may not have been murdered. Investigating these cases is Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, a perceptive, curious and compassionate policeman recently moved to the Yorkshire Dales from London to escape the stress of city life. In addition to all this, Banks has to deal with the local feminists and his attraction to a young psychologist, Jenny Fuller. As the tension mounts, both Jenny and Banks' wife, Sandra, are drawn deeper into the events. The cases weave together as the story reaches a tense and surprising climax. "The novels of Peter Robinson are chilling, evocative, deeply nuanced works of art." - Dennis Lehane. "If you haven't encountered Chief Inspector Alan Banks before, prepare for a crash course in taut, clean writing and subtle psychology. And watch for those twists - they'll get you every time." - Ian Rankin.

Peter Robinson The body of a well-liked local historian is found half-buried under a drystone wall near the village of Helmthorpe, Swainsdale. Who on earth would want to kill such a thoughtful, dedicated man? Penny Cartwright, a beautiful folk singer with a mysterious past, a shady land-developer, Harry's editor and a local thriller writer are all suspects - and all are figures from Harry's previous, idyllic summers in the dale. A young girl, Sally Lumb, knows more than she lets on, and her knowledge could lead to danger. Inspector Banks' second case unearths disturbing secrets behind a bucolic facade. "The novels of Peter Robinson are chilling, evocative, deeply nuanced worksof art." - Dennis Lehane. "If you haven't encountered Chief Inspector Alan Banks before, prepare for a crash course in taut, clean writing and subtle psychology. And watch for those twists - they'll get you every time." - Ian Rankin.

Peter Robinson A faceless corpse is discovered in a tranquil, hidden valley below the village of Swainshead. And when Chief Inspector Alan Banks arrives, he finds that no-one is willing to talk. Banks' frustration only grows when the identity of the body is revealed. For it seems that his latest case may be connected with an unsolved murder in the same area five years ago. Among the silent suspects are the Collier brothers, the wealthiest and most powerful family in Swainsdale. When they start use their influence to slow down the investigation, Inspector Alan Banks finds himself in a race against time..."The novels of Peter Robinson are chilling, evocative, deeply nuanced works of art" - Dennis Lehane.

Peter Robinson When Alan Banks receives a disturbing message from his brother, Roy, he abandons the peaceful Yorkshire Dales for the bright lights of London, to seek him out. But Roy seems to have vanished into thin air. Meanwhile, DI Annie Cabbot is called to a quiet stretch of road just outside Eastvale, where a young woman has been found dead in her car. In the victim's pocket, scribbled on a slip of paper, police discover Banks' name and address. Living in Roy's empty South Kensington house, Banks finds himself digging into the life of the brother he never really knew, nor even liked. And as he begins to uncover a few troubling surprises, the two cases become sinisterly entwined. 'The Banks novels are, simply put, the best series now on the market' - Stephen King.

Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson In Bad Boy, as before in his impressive body of work, Peter Robinson has tackled – and mastered – a naggingly recurrent problem for crime writers: the over-familiar scenario. He grabs with both hands the notion of the male/female copper duo eternally at odds with each other and does something subtly different, always coming up with some new innovation to keep cliché firmly at bay. Here again are DCI Alan Banks and his associate DI Annie Cabbot tackling particularly knotty problems, and even though Banks is offstage for a chunk of the action (evidence, again, of Robinson ringing the changes), we are reminded why readers are so at ease with this long-running series: Banks and Cabbot are two of the most distinctive figures in the overcrowded police procedural field.

In Bad Boy, Banks’ daughter Tracy – prone to ill-considered actions — has found herself bewitched by her flatmate’s boyfriend, whose good looks conceal a dangerous personality. He goes on the run from the police, he drags along the pliable Tracy Banks, and the threatening events that result are bad news for everyone involved – in particular, the beleaguered policeman who is also a worried parent, Alan Banks.

As aficionados know, with any Peter Robinson novel, the reader can sit back and enjoys a master of the police procedural form, with all the expected elements satisfyingly in place. DCI Banks is shortly to enjoy a television incarnation – and it’s a safe bet that the filmmakers will struggle to keep things as fresh as Robinson always manages to do. —Barry Forshaw

Philip Roth Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

With a new Afterword by the author for the 25th Anniversary edition.

J. K. Rowling

Arundhati Roy The Asian literary phenomenon of the 90s.

Jed Rubenfeld An intricately plotted literary thriller that uses Freud's theories and Shakespeare's HAMLET to solve a devious crime, this is a novel in the bestselling tradition of Caleb Carr's THE ALIENIST and Matthew Pearl's THE DANTE CLUB.

James Runcie A story of post-war Britain through the lives of one family

Damon Runyon

Norman Rush

Salman Rushdie Flapping Eagle is a young Indian given the gift of immortality after drinking a magic fluid. Tiring of the burden of immortal life he sets off to find the mystical Calf Island, where he can rejoin the human race. His journey is peopled with strange assortments of characters, including the clumsy, loquacious Virgil Jones; his ugly, tragic companion, Dolores O'Toole; the wicked conjurer, Nicholas Deggle; the dainty, light-spirited Elfrida Gribb; and the enigmatic, pervasive Grimus, creator and controller of the mysterious island.

Salman Rushdie Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself handcuffed to history by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent. This is a family saga set against the background of the India of the 20th century.

Salman Rushdie No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a fatwa from Iran's Ayatollahs decreeing his death. Furore aside, it is a marvellously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's astonishing powers of invention are at their best in this Whitbread Prize winner.

Salman Rushdie Containing nine stories, this book looks at what happens when East meets West, at the forces that pull the characters first in one direction, then the other. Fantasy and realism collide as a rickshaw driver writes letters describing his film career in Bombay; a mispronunciation leads to romance; an unusual courtship in sixties London; and more.

Saki Alone among Saki's works in being almost entirely located in London, this novel focuses on the Mayfair scene of bridge afternoons, dinner parties, and concerts. At the center of a group of brilliantly depicted bores and savage wits is Comus Bassington, "the beatiful wayward laughing boy."

Saki, H. H. Munro Saki's satirical, comic and macabre short stories of pre-war society.

J.D. Salinger A 16-year old American boy relates in his own words the experiences he goes through at school and after, and reveals with unusual candour the workings of his own mind. What does a boy in his teens think and feel about his teachers, parents, friends and acquaintances?

Jean-Paul Sartre An extraordinary picture of life in France during the critical eight days before the signing of the fateful Munich Pact and the subsequent takeover of Czechoslovakia in September 1938. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton.

Josephine Saxton

Danny Scheinmann Leo Deakin wakes up in a hospital somewhere in South America, his girlfriend Eleni is dead and Leo doesn't know where he is or how Eleni died. Moritz Daniecki is a fugitive from a Siberian POW camp separated him from his village and his sweetheart. The author paints a dramatic portrait of two men sustaining their lives through the memory of love.

Bernhard Schlink An exceptionally powerful novel exploring the themes of betrayal, guilt and memory against the background of the Holocaust. An international bestseller.

Christina Schwarz “POWERFUL . . . SUSPENSEFUL . . . RICHLY TEXTURED . . . [A] CHILLING, PRECOCIOUSLY GOOD START TO A BRIGHT NEW NOVELIST’S CAREER.”
–The New York Times

“[A] gripping psychological thriller . . . In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. . . . Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened the night of the drowning. . . . Schwarz certainly succeeds at keeping the reader engrossed.”
–FRANCINE PROSE
Us Weekly

“DEFT AND ASSURED . . . [WITH] STRONG CHARACTERS AND A PLOT LONG ON TENSION AND SURPRISES.”
–Time

“A strong sense of portent and unusually vivid characters distinguish this mesmerizing first novel about horrifying family secrets and nearly annihilating guilt. Drowning Ruth is a complex and rewarding debut.”
–ANITA SHREVE
Author of The Pilot’s Wife

“RIVETING . . . A VERY SUSPENSEFUL TALE, ONE THAT WILL KEEP READERS UP SHIVERING IN THE NIGHT.”
–USA Today

Rachel Seiffert 'The Dark Room' tells three stories: that of Helmut a young photographer in the 1930s; Lore a 12-year-old girl at the end of the war; and Micha, a young school teacher, half a century later. Between them, the reader traces the legacy of the Nazi period on the lives of ordinary Germans.

Hubert Selby

Diane Setterfield

Tom Sharpe First meet young Lockhart Flawse from Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell. Then hear his story of gassing, whipping, blowing up, killing and stuffing - in fact, the everyday tale of a wild child of nature plunged into the genteel mock-Tudor world of surburban Surrey.

Carol Shields

Carol Shields This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in Daisy's vivacious yet reflective voice, has been winning over readers since its publication in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful gardening columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The events of Daisy's life, however, are less compelling than her rich, vividly described inner life— from her memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death. Shields' sensuous prose and her deft characterizations have made this, her sixth novel, her most successful yet.

Carol. Shields Forty-four-year-old Reta Winters, wife, mother, writer, and translator, is living a happy life until one of her three daughters drops out of university to sit on a downtown street corner silent and cross-legged with a begging bowl in her lap and a placard round her neck that says "Goodness." The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winner Carol Shields, Unless is a candid and deeply moving novel from one of the twentieth century's most accomplished and beloved authors.

Anita Shreve Evocation of turn-of-the-century Boston and a modern classic of literary romantic fiction.

Anita Shreve Anita Shreve's eighth novel is a contemporary novel of love and forgiveness - and a life not lived.

Lionel Shriver

Robert Silverberg Science Fiction examining the moral and legal implications of man's first steps oward immortality.

Paullina Simons A powerful story of grief and hope, a passionate and epic love story from the Russian-born author of the internationally bestselling novels TULLY and ROAD TO PARADISE.

Maj; Wahloo, Per Sjowall

Karin Slaughter A walk in the woods takes a sinister turn for police chief Jeffrey Tolliver and medical examiner Sara Linton when they stumble across the body of a young girl. Secreted in the ground, all the initial evidence indicates that she has, quite literally, been scared to death. But as Sara begins an autopsy, something even more horrifying comes to light.

Jane Smiley Ageing Larry Cook announces his intention to turn over his 1,000-acre farm—one of the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa—to his three daughters, Caroline, Ginny and Rose. A man of harsh sensibilities, he carves Caroline out of the deal because she has the nerve to be less than enthusiastic about her father's generosity. While Larry Cook deteriorates into a pathetic drunk, his daughters are left to cope with the often grim realities of life on a family farm—from battering husbands to cut-throat lenders. In this winner of the US 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Smiley captures the essence of such a life with stark, painful detail. —Amazon.com

Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith * A highly original 'detective' novel with unique setting and characters, this is the first of four 'Botswana' titles are both beautiful and charming.

Alexander McCall Smith *The fifth in the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series *Highly original 'detective' stories with unique setting and characters for people who are fed up with aggressive literature which dwells on selfishness, discourtesy and conflict.

Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith * Highly original 'detective' stories with unique setting and characters featuring Mma Ramotswe and her No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

Ali Smith

Betty Smith Francie Nolan, avid reader, penny candy connoisseur and adroit observer of human nature, has much to ponder in colourful, turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. She grows up with a sweet, tragic father, a severely realistic mother and an aunt who gives her love too freely—to men and a brother who will always be the favoured child. Francie learns early the meaning of hunger and the value of a penny. She is her father's child—romantic and hungry for beauty. But she is her mother's child, too—deeply practical and in constant need of truth. Like the Tree of Heaven that grows out of cement or through cellar gratings, resourceful Francie struggles against all odds to survive and thrive. Betty Smith's poignant, honest novel created a big stir when it was first published more than 50 years ago. Her frank writing about life's squalor was alarming to some of the more genteel society, but the book's humour and pathos ensured its place in the realm of classics—and in the hearts of readers, young and old. (Ages 10 and up) —Emilie Coulter, Amazon.com

Joan Smith

Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith

Zadie Smith Deals with a range of topics: friendship, love, war, three cultures, three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and, the tricky way the past has of coming back.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn has written what Nina Krushcheva, in The Nation, calls "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history." The assassination of tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is reconstructed from the alienating viewpoints of historical witnesses. The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died at the hands of the anarchist Mordko Bogrov, and with him perished Russia's last hope for reform. Translated by H.T. Willetts.

August 1914 is the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's epic, The Red Wheel; the second is November 1916. Each of the subsequent volumes will concentrate on another critical moment or "knot," in the history of the Revolution. Translated by H.T. Willetts.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn From back cover: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a forty-four-year old physicist and mathematician, served in the army until February, 1945, when he was arrested and condemned to eight years in prison. He was subsequently sent to a concentration camp, from which he was released in 1956. Rehabilitated in 1957, he now teaches mathmatics and physics in a secondary school in Ryazan.

Muriel Spark Lise, driven to distraction by an office job, leaves everything and flies south on holiday - in search of passionate adventure, the obsessional experience and sex. Infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in the unnamed southern city.

Robert Louis. Stevenson

Ian Stewart First there was Edwin A. Abbott's remarkable Flatland, published in 1884, and one of the all-time classics of popular mathematics. Now, from mathematician and accomplished science writer Ian Stewart, comes what Nature calls "a superb sequel." Through larger-than-life characters and an inspired story line, Flatterland explores our present understanding of the shape and origins of the universe, the nature of space, time, and matter, as well as modern geometries and their applications. The journey begins when our heroine, Victoria Line, comes upon her great-great-grandfather A. Square's diary, hidden in the attic. The writings help her to contact the Space Hopper, who tempts her away from her home and family in Flatland and becomes her guide and mentor through ten dimensions. In the tradition of Alice in Wonderland and The Phantom Toll Booth, this magnificent investigation into the nature of reality is destined to become a modern classic.

Bram Stoker

Rebecca Stott In 2002, a Cambridge historian is found dead, floating down the river Cam, a glass prism in her hand, after researching a book about a series of suspicious circumstances surrounding Newton's appointment as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1667. That year, two Fellows died by falling down staircases, apparently drunk; another died in a field, apparently drunk; and a fourth was expelled, having gone mad–leaving vacancies for new appointments and paving the way for Newton’s extraordinary scientific discoveries. When Lydia Brooke, at the request of her ex-lover, the historian’s son, steps in to finish the book, strange shows of light begin to play on the walls, and papers disappear only to reappear elsewhere. And when events escalate to murder, and Lydia’s rekindled romance appears increasingly implicated in the danger, the present becomes entangled with the seventeenth century, with Isaac Newton at the center of the mystery.

Filled with evocative descriptions of Cambridge, past and present, of seventeenth-century glassmaking, alchemy, the Great Plague, and Newton’s scientific innovations, Ghostwalk centers on a real historical mystery that Rebecca Stott has uncovered, involving Newton’s alchemy. A riveting literary thriller, Ghostwalk is a rare debut that will change the way most of us think about scientific innovation, our perception of time, and the force of history.

Alice Strobl

Patrick Suskind

Donna Tartt The much-anticipated follow-up to The Secret History

Donna Tartt A follow up to the 'The Secret History'.

Andrew Taylor Interweaving real and fictional elements, The American Boy is a major new literary historical crime novel in the tradition of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Possession.

William Makepeace Thackeray riB "YULLIG4N (OJ! :nAL~YMULLIGAN), AND !lOW WE WENT· 7Y} .MRS. PERKINSS .l!ALL. oo·nofkD.ow;where BalIymuIliganois, and never knew anybo<;ly who L On,ce: I asked the MuI1igan the question, when that chieftain' mmed, a look of di~ity so ferocious, and' spoke of "Saxon daW$itee",jn a,tone of.snch evident displeasure, that,.as after aU it tt.mat~rvery little to mcnvh~reabouts lies the Celtic principality in :~ii6n;·I·b.av¢ n~ver pressed the inquiry any farther. ~,t:dQli't ~Ow:~ven~e Mulligan's town residence. Ope &light, as ~~~'U:s~ Jl(iieu in Oxford Street,-"I ljve tlzere," says he, pointing ~~~ds trxbrid~el with tije big stick he carries :—:..so' his ab,ode ;@; t}lat. direct jon at.any rate. lie has his letters addressed to ~l'ofhis friends' houses, a.nd his parcels, &c. are left for.1iim at " ··'···;taverns.'which·he frequents. That pair_of checked trousers, in ,'ell' s~e hUn: attired, he did me the favour of ordering from my _r, who is quite as anxiou

Table of Contents

CONTENTS; 101; Hu PERKINs'S BALL ? ? ? ?; OUR STREET , ? ? ?; DL BUtCH AND HIS YOUNGF'RIENDS; REin~ccA AND ROWENA, A ROMANCE UPON ROMANCE; TH& KICItLEBURYS ON THE RHINE ?; ?; PAGE; '3; ? ? 3S; 73; ? 165 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ; ? 0—; MRS PERKINS'S BALL; OU)JJ) POLKA ?; VIG~ETTE TITLE ?; 1"HE MULLIGAN AND Mit M A~ TITMARSH; THE' M, UL,L IGAN AND MISS FANNY PE, RKINS; MR' ·~REDERICK MINCHIN :; iR E itALL-ROOM DOOR - ' ; ?; 'lADY BACON)' THE MISS BACONS, AND MR :fLAM ' ; ' ~; MI LAU:INS ',', Jiltss ~UNION; M'R' -HICKS ?; MlSS MEGGOT ?; ? ; " o ?; o; (Frontispiece); ? I; To face page '5; 8; 9; (I; _ 12; 13; ? 15 16; 17; MISS- ' RANVILLE,· REV MR Toop" MISS MULLINS, AND MR ,; 'WINTER '; MISS JOY, MR ANI;> MitS; JOY, MR BOTTER; MR ~ ~NVtLLE RANvILLE AND JACK HUBBARD; [8; J9; ? 20; M~~TROTTER, Mlss TROTT~R, MISS TOADY, LORD METHUSEl

Paul Theroux

Flora Thompson By the author of the autobiographical "Lark Rise to Candleford", this book is a fictional portrait of an Oxfordshire village and its inhabitants around Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887. It was first published posthumously in 1948.

Douglas Thomson, Clark Ramsay Thomson

Rupert Thomson There was a sailor's graveyard in Moon Beach. This was where the funeral business first started. Rumour had it that the witch's fingers used to reach out and sink ships. But there hadn't been a wreck for years, and all the funeral parlours had moved downtown. This is a obsessive novel by the author of 'The Insult'.

Thucydides, M. I. Finley Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the struggle between Athens and Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling the author's ambitious claim that the work "was done to last forever." The conflicts between the two empires over shipping, trade, and colonial expansion came to a head in 431 b.c. in Northern Greece, and the entire Greek world was plunged into 27 years of war. Thucydides applied a passion for accuracy and a contempt for myth and romance in compiling this exhaustively factual record of the disastrous conflict that eventually ended the Athenian empire.

J. R. R. Tolkien The popular paperback edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's classic masterpiece, illustrated for the first time with Tolkien's own painting originally created by him for the first edition, and featuring brand new reproductions of all his drawings and maps.

Tatyana Tolstaya

Jeff Torrington UK first impression of this Whitebread winner. First state with the man swinging a hammer. French flaps, VG overall with a small tear to top of rear cover. Secker & Warburg 1992.

Rose Tremain

William Trevor

Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope

Joanna Trollope Julia Hunter and Kate Bain have found true happiness with men old enough to be their fathers. Julia organises her husband Hugh and their cherubic twins with ruthless efficiency and Kate has lived with James, for eight years, and although she refuses to marry him, she's apparently devoted to him. But the age differences cannot be ignored forever.

Kilgore Trout

Mark Twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by legendary author Mark Twain is widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time. This great classic will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is required reading for various courses and curriculums. And for others who simply enjoy reading timeless pieces of classic literature, this gem by Mark Twain is highly recommended. Published by Classic House Books and beautifully produced, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone's personal library.

Salley Vickers The new edition of Salley Vicker's sensational debut novel. 'Miss Garnet's Angel' is a voyage of discovery; a novel about Venice but also the 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. Its beauty, its secret corners and treasures, and its people overwhelm a lifetime of reserve and caution. Above all, she's touched by the all-prevalent spirit of the Angel, Raphael. The ancient tale of Tobias, who travels to Media unaware he is accompanied by the Archangel Raphael, unfolds alongside Julia Garnet's contemporary journey. The two stories interweave with parents and landladies, restorers and priests, American tourists and ancient travellers abounding. The result is an enormously satisfying journey of the spirit — and Julia Garnet is a character to treasure.

GORE VIDAL america's No 1 best seller for 1976

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal

Barbara Vine Eccentric Jarvis lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking the tube line, compiling his obsessive history of the Underground. A group of misfits are also drawn towards his strange house: Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper who finds his terrifying thrills on the tube; and enigmatic Axel, whose deadly secret casts a shadow over all their lives. Damaged, dispossessed, outcasts, they are brought together in violent and unforeseen ways by London's dark and dangerous underground system.

Barbara Vine Jenny's marriage is loveless, and she is having an affair. She works at an old people's home, where she is especially fond of Stella, a woman dying of cancer - whose own secrets parallel Jenny's - with the difference that she may have been involved in murdering her lover's husband.

Barbara Vine In the long hot summer of 1976, a group of young people are camping in Wyvis Hall. Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie hardly ask why they are there or how they are to live; they scavenge, steal and sell the family heirlooms. In short, they exist. Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and child are discovered in the Hall's animal cemetery. Which woman? Whose child? "I defy anyone to guess the conclusion! The clues are cunningly planted, so that it seems one should have known all along. A most satisfying end" - "Daily Telegraph".

Voltaire This tale begins with the hero, Candide, being expelled from the Westphalian castle of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh for making love to the Baron's daughter, Cunegonde. So begins a series of disastrous misadventures on a fantastic odyssey for Candide, Cunegonde and Dr Pangloss.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.