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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Anatoly Marienhof

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

'A love that cannot be throttled by the rubber tube of an enema bulb is immortal.' 
 
Bookish and idealistic Vladimir is tormented with love for Olga; he brings her flowers when other men bring her flour and millet. Olga eventually agrees to marry him, as her building’s central heating will be out of service all winter and at least with two in the bed they’ll be warmer. When she decides she’d like to serve the revolution, he introduces her to his brother Sergei, a Bolshevik who manages the waterways. Thus begins an excruciating love triangle, measured in ration coupons and black market goods. 
 
Described by the poet Joseph Brodsky as 'one of the most innovative novels in Russian literature', Marienhof’s Cynics is a pitch-black comedy set during the wild and savage years of War Communism and the New Economic Policy. Cinematic in its style and collagist in its aesthetic, it establishes Marienhof as a true formal radical. It is a bawdy, savage, lavishly emotional portrayal of working for the revolution (and trying to ignore it).

Cynics

Seicho Matsumoto

Onizuka Kumako is a fierce woman: tall, beautiful, and not afraid to speak her mind. In Tokyo bars, she seduces customers and commits petty crime, using her connections to the local yakuza to get by. When she meets Shirakawa Fukutaro, a rich widower desperate for companionship and unaware of her shady past, the two hit it off and are soon married. But their newly-wed bliss is suddenly cut short: one rainy July evening, their car veers off course, plunges into the harbour and Fukutaro is pulled beneath the waves. 
 
Suspected of murder and labelled a femme fatale, Kumako is hounded by the press, but stays firm, repeatedly proclaiming her own innocence. As pressure from dogged journalists mounts, the tide of public opinion is rising against her. But when a scrupulous defence lawyer takes on her case, doubt begins to creep in . . . 
 
In this intricate, psychological noir, masterfully translated into English for the first time, Seicho Matsumoto draws out the hidden demons that guide our convictions, our biases and our deepest desires.

Suspicion

James Baldwin

David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months David's fiancée returns and, denying his sexuality, he rejects Giovanni for a 'safe' future as a married man — a decision that will bring tragedy, longing and regret.

Giovanni's Room

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Vienna, 1939. Count Wallmoden, an officer and veteran of the First World War, is preparing to take part in a mysterious ‘military exercise’. One evening, while off duty, he meets the austere and beautiful Baroness Pistohlkors, whose secretive nature and elusive circle of acquaintances suggest that things – including the ‘military exercise’ – are not quite what they seem. Forced to leave the Baroness, Wallmoden promises to return for a tryst once his tour of duty is over, only to discover his unit has been mobilised for war. He finds himself over the border, marching across Europe – and, more seductively, stumbling to and fro over the border that separates the living from the dead. One constant remains: in this world or the next, he must keep his tryst with Baroness Pistohlkors. 
 
Simultaneously a ghost story drawing on the phantasms of the unconscious mind, a thriller where the erotic and the supernatural converge, and a shockingly realist account of the German Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, the novel Mars in Aries was refused a publishing permit by the Nazis, hinting as it did at the existence of an Austrian resistance. The book’s entire print run was put into storage and subsequently destroyed by an Allied air raid. Reprinted from the author’s proofs after the war, Mars in Aries is one of Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s finest and most celebrated novels.

Mars in Aries

Brigitte Reimann

Kathrin – five years into a disenchanting marriage – struggles to work the farm with her sister-in-law while her husband Heinrich is away fighting for the Third Reich. To help them with the harvest, Heinrich arranges for Alexei, a Russian prisoner of war, to labour in the fields. Though initially suspicious of this watchful stranger, Kathrin is soon drawn to Alexei, with ruinous consequences. 
 
First published in 1956, Woman in the Pillory is a formative novella by one of East Germany’s most significant writers, showcasing Brigitte Reimann’s vivid ideological engagement with the legacy of Nazi Germany and the Communist drive to create ‘a new kind of person’ following the devastation of the war.

Woman in the Pillory

Georges Simenon

In the oppressive silence of the sitting room, the woman finally smoothed out the paper and, without putting on her glasses, read the two words her husband had written: 
 
The cat. 
 
Amidst the din of their Parisian neighbourhood, Émile and Marguerite live in total silence. After a hasty marriage in their sixties, their uneasy peace was shattered when Émile’s beloved cat mysteriously disappeared and was later found dead. Branding his wife the culprit, Émile’s retaliation against Marguerite’s cherished parrot sparked a silent battle of wills. Now they live parallel lives, communicating only through spiteful notes, mocking glances and mute accusations. As their suspicion and resentment mount, this bitter game of psychological warfare becomes a twisted necessity, binding them together in a relentless cycle of torment from which there can only be one escape. 
 
First published in 1967, The Cat is a masterful exploration of marital discord, loneliness and the absurdity of human relationships, painting a vivid portrait of two souls trapped in quiet desperation.

The Cat

Tove Ditlevsen

I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm... 
 
The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel – published a year before her suicide in 1976 – is a masterful conclusion to a great work of writing: a blackly funny and devastating tour-de-force that pulses with life even as it journeys towards death.

Vilhelm's Room

Oh Jung-hee

In this emblematic selection of her stories, Oh Jung-hee probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by desertion, psychosis, and death. In ‘Chinatown’ a young girl living on the edge of the city’s Chinese community comes of age among mundane violences, collisions with adult sexuality and the American occupation; in ‘The Garden Party’ a woman grapples with her conflicting identities of wife, mother and writer at an alcohol-fuelled gathering. Throughout a career spanning six decades, Oh Jung-hee has drawn comparisons to Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates, and is assuredly a trailblazing writer.

Chinatown

Gun-Britt Sundström

‘I want to have him, I really do. I just don’t want him to have me.’ 
 
Martina and Gustav, students in 1970s Stockholm, meet and fall immediately into coupledom. But what is coupledom? A route to marriage? A declaration of co-dependency? A new dimension of commitment and responsibility? A sexual confrontation? Or is it a habit that an intelligent person must consider breaking? Martina and Gustav discuss their relationship endlessly, between themselves and with others, as they try to make it work. 
 
Engagement, set during a time of social change and political upheaval, sees Martina trying to engage with the world on her own terms. Unwilling to marry, she finds herself in a state of permanent engagement while her friends settle down to marriage and children; uncertain of the world’s future, she engages with demos, sit-ins and philosophy seminars in her quest for a new blueprint for joy. First published in 1976, when it was heralded as an instant classic, Engagement remains as relevant, hilarious and heartbreaking today.

Engagement

John Cowper Powys

First published in 1929, Wolf Solent was the first in John Cowper Powys’ great sequence of visionary works of fiction, set in Hardy’s Wessex but a Wessex now ravaged by the impact of the Great War and the curse of modernity. Both a lyrical story of the English countryside and an agonised account of life and love in the shadow of monstrous change, Wolf Solent is a cult novel like no other.

Wolf Solent

Tokyo, 1960. As the first rays of morning light hit the rails at Kamata Station, a man’s body is found on the tracks. With only two leads – a distinctive accent and a single word, ‘kameda’ – Senior Inspector Imanishi Eitaro is called in to solve the puzzle.Setting aside his beloved bonsai and haikus, he must cross Japan in search of answers, from Osaka to Akita, accompanied by junior detective Yoshimura. At each new town, they encounter traces of the avant-garde Nouveau Group – young Tokyo artists who are bringing new ideas from the West. What to make of this modern collective? And how to stop another mysterious death occurring? Inspector Imanishi investigates . . .A fascinating glimpse into Japanese society at a time of great change, this is one of Seicho Matsumoto’s best-loved novels – a riveting mystery from the master of Japanese crime.

Inspector Imanishi Investigates

Torborg Nedreaas

In the blue dusk of a spring evening, a man is drawn to a lonely, beautiful stranger across a station platform. She follows him home, and over one heady night of wine and cigarettes, recounts to him the devastating story of her life . . .First published in 1947, Nothing Grows by Moonlight tells the haunting tale of one woman’s soul-shattering love affair. When an obsessive passion for her high school teacher consumes a small-town seventeen-year-old, her life spirals out of control, giving way to pregnancy, poverty and alienation. Here, darkness and light converge, and unrequited love blooms against the shadows of societal injustices, as she fights for autonomy: over her life, her mind and her body.Captivating, visceral and brimming with emotion, Nothing Grows by Moonlight is a feminist classic of Scandinavian literature, and an uncompromising ode to female desire.

Nothing Grows by Moonlight

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. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

The Great Gatsby

Elsa Morante

'Thrillingly addictive, magnificent, luxurious . . . as staggering and absorbing as a great 19th-century novel' Telegraph 
 'I loved it and it had been a long time since I had read anything that gave me such life and joy' Natalia Ginzburg 
 
 The first unabridged English translation of the electrifying novel of secrets and delusions, from one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. 
 Elisa – orphaned as a child, raised by a ‘fallen woman’, fed by fairy tales – has lived in an outlandish imaginary world for years. When her guardian dies, she feels compelled to confront her family’s tortured and dramatic past, weaving the tale of her mother and grandmother through a history of intrigue, treachery, deception and desire. But as her saga of three generations of Sicilian women proceeds, it becomes something else entirely, taking in a whole legacy of oppression and injustice. By turns flamboyant and intense, raging and funny, Lies and Sorcery is a celebration of the female imagination, and the power of storytelling itself. 
 
 First published in 1948, Elsa Morante’s debut novel won the Viareggio Prize and earned her the lasting admiration of generations of writers from Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg to Elena Ferrante. 
 
 Translated by Jenny McPhee 
WINNER OF THE ALTA 2024 ITALIAN PROSE IN TRANSLATION AWARD 
WINNER OF THE JOHN FLORIO PRIZE 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE OXFORD-WEIDENFELD PRIZE 2024

Lies and Sorcery

Elaine Kraf

Ellen is a single artist living alone on New York’s Upper West Side in the 1970s. She is beset by old boyfriends, paint pigment choices, and, occasionally, by 'radiances' - episodes of joyous, reckless unreality. Under the influence of 'radiances' she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street becomes the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a liberating experience for Ellen, who, despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday. And yet those around her, particularly the men in her life, are threatened by her incarnation as Esmeralda, and by the freedom that it gives her. 
 
The Princess of 72nd Street is Elaine Kraf's witty, dizzyingly inventive take on female liberation and mental health, a work of immense literary power and unbridled energy. Provocative at the time of its publication in 1979 and thoroughly iconoclastic, it is a remarkable portrait of an unforgettable woman.

The Princess of 72nd Street

Carlo Emilio Gadda

'The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict.' Italo Calvino 
 
At the height of Fascist rule in Italy and following the death of his mother, Carlo Emilio Gadda began work on his first novel, The Experience of Pain. This portrait of a highly educated young man whose anger and frustration frequently erupt in ferocious outbursts directed towards his ageing mother is a powerful critique of the society of his time and the deep wounds inflicted on his generation. Set in a fictional South American country, The Experience of Pain is at once richly imaginative and intensely personal: the perfect introduction to Gadda's innovative style and literary virtuosity. 
 
Translated by Richard Dixon

The Experience of Pain

Yasunari Kawabata

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two half sisters - born to the same father but different mothers - struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time, while Momoko, their father's first child - haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together - seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan's greatest writers.

The Rainbow

Simone de Beauvoir

&lsquo;These carefree faces, on which we allowed our smiles to spread, were for others the mask of tragedy.&rsquo; 
 
Jean Blomart, patriot leader against the German forces of occupation, waits throughout an endless night for his wounded lover, Hélène, to die. Told through memories of his and her life, The Blood of Others paints an intense and moving picture of their love story and life in German occupied Paris during the Second World War. In the face of a seemingly unstoppable force, Hélène and Jean are confronted by the illusion of freedom and made to question their individual roles in the collective struggle against fascism, with devastating consequences. 
 
First published in 1945, this powerful novel resonates profoundly today and brings the ideas of one of the most important existentialist thinkers to life in spellbinding prose. 
 
With an Introduction by Ali Smith.

The Blood of Others

Albert Camus

Ryota Kurumado

'My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.' 
 
A stranger to society, a stranger to his own life, Meursault seems indifferent to everything. In The Outsider, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach near Algiers, his lack of remorse compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and the law. Yet he is as much a victim as a criminal. 
 
A first in Penguin Modern Classics, Camus’ classic existentialist novel is told through Ryota Kurumado’s powerful artwork. Unlike previous editions of Camus’ novel, Meursault and other characters’ emotions are drawn out through stunning illustrations and seen for the first time. A rare and challenging feat, Kurumado’s manga adaptation makes a novel first published in 1942 feel contemporary.

The Outsider

Manga Edition

Joanne Greenberg

Two young deaf people, Abel and Janice, leave their punitive school and begin their life as a married couple &lsquo;Outside&rsquo; &ndash; in the unwelcoming world of the hearing. A misunderstanding about the payment plan on a car kickstarts years of debt, hard labour and ostracization; but they find solace and expression in the richness of Sign, in their hard-won independence and in the birth of their daughter Margaret. 
 
First published in 1970, only a decade after ASL&rsquo;s formal recognition as a language, In This Sign is a rare, compassionate portrait of the deaf community and a moving family saga that spans the twentieth century. 
 
With an introduction by Sara Novic and a new afterword by the author.

In This Sign

Aharon Appelfeld

'A masterpiece ... the greatest novel of the Holocaust' The Guardian 
 
Badenheim, a resort town near the forests of Vienna, is preparing for the arts festival of the summer season. The hotel workers and local tradespeople rush to prepare the small town for the influx of vacationers. But just as the season is getting into full swing, a small note appears on a municipal notice board: the Sanitation Department is announcing an increase in its jurisdiction. No one knows what the Sanitation Department is, but no matter &ndash; the festival carries on. 
 
Soon inspectors are spread all over town, bringing estrangement, suspicion and mistrust wherever they go. Meanwhile, the guests carry on pursuing their pleasures and the townspeople attend to their troubles. Then another announcement appears: all Jews must register with the Sanitation Department. 
 
An allegory, satire and fable all in one, Badenheim 1939 is a story of denial and normalisation, masterfully creating an atmosphere of impending dread and horror. Gripping and unforgettable, this is one of most intriguing and eerie books ever written about the Holocaust.

Badenheim 1939

‘There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.’The eight stories in this collection showcase the breadth of Baldwin’s imagination, empathy and social critique as he explores the subtle and profound wounds that discrimination leaves in both its victims and its perpetrators: from the down-and-out jazz pianist recovering from addiction in ‘Sonny’s Blues’ to the adolescent who hides his burgeoning sexuality from the church community that defines his world in ‘The Outing’ to the horrifying story of the initiation of a racist, as a deputy sheriff remembers his parents taking him to see the mutilation and murder of a black man by a gleeful mob in 'Going to Meet the Man'.First published in 1965, these tales of ingenuity, desperation, power and fear provide a snapshot of a writer at the height of his literary powers.

Going To Meet The Man

The Rockpile; The Outing; The Man Child; Previous Condition; Sonny's Blues

Yukio Mishima

Bringing together Yukio Mishima's finest stories, this selection shows his extraordinary ability to depict a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. A moonlit journey to fulfil a wish; a mother lost in mourning; a night of infidelity; and a young lieutenant who ends his life. Filled with rich description and luxurious beauty, these hauntingly beautiful short stories from one of Japan's greatest writers show the pull between duty and desire, ecstasy and death. 
 
In the title story, 'Death in Midsummer', which is set at a beach resort, a triple tragedy becomes a cloud of doom that requires exorcising. In another, 'Patriotism', a young army officer and his wife choose a way of vindicating their belief in ancient values that is as violent as it is traditional; it prefigured his own death by seppuku in November 1970. There is a story in which the sad truth of the relationship between a businessman and his former mistress is revealed through a suggestion of the unknown, and another in which a working-class couple, touching in their simple love for each other, pursue financial security by rather shocking means.

Death in Midsummer

Wang Xiaobo

'Life is but a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed.' 
 
Twenty-one-year-old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, napping and dreaming of losing his virginity. His dreams come true in the shape of the beautiful doctor Cheng Qinyang. So begins the riotously funny story of their illicit love affair, the Party officials who enjoy their forced confessions a little too much, and Wang's life under the Communist regime: his misadventures as a biology lecturer in a Beijing university, and his entanglements with family, friends and lovers. Golden Age is an explosive, subversive, wild and hilarious satire, featuring one of literature's great protagonists, a sensation when it was published in the 1990s and beloved today.

Golden Age

Evelyn Waugh

After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. Brilliantly combining tragedy, comedy and savage irony, A Handful of Dust captures the irresponsible mood of the 'crazy and sterile generation' between the wars. This breakdown of the Last marriage is a painful, comic re-working of Waugh's own divorce, and a symbol of the breakdown of society.

A Handful of Dust

Wallace Stegner

In 1960s America, Lyman Ward, a retired history professor and author of books about the Western frontier, returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Abandoned by his wife and wheelchair-bound with a debilitating bone disease, Ward embarks on a search of monumental proportions – to rediscover the life story of his grandmother Susan Burling Ward, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier. 
 
Through detailed letters and personal writings, Ward follows the refined, educated Susan and her rugged, mining engineer husband Oliver on their journey from New York to California, traversing family struggles, infidelity, jealousy and tragedy, as they forge a new life in the Western states. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him. 
 
Winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Angle of Repose is Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece and a fascinating glimpse into frontier-era America.

Angle of Repose

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

Brideshead Revisited

The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly unsurprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds and the young run riot, no one is safe, least of all Paul.

Decline and Fall

Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of The Daily Beast, has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner party tip from Mrs Algernon Stitch, he feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising little war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. But for, pale, ineffectual William Boot, editor of the Daily Beast's 'nature notes' column, being mistaken for a competent journalist may prove to be a fatal error...

Scoop

Waugh's own unhappy experience of being a soldier is superbly re-enacted in this story of Guy Crouchback, a Catholic and a gentleman, commissioned into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers during the war years 1939-45. High comedy - in the company of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook or the denizens of Bellamy's Club - is only part of the shambles of Crouchback's war. When action comes in Crete and in Yugoslavia, he discovers not heroism, but humanity.

Sword of Honour

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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