Abilio Estévez

Abir Mukherjee is the bestselling author of the award-winning Wyndham &amp; Banerjee series of crime novels set in 1920s India and the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year 2025 Hunted. His books have been translated into sixteen languages and won various awards including the CWA Dagger for best Historical Novel, the Prix du Polar Européen, and the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing. 
 
 
He also co-hosts the popular Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast which takes a wry look at the world of books, writing, and the creative arts, tackling everything from bestsellers to pop culture. Abir grew up in Scotland and now lives in Surrey with his wife and two sons. 
 
 
Website: abirmukherjee.com Twitter, Threads &amp; Instagram: @radiomukhers Facebook: AuthorAbir

Abir Mukherjee

Abolqasem Ferdowsi

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham L. Newman is a professor at the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University. He is a 2022-2023 Berlin Prize winner and his work has been published in leading outlets like The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, Nature, Science, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, and Politico.

Abraham Newman

Abraham Verghese

Absolut Vodka

Ad Putter

Ada Moncrieff is the author of Murder Most Festive, Murder at the Theatre Royale and Murder at Maybridge Castle. She lives and works in London.

Ada Moncrieff

Adam Aleksic is a linguist and content creator posting educational videos as the “Etymology Nerd” to an audience of over two million. As a linguistics student at Harvard College, he founded and served as president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. He’s discussed online language on NPR, repeatedly contributed to The Washington Post, and his work has been mentioned in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian. He’s lectured on language and social media at Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and other top universities, including a TEDx talk at the University of Pennsylvania. Adam is based in New York City, where he spends a lot of time scrolling TikTok for “research.”

Adam Aleksic

Adam Alter is an Associate Professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, and holds an affiliated appointment within the Psychology Department. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel and Behave and has written for The New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, Wired, Popular Science and numerous other publications.

Adam Alter

Professor Adam Balen is lead clinician at one of the UK's largest and most successful IVF units at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. In recognition of his research on fertility and related conditions, he holds a DSc (the highest academic degree in medicine) from the University of Leeds. Adam is internationally renowned, holding roles with the World Health Organisation (WHO), the International Federation of Gyneacology and Obstetrics (FIGO) and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gyneacologists (RCOG). He runs both NHS and private fertility clinics so he understands the issues that arise from both sides and he works closely with fertility patient support organisations across the UK. Adam regularly features in the media on all aspects of reproductive health and lectures widely throughout the world.

Adam Balen

Adam Baron

Adam Bornstein

Adam Brookes grew up in the UK and was a journalist with BBC News for many years. As a foreign correspondent he was based in Indonesia, China and the United States. Along the way he reported from many other countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea. He lives in Washington DC.

Adam Brookes

Adam Buxton

Adam Christopher is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith and Stranger Things: Darkness on the Edge of Town. He has also written official tie-in novels for the hit CBS television show Elementary and the award-winning Dishonored video game franchise. Co-creator of the twenty-first-century incarnation of Archie Comics superhero The Shield, Adam has also written for the universes of Doctor Who and World of Warcraft, and is a contributor to the internationally bestselling Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View anniversary anthology series and the all-ages Star Wars Adventures comic. Adam’s original novels include Made to Kill and The Burning Dark, among many others, and his debut novel Empire State was both a SciFi Now and Financial Times book of the year.

Adam Christopher

Adam Foulds's most recent books are In the Wolf’s Mouth, The Quickening Maze, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature, and The Broken Word, which won the Costa Poetry Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. He has recently been awarded the E.M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named as one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’.

Adam Foulds

Dr Adam Fox is a highly qualified and respected allergy specialist and consultant paediatric allergist and clinical lead for Allergy at Guy's &amp; St Thomas' Hospitals. The Times recently named him as one of Britain's top 100 children’s doctors. 
 
www.allergyfreebabyandtoddler.com

Adam Fox

Adam Frost

Adam Galinsky is currently the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He received his PhD from Princeton University in Social Psychology and his B.A. from Harvard University.

Adam Galinsky

Adam Glasser

Adam Goodfellow

Adam Goodwin

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where he has been the top-rated professor for seven straight years. His books have sold millions of copies, his TED talks have been viewed more than 30 million times, and he hosts the hit podcast Re:Thinking. His pioneering research on motivation and meaning has enabled people to reach their aspirations and exceed others' expectations. His viral piece on languishing was the most-read New York Times article of 2021 and the most-saved article across platforms. He has been recognized as one of the world's ten most influential management thinkers and Fortune's 40 Under 40, and has received distinguished scientific achievement awards from the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation. Grant received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and he is a former Junior Olympic springboard diver. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and their three children.

Adam Grant

Adam and Charlotte met in Zanzibar while working with Voluntary Services Overseas. Upon their return to the UK, Charlotte completed an MA at Oxford Brookes and started her career in publishing. Adam in the meantime became writer-in-residence at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre before co-founding Storytelling Schools, an international organisation dedicated to training teachers in oracy, literacy and creativity. Adam and Charlotte's first book together was the best-selling and award-winning Spaghetti with the Yeti. Since then, Adam and Charlotte have continued to follow their passion for creating engaging books that inspire interaction and creativity in young readers.

Adam Guillain

ADAM HAMDY is a bestselling author and screenwriter. His most recent novel, The Other Side of Night, was an NPR best book of 2022 and a New York Times best thriller of the year, and has been described as ingenious and deeply moving. He is the author of the Scott Pearce series of modern spy thrillers, Black 13, Red Wolves and White Fire, and the Pendulum trilogy. Keep up to date with his latest books and news at www.adamhamdy.com.

Adam Hamdy

Adam Hart-Davis

Adam Haslett is the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novels Imagine Me Gone and Union Atlantic. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and his books have been translated into over thirty languages. His journalism on culture and politics has appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He lives in New York City.

Adam Haslett

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Colm Tóibín

In his essay on the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, Colm Tóibín reveals an artist 'alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish' and one profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father or Thomas Mann and his children or J.M. Synge and his mother, Toibin examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents we see an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever's journals Tóibín makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. 'Educating an unintellectual woman,' Cheever remarked, 'is like letting a rattlesnake into the house.' 
 
In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also articulates, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Writers and Their Families

Carol Anshaw

'When you add us up, you always have to carry the one' 
 
In the early hours of the morning, following a wedding reception, a car filled with stoned, drunk and sleepy guests accidentally hits and kills a girl on a dark country road. For the next twenty-five years, the lives of those involved are subtly shaped by this tragic moment. 
 
Through friendships and love affairs, marriage and divorce, parenthood, addiction, and the modest calamities and triumphs of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one life affects another and how those who thrive and those who self-destruct are closer to each other than we'd expect.

Carry the One

W. G. Sebald

Across the Land and the Water brings together poems from throughout W. G. Sebald's life as well as additional works found after his death. Arranged chronologically, from his student days in the 1960s to the longer narratives he worked on in the 1980s, these poems are suffused by the themes which dominated Sebald's books. Here you will find subtle vignettes on nature and history, death and memory, journeys and landscapes, each short piece filled with insight, sensitivity and brilliance.

Across the Land and the Water

Selected Poems 1964-2001

Vladimir Nabokov

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Nabokov begins his Strong Opinions: 'I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.' In the interviews collected here - covering everything from his own burgeoning literary celebrity to Kubrick's Lolita to lepidoptery - he is never casual or off-guard. Instead he insisted on receiving questions in advance and always carefully composed his responses. 
 
Keen to dismiss those who fail to understand his work and happy to butcher those sacred cows of the literary canon he dislikes, Nabokov is much too entertaining to be infuriating, and these interviews, letters and articles are as engaging, challenging and caustic as anything he ever wrote. 
 
Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.

Strong Opinions

Sue Townsend

Enter the world of Susan Lilian Townsend - sun-worshippers, work-shy writers, garden centre lovers and those in search of a good time are all welcome ... 
 
This sparkling collection of Sue Townsend's hilarious non-fiction covers everything from hosepipe bans to Spanish restaurants, from writer's block to slug warfare, from slob holidays to the banning of beige. 
 
These funny, perceptive and touching pieces reveal Sue, ourselves and the nation in an extraordinary new light. Sit back and chortle away as one of Britain's most popular and acclaimed writers takes a feather to your funny bone.

The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman

Thomas Hardy

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With an essay by D. H. Lawrence. 
 
'Do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life - music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world?' 
 
Tempestuous Eustacia Vye passes her days dreaming of passionate love and the escape it may bring from the small community of Egdon Heath. Hearing that Clym Yeobright is to return from Paris, she sets her heart on marrying him, believing that through him she can leave rural life and find fulfilment elsewhere. But she is to be disappointed, for Clym has dreams of his own, and they have little in common with Eustacia's. Their unhappy marriage causes havoc in the lives of those close to them, in particular Damon Wildeve, Eustacia's former lover, Clym's mother and his cousin Thomasin. The Retun of the Native illustrates the tragic potential of romantic illusion and how its protagonists fail to recognize their opportunities to control their own destinies.

The Return of the Native

Henry Fielding

With an essay by Mark Spilka. 
 
'Kissing, Joseph, is but a prologue to a Play. Can I believe a young fellow of your Age and Complexion will be content with Kissing?' 
 
Henry Fielding's riotous tale of innocents in a corrupt world was one of the earliest English novels, blending bawdy slapstick, philosophical musing and pointed social satire to create a work of moral complexity and generous, life-affirming humanity. Published in 1742, it tells the story of the chaste servant Joseph Andrews who, after being sacked for spurning the advances of the lascivious Lady Booby, takes to the road, accompanied by his beloved Fanny Goodwill and the absent-minded, much put-upon Parson Adams. There they encounter robbers, tricksters, seducers, mishaps and strange twists of fortune, in a series of adventures filled with exuberant comedy. 
 
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Joseph Andrews

Claire Tomalin

Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonically hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more. 
 
Claire Tomalin, author of Whitbread Book of the Year Samuel Pepys, paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve.

Charles Dickens

A Life

Claire Tomalin brings her extraordinary gifts of scholarship, fluent writing and empathy for her subjects to bear on one of our greatest, and most elusive, novelists. Widely acclaimed as the finest of Austen biographies, the book offers us 'a brave, sharp-tongued character who fairly bounces off the page' (Val Hennesy). And along the way it gives us an 'authoratative, graceful,succinct account of a wide swathe of English society which brilliantly illuminates' the novelist (Victoria Glendinning).

Jane Austen

Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the Furies at her heels. Dying at the age of only 34, she became posthumously one of the most influential writers of the last century. Sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, she glittered in the brilliant circles of DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion. Claire Tomalin's biography brings her nearer than we have ever been to this haunted and hauting writer.

Katherine Mansfield

A Secret Life

Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, lived through the Terror in France, had an illegitimate daughter and married the philosopher William Godwin before dying in childbirth at the age of 38. 
Claire Tomalin's first book inaugurated a glittering career, and brought to life one of the great figures in the history of women.

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twenieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband but a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats. In the hands of Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy the novelist, poet, neglectful husband and mourning lover all come intensely alive.

The Time-torn Man

Lila Azam Zanganeh

Plunging into the enchanted and luminous worlds of Speak, Memory, Ada, or Ardor; and the infamous Lolita, Lila Azam Zanganeh seeks out the Nabokovian experience of time, memory, sexual passion, nature, loss, love in all its forms, language in all its allusions. She explores his Russian childhood, his European sojourns, the landscapes of 'his' America, hallucinates an interview and seeks the 'crunch of happiness' in Vladimir Nabokov's singular vocabulary. This rhapsodic and beautifully illuminated book, which includes such fans as Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, will lure the innocent reader to a well of delights.

The Enchanter

An Adventure in the Land of Nabokov

Sandra Newman

There they sit, the great tomes of classical literature, taunting you with their length and difficulty, as you ask: which books are the most important and why - and what's actually any good? Why does most writing about the classics have words like 'seminal' or 'oeuvre' in it? What does postmodernism mean? Can I get away with just reading the introduction? 
 
Now you can enjoy the classics without fear. This survival kit will guide you painlessly through the Western literary canon, century by century: from Ancient Greek drama to the modern novel, via Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Romantic poetry, Tolstoy and Proust. There are entertaining plot summaries, unpretentious definitions of literary movements and fresh insights into authors' lives. With each work assigned ratings from 1 to 10 on Importance, Accessibility and Fun, you'll discover what's really worth bothering with and what you can safely discard without guilt. 
 
This book will make the things you've read clearer, inspire you to tackle the ones you've always meant to and make you sound far cleverer than you really are.

The Western Lit Survival Kit

How to Read the Classics Without Fear

Dick Francis

Dick Francis was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt jockeys. The winner of over 350 races, he was champion jockey in 1953/1954 and rode for HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, most famously on Devon Loch in the 1956 Grand National. On his retirement from the saddle, he published his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, before going on to write forty-three bestselling novels, a volume of short stories (Field of 13), and the biography of Lester Piggott. 
 
During his lifetime Dick Francis received many awards, amongst them the prestigious Crime Writers' Association's Cartier Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to the genre, and three 'best novel' Edgar Allan Poe awards from The Mystery Writers of America. In 1996 he was named by them as Grand Master for a lifetime's achievement. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List of 2000. 
 
Dick Francis died in February 2010, at the age of eighty-nine, but he remains one of the greatest thriller writers of all time.

The Sport of Queens

An Autobiography

Jenny Williams

Hans Fallada was a drug addict, womanizer, alcoholic, jailbird and thief. Yet he was also one of the most extraordinary storytellers of the twentieth century, whose novels, including Alone in Berlin, portrayed ordinary people in terrible times with a powerful humanity. 
 
This acclaimed biography, newly revised and completely updated, tells the remarkable story of Hans Fallada, whose real name was Rudolf Ditzen. Jenny Williams chronicles his turbulent life as a writer, husband and father, shadowed by mental torment and long periods in psychiatric care. She shows how Ditzen's decision to remain in Nazi Germany in 1939 led to his self-destruction, but also made him a unique witness to his country's turmoil. 
 
More Lives Than One unpicks the contradictory, flawed and fascinating life of a writer who saw the worst of humanity, yet maintained his belief in the decency of the 'little man'.

More Lives than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada

Paul Theroux

'Both unputdownable and utterly engaging' Jonathan Raban, The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'I started reading Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, the story of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul over thirty years and five continents - its origins, development, and sad, enigmatic termination. I couldn't, as they say, put it down. I don't know of a more revealing study of the peculiar nature of friendship between professional writers, an unstable compound of empathy, solidarity and rivalry. Theroux's portrait of Naipaul . . . may be [his] finest literary creation' David Lodge, Guardian Books of the Year 
 
'Thoroughly compelling. We can call it a memoir, or a biographical sketch, but it has more in it - more candour, more intensity, more angry puzzlement - than we would normally expect from either of these genres. I can think of no other book that renders in such merciless detail a still-living public figure' Sunday Telegraph

Sir Vidia's Shadow

A Friendship Across Five Continents

Zadie Smith

How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be over-dressed for the Oscars? What is Italian Feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? What does 'soulful' mean? Is Date Movie the worst film ever made? 
 
A collection of essays that brims over with personality and warmth, Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent and funny - a gift to readers and writers both. Within its covers an essay is more than a column of opinions: it's a space in which to think freely.

Changing My Mind

Occasional Essays

Daniel Swift

One night in June 1943 James Swift, along with the Lancaster bomber he piloted, vanished. In Bomber County, his grandson Daniel seeks to discover what happened. At the same time he tries to understand the men who took part in these dangerous raids, as well as their devastating impact on the civilians below. In examining the life of one pilot, Daniel Swift also investigates why it is we have tried to forget what was then a new, shocking form of warfare, and why literature and poetry exploring these terrible losses have not found the recognition they deserve.

Bomber County

With sly sophistication and ebullient charm, Lila Azam Zanganeh shares the intoxication of delirious joy to be found in reading - in particular, in reading the masterpieces of 'the great writer of happiness' Vladimir Nabokov. 
 
Plunging into the enchanted and luminous worlds of Speak, Memory; Ada, or Ardor; and the infamous Lolita, Zanganeh seeks out the Nabokovian experience of time, memory, sexual passion, nature, loss, love in all its forms, language in all its allusions. She explores his geography - his Russian childhood, his European sojourns, the landscapes of 'his' America - suffers encounters with his beloved 'nature' hallucinates an interview with the master, and seeks the 'crunch of happiness' in his singular vocabulary. This rhapsodic and beautifully illuminated book will both reignite the passion of experienced lovers of Nabokov's work, and lure the innocent reader to a well of delights.

Nabokov and Happiness

Robert Graves

'There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks; it is most confusing. The parapet of a trench which we don't occupy is built up with ammunition boxes and corpses . . .' 
 
In one of the most honest and candid self-portraits ever committed to paper, Robert Graves tells the extraordinary story of his experiences as a young officer in the First World War. He describes life in the trenches in vivid, raw detail, how the dehumanizing horrors he witnessed left him shell-shocked. They were to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Goodbye to All That

David Shields

Reality Hunger questions every assumption we ever made about art, the novel, journalism, poetry, film, TV, rap, stand-up, graffiti, sampling, plagiarism, writing, and reading. In seeking to tear up the old culture in search of something new and more authentic, it is the most vital book of the new century.

Reality Hunger

A Manifesto

Valerie Grove

Kaye Webb, a journalist with no publishing experience, burst into the world of children's books in 1961 and changed the face of children's publishing forever. Her child-like enthusiasm and shrewd business mind led her to become Puffin's most successful editor and the genius behind the Puffin Club, which opened up the exciting world of authors and books to children across Britain. 
 
But whilst Kaye's professional life had worked out beautifully, her private life had been the reverse. Kaye had two husbands before her marriage to the artist Ronald Searle, and the torment of his sudden and shocking departure never left her. 
 
Yet to the outside world Kaye Webb remained passionate and unstoppable. 
This is the unknown story of the woman who brought the joy of books to children everywhere whilst battling the emotional pain that plagued her private life.

So Much To Tell

In 2009 it was How NOT to Write a Novel ('A hilarious, wickedly observed and deeply useful guide' Observer). In 2010 it's READ THIS NEXT - Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark have written the perfect book for anyone who has ever struggled to choose what to read next. 
 
But this is far more than a guide for book groups. Covering 600 books ranging from The Shock Doctrine to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and exploring all the important issues like how to tell the difference between Naomis Wolf and Klein, whether anyone really likes Emma Bovary, what makes a really good loo book and whether it's really wrong to marry for money, READ THIS NEXT reminds you exactly why you love reading and then makes you want to go out and read lots more. And what's more, it's very, very funny.

READ THIS NEXT

And Discover Your 500 New Favourite Books

Albert Jack

Mr Jack has been nimble and he's been quick, searching through the history of nursery rhymes and he's found out all kind of plum tales, just like little Jack Horner. He's unearthed the answers to some very curious questions... 
 
Who were Mary Quite Contrary and Georgie Porgie? How could Hey Diddle Diddle offer an essential astronomy lesson? And if Ring a Ring a Roses isn't about catching the plague, then what is it really about? This ingenious book delves into the hidden meanings of the nursery rhymes and songs we all know so well and discovers all kinds of strange tales ranging from Viking raids to firewalking and from political rebellion to slaves being smuggled to freedom. 
 
Full of vivid illustrations and with each verse reproduced, here are a multitude of surprising stories you won't be able to resist passing on to everyone you know. Your childhood songs and rhymes will never sound the same again.

Pop Goes the Weasel

The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes

Penelope Lively

The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents' country house Golsoncott. Years later, as the house was sold out of the family, she began to piece together the lives of those she knew fifty years before. 
 
In a needlework sampler, she sees her grandmother and the wartime children that she sheltered under her roof in 1940. Potted meat jars remind her of the ritual of doing the flowers for church. The smell of the harness room brings her Aunt Rachel - avant-garde artist, fervent horserider - vividly back to life. 
 
In A House Unlocked, Penelope Lively delves into the domestic past of her former home, and tells of her own youth and the contrasts between life today and the way they lived then.

A House Unlocked

Alexander Aciman

Emmett Rensin

From Oedipus: PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF. 
From Paradise Lost: OH MY GOD I'M IN HELL. 
Perhaps you once asked yourself, 'What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince his words, muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub?' No doubt such questions would have been swiftly resolved were the Prince of Denmark a registered user on Twitter.com. This, in essence, is Twitterature. 
From Hamlet: WTF IS POLONIUS DOING BEHIND THE CURTAIN??? 
Here are over 60 of the greatest works of literature - from Beowulf to Bronte, Kafka to Kerouac, Dostoevsky to Dickens - distilled in the voice of Twitter to their pithiest essence, providing everything you need to master the literature of the civilised world, while relieving you of the task of reading it. 
From Dante's Inferno: I'm havin a midlife crisis. Lost in the woods. Shoulda brought my iPhone.

Twitterature

The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter

Robin Lane Fox

This remarkable and original book proposes a new way of thinking about the Greeks and their myths in the age of the great Homeric hymns. It combines a lifetime's familiarity with Greek literature and history with the latest archeological discoveries and the author's own journeys to the main sites in the story to describe how particular Greeks of the eighth century BC travelled east and west around the Mediterranean, and how their extraordinary journeys shaped their ideas of their gods and heroes. It gathers together stories and echoes from many different ancient cultures, not just the Greek - Assyria, Egypt, the Phoenician traders - and ranges from Mesopotamia to the Rio Tinto at Huelva in modern Portugal.

Travelling Heroes

Greeks and their myths in the epic age of Homer

Jonathan Bate

How did plague turn Shakespeare from a jobbing hack into a courtly poet? How did Bottom's dream rewrite the Bible? How did Shakespeare's plays lead to the deaths of an earl and a king? And why was he the one dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned? 
 
Weaving a dazzling tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, private passions and political intrigues, Soul of the Age leads us on an exhilarating tour of the extraordinary, colourful and often violent world that shaped and informed Shakespeare's thinking. Written by one of the world's leading experts, it combines almost everything there is to know about the man and his work in one sensational narrative, and brings us closer than ever to understanding what being Shakespeare was actually like.

Soul of the Age

The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare

Anne Fadiman

Butterflies, ice-cream, writing at night, playing word games...in this witty, intimate and delicious book Anne Fadiman ruminates on her passions, both literary and everyday. From mourning the demise of letter-writing to revealing a monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from Balzac's coffee addiction to making ice-cream from Liquid Nitrogen, she draws us into a world of hedonistic pleasures and literary delights. This is the perfect book for life's ardent obsessives.

At Large and at Small

Confessions of a Literary Hedonist

Atlantia

Avalon

BBC Children's Classics

BBC Classics

BBC Earth

BBC Radio’s The Lord of the Rings

BBC TV Soundtracks

BP Animation

Baby Touch

Ballroom Girls

Barnaby Grimes

Be More...

Bear Mountain Rescue Series

Beasts of Prey

The complete boxed collection of Beatrix Potter's beloved Peter Rabbit books

Beatrix Potter Originals

Beautiful Creatures

Bel Dame Apocrypha

Bella Wallis Victorian Mysteries

Belle

Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom

Bergman Brothers

Big Ideas for Little Philosophers

Bill Clinton & James Patterson stand-alone thrillers

Bill Smith / Lydia Chin

Bim Blake

Bindi Babes

Tim and Biscuit, two unlikely friends, always seem to get themselves into difficult situations. From their first meeting in Cliffhanger, where bookish Tim is forced to endure an activities camp, to Buried Alive, where a quiet camping holiday turns out to be full of surprises, there is never a dull moment with these two around.Jaqueline Wilson’s hilarious duo of books catalogues their escapades, triumphs and failures, with a good helping of snacks along the way!

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