The Ottoman Sultan has commissioned the best artists in the land to create a book celebrating the glories of his realm: but he wants them to illuminate it in the European style. Because figurative ...
Variations on a musical theme by a striking range of authors, among them Flaubert, Turgenev, Proust, Nabokov, Katherine Mansfield, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Bernard MacLaverty and...
From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize-winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring a brutal attempt on his life, thirty years after the fatwa that was order...
Once there was magic in Britain. There were dragons and wizards and green knights and kings who pulled swords out of stones. But now, the doors to the Otherworld have closed.'A gamechan...
Now a classic feminist text, Jane Eyre was the first of Charlotte Brontë’s novels to be published, in 1847. Like her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights, which it matches in power, Ch...
The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and...
A major book in the history of feminism, which, when it was first published in the 1950s, was considered a radical thesis. But its claim that the subordination of women is not a fact of nature but ...
A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin - and every bit their equal - Chester Himes was the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories and essays, as well as the classic cri...
Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. IF THIS IS A MAN describes his deportation to Poland and the twenty months he spend working in Auschwitz. THE TRU...
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121 180) succeeded his adoptive father as emperor of Rome in a.d. 161 and Meditations remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever writ...
Emma Woodhouse ‘had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her’, but during the course of this, the wisest and most disturbing of Jane Austen&rsq...
An attack on war which broadens into a satire on the ANCIEN REGIME of the Austro-Hungarian empire, THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK recreates the age-old figure of the simple soldier whose sheer determinatio...
James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on one day in June 1904. It is considered to be one of the most important wo...
Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of ...
Included here are famous tales like 'Sound of Thunder', in which the carelessness of a group of time-travellers leads to disastrous consequences, and 'The Veldt', in which two seemingly innocent yo...
Here are libraries modest, mobile, mystical (Borges of course) and magical (Helen Oyeyemi's enchanting 'Books and Roses'); public and private, provincial and prestigious. Little that happen in Eliz...
Wise, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood tells the story of Marjane Satrapi's life in Tehran from the ages of six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow o...
A feminist fairy-tale, which I recommend if you’re looking for a Christmas present for a teenage girl… A wondrously intricate book, and a witty attack on the patriarchy, this is an ins...
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Fun Home comes this Christmas's must-gift graphic novel.All her life, Alison Bechdel has searched for an elusive secret...The s...
The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries - from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize-winning, internationally ...