Humane, hilarious and heart-breaking - an enlightening and darkly comic window into the world of psychiatry'Very funny and deeply sympathetic. Really excellent' HENRY MARSH, autho...
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...
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...
In Lord Byron's lifetime, details of his travels were widely known through poems set in different countries, ranging from his homes in Scotland and England, through Europe and the Middle East, to t...
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...
That Machiavelli’s name has become synonymous with cold-eyed political calculation only heightens the intrinsic fascination of The Prince – the world’s pre-eminent how-to manual o...
An immaculate success on its publication in 1726, Gulliver’s Travels has since had an odd double life as both a classic traveller’s tale for children and a scathing satire of the human ...
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...
The Edwardian era was the Golden Age of childhood, of high adventure and fantasy, and home for tea in the nursery. Or not... The story of the boy who took the quest for untrammelled freedom to its ...
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...
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...