All

Lawrence Durrell was one of the best-selling, most celebrated English novelists of the late 20th century. The Alexandria Quartet is unquestionably his most admired work, at heart a sensuous and...

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of...

Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling. Tunde, the man at the...

Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental...

One man's obsession with the mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing his wife...

In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackouts at night and a single random bombsite. But the...

In his highly acclaimed debut, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman no wliving alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide...

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Never Let Me Go . In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will...

In one of the most acclaimed and strange novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of...

The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn beween the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s McCarthyite America. Born in the U.S. and reared...

This is the complete collection of stories from one of the most original and powerful American writers of the twentieth-century. Including A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything...

'It was our third time playing the Godfather theme since lunch.' In a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the...

Wise Blood , Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle...

'I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.' So...

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R....

An enormously satisfying, exciting and enriching book, Vikram Chandra's novel draws the reader deep into the lives of detective Sartaj Singh and Ganesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster in India....

Following the end of the First World War, Eneas McNulty joins the British-led Royal Irish Constabulary. With all those around him becoming soldiers of a different kind, however, it proves...

Meet Mr Bones, canine sidekick of Willy G. Christmas, a troubled poet-saint from Brooklyn. Together they sally forth to Baltimore in search of Willy's beloved mentor Bea Wanson - who...

I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water . So begins Mr Vertigo, the story of Walt, an irrepressible orphan from the Mid-West. Under the tutelage...

Annie Dunne and her cousin Sarah live ands work on a small farm in a remote and beautiful part of Wicklow in late 1950s Ireland. When Annie's nephew and his...

Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and nerves prick, And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of, Being slow. -...

In Ignorance, set in contemporary Prague, one of the most distinguished writers of our time takes up the complex and emotionally charged theme of exile and creates from it a...

A budding poet and his adoring mother are the central characters of this intriguing early novel by Milan Kundera. He takes us through the young man's fantasies and love affairs...

'To read [ Birthday Letters ] is to experience the psychic equivalent of the bends'. It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance...

A celebrated actress who has died in mysterious and shocking circumstances leaves behind an unconventional extended family that includes an older sister, a woman in her 20s through whose eyes...

A plane crashes on an uninhabited island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land...

Slowness was Milan Kundera's first novel written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows him through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated in time by...

'This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme,...

The Joke , Milan Kundera's first novel, gained him a huge following in his own country and launched his worldwide literary reputation. In his foreword Kundera explains why this completely...

Dog and cat owners are becoming increasingly concerned about the safety of processed pet food and the possible side-effects of over-use of antibiotcs and hormone treatments. This new edition, thoroughly...

This breathtaking, reverberating survey of human nature finds Kundera still attempting to work out the meaning of life without losing his acute sense of humour. It is one of those...

In this novel - a story of irreconcilable loves and infidelities - Milan Kundera addresses himself to the nature of twentieth-century 'Being' In a world in which lives are shaped...

This selection made by E.E. Cummings himself from eleven books of poems constitutes a comprehensive introduction to his work.

This selection, which was made by Eliot himself, is intended as an introduction to the main body of his poetry prior to Four Quartets, which is available separately in Faber...