Non-Secondhand Books

These ten classic stories are masterful depictions of the underside of life, deep in the American South. On receiving an early copy, Evelyn Waugh remarked 'If these stories are in...

Ariel , first published in 1965, contains many of Sylvia Plath's best-known poems, written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before her death in 1963. Including poems such as...

OVER HALF A MILLION COPIES OF APPLE TREE YARD SOLD 'Psychologically acute. Terrific.' Daily Mail 'A page-turning read. Kept me reading well past bedtime!' VAL McDERMID 'Pacey and propulsive.' Guardian...

Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the...

In April 1956, C.S. Lewis, a confirmed bachelor, married Joy Davidman, an American poet with two small children. After four brief, intensely happy years, Davidman died of cancer and Lewis...

Best known today as a fine composer, the twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was also a religious leader and visionary, a poet, naturalist and writer of medical treatises. Despite...

In the spring of 1453, the Ottoman Turks advanced on Constantinople in pursuit of an ancient Islamic dream: capturing the thousand-year-old capital of Christian Byzantium. During the siege that followed,...

Lord of the Flies is a novel that has captivated schoolchildren ever since it was first published in 1954. A teacher himself, Golding clearly understood what excites and interests children....

As remarkable as Columbus and the conquistador expeditions, the history of Portuguese exploration is now almost forgotten. But Portugal's navigators cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, launched the expedition...

Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by...

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...

'I was supposed to be having the time of my life.' When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she...

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 the late 1590s, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and his empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day -...

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...

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....

The Museum of Innocence - set in Istanbul between 1975 and today - tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul's richest families, and of his obsessive...

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...

Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphans growing up in the small desolate town of Fingerbone in the vast northwest of America. Abandoned by a succession of relatives,...

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...

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...

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...

This volume contains all Sylvia Plath's mature poetry written from 1956 up to her death in 1963.The text is preceded by an introduction by Ted Hughes and followed by notes...

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain . . . Published in 1922, The Waste...

Winner of the 2021 Cundill History Prize Winner of the 2021 Frederick Douglass Prize 'A richly detailed account of a gripping human story' - Washington Post '[An] epic history ......

Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age-Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt-is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For twenty years she ran the country's largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which...

By the author of LOOK WHO'S BACK, a radical and bold satire in inequitable times. "Whizz-bang energy and gleeful imaginative savagery" Sam Leith, Guardian "More than mere satire, it's a...

Welcome to Briar U!Get ready for your newest obsession . . . Discover the addictive world of the Off-Campus series from The Queen of Hockey Romance, Elle Kennedy!Read The Score...

'Exquisitely written and structurally bold ... a deeply impressive novel' Eva Dolan, author of This Is How It EndsArthur and Gwen married young. Twenty years on, Gwen's got it all:...

The first novel in the magical White Fox series - a beautifully illustrated tale of a young fox and a magical moonstone. '[A] delight, full of peril, friendship and mysticism'...