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Book SynopsisTrade Review"The Prophet's Wife is one of finest books I have read in some time. Not only is it a gorgeously written and nuanced examination of the evolution of an American faith, The Prophet's Wife offers a deeply affecting portrait of the marriage between a complicated man and the strong woman caught in the storm of his making. A masterpiece of a novel perfect for fans of Hilary Mantel and Geraldine Brooks. Don’t miss this one!" — Kris Waldherr, author of The Lost History of Dreams and Unnatural Creatures: A Novel of the Frankenstein Women "The Prophet's Wife is a fascinating look at the origin story of an American religion—and an equally fascinating portrayal of what we're willing to endure in the name of love and faith. Emma and Joseph Smith are both deeply flawed and curiously sympathetic, together making one of the most interesting and nuanced portrayals of a marriage I've read in a very long time. The psychology at work in this book is brilliant." — Allison Epstein, author of A Tip for the Hangman "Grant’s amazing book, The Prophet’s Wife, brings to life a vivid portrait of Emma Smith, and does a beautiful job of bringing readers into her world, her mind, and her heart. This is just the book we have been needing to restore this founder to her rightful historical place." — Piper Huguley, author of By Her Own Design "The Prophet's Wife moves beyond a simple story of religious history to excavate the inner workings of a marriage and the ongoing battle between mind and heart. Through beautiful prose and complex characters, Libbie Grant incites us to consider a difficult question: would you publicly stand by your partner for something you sense is morally flawed? This is a thought-provoking novel that covers vast historical ground with a deeply emotional and intimate touch." — Ellen Keith, internationally bestselling author of The Dutch Wife "Libbie Grant's The Prophet's Wife is a captivating story about the origins of the Mormon church as told through the eyes of Emma Hale Smith, wife of the church's founder Joseph Smith. With meticulous attention to detail, Emma's fascinating and at times heartbreaking story is both timely and timeless, as it explores themes around marriage, faith and power, as well as the impossible choices women throughout history have been forced to make to survive." — Jane Healey, bestselling author of The Secret Stealers "You will enter an unforgettable world in The Prophet's Wife. It's a story of fiery faith, love, and emotionally charged drama, all seen through the point of view of Emma Hale. She's a young woman of independent spirit who sees something no one else does in a man who appears one day at her family home: Joseph Smith. Together they changed American history. The writing is richly detailed--this is a novel not to be missed." — Nancy Bilyeau, author of Dreamland

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Book SynopsisForeword by Neil GaimanThe world’s leading Arthurian authority reimagines one of the most beloved and influential legends—the story of King Arthur and his Knights—for a new century in this gorgeous keepsake edition, illustrated with luminous full-color paintings and drawings by internationally acclaimed Tolkien artist John Howe.The stories of King Arthur and Merlin, Lancelot and Guinevere, Galahad, Gawain, Tristan and the rest of the Knights of the Roundtable, and the search for the Holy Grail have been beloved for centuries and are the inspiration of many modern fantasy novels, films, and shows. These legends began when an obscure Celtic hero named Arthur stepped on to the stage of history sometime in the sixth century, generating a host of oral tales that would be inscribed some 900 years later by Thomas Malory in his classic Morte D’Arthur (The Death of Arthur).The Great Book of King Arthur brings these legends into the modern age, using accessible prose for contemporary readers for the first time. In addition to the stories in Morte D’Arthur, John Matthews includes many tales of Arthur and his knights either unknown to Malory or written in other languages, such as the story of Avenable, the girl brought up as a boy who becomes a famous knight; Morien, whose adventures are as fantastic and exciting as any found in Malory’s work; and a retelling of the life of Round Table favorite Gawain, from his strange birth to his upbringing among the poor to his ascension to the highest position—Emperor of Rome.In addition, there are some of the earliest tales of Arthur, deriving from the tradition of Celtic storytelling. The epic hero is represented in such powerful stories as “The Adventures of Eagle-boy” and “The Coming of Merlin,” which is based on the early medieval text Vita Merlini and tells a completely new version of the great enchanter’s story. The Great Book of King Arthur includes 15 full-color paintings and 25 pencil drawings.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisJAMES BOND INVESTIGATES A VILLAIN WITH THE POWER TO LAUNCH A NUCLEAR WARHEADSir Hugo Drax is a multimillionaire tycoon and war hero, revered by the British public for his new Moonraker missile defense system. But there’s more to this enigmatic millionaire than he lets on. When M suspects Drax of cheating at cards, he is baffled that the patriot would risk his reputation and his rocket program on a game, so he assigns Bond to infiltrate Drax’s circle.As 007 probes the activities at the Moonraker base in the days leading up to the beloved rocket’s maiden launch, he learns the truth about Drax’s battle scars, his wartime allegiances—and his murderous plans for the deployment of Moonraker.

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Book SynopsisJAMES BOND MUST STOP A GOLD-OBSESSED MILLIONAIRE AND THE HEIST OF THE CENTURYAuric Goldfinger is the richest man in England―though his wealth can’t be found in banks. He’s been hoarding vast stockpiles of his namesake metal, and it has attracted the suspicion of Bond’s superiors at MI6.Sent to investigate, Bond uncovers an ingenious gold-smuggling scheme, as well as Goldfinger’s most daring caper yet: Operation Grand Slam, a heist so audacious it could bring down the world economy and put the fate of the West in the hands of SMERSH. Only 007 can stop the enigmatic millionaire and his murderous mania for gold.

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisRead Elizabeth Bowen's accessible feminist take on the Irish aristocracyWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VICTORIA GLENDINNINGThe Irish troubles rage, but up at the ''Big House'', tennis parties, dances and flirtations with the English officers continue, undisturbed by the ambushes, arrests and burning country beyond the gates. Faint vibrations of discord reach the young girl Lois, who is straining for her own freedom, and she will witness the troubles surge closer and reach their irrevocable, inevitable climax.Trade ReviewA book I read only some years ago, and was astonished by its modernity, its formidable intelligence and its punk sensibility, was The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen -- Sebastian Barry * Guardian *A strongly autobiographical portrait of a lost class marking out its final moments - every garden party, every house guest and every flirtation is touched by a sense of impending extinction * Guardian *When I read [The Last September] I was knocked out by the sheer magnificence of her writing, the cinematic possibilities, and her obsession with the minutiae and the detail of life... I was totally gripped by the story * Glasgow Herald *Posterity will one day return to Miss Bowen's novels as a repository of clues to the inner life of our times * Sunday Telegraph *A combination of social comedy and private tragedy...brilliant description of Anglo-Irish life at the troublesome time of 1920 * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisElizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.Trade ReviewThe worlds Bowen creates are so immediately absorbing, the glimpses she allows us of the eccentricities of other people's relationships so fascinating, that one cannot help wanting more -- Selina HastingsThose qualities which Elizabeth Bowen's prose exemplifies: a formidable precision of writing, a faithful delineation of mood and place - an aspiration towards the absolute truthfulness of the individual vision-If there is anything to the catchphrase "life felt", it is here - in Elizabeth Bowen's munificence of detail, the fine closeness of the atmosphere which she creates -- Peter Ackroyd

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Book SynopsisWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. N. WILSONThroughout these seventy-nine stories - love stories, ghost stories, stories of childhood, of English middle-class life in the twenties and thirties, of London during the Blitz - Elizabeth Bowen combines social comedy and reportage, perception and vision in an oeuvre which reveals, as Angus Wilson affirms in his introduction, that ''the instinctive artist is there at the very heart of her work''.Trade ReviewBowen's stories show the awesome capabilities of the English language and the surprise and mystery of the human soul * Anne Tyler *Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of the naked crystals which have formed them -- V.S. Pritchett * Vogue *

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Book SynopsisElizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.Trade ReviewResonant, beautiful and often very funny... Eva is triumphantly real, a creation of great imaginative tenderness * Financial Times *Elizabeth Bowen was one of the handful of great English novelist of this century and must be ranked beside Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, and Ford Madox Ford -- Edmund White * Washington Post *Eva is the larger-than-life, some would say monstrous, culmination of a subject that haunted Bowen's work: the neglected, or misplaced, child * New York Times *I still remember the electrifying effect it had upon me when it was published in 1969. At various stages of life I have become almost possessed by it... The book shimmers with life in every paragraph -- A. N. Wilson * Daily Telegraph *A subtle, elusive novel making its mysterious way forward by side glances and half-gleams, by sudden small illuminations and half-hidden ironies, by a tenderness that is half-mocking and a mockery that is half-tender * Evening Standard *

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Book SynopsisErnest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.Trade ReviewFor the novice, there could be no better initiation - For students of Hemingway, here is a well-balanced view * Daily Express *He can perform prodigies. He can fascinate us by pure evocation, by the tensity of the situation * Times Literary Supplement *Hemingway's style, at its best, is a superb vehicle for revealing tenderness of feeling beneath descriptions of brutality * The Guardian *

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Book SynopsisTHE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONIn The Guermantes Way Proust''s narrator recalls his initiation into the dazzling world of Parisian high society. Looking back over his time in the glamorous salons of the aristocracy, he satirises this shallow world and his own youthful infatuation with it. His observations, and his experiences with his lover Albertine, also educate him in the volatile nature of desire as he walks the path towards adulthood.Trade ReviewA version that wonderfully proves the greatness of this novel, this novelist -- Melvyn Bragg * Guardian *What a genius! Whole pages cascade, like great jazz slaloms -- Bill Nighy * The Times *One of the cornerstones of the Western literary canon * The Times *It's a novel with zero plot, but the narrator's brilliant analyses of everyday experiences more than make up for it. I've never read a better description of what it feels like to fall asleep -- Alain de Botton * Mail on Sunday *The plot is as gripping as any soap opera, the jokes come thick and fast...Proust's is a world entire - so why not take it with you anywhere in the world? -- Will Self * Independent on Sunday *

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Book SynopsisTHE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONIn Sodom and Gomorrah Proust''s narrator not only depicts the class tensions of a changing France at the beginning of the twentieth century but also exposes the decadence of aristocratic Parisian society and muses upon the subjects of homosexuality and sexual jealousy.Trade ReviewA giant miniature, full of images, of superimposed gardens, of games conducted between space and time -- Jean CocteauOne of the cornerstones of the Western literary canon * The Times *Proust isn't just the most profound of novelists, but the most entertaining, too * Independent *The way he replicates the workings of the mind changed the art of novel-writing forever...his style is extraordinary, enveloping, captivating * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisThe quiet life of schoolmaster Bill Mor and his wife Nan is disturbed when a young woman, Rain Carter, arrives at the school to paint the portrait of the headmaster. Mor, hoping to enter politics, becomes aware of new desires and a different dream of life. A complex battle develops, involving love, guilt, magic, art and political ambition. Mor''s teenage children and their mother fight discreetly and ruthlessly against the invader. The Head, himself enchanted, advises Mor to seize the girl and run. The final decision rests with Rain. Can a ''great love'' be purchased at too high a price?Trade ReviewIris Murdoch is incapable of writing without fascinating and beautiful colour * The Times *Iris Murdoch was one of the best and most influential writers of the twentieth century * Guardian *Of the novelists who have made their bow since the war she seems to me to be the most remarkable -- Raymond Mortimer

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Book SynopsisErnest Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899, the second of six children. In 1917, he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris, associating with other expatriates like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.Trade ReviewAn excellent story-teller, intense and skillful * Daily Telegraph *He can perform prodigies. He can fascinate us by pure evocation, by the tensity of the situation * Times Literary Supplement *Hemingway's style, at its best, is a superb vehicle for revealing tenderness of feeling beneath descriptions of brutality * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisGraham Greene (Author) Graham Greene was born in 1904. He worked as a journalist and critic, and in 1940 became literary editor of the Spectator. He was later employed by the Foreign Office. As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography, two of biography and four books for children. He also wrote hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.Monica Ali (Introducer) Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She is the author of Untold Story, In The Kitchen and Alentejo Blue. Her Sunday Times bestselling first novel Brick Lane was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the George Orwell Prize for political writing and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and has been made into an acclaimed film. Her latest Trade ReviewSingularly beautiful and moving -- Evelyn WaughOne of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language * William Faulkner *In a class by himself...the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety -- William GoldingDevastating study of the collision of different kinds of faith, betrayal and commitment * The Times *Greene's novel of illicit love captures perfectly the atmosphere of rainy wartime London - try to read this in one sitting if you can * Express *

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Book SynopsisA seductive psychological thriller about obsession, jealousy and deceit, and a Japanese classic Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady in an uninspiring marriage. When she decides to take an art class in town she meets the extraordinary Mitsuko, a woman as beautiful and charismatic as she is cunning. They begin a passionate affair and Sonoko soon finds herself infatuated by Mitsuko, and ensnared in a web of sex, humiliation and deceit. With an introduction by Kristen Roupenian, author of ''Cat Person''Trade ReviewA riveting tale of malevolent corruption fatally masked by a terrible and deceptive beauty: fatal attraction in a 1920s Japanese setting * Kirkus Reviews *Quicksand reads like a mixture of James Cain and Vladimir Nabokov and teases us with forbidden pleasures * Washington Times *A harrowing black comedy of love and death * Chicago Tribune *Beautifully and mysteriously contrived * Newsday *

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Book SynopsisIrène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, Le Bal and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, as well as the posthumous Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. In July 1942 she was arrested by the French police and interned in Pithiviers concentration camp, and from there immediately deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942.Trade ReviewA masterpiece * Sunday Times *Quite outstanding, full of beauty, pain and truth -- Anne Chisholm * Sunday Telegraph *An irresistible work. Suite Francaise clutches the heart -- Carmen Callil * The Times *The work of a genuine artist -- Julian Barnes * Guardian *Magnificent * The Times *

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Book SynopsisJohn Buchan was born in Perth in 1875, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, and educated at Glasgow. He gained a first at Oxford University, where he began writing, producing two volumes of essays, four novels and two collections of stories and poems before the age of twenty-five. He worked briefly as a lawyer, then served as a private secretary in the colonial administration of South Africa after the Boer War. During the war he worked both as a journalist and at Britain's War Propaganda Bureau, eventually becoming Director of Information. He published his most popular novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, in 1915, and it has never since been out of print. In 1935 Buchan was elevated to the peerage, becoming Baron Tweedmuir of Elsfield, and later that year was appointed Governor General of Canada by King George V. He died on 11 February 1940.Trade ReviewRichard Hannay is, like his American brother Philip Marlowe, a modern knight errant. Charging through a hypocritical world, he is a seeker after truth with a boundless love of nature, a liking for simple pleasures and a hatred of pettiness and snobberies.... Buchan's novels are eerily resonant with today's troubles... Hannay is a hero for all times * Observer *The book is even more fun than the films * Guardian *The father of the modern espionage adventure * Sunday Times *Buchan makes superb use of wild landscapes in this economical and gripping story * The Times *Go into a bookshop today, pick up The Thirty-Nine Steps and I guarantee you will read it to the end. There is random and graphic violence, there is clear and present evil, eyes that are hooded 'like a bird of prey' - and a man 'skewered to the floor by a long knife through his heart' * Daily Mail *

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Book SynopsisSatan is out for revenge. His rebellion has failed, he has been cast out from heaven and is doomed to spend eternity in hell. Somehow he must find a way to prove his power and wound his enemies. He fixes upon God''s beloved new creations, Adam and Eve, as the vehicles of his vengeance. In this dramatic and influential epic, Milton tells the story of the serpent and the apple, the fall of man and the exile from paradise in stunningly vivid and powerful verse.Trade ReviewOffers an intensely filmic description of the events that countless artists have sought to visualise * The Times *Milton represents the English imagination at its most organised, disciplined and sublime -- Tom Paulin * Guardian *Never was a work of literature so imbued with the visual. He creates a universe that never existed, and paints it so you see it and are overwhelmed by its immensity, its magnificent splendour at the top end, the great dark plains and huge rocky mountains, the fires and storms at the other - and the horror of the void between -- Julian Rathbone * Independent *I read Paradise Lost when I was 11, and it made me suddenly realise that the Devil was sexy, which was quite muddling at that age and had disastrous consequences in that I then lusted after unsuitable men for the rest of my life -- Jilly Cooper * Daily Mail *When the blind John Milton came to retell the story of Genesis in book seven of Paradise Lost he dwelt with understandable poignancy on the sheer visual loveliness of the newly created world. Anyone who thinks Milton is a pedantic old bore should peruse the lines that celebrate the wonder and beauty of birds' flight, migration and song * Financial Times *

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Book SynopsisWITH A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOROn his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures is post-war Germany.Trade ReviewGiven Grass's close involvement with this new translation, it is fair to call this the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the post-war era. * Observer *Grass published his milestone of postwar literature 50 years ago, and the event is being celebrated with new translations...Mitchell's excellent translation reveals the novel as a timeless masterpiece. * The Times *At the ages of fourteen and fifteen, I had read Great Expectations twice - Dickens made me want to be a writer - but it was reading The Tin Drum at nineteen and twenty that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens' full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos - all with an unforgiving conscience. -- John Irving * New York Times Book Review *Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game * Daily Telegraph *Encountering The Tin Drum in the early sixties was like discovering a new planet, a reinvention of literature. It brings the exhilaration of discovery, linked with an enormous gratitude for the way in which Günter Grass makes the world a worthwhile place to be in, and living a worthwhile thing to do. He has forever pushed back - and opened up - our concept and awareness of what is real, and what is possible, and what we dare to dream about. * André Brink *

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Book SynopsisMikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he graduated as a doctor in 1916. He rapidly abandoned medicine to write some of the greatest Russian literature of this century. After a lifetime at odds with the stultifying Soviet regime, he died impoverished and blind in 1940, shortly after completing his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. None of his major fiction was published during his lifetime.Trade ReviewThis book is absorbing, brilliant slapstick, and looks deep in to the heart of fantasy and longing * Sunday Times *Stunning, superb...Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest * Independent *

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Book SynopsisSherman McCoy is a WASP, bond trader and self-appointed 'Master of the Universe'. He has a fashionable wife, a Park Avenue apartment and a Southern mistress. His spectacular fall begins the moment he is involved in an accident in the Bronx. Prosecutors, newspaper hacks, politicians and clergy close in on him, determined to bring him down.Trade ReviewA noisy satire on Manhattan’s Wall Street cash-bloated plutocracy… Hugely readable. -- John Sutherland * The Times *If there is a set-book of the Eighties, it is Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. No other novel has achieved such a precise place in the imagination of the reading classes. With his first attempt at fiction Wolfe has become the 'Dickens or Balzac of his age'; the dandy journalist has become the towering genius * The Times *Wolfe's modern morality tale displays the sardonic humour and sharp appreciation of the grotesque familiar to admirers of his non fiction... Savagely funny and compelling * Guardian *The air of New York crackles with an energy that causes the adrenalin to pump, until one has the illusion that this is where the whole of life is taking place. The feeling is perfectly reproduced in Wolfe's novel, which opens such cans of worms as racial hostility, dress codes, political labelling and the cynical opportunism that governs every action. It's, well, electric * Sunday Times *It's witty, sprawling and ambitious * Daily Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisIn Titus Awakes the 77th Earl of Groan leaves the crumbling castle of Gormenghast and finds the larger world even stranger than his birthplace. Confronted by elemental and human threats - snowstorms, shipwrecks and attempts on his life - Titus'' bravery is tested and he must fight to free himself from the claims of his past. Peake began this fourth and final volume of the Gormenghast stories but he died having only written a few pages. Using notes and the fragments he left behind, his wife, the painter and writer Maeve Gilmore, has created a richly imagined sequel that fans of The Gormenghast Trilogy will delight in.Trade ReviewTitus Awakes is a treasure salvaged from the ruins * New Statesman *Peake does not, as some have said, defy classification; rather, he is beyond classification in any single genre, and therein perhaps lies his genius. In his centenary year it is to be hoped that the latest surge of interest in his enormous range of work will finally help to place him in his rightful position as one of Britain's most brilliant, original and creative figures * Times Literary Supplement *A century after his birth, the gothic surrealism of Peake's fantasy world still attracts new fans * Independent *

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Book SynopsisFROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BEAST MUST DIE - NOW A BRITBOX SERIESThe annual Sports Day at respected public school Sudeley Hall ends in tragedy when the headmaster''s obnoxious nephew is found strangled in a haystack. The boy was despised by staff and students alike, but English master Michael Evans, who was seen sharing a kiss with the headmaster''s beautiful young wife earlier that day, soon becomes a prime suspect for the murder. Luckily, his friend Nigel Strangeways, nephew to the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, is on hand to help investigate the case. A Nigel Strangeways murder mystery - the perfect introduction to the most charming and erudite detective in Golden Age crime fiction.Trade Review"A master of detective fiction" Daily Telegraph "A thirties classic" Independent "It's an excellent introduction to this fine series of well-made and thoroughly engaging mysteries, which are some of the best of their kind." -- Laura Wilson Guardian "His plots are ingenious" Times Literary Supplement "The Nicholas Blake books are something quite by themselves in English detective fiction" -- Elizabeth Bowen

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Book SynopsisNikolai Leskov was born in 1831 in the village of Gorokhovo in Russia. He began his writing career as a journalist living in Kiev, and later settled in St. Petersburg. He published his first piece of fiction in 1862 in The Northern Bee, and continued on to write and publish many short stories and novellas, including The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865), The Sealed Angel (1873), The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), and Lefty (1882). He died in February 1895.Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gogol. They were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation prize. They live in Paris.Trade ReviewI don’t know why Nikolai Leskov is not better known: he’s one of the best… You don’t just feel the falling snowflakes and smell the hay – you glimpse where God might be -- Sara Wheeler * Observer *Nikolai Leskov is one of the greatest and most popular of the wonderful group of Russian storytellers who flourished in the nineteenth century * New York Times Book Review *Serious criticism ignored him but his tales succeeded instantly with the public... No-one catches so truthfully the diversity of national character of his time. His variety is astonishing... Leskov has both feet in life -- V.S. PritchettOn Lady Macbbeth of Mtensk: 'Short, sharp and shocking novel...It is a strikingly modern work, a sort of souped-up Madame Bovary in which the anti-heroine, the bored provincial housewife Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, is gripped by an excessive passion for a seductive farmhand. She's hardboiled as any Chandler dame as her ardour for her low-born lover takes her down a jet-black road of cruelty and murder' -- Sunday TelegraphNikolai Leskov fully deserves the privilege of standing in line with such makers of Russian literature as Tolstoi, Gogol, Turgenev and Goncharov. In power and beauty, Leskov's talent cedes only a little to the talent of any one of these men I have named - the creators of the Holy Bible of the Russian land - but in breadth of exposition, in depth of understanding of life's riddles, and in knowledge of the Russian language, he very often surpasses his predecessors and fellow writers -- Maxim Gorky

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Book SynopsisT F Powys was a member of a distinguished literary family and the descendant of three generations of country parson. Although born in Derbyshire he spent almost the whole of his life in a remote Dorset village, where all his works were written. He died in 1953.Trade ReviewMr Weston's Good Wine is a book without parallel. It is an allegory, it is a bucolic farce, it is a religious (or anti-religious?) masterpiece -- A N Wilson * Daily Telegraph *The greatest value of his work, though, is in showing that it is still possible to write about the primordial human experiences to which religion is a response...Very few 20th-century authors have the knack of writing convincingly of first and last things. A religious writer without any vestige of belief, Theodore Powys is one of them -- John Gray * New Statesman *Grimly brilliant -- John Carey * Sunday Times *[It is] generally considered his masterpiece * Washington Post *A writer who far outshone his contemporaries * Spectator *

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