Search results for ""vintage publishing""

When Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 in 1626 he showed his shrewdness by also buying the oyster beds off tiny, nearby Oyster Island, renamed Ellis Island in 1770. From the Minuit purchase until pollution finally destroyed the beds in the 1920s, New York was a city known for its oysters, especially in the late 1800s, when Europe and America enjoyed a decades-long oyster craze. In a dubious endorsement, William Makepeace Thackeray said that eating a New York oyster was like eating a baby. Travellers to New York were also keen to experience the famous New York oyster houses. While some were known for their elegance, due to a longstanding belief in the aphrodisiac quality of oysters, they were often associated with prostitution. In 1842, when the novelist Charles Dickens arrived in New York, he could not conceal his eagerness to find and experience the fabled oyster cellars of New York City's slums. The Big Oyster is the story of a city and of an international trade.Filled with cultural, social and culinary insight - as well as recipes, maps, drawings and photographs - this is history at its most engrossing, entertaining and delicious.

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Mary Panton walls up her desires in a beautiful villa high up in the hills above Florence, as she calmly contemplates her disastrous marriage. But a single act of compassion begins a nightmare of violence that shatters her serenity. She turns for help to the notorious Rowley Flint, and through him comes to realise that to deny love, with all its passions and risks, is to deny life itself.

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In search of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. There, in a nation straightjacketed by totalitarian Communism, he discovers a literary predicament marked by an institutionalised oppression that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the subjugated writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism. The Prague Orgy, consisting of entries from Zuckerman's notebooks recording his sojourn among these outcast artists, completes the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound. It provides a startling ending to Roth's intricately designed magnum opus on the unforeseen consequences of art.

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Where does our food come from? The story of one of the world's most important crops From the gold potatoes at the Sun Temple in Cuzco, Peru, the muddy ones in Ireland and those grown in China for McDonald's chips, the story of the spud is both satisfying and fascinating. John Reader follows the thread of the potato's story through the tapestry of human history, from its origins and evolution to its mysterious arrival in Europe, where it became a crucial part of gastronomic and social fabric. As global population swells and environmental sustainability becomes ever more crucial, Reader asks what role the potato still has to play - in this lively, readable study of our most humble foodstuff. ‘Each chapter is discrete in content and manner, yet densely connected to the rest. Wonderful: to understand the whole world through a single crisp’ Guardian

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Astonishingly inventive, amusing and engrossing, Rumo is a captivating story from the unique imagination of Walter Moers. Rumo is a little Wolperting who will one day become the greatest hero in the history of Zamonia. Armed with Dandelion, his talking sword, he fights his way across Overworld and Netherworld, two very different worlds chock-full of adventures, dangers, and unforgettable characters: including Rala, the beautiful girl Wolperting who cultivates a hazardous relationship with death; General Ticktock, the evil commander of the Copper Killers; Ushan DeLucca, the finest and most weather-sensitive swordsman in Zamonia; Professor Abdullah Nightingale, inventor of the Chest-of-Drawers Oracle; and, worse luck, the deadly Metal Maiden.

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**AS SEEN ON BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS****Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this exquisite short story collection. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes these stories more powerful and compelling than anything she has written before.Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009.

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In these twelve stories, Eugene McCabe plumbs the soul of the Irishborder counties, where confusion, divided loyalties, and conflict arepart of everyday life. A master of arresting dialogue and intimate characterisation, celebrated as a major playwright and author of one of the most important Irish novels of the last fifty years, McCabe demonstrates his outstanding gift for short fiction in this revelatory and haunting collection.

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Kenneth Toomey is an eminent novelist of dubious talent; Don Carlo Campanati is a man of God, a shrewd manipulator who rises through the Vatican to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood. These two men are linked not only by family ties but by a common understanding of mankind's frailties. In this epic masterpiece, Anthony Burgess plumbs the depths of the essence of power and the lengths men will go for it.

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Read the seminal bestselling novel that changed the face of British fiction and inspired Danny Boyle's film.'The best book ever written by man or woman... Deserves to sell more copies than the Bible' Rebel Inc Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. 'Welsh writes with a skill, wit and compassion that amounts to genius.' Sunday Times

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'An astute and accomplished work' Daily MailJoyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way. For Joyce, art school provides an escape route, and there she falls in love with one of her teachers. When she marries and has children, she is determined to manage her relationship with a new freedom, but will she be able to save herself from the mistakes of the previous generation? Or will her daughter, Zoe, only see Joyce as similarly trapped? A poignant tale of navigating mothering and womanhood in twentieth century Britain, Everything Will Be All Right is yet another work of the finest beauty from Tessa Hadley.

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John Self is a consumer extraordinaire. Rolling between London and New York he closes movie deals and spends feverishly, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography and mountains of junk food. But John’s excesses haven’t gone unnoted. Menaced by a phone stalker, his high-wire, hoggish lifestyle is about to bring him face-to-face with the secret of his success. 'Terribly, terminally funny: laughter in the dark, if ever I heard it' Guardian

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Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer in residence on a cruise liner; a visit to her sister, a missionary in Africa, who is receiving an honorary degree, an occasion which both recognise as the final opportunity for effecting some form of reconciliation; and a disquieting appearance at a writers' conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly amongst the audience. She has made her life's work the study of other people yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations.

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In a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunis, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. His spiritual son Dr Khaleel ­­- who has no real medical qualifications - nurses the older man, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. In an attempt to revive his patient, Khaleel, begins telling Yunis the stories of their people's exile in Lebanon. He evokes deserted peasant villages, the suffering caused by the Lebanese civil war and the refugees' hopes to return home with a subtle mixture of anger and compassion. Khaleel also narrates Yunis' own extraordinary life.Interweaving many true-life tales collected throughout Lebanon and its refugee camps over the course of seven years, Elias Khoury has created a monumental and spellbinding saga.

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'Rich, authentic and entertaining' New StatesmanDiscover the darkly funny follow-up to cult classic Death and the PenguinViktor - last seen in Death and the Penguin fleeing Mafia vengeance on an Antarctica-bound flight booked for Penguin Misha - seizes a heaven-sent opportunity to return to Kiev with a new identity. Clear now as to the enormity of abandoning Misha, then convalescent from a heart-transplant, Viktor determines to make amends. Viktor falls in with a Mafia boss who engages him to help in his election campaign, then introduces him to men who might further his search for Misha, said to be in a private zoo in Chechnya. What ensues is for Viktor both a quest and an odyssey of atonement, and, for the reader, an experience as rich, topical and illuminating as Death and the Penguin.

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This is Hemingway's East African safari journal.'All I wanted to do was get back to Africa'Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife Pauline journeyed in December 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.'In a class by itself - the country at all hours shines bright and clear in these pages' Daily Telegraph'The best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere' New York Times

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Discover Colin Thubron's journey through central asia in the wake of the fall of the iron curtain.Thubron travelled throughout Central Asia in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union and documented the widespread social upheaval in a region reeling from political change. Thubron is an inspirational writer, intrepid traveller and insightful observer and his The Lost Heart of Asia is an outstanding guide to the history, people and culture of a vast region resonating with history and politics.'Thubron's journey takes him through a spectacular, talismanic geography of desert and mountain... and he weaves its mysteries with modern images into a dazzling embroidery' The Times

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Every week, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor meet for dinner. They are unlikely friends - one of them tortured by his 'art', the other fat and wealthy from the earthy business of providing spare blood for the citizens of China. Over the course of one especially gastronomic evening, the writer starts to complain about his latest Party commission: the story of an ordinary soldier who sacrifices his life to the revolutionary cause. This is not the novel he wants to write, he tells his friend. Inside his head lives an unwritten book about the people he knows or sees everyday on the streets - people who lives are far more representative of the world in which he lives...

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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAWAnthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. His past is haunted by the death of his best friend Brian and by his entanglement with the cynical and manipulative Mary Amberley. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Anthony attempts to find a new way to live. Eyeless in Gaza is considered by many to be Huxley's definitive work of fiction.

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A haunting and affecting meditation on love from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida – even L – all are women obsessed with Bill Cosey. He shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend. This audacious vision from a master storyteller on the nature of love – its appetite, its sublime possession, and its consuming dread – is rich in characters and dramatic events, and in its profound sensitivity to just how alive the past can be. Sensual, elegiac and unforgettable, Love ultimately comes full circle to that indelible, overwhelming first love that marks us forever. Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction ‘Love is her best work…a slender but mesmerising tale’ Evening Standard

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The clue to a murder in the art world of contemporary Madrid lies hidden in a medieval painting of a game of chess.In a 15th-century Flemish painting two noblemen are pictured playing chess. Yet two years before he could sit for the portrait, one of them was murdered. In 20th-century Madrid, Julia, a picture restorer preparing the painting for auction, uncovers a hidden inscription in Latin that points to the crime: Quis necavit equitem? Who killed the knight? But as she teams up with a brilliant chess theoretician to retrace the moves, she discovers the deadly game is not yet over.

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A funny look at the social and political dynamic of French village life. Gabriel Chevallier's delightful novel Clochemerle satirizes the titanic confrontation of secular and religious forces in a small wine-growing village in Beaujolais. The eruption begins when the socialist mayor decides that he wants to leave behind a monument to his administration's achievements. He takes as his model the ancient Romans, who were famous for two things: hygiene and noble edifices. Thus, he decides to unite the two concepts...by constructing a public urinal in the centre of town. There is one problem, however: the chosen locale is next to the village church, and this outrages the ecclesiastical party.*Perfect for fans of Joanne Harris’s Chocolate*

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The vivid scenes on the Bayeux Tapestry depict the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It is one of Europe's greatest treasures and its own story is full of drama and surprise. Who commissioned the tapestry? Was it Bishop Odo, William's ruthless half-brother? Or Harold's dynamic sister Edith, juggling for a place in the new court? Hicks shows us this world and the miracle of the tapestry's making: the stitches, dyes and strange details in the margins. For centuries it lay ignored in Bayeux cathedral until its 'discovery' in the eighteenth century. It became a symbol of power as well as art: townsfolk saved it during the French Revolution; Napoleon displayed it to promote his own conquest; the Nazis strove to make it their own; and its influence endures today. This marvellous book, packed with thrilling stories, shows how we remake history in every age and how a great work of art has a life of its own.

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‘Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century’ The TimesWhat begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.‘A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas… Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears’ Teju Cole, Guardian

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A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.

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A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakami’s international reputation.It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company’s advertisement. What he doesn’t realise is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best.'A Wild Sheep Chase has the conventional hull of a thriller - a quest, a mystery, an extraordinary woman, and plenty of elegant duress - but its fantastic superstructure transforms it into something quite different...a science fiction fantasy, a romance, a metaphysical tease, or a dramatisation of philosophical ideas' Independent

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A mystery story about love, the cosmos and other fictional universes.Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. Miu is glamorous and successful. Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel. Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire, and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her? Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own unrequited love for Sumire. Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished...'Confirms Murakami as a master of his craft... Out of this world' Time Out

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In 1963, in a south London hotel, Andrew Loog Oldham discovered an unknown rhythm and blues band called the Rolling Stones and became their manager and producer; by 1967 they had achieved worldwide celebrity, been arrested in a notorious drugs raid and split with the manager that made them. 2Stoned is the remarkable record of these years, when Oldham's radical strategies transformed them into the Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band That Ever Drew Breath. In his first book, Stoned, Oldham recorded his early years and the meeting with the Stones that changed all their fates; 2Stoned is the story of what followed.

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Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccentric grandmother and adored grandfather. Tormented as a young student in a right-wing, catholic Austria, Bernhard ran away from home aged fifteen. At eighteen he contracted pneumonia. Placed in a hospital ward for the old and terminally ill, he observed with unflinching acuity protracted suffering and death. From the age of 21, everything he wrote was shaped by the urgency of a dying man's testament - his witness, the quintessence of his life and knowledge - and where this account of his life ends, his art begins.

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'Daring and provocative... Startlingly original' New York TimesThe nuclear holocaust has been and gone, and now everything is different. In Twicetown, once Key West, two missiles sit unexploded, objects of awe and indifference. Mr Cheung teaches the boy Fiskadoro to play the clarinet; Grandmother Wright, the oldest person in the world, endlessly relives the fall of Saigon; Cassius Clay Sugar Ray trades in radioactive artefacts. Boats go out to comb the sea for fish, and the sea keeps some of the men. Tossing fitfully in nightmares of forgotten wars, lazing in the tropical heat, the flotsam and jetsam of a lost civilization pursue their lives through a world of fractured memories. And they wait - for the Cubans to come, for the Quarantine to be lifted, for the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus to return and build their kingdoms.From the author of Tree of Smoke, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

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‘A dazzling and savage first novel’ New York TimesAngels tells the story of two born losers. Jamie has ditched her husband and is running away with her two baby girls. Bill is dreaming of making it big in a life of crime. They meet on a Greyhound bus and decide to team up. So begins a stunning, tragic odyssey through the dark underbelly of America – the bars, bus stations, mental wards and prisons that play host to Jamie and Bill as they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral though rape, alcohol, drugs and crime, to madness and death.From the author of Tree of Smoke, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

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Koba the Dread is the successor to Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author's father, Kingsley Amis, was 'a Comintern dogsbody' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and later in life his closest friend, was Robert Conquest, whose book The Great Terror was second only to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.

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Tell Me No Lies is a celebration of the very best investigative journalism, and includes writing by some of the greatest practitioners of the craft: Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre; Paul Foot on the Lockerbie cover-up; Wilfred Burchett, the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima following the atomic bombing; Israeli journalist Amira Hass, reporting from the Gaza Strip in the 1990s; Gunter Wallraff, the great German undercover reporter; Jessica Mitford on 'The American Way of Death'; Martha Gelhorn on the liberation of the death camp at Dachau. The book - a selection of articles, broadcasts and books extracts that revealed important and disturbing truths - ranges from across many of the critical events, scandals and struggles of the past fifty years. Along the way it bears witness to epic injustices committed against the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor and Palestine. John Pilger sets each piece of reporting in its context and introduces the collection with a passionate essay arguing that the kind of journalism he celebrates here is being subverted by the very forces that ought to be its enemy. Taken as a whole, the book tells an extraordinary 'secret history' of the modern era. It is also a call to arms to journalists everywhere - before it is too late.

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‘May be the most detailed, painstaking anatomy of desire that we are ever likely to see or need again... An ecstatic celebration of love and language’ Washington PostThe language we use when we are in love is not a language we speak. It is a language addressed to ourselves and to our imaginary beloved. It is a language of solitude, of mythology, of what Barthes calls an 'image repertoire'. Reviving the notion of the amorous subject beyond psychological or clinical enterprises, Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse is a book for everyone who has ever been in love, or indeed, thought themselves to be immune to its power.

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In 1593, the brilliant and controversial young playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a Deptford lodging house. The circumstances were shady, the official account - a violent quarrel over the bill, or 'recknynge' - long regarded as dubious.For the first time tracing Marlowe's shadowy political and intelligence dealings, Charles Nicholl uncovers critical new evidence about that fatal day. Also providing an enthralling revelation of the extraordinary underworld of Elizabethan crime and espionage, the 'secret theatre', Nicholl penetrates four centuries of obscurity to expose a complex and chilling story of entrapment and betrayal.

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On the high seas of the Caribbean, a family of English children is set loose - sent by their parents from their home in Jamaica to receive the civilising effects of England. When their ship is captured by pirates, the thrilling cruise continues as the children transfer their affections from one batch of sailors to another. Innocence is their protection, but as life in the care of pirates reveals its dangers, the events which unfold begin to take on a savagely detached quality.Writers' reviews for A High Wind in Jamaica:'One of my all time favourite books' Ann Patchett'I wouldn't let a 14-year-old near it' Meg Rosoff'I read the whole thing in one gulp. It was remarkable. Tiny. Crazy. I felt just like I did as a kid.' Andrew Sean Greer'When I really like a book I'll sometimes read a passage or two aloud to whoever's nearby; this one I'd happily recite cover-to-cover' Imogen Hermes Gowar'A thrillingly good book' Martin Amis

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Discover Man Booker winner Anne Enright's first collection of short stories.'Elegant, scrupulously poised, always intelligent and, not least, original' Angela Carter The characters in Anne Enright's fierce and witty first collection of stories stand at an oblique angle to society. Full of desire, but out of kilter, their response to a dislocated reality is mutinous, wild, unforgettable.'Quirky, subversive, original wit and an imaginative linguistic fluency' Irish Times

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These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'. Little Wilson and Big God moves from Moss Side to Malaya recalling Burgess's time as an education officer in the tropics, his tempestuous first marriage, his struggles with Catholicism and the beginning of his prolific writing life. Wise, self-deprecating and bristling with incident, this is a first-class memoir.

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Dickens was a landmark biography when first published in 1990. This specially edited shorter edition takes the reader into the life of one of the world's greatest writers.Here, Ackroyd attempts to peel away the mask of a man whose life was outwardly a picture of Victorian rectitude, but whose love life was as complicated (and unconventional) as any modern writer's. Dickens had everything - fame, success and riches - but he died harbouring a deep sadness he had experienced all his life. He was a man of mercurial character, had enormous vitality and humour, but he also had a sense of loss and longing that would constantly appear in his work. Like many eminent Victorians, he led a double life: although he insisted that nothing in the newspapers he edited should upset his middle-class readers, he regularly indulged in dubious night-time escapades with fellow author Wilkie Collins, and, for the last 13 years of his life, kept a secret mistress.

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Peoplewatching is the culmination of a career of watching people - their behaviour and habits, their personalities and their quirks. Desmond Morris shows us how people, consciously and unconsciously, signal their attitudes, desires and innermost feelings with their bodies and actions, often more powerfully than with their words.

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The narrator of Love and Garbage has temporarily abandoned his work-in-progress - an essay on Kafka - and exchanged his writer's pen for the orange vest of a Prague road-sweeper. As he works, he meditates on Czechoslovakia, on Kafka, on life, on art and, obsessively, on his passionate and adulterous love affair with the sculptress Daria. Gradually he admits the impossibility of being at once an honest writer and an honest lover, and with that agonising discovery comes a moment of choice.

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In this beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book Liza Dalby traces the history of the kimono - its designs, uses, aesthetics and social significance. The colourful and stylised kimono, the national garment of Japan, expresses not only Japanese fashion and design taste but also reveals something of the soul of Japan, and is seen by many as a symbol for all that is Japanese - simplicity, elegance and beauty. Amazingly beautiful, the kimono has gone through many changes in the centuries since it was first imported from China, changes that reflect the way that Japanese society has also developed over the ages.

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This final classic collection of stories reveals Somerset Maugham's unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relationships. Brilliant tales of love, infidelity, passion and prejudice, the stories range from 'The Lotus Eater' in which a man has a vision of a life of bliss in the Mediterranean, to the astringent tales of 'The Outstation' and 'The Back of Beyond' in Malaya and South East Asia. Largely set in favourite Maugham country, this colourful collection brilliantly evokes the numbered days of the British Empire.

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Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems.'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

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‘It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary’Rediscover Kafka's classic work of psychological horror. The Trial is the terrifying tale of Joseph K, a respectable functionary in a bank, who is suddenly arrested and must defend his innocence against a charge about which he can get no information. A nightmare vision of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the insanity of twentieth-century totalitarianism has resonated with readers for generations.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PHILLIPE SANDS

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'A bible for the working mother' OPRAH WINFREY 'It may change your life' OBSERVER'I can't think of a woman who wouldn't want this book' INDIA KNIGHT The twentieth anniversary edition of Allison Pearson's first novel that became a global sensation, now with a new introduction from the author. Meet Kate Reddy, hedge-fund manager, wife and mother of two. Always time-poor, Kate must monitor nine currencies in five time zones but also keep in step with the Teletubbies. Factor in a manipulative nanny, piggish colleagues, a long-suffering husband, her quietly aghast in-laws, two needy children and an email lover, and you have a woman juggling so many things that some day something's going to hit the ground. And that something might just be Kate. In an uproariously funny and achingly sad novel, Allison Pearson brilliantly dramatises the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the twenty-first century. 'The definitive social comedy of working motherhood' WASHINGTON POST

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Ten years on from Trainspotting Sick Boy is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London. Having failed spectacularly as a hustler, pimp, husband, father and businessman, Sick Boy taps into an opportunity which to him represents one last throw of the dice. However, to realise his dream of directing and producing a pornographic movie, Sick Boy must team up with old pal and fellow exile Mark Renton. In the world of Porno, though, nothing is straightforward, as Sick Boy and Renton find out that they have unresolved issues to address concerning the increasingly unhinged Frank Begbie, the troubled, drug-addled Spud, but, most of all, with each other.

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'This is a vicious, furious book, unapologetically not of this age - it is also horribly funny and unflinchingly honest' New StatesmanDavid Kepesh, white-haired, and now in his sixties, is an eminent cultural critic on NPR radio and a formidable lecturer at a New York college. For years he's been casually, almost habitually, sleeping with the more spirited of his female students, though with an aesthete's critical distance. But now he's met Consuela Castillo, a twenty-four-year-old Cuban student of such head-turning beauty, that Kapesh finds himself dragged helplessly into a quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss.The Dying Animal is a virtuoso performance from Philip Roth, following Kapesh through the tumult of erotic lust and the search for freedom, shackled by a mortal human body.

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A young girl, Liv, lives with her mother on a remote island in the Arctic Circle. Her only friend is an old man who beguiles her with tales of trolls, mermaids, and the huldra, a wild spirit who appears as an irresistably beautiful girl, to tempt young men to danger and death. Then two boys drown within weeks of each other under mysterious circumstances, in the still, moonlit waters off the shores of Liv's home.Were the deaths accidental or were the boys lured to their doom by a malevolent spirit?

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