Search results for ""Alma Books Ltd""

When Céline’s first novel, Journey to the End of the Night was first published in 1932, it created an instant scandal, being extravagantly praised by its supporters and savagely attacked by its horrified opponents. Four years later came the sequel, Death on Credit. Both were a new kind of novel, frank about the author’s thoughts and actions in ways that readers had never encountered, ultra-realistic – and full of incidents that could not possibly be true to life – and characters that stretched the imagination. In Death on Credit, Ferdinand Bardamu, Céline’s alter ego, is a doctor in Paris, treating the poor who seldom pay him but who take every advantage of his availability. The action is not continuous but goes back in time to earlier memories and often moves into fantasy, especially in Bardamu’s sexual escapades; the style becomes deliberately rougher and sentences disintegrate to catch the flavour of the teeming world of everyday Parisian tragedies, the struggle to make a living, illness, venereal disease, the sordid stories of families whose destiny is governed by their own stupidity, malice, lust and greed. This fascinating book by one of the greatest twentieth-century novelists is an unforgettable experience for the reader.

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When Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane and their baby brother start exploring a gravel pit not far from their new countryside home, they make an unexpected and very curious discovery. The gravel pit is home to a Psammead, a sand fairy. This ugly creature has eyes like a snail, ears like a bat and the body of a spider, and is very grumpy indeed. He grants the children one wish every day, and though they are excited to have all their desires fulfilled, they soon realize that having one's wishes come true can have unexpected consequences... E. Nesbit's much loved children's tale has enchanted generations of readers, and has been adapted for the screen numerous times - most notably by the BBC in a hugely popular 1990s series. It remains one of the most cherished children's classics ever written, and an indispensable part of every young reader's library.

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While enjoying a six weeks' stay in fashionable Bath, the young and callow Catherine Morland is introduced to the delights of high society. Thanks to a new literary diet of the sensational and the macabre, Catherine travels to Northanger Abbey fully expecting to become embroiled in a Gothic adventure of intrigue and suspense - and, once there, soon begins to form the most gruesome and improbable theories about the exploits of its occupants. An early work, but published posthumously, Northanger Abbey is a parody of the Gothic genre typified by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, as well as a witty comedy of manners in the style of Jane Austen's later novels and, ultimately, an enchanting love story.

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Katy, a twelve-year-old gangly tomboy, dreams of blossoming into a sophisticated young woman, capable of grand deeds and adventures. She is however prone to mischief, and leads her six siblings into various scrapes, much to the annoyance of her kindly father and domineering aunt. Her life is turned upside down by a terrible accident, which leaves her a bedridden invalid. Now she is forced to learn the virtues of patience, sacrifice and hopefulness, as she comes to terms with her disability. A heart-warming tale that has become a children's classic since its publication in 1872, Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did is a lesson in the value of good humour and perseverance against the odds for young readers. Beautifully illustrated by Susan Hellard, this is a poignant and timeless story that every child should read.

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Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially successful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly persecuted, Golyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life unravelling, in a spiral that leads to a catastrophic denouement. The Double, Dostoevsky's second published work of fiction, which foreshadows in its themes many of his mature novels, is the surreal and hallucinatory tale of an unfortunate anti-hero, at once chilling in its depiction of the dark sides of human nature and exuberantly comical.

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A murderer is forced to reveal his crime by the sound of a beating heart, a mysterious figure wreaks havoc among a party of noblemen during the time of the plague, a grieving lover awakens to find himself clutching a box of his beloved blood-stained teeth, a man is obsessed with the fear of being buried alive – these are only some of the memorable characters and stories included in this volume, which exemplify Poe’s inventiveness and natural talent as a storyteller. Immensely popular both during and after his lifetime, and a powerful influence on generations of writers and film-makers to this day, Edgar Allan Poe is still counted among the greatest short-story writers of all time and seen as one of the initiators of the detective, horror and science-fiction genres.

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Born into a poor family, Fanny Price is raised amid the daunting splendour of Mansfield Park by her rich uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram. Treated as an inferior by most of the family, Fanny forms a close attachment to her cousin Edmund, the only person to show her kindness. With the departure of her uncle to the West Indies and the arrival from London of the fashionable Henry and Mary Crawford, flirtation and romantic intrigue abound. As Fanny becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the conduct of her companions, she finds herself isolated and forced to face the conflict between her sense of integrity and social expectation.

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The four March sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy - live in financial hardship in New England with their mother, while their father has been drafted to fight in the Civil War. The girls embark on a series of adventures and endure a number of unexpected misfortunes - experiences that allow their personalities to emerge: Meg sensible and outgoing, Jo literary and boyish, Beth musical and shy, and Amy artistic and selfish - but the bonds holding together the March family remain unbroken.Initially written as a novel for girls, Little Women is now regarded as an all-time American classic for all readers, inspiring generations of women writers and giving rise to many adaptations. ABOUT THE SERIES: Alma Classics Junior series of illustrated classics includes some of the greatest books ever written for younger readers and new translations of unjustly neglected international works. Our aim is to give our list an international feel and offer young readers to opportunity to connect with other cultures and literatures - this applies not only to the titles we chose but also to the illustrators we commission - so that we can bring a bit of novelty into the canon of British children's literature. All children's classics contain extra material for young readers, including a profile of the author, a section on the book, a list of characters, a glossary and a test-yourself quiz.

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When it is discovered that the reigning world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic, is on board a cruiser heading for Buenos Aires, a fellow passenger challenges him to a game. Czentovic easily defeats him, but during the rematch a mysterious Austrian, Dr B., intervenes and, to the surprise of everyone, helps the underdog obtain a draw. When, the next day, Dr B. confides in a compatriot travelling on the same ship and decides to reveal the harrowing secret behind his formidable chess knowledge, a chilling tale of imprisonment and psychological torment unfolds. Stefan Zweig’s last and most famous story, ‘A Game of Chess’ was written in exile in Brazil and explores its author’s anxieties about the situation in Europe following the rise of the Nazi regime. The tale is presented here in a brand-new translation, along with three of the master storyteller’s most acclaimed novellas: Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman, The Invisible Collection and Incident on Lake Geneva.

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Over the last fifteen years of his life, Tolstoy collected and published the maxims of some of the world’s greatest masters of philosophy, religion and literature, adding his own contributions to various questions that preoccupied him in old age, such as faith and existence, as well as matters of everyday life. Banned in Russia under Communism, A Calendar of Wisdom was Tolstoy’s last major work, and one of his most popular both during and after his lifetime. This new translation by Roger Cockrell will offer today’s generation of readers the chance to discover, day by day, these edifying and carefully selected pearls of wisdom.

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Having moved into an abandoned haunted house, the narrator, undaunted by the warnings of the locals, invites a party of friends over; on Twelfth Night he and his guests gather together, and relate the supernatural experiences they have had. The resulting ghost stories thrill, shock and amuse by turns. For this work, commissioned for his periodical All the Year Round, Dickens enlisted some of the era’s most famous writers, including Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, to collaborate with him on this Victorian supernatural classic.

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Having been found guilty of adultery, Hester Prynne is forced to wear an embroidered scarlet letter A as a punishment for her sin. While her vengeful husband embarks on a quest to discover the identity of her lover, she is left to face the consequences of her infidelity and find a place for herself and her illegitimate child in the hostile environment of seventeenth-century Puritan Boston. Nathaniel Hawthorne's tense narrative astonished readers with its unparalleled psychological depth when it first appeared, and the novel now stands as one of America's literary landmarks.

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When the descendant of an ancient aristocratic family moves from Massachusetts to Exham Priory, his ancestral home in the south of England, he is plagued by the constant noise of rats scurrying within its walls. As the sound begins to haunt his dreams, he investigates the house and discovers a horrific secret underneath, which will bring him to the point of madness. Considered one of the most accomplished examples of the horror genre, 'The Rats in the Walls' is presented here alongside other quintessentially Lovecraftian tales - such as 'The Dunwich Horror', 'At the Mountains of Madness', 'The Colour out of Space' and 'The Horror at Red Hook' - in a brand-new collection which will delight new readers and those familiar with the blood-curdling imaginary worlds of the twentieth century's master of terror.

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Micromegas is a six-hundred-and-fifty-year-old, thirty-nine-kilometre-high giant from the planet Sirius who can speak a thousand languages and has been expelled from his homeland for writing a heretical tract. On Saturn he befriends the local secretary of the Academy of Sciences – a comparative dwarf, being only two kilometres high – and the two decide to travel to earth together, where they will make startling discoveries about human nature. At once a story-length Bildungsroman and a philosophical tale, ‘Micromegas’ is a classic Enlightenment text, and is accompanied in this volume by thirteen other pieces – including ‘Plato’s Dream’ and ‘Memnon’ – all in a new translation by acclaimed French specialist Douglas Parmée.

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When an ageing, impoverished nobleman decides to style himself “Don Quixote” and embarks upon a series of daring endeavours, it is clear that his ability to distinguish between reality and the fantasy world of literary romance has broken down. His exploits turn into comic misadventures, in which everyday objects are transformed into the accoutrements of chivalry, peasant girls become princesses and windmills are mistaken for formidable giants, leading the hero and his squire Sancho Panza into the realms of absurdity and humiliation. Renowned for its comical set pieces, Don Quixote is a profound meditation on the relationship between truth and fiction and the morality of deception, as well as the foundation stone of the modern novel.

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A novel of high romance and great intensity, Jane Eyre has enjoyed popular success and critical acclaim ever since its first publication in 1847. Jane's journey from a troubled childhood to independence - and her turbulent love affair with the enigmatic Mr Rochester - electrified Victorian readers with its narrative power. With characters that are as unforgettable as the story they enact, and a striking use of language that amazed the readers of the day, Jane Eyre ranks among the most influential English novels ever written.

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Dorian Gray is having his picture painted by Basil Hallward, who is charmed by his looks. But when Sir Henry Wotton visits and seduces Dorian into the worship of youthful beauty with an intoxicating speech, Dorian makes a wish he will live to regret: that all the marks of age will now be reflected in the portrait rather than on Dorian's own face. The stage is now set for a masterful tale about appearance, reality, art, life, truth, fiction and the burden of conscience. Oscar Wilde's only full-length novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a lasting gem of sophisticated wit and playfulness, which brings together all the best elements of his talent in a reinterpretation of the Faustian myth.

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In the Twilight, the third collection of short stories compiled by Anton Chekhov himself, was his first major success and won him the prestigious Pushkin Prize when it was published in 1888. This volume represents a clear milestone in the writer’s passage from the youthful Antosha Chekhonte, author of slight comic sketches, to the mature master of the short-story genre. This edition presents the sixteen tales of the original collection – ranging from well-known and acknowledged gems such as ‘Agafya’ and ‘On the Road’ to others which will be fresh even to many seasoned readers of Chekhov – in a brand-new translation by Hugh Aplin, providing an invaluable glimpse into a pivotal moment in the writer’s literary career.

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Leo Tolstoy’s most personal novel, Anna Karenina scrutinizes fundamental ethical and theological questions through the tragic story of its eponymous heroine. Anna is desperately pursuing a good, “moral” life, standing for honesty and sincerity. Passion drives her to adultery, and this flies in the face of the corrupt Russian bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the aristocrat Konstantin Levin is struggling to reconcile reason with passion, espousing a Christian anarchism that Tolstoy himself believed in. Acclaimed by critics and readers alike, Anna Karenina presents a poignant blend of realism and lyricism that makes it one of the most perfect, enduring novels of all time.

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In addition to a sparkling modern translation of Praise of Folly, this volume also includes other works by Erasmus: Pope Julius Barred from Heaven, Epigram against Pope Julius II and a selection of his Adages. Together with the extensive annotation of the texts, these help to set Erasmus’s masterpiece in an accessible context for the modern reader. A central text of the Renaissance, Praise of Folly is an essential part of the Western canon, without which much that has followed – in culture, theology and literature – would not exist. Deeply subversive in its time, the book, after the initial controversy it created, finally gained acceptance as theologians, philosophers and readers came to appreciate Erasmus’s lucid, playful and eloquent reasoning.

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First published in 1859, Oblomov is an indisputable classic of Russian literature, comparable in its stature to such masterpieces as Gogol’s Dead Souls, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The book centres on the figure of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a member of the dying class of the landed gentry, who spends most of his time lying in bed gazing at life in an apathetic daze, encouraged by his equally lazy servant Zakhar and routinely swindled by his acquaintances. But this torpid existence comes to an end when, spurred on by his crumbling finances, the love of a woman and the reproaches of his friend, the hard-working Stoltz, Oblomov finds that he must engage with the real world and face up to his commitments. Rich in situational comedy, psychological complexity and social satire, Oblomov – here presented in Stephen Pearl’s award-winning translation, the first major English-language version of the novel in more than fifty years – is a timeless novel and a monument to human idleness.

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Monroe Stahr is a film producer at the height of his career, revered by the industry and in control of every aspect of his business empire. In his ruthless rise to the top, the young widower has had little time for sentiment, until he mets the beguiling Kathleen Moore and the two embark on an intense but ill-fated relationship. Told in parts from the perspective of Cecelia Brady, the witty and perceptive daughter of Stahr's business partner, The Last Tycoon is a sophisticated, gripping tale of love and intrigue in the Golden Age of Hollywood, containing what many critics have claimed are Fitzgerald's most modern and engaging chracters.

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A collection of early short stories which helped make Fitzgerald’s name, Tales of the Jazz Age combines period pieces – the most notable of which is the novella-length ‘May Day’ – with more fanciful creations, such as the fantastical ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, recently made into a Hollywood film. Also containing the now classic story ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, as well as lesser-known sketches and tales, this diverse selection, compiled by Fitzgerald himself from material published in newspapers and magazines, showcases both the variety of his writing and early examples of the themes and characters which would find their way into his later novels.

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Finding himself locked in his room for six weeks, a young officer journeys around his room in his imagination, using the various objects it contains as inspiration for a delightful parody of contemporary travel-writing and an exercise in Sternean picaresque, and humorously demonstrating what one can explore without having set off to exotic locations. Accompanied in this volume by its equally superb sequel, ‘Nocturnal Expedition around my Room’, in which a similar voyage is made at night several years later, ‘A Journey around My Room’ is a masterly and innovative piece of writing, which was immensely popular in its time and would later influence Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust, among others.

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In a series of nine letters, the narrator tells his friend how he introduced Vera Nikolayevna, a married woman who had been forbidden as a child to read fiction and poetry, to the intellectual pleasures of Goethe's masterpiece. Opening up in front of Vera's eyes is not only the realm of imagination, but also a world of unbridled feelings and tempestuous passions, which can only shatter the comfort and safety of her existence and force her to set off on a journey of spiritual awakening.

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Alexander Pope was, at one time, the world’s most celebrated poet. His trenchant satirical works – in which the foibles of all the critics, hacks and bad poets of his day are exploded – and his masterful heroi-comic poem The Rape of the Lock continue to inspire generations of writers and readers to this day. Alongside his more prominent poetical production, Pope engaged with some of the sharpest wits of his era – including Jonathan Swift and John Gay, the author of The Beggar’s Opera – in writing a number of satirical prose works, of which Scriblerus is perhaps the greatest achievement. As he prepares to become father for the fi rst time, the scholar Cornelius is determined to settle on nothing less than a child of the “learned sex” – a boy – and give him the most thorough education so that he can become the greatest critic who ever lived. An account of the birth, the infancy, the schooling, the diet-planning, the unconventional love affairs and the attainments of this child prodigy,The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus is surely the funniest imaginary biography ever written.

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At a train station on her way to meet her friends Marie and Leo to recover her pet rock, Madame Charlotte accidentally picks up the Prime Minister’s elephant-hide bag instead of her own. As it contains important documents and the politician is due to make an important speech on children’s education, Miss Charlotte – hoping that she might get a ministerial job out of this – embarks on a quest to track him down. Along the way, Miss Charlotte cannot help making speeches on behalf of the country’s leader and putting her own original twist on his boring children’s policy, while attracting at the same time the attentions of the media and the secret service.

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A new middle-grade sci-fi novel from the author of SIX, Slick is a fresh, funny and heargelt story about what it means to be human. Longlisted for the 2020 UKLA Book Award Eric Young is the first child android to be trialled in society, but he doesn't know that. He does know that he's just moved to Ashland from London, so it's important that he makes new friends. Not just any friends, but the right kind - the kind that would be interested in skateboarding and the new Slick trainers his Uncle Martin sends him. He's already growing his social media presence, but he knows it's important to make friends in the real world too. Danny Lazio doesn't have any friends, but he doesn't care about that. He would rather not be friends with someone like Eric, who's had seemingly everything handed to him. But when Eric takes an interest in Land X, Danny's favourite game, Danny thinks he might have found a real friend... if he can figure out the mystery behind Eric's sudden disappearances and strange lifestyle. As their friendship grows, it becomes harder to ignore the weird events that happen around Eric, from weekly "dentist" appointments to inexplicable medical mishaps. But uncovering the truth is an act that might cost them both, as powerful forces soon move in around them.

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Available for the first time in an English translation, this selection gives non-Francophone readers the chance to encounter the many incarnations of renowned Belgian painter René Magritte – the artist, the man, the aspiring noirist, the fire-breathing theorist – in his own words. Through whimsical personal letters, biting apologia, appreciations of fellow artists, pugnacious interviews, farcical film scripts, prose poems, manifestos and much more, a new Magritte emerges: part Surrealist, part literalist, part celebrity, part rascal. While this book is bound to appeal to admirers of Magritte’s art and those who are curious about his personal life, there is also much to delight all readers interested in the history and theory of art, philosophy and politics, as well as lovers of creativity and the inner workings of a probing, inquisitive mind unrestricted by genre, medium or fashion.

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Miss Charlotte – the new coach of a children’s football team – has some odd methods to prepare them for the big match, including talking to the ball and drinking a special potion, smalalamiam. Also, she teaches them how to lose! And to have fun. Incredibly, it seems to work – but will their hopes of victory be dashed when their star player decides to join the other team? The latest instalment in Dominique Demers’s popular Adventures of Miss Charlotte series, The New Football Coach, brilliantly illustrated by Tony Ross, is a marvellous tale about believing in yourself and beating the odds.

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When the mysterious and eccentric Miss Charlotte arrives in the village of Saint-Anatole to take over the tiny library, the locals are surprised to find out that she does things differently. Wearing a long blue dress and a giant hat, she takes her books out for a walk in a wheelbarrow and shows the children that reading can be fun and useful. Sometimes she is so caught up in the magic of the stories she shares with her audience that she forgets all sense of reality – so much so that one day she loses consciousness and the children must find a way to bring her back. The second in Dominique Demers’s popular The Adventures of Miss Charlotte series, The Mysterious Librarian, brilliantly illustrated by Tony Ross, is a wonderful story about the magical and inspiring power of books.

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Rebelde the snail can’t stop asking his fellow molluscs awkward questions, starting with: why are we so slow? When he is finally banished from the snail community because of this, he is forced to travel the world alone. As he explores in his slow snail-like way, Rebelde makes new friends and goes on plenty of adventures, gaining wisdom from every new encounter. But when he finds out his friends are in danger, he decides to rush home to warn them. Will he get there in time to save them? Luis Sepúlveda’s bestselling The Story of a Snail Who Discovered the Importance of Being Slow is a wonderful ode to diversity and unity, celebrating the importance of being slow in a world obsessed with speed.

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All children dream of having a secret house where they can live on their own, far from any rules and regulations. But not all of them are as lucky as Aglaia, who lives at the top of a magical tree together with her friend Bianca and an incredible host of flying dogs, talking cats, carnivorous flowers and children who speak in verse.Inventively illustrated by Quentin Blake, Aglaia's adventures - and her battles with the gruff Signor Brullo and the woodmen who want to cut down the tree - are sure to enchant and inspire the imagination of every child.

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England, 31st August 1939: the world is on the brink of war. As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, thousands of children are evacuated from London to escape the impending Blitz. Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate which has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple. Soon Anna gets drawn into their unravelling relationship, seeing things that are not meant for her eyes – and finding herself part-witness and part-accomplice to a love affair, with unforeseen consequences. A story of love, loss and complicated loyalties, combining a sweeping narrative with subtle psychological observation, The Very Thought of You is a haunting and memorable debut.

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Shortlisted for the Essex Book Awards and Stockton Children’s Book of the Year Award When Parker Banks moves with his family from London to New York, he struggles to adapt to his new school and environment. His scientist dad is constantly at work on a top-secret technological venture for a major corporation, when one day he is kidnapped. It is up to Parker, along with his deaf sister Emma, their friend Michael and the pet pig their father left behind, to find and rescue him. They have at their disposal the E.F.E. device that their dad has invented to allow the family members to communicate with one another through telepathy. As their search progresses, it becomes clear that Six, the project that Parker's father has been involved in against his will, is a sinister enterprise that poses a threat not only to the Banks family, but to the world at large.

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An enchanting book set in a world where the odd is the ordinary, evil has many faces and love is the most powerful magic of them all. Twelve-year-old Grubb lives a hand-to-mouth existence in Victorian England, working as a chimney sweep under a cruel master. After an incident at an inn, he hides in the trunk of one of its guests, the enigmatic Alistair Grim, and is whisked away to his Odditorium, a wonderful flying house full of incredible mechanical features powered by an enigmatic substance called animus. Now apprenticed to Grim, Grubb begins to settle into his new life and find a new family in the eccentric crew of the Odditorium, when suddenly his new world comes under attack by the evil Prince Nightshade and he is propelled into a perilous quest. As he gets caught up in the struggle, Grubb will learn valuable lessons and discover remarkable secrets about himself and his new host.

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Supermarket checkout girl Tracy Pringle has a very lively imagination indeed. In front of her, as she blip-blips herself into a daydream, walk past not boring housewives with screaming children or tired office clerks, but the likes of Lord Byron, Lawrence of Arabia and Princess Leia. It comes as no surprise, then, that she turns a blind eye when Her Majesty herself pops a packet of Mr Kipling’s Bakewell tarts into her handbag without paying. Obviously, the management sees it differently, and Tracy is given the sack on the spot and forced to find herself another job. But nothing can prepare her for the new life that awaits her at the Taste of Persia restaurant, where she is flung headlong into a clash of cultures, languages, dinner plates, religions and a rather tricky domestic arrangement...

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Now a motion picture starring Andy Serkis and Thomas Brodie-Sangster Donald Delpe is a troubled teenager. Not only is he a ‘terrible teen’ by default, as obsessed with sex, music, videogames and drugs as the rest of his gang, but he is also suffering from a life-threatening form of leukaemia, which makes him an even more difficult boy, both for his parents and his teachers. Escaping into his own comic-book realm of immortal superheroes, ruthless villains and sex-crazed vamps, he repeatedly dashes his family’s hopes by refusing to fight the battles facing him in the real world. As famous psychologist Dr King is brought in to help, a glimmer of hope is rekindled. But will the doctor break the rules, betray the parents’ trust and risk everything to help Donald achieve his greatest wish? Or will Donald be the one to save the doctor? Inspired by real events, Death of a Superhero is a brilliantly original fusion of novel, comic book and film script; a celebration of the transience of life, the eternal difficulty of love and a hilarious riff on our 21st-century infatuation with movies and the superhero solution.

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The poetry of Eluard is that of the real world and its natural sensations and feelings. The main themes that stand out are love, brotherhood and kindness. His imagery is characterized by its appeal to the senses and the importance of concrete objects and of everyday things. In these translations by Gilbert Bowen, the best work of Paul Eluard, perhaps the most popular of twentieth century French poets, has been collected in a bilingual edition. This edition contains a representative selection of poems from different periods and different aspects of his vast output.

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Europe after the Rain takes its title from Max Ernst’s surrealist work, which depicts a vision of rampant destruction – a theme which Burns here takes to its conclusion, showing man not merely trying to come to terms with desolation, but combating human cruelty with that resilience of spirit without which survival would be impossible. The Europe through which the unnamed narrator travels is a devastated world, twisted and misshapen, both geographically and morally, and he is forced to witness terrible sights, to which he brings an interested apathy, without ever succumbing to despair or cynicism. Upon the novel’s first publication, Burns was heralded as presenting a picture of his age and capturing the ‘collective unconscious’ of the twentieth century – in a language that can have few rivals for economy, beauty and rhythm. His austere sentences glow with intelligence, colour and force, and evoke a powerful image for the modern reader of fears every bit as relevant today as on the day when they were written.

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Following a disjointed, vision-like structure, The Blind Owl is the nightmarish exploration of the psyche of a madman. The narrator is an ailing, solitary misanthrope who suffers from hallucinations, and his dreamlike tale is layered, circular, driven by its own demented logic, and punctuated with macabre and surreal episodes such as the discovery of a mutilated corpse, and a bizarre competition in which two men are locked in a dungeon-like room with a cobra. Initially banned in the author’s native Iran, the novel first appeared in Tehran in 1941 and became a bestseller. Full of powerful symbolism and terrifying imagery, this dark novella is Hedayat’s masterpiece.

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Written in America while Trocchi was working on a scow on the Hudson River, Cain's Book is an extraordinary autobiographical account about a junky's life, and an honest, raunchy, eye-opening trip through hell. Probably the most famous novel about drug addiction and the hazards and excitements of an addict's life after Burrough's Naked Lunch, this modern classic - which was prosecuted in Britain for obscenity in 1965 - still shocks in its frankness and is relevant to this day.

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According to many experts, China is already the largest economy on the planet – yet its relations with the rest of the world have deteriorated in recent years, and are now at an all-time low. Is this a passing phase caused by the shockwaves of the Covid pandemic and the personalities of leaders in China and in the USA, or are the current divergencies going to become wider and more entrenched, as China grows economically and develops technological leadership? Can the West learn from its past mistakes and engage successfully with China on many common interests, or are we on the verge of a new Cold War? In The Chinese Conundrum, Vince Cable – author of the the Sunday Times number-one bestseller The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What it Means – provides an answer to these and many other topical questions of global politics and economy, examining the long history of relationships between China and the West, as well as the change in attitudes on both sides of the divide, with a particular focus on the possible repercussions of the recent election of Joe Biden as president of the United States. The result is a gripping, insightful and accessible investigation into the intricacies of today’s economic and geopolitical situation.

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Published in 1880, one year before Verga’s influential novel The Malavoglias, Life in the Country first marked his stylistic shift towards the verismo school of Italian realism. The collection’s centrepiece, ‘Rustic Honour’ (‘Cavalleria rusticana’) – which was famously adapted into a play by the author before becoming an opera by Mascagni – tells the tale of Turiddu, a poor young man who returns from military service and finds himself embroiled in adultery and a feud with a rival. Also including the well-known stories ‘She-Wolf’ and ‘Foxfur’, Life in the Country captures, in an objective, non-judgemental prose, the difficult conditions and personal struggles of the peasant class in his native Sicily at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Dante is known to most readers outside Italy for his gritty descriptions of the Inferno, but there is another, gentler side to his poetry, which found expression throughout his career in verses that made him, together with his friend Guido Cavalcanti, the leading love poet of his generation. From the ballads and rime of his youth to the heart-rending lyrics written on the death of Beatrice and the more sober, philosophical canzoni of his later years, this volume provides the only English edition of the great Florentine’s complete love poems, in brilliant verse translations by Dante specialists J.G. Nichols and Anthony Mortimer.

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The first story in this volume, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, is an amusing portrayal of two exceptionally close friends, the mortal insult that drives them apart, and the ensuing chaos that occurs. This is Gogol’s humour at its best, where the most irrelevant-seeming details and turns of phrase take on a bizarre life of their own. Ivan Krylov’s Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather has an ingenuous narrator praise the nobility and modesty of a landowner whose actions prove him to be otherwise. The two tales by Mikhail Saltykov are satirical attacks on civil servants and Russia’s autocracy. The final piece, Tolstoy’s Ivan the Fool, is a playful and allegorical critique of contemporary Russian society. Together, they represent some of Russia’s finest comic writing before the twentieth century.

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Based on a famous Spanish folk tale and set in rural Andalusia, The Three-Cornered Hat recounts the tribulations of a lecherous local magistrate as he attempts to have his way with the miller’s beautiful but devoted wife, with unforeseen and hilarious consequences. Alarcon’s astute blend of slapstick and comedy of manners provides both timeless entertainment and a sharp satire on the corruption of rural officials and the politics of lust and seduction.

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