A TIMES and SPECTATOR Book of the Year'A love letter to the energising thrill of literature' SUNDAY TIMES'A lively book that seeks to enthuse us to read more deeply, more thoughtfully' THE TIMES'The best book about reading I have read for a very long time' STEPHEN FRYA joyful and enlightening masterclass in how reading attentively can change our livesFor thirty years, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has shared his passion for reading with students. In Look Closer, he brings fresh li...
The perfect cozy mystery to curl up with this Christmas.A luxury party sets sail on New Year's Day. But festivities will take a deadly turn…New Year’s Day 1938. The luxurious ocean liner The Midnight Star is partway through its voyage from London to New York. On board, an elite group of passengers – including Daphne King – have been invited by the enigmatic philanthropist Augustus Bellamy. Once a celebrated archaeologist, Bellamy now curates not only rare artefacts but also e...
A beautifully illustrated edition of the internationally bestselling author's meditation on memory and family. In this meditation on memory and what makes us who we are, Haruki Murakami recalls his relationship with his father – the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him to fight in the Second World War. Murakami’s father wrote accomplished haiku and eventually became a teacher, but as Haruki grew older they found they had les...
Meet your new life coach: Franz Kafka ‘The last glass of milk has not yet been drunk' There is still time. There is still hope. And sometimes, the most unexpected voice is the one we need most – like Franz Kafka, your unlikely life coach. Dead for over a century, yet strikingly present, Kafka speaks like a friend: attentive, understanding, and gently encouraging. Drawn from letters to lovers, friends, and family, these pages offer brief, luminous moments of comfort, humour, a...
A profound and unflinching work of investigative journalism that presents the testimony of displaced Palestinians who are living through genocide, from the acclaimed author of PalestineIn the spring of 2025, the comics journalist Joe Sacco and reporter Chris Hedges travelled to Cairo where they interviewed 29 Palestinian families who had recently left Gaza. In Requiem for Gaza, their experiences and stories detail the crucible of the genocide, its horror, displacement and obl...
W Somerset Maugham's classic coming-of-age Christmas tale of one man's descent into Paris' dark side. At the age of twenty-three, Charlie Mason is endowed with good looks, good manners and a cheerful disposition. Following three years at Cambridge and one working in his father's business, he is looking forward to a ‘glorious, wild and romantic’ Christmas in Paris with one of his oldest friends. Yet Paris is not what he expects - in just a few days his young eyes are opened to...
Two great loves. A world in chaos. And a life that never lands in order. Discover the long-awaited sequel to the bestselling phenomenon, The Time Traveler’s Wife.Alba DeTamble is a time traveler, slipping unpredictably through decades like her father before her. But the hardest thing she carries isn’t the burden of futures she can’t understand, or pasts she cannot change – it’s a secret: she is in love with two different people.Each of them offers a different life. Zach lives...
Thomas Pynchon's wretchedly funny dystopian thriller, sending up the end days of America's countercultural dreamVineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.Full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unreso...
‘An elegant and deeply sensory exploration of darkness in all its forms’ Katherine May, author of WinteringAn exhilarating leap into darkness: the new work of non-fiction from award-winning poet and writer Jean SpracklandIn her search for a new, more intimate relationship with darkness, acclaimed poet and writer Jean Sprackland confronts some of the deepest – and darkest – questions about who we are and our place in the world.With glimmering prose that draws on memory and ima...
The definitive investigation into why – across continents, classes, cultures and religions – we’re having fewer children, by an award-winning journalist In Britain, one in five couples have no children, and almost half of all families have only one. The populations of China, Japan, Russia and Italy are shrinking. Pronatalists cry that feminism has killed the family. Governments throw money at childcare. Would-be grandparents wring their hands at the apparent selfishness of th...
Discover the dark, whimsical wonder of ancient Korea in this spellbinding hardback collection of magical tales told and retold across the centuries. Leave behind drab, dark nights to battle the moonlit snowstorms of the winter mountains, shiver at the uncanny horror of the wild-cat woman, explore the enchanted halls of the fairy palace, and follow the strange cries that beckon from beneath the Mysterious Hoi Tree. The Sky Bridge of Birds brings together some of the best, ...
A thousand years of history. One house. Countless lives.This is the extraordinary story of England told through one ordinary house – from the bestselling author of the acclaimed Time Traveller’s Guides. 'It is great stuff … [an] original history of England …Mortimer has established himself as a fine teller of tales about people, rather than kings … A book rich in anecdotage' MAX HASTINGS, Book of the Week, Sunday Times‘Endlessly fascinating … a must-read for history lovers ev...
The world’s most influential voices on AI risk explain why superintelligent AI is a global suicide bomb – and we must halt development immediately'The most important book of the decade' MAX TEGMARK, author of Life 3.0'Better than any book on the subject I've ever read. A loud trumpet call to humanity to awaken us as we sleepwalk into disaster' STEPHEN FRYAI is the greatest threat to our existence that we have ever faced. The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the ...
A SPECIAL COLLECTOR'S EDITION OF ONE OF THE GREAT MODERN LOVE STORIES Henry and Clare meet, fall in love, and build a life together. Just not in that order. Henry is a dashing, adventurous librarian who travels helplessly through time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his own past and future.Clare is an artist whose life moves forwards like the rest of us, one day to the next. As they try to anchor their passionate affair in the here and now, Henry’s constant disap...
'An epic achievement and an honest, heartfelt account' GUARDIANA personal history of war, obsession, love and truth by the Sunday Times-bestselling author of The AdversaryStanding among the mourners gathered to honour Hélène Carrère d’Encausse – renowned historian of Russia, member of the Académie Française, national figure – her son, Emmanuel Carrère, wonders who this formidable woman was: to the country, to history and to himself. In Kolkhoz, Carrère turns his unflinching g...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of the great American adventure novel with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. Huck is a young, naive white boy fleeing from his drunken, dangerous Pap, and Jim is a runaway slave longing to be reunited with his family. Flung together by circumstance, they journey down the Mississippi together on a log raft, each in search of his own definition of freedom.A daring adventure and a sto...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Verne's adventure to the depths of the sea with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon.Professor Aronnax embarks on an expedition to hunt down and destroy a menacing sea monster. However, he discovers that the beast is metal – it is a giant submarine called the Nautilus built by the renegade scientist Captain Nemo. So begins an underwater adventure that takes them from the South Pole ...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of the very best, most dark and delightful fairy tales including 'The Little Mermaid', ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbonThis collection gathers together some of the most iconic fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen. Using old folk tales as his raw material, Andersen told stories full of darkness, magic, power and meaning, ...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of one of the most charming classics ever written, the story of the one-and-only Anne, with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. This is the story of how a bad-tempered, naughty, red-haired orphan charmed a whole town. Anne loves living at the Green Gables, her best friend Diana and dresses with puff sleeves. But she loathes being an orphan, having red hair and being called ‘carrots’ ...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Defoe's shipwreck classic with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. Robinson Crusoe runs away from home to join the navy. After a series of adventures at sea, he is shipwrecked in a devastating storm, and finds himself alone on a remote desert island.He remains there many years, building a life for himself in solitude, until the day he discovers another man’s footprint in the sand....
A Bill Gates, Financial Times, Sunday Times BOOK OF THE YEAR'Pragmatic and undoomy' GUARDIAN 'Essential reading' RUTGER BREGMAN 'Read this book -- now' MARK LYNASWe can’t afford to delay climate action, but with all the shouting and disagreement it’s hard to know where to turn. In her new book, bestselling environmental star Hannah Ritchie answers 50 key climate questions once and for all, clearing the air so we can get on and fix things. Q: Aren’t our efforts pointless if Ch...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of the great pirate adventure novel, with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. When young Jim Hawkins discovers a treasure map in a pirate's chest in his parents' inn, he is drawn into a world of danger and adventure. He joins the crew setting sail to the Caribbean to seek out the booty and over the course of the voyage confronts mutiny, murder and the charismatic and devious Long Joh...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of the magical classic of the boy who never grew up with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. Wendy, Michael and John are fast asleep when the window of their nursery blows open and lets in a very remarkable boy, Peter Pan, and his fairy, Tinker Bell. Peter entices the three children from their beds and out through the window to Neverland. There, they encounter mermaids, fairies, the ...
A classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story from a Danish literary superstar'Like a normal novel with the boring bits taken out' GUARDIAN‘A comet in Scandinavian literature’ OLGA RAVNA woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London. Free in a new city, she reveals how she once sold herself to a man called T. Desperate for money, she accepted when T offered her lavish gifts and a suitcase full of cash in exchange for total control of her body.But a...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of a beloved classic, the story of Ratty, Badger and Mole, with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. The day that Mole abandons his spring-cleaning and sets out to enjoy the sunshine is the start of many adventures. Not only does he discover the river and the joys of messing around in boats, but he also makes lifelong friends with Rat, Badger and the eccentric and incorrigible Toad.Th...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Melville's great American epic, a story of a quest and an obsession, and with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he has no idea of the horrors awaiting him out on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship's strange captain, Ahab, is in the grip of an obsession to hunt down the famous white whale, Moby Dick, ...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Wells's time travelling classic with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. In the Time Traveller’s miraculous new machine, we will be carried from a Victorian dinner table to 802,701 AD, when the Earth is divided between the gentle, ineffective Eloi, and the ape-like Morlocks; forward again by a million years or so to glimpse a dying world of blood-red beaches and menacing shapes;...
Professor Kevin Fong flies with the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, making split-second, life-or-death decisions in the most extreme circumstances. In this gripping blend of memoir and reportage, he confronts a disturbing truth: sometimes even the best trained expert does not know the right thing to do. Telling stories of astonishing skill and catastrophic error, he shows that our ability to move at ever greater speeds in ever greater safety comes with a bitter irony: w...
THE NOVEL THAT INSPIRED THE OSCAR WINNING FILMAmidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll.As Thomsen and Doll’s wife pursue their passion – the gears of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution grinding around them – Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his ow...
This gripping story of Kyiv during the Second World War told by a young boy who saw it all.''Rightly hailed a masterpiece'' Daily Mail''So here is my invitation: enter into my fate, imagine that you are twelve, that the world is at war and that nobody knows what is going to happen next...''When the German army rolled into Kyiv in 1941 the young Anatoli was just twelve years old. He began writing down what he saw in his journals.Within ten days of the invasion, the Nazis had b...
‘The best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years’ Literary Review There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings....
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE We have come to see the Holocaust as a factory of death, organised by bureaucrats. Yet by the time the gas chambers became operation more than a million European Jews were already dead: shot at close range over pits and ravines. They had been murdered in the lawless killing zones created by the German colonial war in the East, many on the fertile black earth that the Nazis believed would feed the German people.It comforts us to bel...
A powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin''s Russia and Hitler''s Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944.In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today''s Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the easte...
The pogrom that swept through Poland was interpreted as a sign of the Coming of the Lord. In the little town of Goray, laid waste by murder and famine, grief becomes joy as good news arrives of the second coming of the Messiah. Once the town’s pious rabbi is usurped, the townspeople are free to look forward to the End of Days, when they will wear golden jackets and dine on marzipan candy. But such perilously high hopes pave the way to hysteria, and a panic which could threate...
In the topsy-turvy years between the dawn of the twentieth century and the dark days of 1939, the Moskat family battled on. But like many Jewish families in Poland they can no longer turn a blind eye to the dwindling of their fortunes. In Warsaw, where saints mingle with swindlers, tough Zionists argue with mystic philosophers, and medieval rabbis rub shoulders with ultra-modern painters, life is inexorably changing. Secularism and war inch nearer and the family Moskat clings...
In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This memoir evokes with deep feeling the sense of uprootendess and exile created by this disruption, something which has been the experience of tens of thousands of people this century.Her autobiography is profoundly personal but also tells one of the most universal and important narratives of twentieth century history: the story of Jewish post-war experience and the tragedies and disco...
Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable, except maybe when it's squatting in the Tate or New York's Metropolitan Museum. Banksy is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cities throughout the world. Witty and subversive, his street art depicts monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, policemen with smiley faces, rats with drills and the ico...
Questions are powerful. They direct our attention and reveal our concerns, shape our conversations and our relationships. But throughout our lives we are judged and rewarded for the answers we give, not the questions we ask. As a result, this essential human skill is overlooked and underdeveloped. Q reveals how we can understand the power of questions, share it more evenly, and learn to use it personally, socially and professionally.Lani Watson takes us on a journey from the...
Antibiotics. Invented by microbes. Mined by humans.And now running out. ‘Combines the passion of Robert Macfarlane with the incisiveness of Patrick Radden Keefe … Brilliant’ Rachel Clarke, Spectator ‘This history of scientific discovery and corporate greed chronicles arguably the most significant technological advance of the 20th century … A lively history and a stark warning’ Sunday Times, Best Books of the Year 2025The discovery of antibiotics is one of humanity’s greatest ...
A first-hand account of art, survival and resistance in wartime UkraineCharlotte Higgins never imagined she would report on a war. But in the autumn of 2022, seven months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she travelled there to find out how artists and writers were reflecting the devastating events in their work. The experience would change her life.In a war fuelled by the attempted erasure of Ukrainian culture – a war that has killed countless artists and created...
A luxurious special edition of one of the greatest romances in Japanese literature. Tokyo, 1912. Love blooms in the rule-bound world of Japan's aristocracy.Kiyoaki falls for the exquisite and spirited Satoko. Although he has been raised by an aristocratic family, he does not belong in this world as she does. As the world around them changes and traditional powers wane, Kiyoaki is torn between the old and the new.Only when Satoko becomes engaged to a royal prince does Kiyoaki ...
Enter the haunted world of Japan in this spine-tingling collection of ghostly tales, beautifully bound in a luxurious special edition. From goblin-infested caves and haunted tombs to vengeful spirits and strange, sinister happenings, ancient Japan was a country and culture that lived between realms: the world of the everyday and the world of the supernatural. It was a place where men could be brought down by karmic forces or lured into deadly danger by ghostly apparitions, an...
If the word flâneur conjures up visions of Baudelaire, boulevards and bohemia – then what exactly is a flâneuse?In this gloriously provocative and celebratory book, Lauren Elkin defines her as ‘a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk’. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between the city and creativity through a journey that begins in New York and move...
Dazzling new short stories from Salman Rushdie that transport us around the world from Bombay neighbourhoods to elite English universities‘Boisterous… Full of panache’ Sunday Times If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour. Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy during national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily ma...
'A damned masterpiece' Sunday Times 'An almost dangerously immersive reading experience that will completely take over your life... utterly captivating' Martin MacInnes, Booker longlisted author of IN ASCENSIONLondon. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all. Kristian Hadeland, newly arrived in the city, seethes with ambition and contempt. His family in Norway never understood him; his fellow photography students bore him. But he knows h...
A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks send him down a rabbit hole in this wild, critically acclaimed debut. 'A stunning debut' GUARDIAN'Stylish and unsettling' OBSERVER'A true original' PAUL MURRAY'Brilliant...Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling' LAUREN GROFFNicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable. He's fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his mostly absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at schoo...
A smart, incisive take-down of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain from them, and how to fight back. ‘You need to read this book’ BRIAN ENO‘Written with absolute authority and incredible wit and verve’ KAREN HAOHave tech companies created artificial minds? Are they going to replace all our jobs? Will they take over the world?The answers to these questions, as the exp...
'His brutal best' - New York TimesA girl is missing, leaving no leads, no hope, no point - it's just the case for Eugène Tarpon. Tarpon is sleeping in his office once again, when he's offered a job he's too broke to refuse. A distant relative wants him to investigate her daughter's disappearance.The police have given up already, but Tarpon is too much of a gentleman to brush the old lady off. And when something smells off, he's not a man who can stop digging. Skeletons in the...
'Manchette was Le Homme...rediscover him this very instant' - James EllroyMeet Eugène Tarpon: ex-cop, ex-idealist, man in free fall. Kicked off the force for killing a protestor, Tarpon is drinking too much and waiting around for something to happen. Then it does.In bursts the wild-eyed and bloodstained Memphis Charles, whose roommate has been brutally murdered. And she wants no one but Tarpon on the case. As the bodies mount, Tarpon is dragged into a Parisian underworld of p...
Told through real cases in real courts, the former – and first woman – President of the Supreme Court leads us on a deeply entertaining and vitally important tour of the law in our land. 'Principled, timely and vital' PHILIPPE SANDS'Powerful and urgent' FINANCIAL TIMES'If this country made any sense, we'd make this book part of the syllabus' IAN DUNTIf we are lucky, we’ll never have an accident, or be wronged, or face a family difficulty. But what if we do? How do we make sen...
The classic 1920s story of a friendship torn apart, Passing is Nella Larsen's devastating masterpiece Irene Redfield is living a life of careful balance in Harlem when a chance encounter draws her back into the orbit of Clare Kendry, a childhood friend. Passing as white, Clare moves effortlessly through a world that Irene has chosen to reject. Their renewed intimacy is charged with fascination and envy. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read ...
Three supernatural tales of longing and loss from the grand-dame of Gothic fiction, Mary Shelly When a storm drives their boat towards the rocks, a group of sailors is saved by the light of a ruined tower. The locals speak of the Invisible Girl who haunts it – a lost, wandering soul. But the truth is more disturbing, and far more human, than any ghost story.Includes the stories: The Invisible Girl, The Mortal Immortal and The MournerBRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and capt...
Hemingway’s enduring story of resilience and solitude: One of the most powerful tales of courage and endurance ever writtenAn ageing fisherman sets out alone into the Gulf Stream, determined to prove that his strength and skill have not left him. When he hooks a great marlin, he begins a struggle that will test his pride and his place in the world. Simple, powerful and deeply moving, The Old Man and the Sea captures what it means to persist – even in the face of inevitable lo...
This ebullient, gallivanting novella encapsulates the world vision of the Czech Republic's best-loved author in one tumbling, breathtaking sentence. An ageing man holds court, spinning a single, unbroken stream of stories about his life – loves won and lost, jobs taken and abandoned, moments of absurdity and chance. As he talks, the line between memory and invention begins to blur.
Welcome to Vermilion Sands, the fully automated desert-resort ready to fulfil your most exotic whims. Out over the towering Coral D, sky artists paint the sky with clouds. A musical statue is broken down, but finds new life in unwanted places.A mysterious new resident introduces a new way of making poetry - aided by machine. Drawing together some of the most mesmerising and mind-blowing stories from J.G. Ballard's Vermillion Sands art-infused universe, this short collection i...
Arthur Conan Doyle’s tense, unsettlingly supernatural tale of obsession and controlAfter Austin Gilroy’s fiancée is hypnotised, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of the woman responsible – Miss Penclosa. Soon, disturbances begin to unsettle him: actions he cannot account for, thoughts that seem to come from elsewhere. As Penclosa’s hold over Gilroy tightens, he discovers how little control he has over his own mind.
At once a gripping thriller and a heartbreaking elegy, this is Toni Cade Bambara's powerful final testament, a hymn to Atlanta's missing children. Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer’s morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. As she takes to the streets to track down what happened to him, Zala is drawn into the nightmare of a city stalked by fear.
Ursula k. Le Guin's beautifully realised space epic of two young friends finding their lives steer a new, and unexpected course 'Our job is to travel. A different job from arrival.'As the ship Discovery makes its slow way through space towards New Earth, two children, Hsing and Luis, born into the ship's society, come of age together. But just as their destinies seem to be unfolding as decreed, a revelation about Discovery's true course throws new light on to their shared fut...
The classic, moving tale of a man born old, destined to die young, and live at odds with his time Born in the body of a 70-year-old man, Benjamin Button is cursed to live life in reverse. As he ages backwards, he embraces life, finds love and seeks out adventure, all while getting younger and younger. But time, however skewered, waits for no man, and even youth waits to rob Benjamin Button of the one rare thing we all share: life. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captiv...
From one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century, these delicate stories illuminate the most intimate matters of the human heart - now available in English for the very first time. Since childhood, Ruliang has had the peculiar habit of sketching a certain profile in the margins of his books. He has mapped out this same face, over and over again, without knowing why - until he meets Cythnia. As brief and evocative as sketches themselves, these five stories o...
Graham Greene’s iconic thriller – a shocking tale of espionage and deceit, told from amongst the smouldering ruins of war-torn Europe. Rollo Martins, a second-rate novelist, arrives penniless in post-war Vienna to visit his friend and hero, Harry Lime. But Harry has died in suspicious circumstances, and the police are closing in on his associates...BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days...
The life of a poet becomes a parable of hope in Yi Mun-yol’s searching novella of art, status and selfhood. With their family condemned as traitors, two young brothers are sent away in disguise to save their lives. One grows up by his wits, accepting what has been lost.The other is set on a different path, shaped by a determination to restore the family’s place in the world. As he wanders in search of recognition as a poet, ambition and survival begin to pull him in opposing ...
A fiendishly brutal but brilliant, charming English murder mystery, from Agatha Christie's favourite writer - the criminally underrated, Margery Allingham. Private detective Albert Campion is summoned to the village of Kepesake to investigate a particularly distasteful death. The body turns out to be that of Pig Peters, freshly killed five months after his own funeral.
One of Cinema's great masters revisits his childhood - and the end of his parent's marriage - in a novella of awakening
Over the course of one summer, eight-year-old Pu Bergman realises that his parents are no longer in love. Surrounded by the quiet idyll of the Swedish countryside, with its ponds, rivers and woods, the daily chaos of the family’s ramshackle summer home threatens to end the bright, brilliant haze of Pu’s childhood world.
Herman Melville's enduringly comic and affecting tale of a man who takes quiet quitting to extreme limitsA new office clerk in a Wall Street lawyer's office is the cause for quiet dismay when he refuses to do his job. But how to deal with Bartleby, The Scrivener, especially when he refuses to leave the office altogether.... BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days
Two literary giants take to the road on a comic journey - both chaotic, and completely unforgettableTired of the grind of work, two apprentices set out on a walking tour with no fixed plan, determined to do as little as possible. As they drift from town to town, they encounter curious characters, regale strange stories and witness moments of quiet absurdity that disrupt their idleness. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting ...
At a Christmas party, a revelation shatters a man's complacency foreverAt a winter gathering in Dublin, friends and family come together for an evening of music, conversation and ritual. As the night unfolds, small tensions surface, and a chance revelation alters one man’s understanding of his life and his marriage. The Dead is James Joyce’s masterful story of memory, loss and awakening.Quietly devastating, it captures an essential realisation of life that lingers long after ...
Five of Franz Kafka’s most compelling short animal stories, where fable, dark humour and unease collideA community gathers to listen to the singing of a mouse. An ape addresses an academy to explain how he became human. A creature digs ever deeper into its burrow, gripped by fear of what might be lurking outside.In these strange and unsettling stories, animals speak plainly about their hopes, fears and fixations. Includes the stories: Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, ...
A dazzling catalogue of be creatures drawn from the dreamworlds of myth, folklore, and imaginationFrom ancient myths to obscure legends, a strange menagerie takes shape: creatures part real, part invented, drawn from cultures across the world. Each is described with care, as if it might exist just beyond the edge of belief. The Book of Imaginary Beings is Jorge Luis Borges’s playful, erudite bestiary of the fantastic.Curious and endlessly inventive, it explores the power of i...
Venture on a BRIEF ENCOUNTER with Margaret Atwood, one of the most iconic writers of our time, in these stories of mothers, evoking laughter, compassion and recognition in us all. This miniature array of perfect stories by the legendary Margaret Atwood flash before us the joys and despairs of mothers good and bad, evoking laughter, compassion and recognition in us all. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS- classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over ...
Edith Wharton's ghost stories whisper of passion, exile, and the things we cannot forgetIn an old Dorset house, a couple settle into a life of quiet comfort – until a presence makes itself felt. At a country gathering, a man is forced to confront a long-buried secret he has tried to outrun. In a small New England community, suspicion gathers around a widower believed to be under the spell of a dead woman.Bewitched brings together three of Edith Wharton’s most unsettling ghost...
A magical, mystical novella about the art and power of storytelling, this is Italo Calvino's miniature masterpiece. A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then in a tavern. Having mysteriously lost their powers of speech, they must tell their tales using only a deck of tarot cards.
