With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry.On the other end of the line is temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher’s job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on se...
She can't read his mind. He can't read hers. But you can read both.The iconic '90s rom-com from the number-one bestselling authors. Dating in the 90s sucks. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus and no one is getting a call after the first date.Meet Jack: twenty-seven-year old commitment-phobe and serious partier. He tried love – it didn’t work out. So why bother, when being single is this much fun? Right?Meet Amy: while she’s stuck in dead-end temp jobs, her friends are se...
An utterly absorbing collection of depraved, delectable and enchanting short stories from the queen of weird girl fiction. 'Absolutely obsessed. Savage, strange and spicy' Lucy Rose, author of LambCan 'no' be a declaration of love? What happens when love is savage, dangerous and all-consuming? In this gorgeous and unsettling collection, women navigate the complexities and cruelties of desire across time and place, from a medieval convent to a Victorian parlour to a 1990s high...
Murder isn’t always ugly.Aimée is drop-dead gorgeous, razor-sharp, and lethally efficient. A killer with a cool head and a taste for chaos, she arrives in the backwater town of Bléville – a festering stew of grudges, corruption, and small-town rot – ready to make a killing.It's a game she’s played before: stir up trouble, pit the locals against one another, then disappear with blood on her hands and money in her pocket. But this time, something breaks and the game turns on he...
In the revolution, everyone paysIn Paris, the Nada gang – a small cell of left-wing radicals – hatch a plan to kidnap the U.S. ambassador. They’re armed, angry, and almost successful – but totally unprepared for what follows. As the crackdown begins, the group splinters, exposing cowardice, betrayal, and the thin line between radical idealism and outright nihilism. There will be no heroes – only casualties.Jean-Patrick Manchette skewers both the establishment and its would-be...
Corruption, sleaze and violence were woven into the fabric of twentieth-century Sicilian life, as the Mafia rose to dominance. This is the story of one man who stood in opposition.In 1986, the largest Mafia trial in Italy’s history took place in Sicily. The maxi-processo saw 471 men and 4 women take the stand, accused of kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking and many thousands of murders. Sitting in the gallery was Leonardo Sciascia, then aged sixty-five. One of the greates...
One couple. One past. A million tomorrows. Adam and Jules have been married for 25 years when they discover a time machine in their shed - can it bring back their romantic spark? Or will it unravel everything? Meet Adam and Jules. Married for nearly twenty-five years and stuck in a rut, their future looks, well, boring. Then Adam stumbles across a pile of old mixtapes he and Jules made for each other when they were young and falling in love. He dusts off his vintage stereo, i...
As Cabaret returns to the West End, revisit the KitKat Club in the book that introduced Sally Bowles to the world.Set in the 1930s, Goodbye to Berlin is the novella that inspired Cabaret, evoking the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people under threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles....
George is heartbroken after the death of his lover.An English professor in suburban California, George must now adjust to a tragic new solitude in the sun. Beneath George’s rigid British restraint, waves of sorrow and fury surge. He doggedly persists with the routines of his past life, heading out to work, to the gym, on again to dinner. Yet along the way, George rediscovers the unexpected pleasures of life and the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. Thi...
Weddings aren't just about the happy couple… A funny, touching, hopeful gem about love, marriage and second chancesIt’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines.First thing, she loses her job (or quits, depending who you ask). Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door looking for somewhere to stay. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories – and a cat looking for a new home.Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, ...
Three powerful heroines – a queen, a sorceress and woman made of flowers – plot revenge against the villain who wronged them. A gorgeously dark debut novel inspired by Celtic Britain’s first fantasy fiction.Three powerful heroines – a queen, a sorceress and woman made of flowers – plot revenge against the villain who wronged them. A gorgeously dark debut novel inspired by Celtic Britain’s original fantasy fiction.Man is cruel but the flowers will take their revenge.Three grea...
A philosophical defence of what makes us human – and a powerful argument for reclaiming ourselves in a digital worldDrawing on decades of research, The Extinction of Experience is a philosophical defence of what makes us human – and a powerful, urgent call to reclaim ourselves in a digital world.Human experiences are disappearing.Social media, gaming and dating apps have usurped in-person interaction; handwriting is no longer prioritised in schools; and emotion is sooner expr...
Detective Konrad tries to solve a woman’s murder and find her lost child from fifty years before. For readers of Ann Cleeves, Ian Rankin and Jo Nesbo.'Arnaldur Indridason is a literary phenomenon - and it's easy to see why' HARLAN COBEN'Indridason writes crime novels that are as chilling as the landscape where they're set' ANN CLEEVES'The undisputed King of the Icelandic Thriller' GuardianA lifetime of secrets. A murder that will expose the truth.A woman is found murdered in ...
'There is no living writer whose new books I fall on with greater delight than Laurent Binet. . .Perspectives is a proper treat' Naomi Alderman 'A dazzling romp' GuardianFlorence,1557. As dawn breaks, a painter is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him, the paintings he laboured over for more than a decade.At his home, a hidden portrait scandalously depicting Maria de Medici, daughter of the Duke of Florence, as a naked Venus. Who is t...
An enchanting fable about love, storytelling and survival, blending historical fantasy, folk tales and queer romance from the award-winning graphic novelist Isabel Greenberg - now a major film starring Emma Corrin, Charli XCX and Richard E. Grant'A feminist fairy-tale... A wondrously intricate book, and a witty attack on the patriarchy, this is an instant classic.' ObserverAn enchanting fable about love, storytelling and survival, blending historical fantasy, folk tales and q...
A couple try to reconnect by getting an implant that allows them to hear each others every thought, but what happens when thoughts turn dark and things turn deadly... A high-concept thriller for fans of Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister, and authors JP Delaney and Sarah Pinborough.You can hear his every thought. But he can hear yours too...When Elijah suggests going to OneMind to celebrate their ten-year anniversary, Anna is dubious about getting the implant that ...
History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. From the Titanic to the Amazon, the raft of the Medusa to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives.Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is no ordinary history, but something stranger: a challenge and...
The Darling children are tucked up in bed when Peter Pan bursts in to their nursery. Peter and his mischievous fairy Tinker Bell entice Wendy and her brothers to fly away with them to a magical world called Neverland. There you can swim with mermaids and play all day with the Lost Boys. But you must watch out for pirates, especially Captain Hook. And how do you find Neverland? Second to the right and straight on till morning of course...
On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris. This chance encounter ignites a close friendship between the two Englishmen, one that draws Bradshaw into the seedier quarters of the city. Here Norris runs a dubious import–export business and lives in excited fear of his bullying secretary, his creditors and his dominatrix girlfriend, Anni. Yet there is something mildly sinister about Norris himself. Bradshaw’s new companion is a man of contr...
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 against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor.These five dazzling works of f...
The phenomenal global and Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Sapiens For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. International and political tensions are rising. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – an alien information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all tha...
After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life.The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing friendship with her cousin ...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Jane Austen's first novel, with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon.Elinor is as prudent as her sister Marianne is impetuous. Each must learn from the other after they are they are forced by their father's death to leave their home and enter into the contests of polite society. The charms of unsuitable men and the schemes of rival ladies mean that their paths to success are thwart ...
These two novellas by the inimitable Tanizaki were among his favourites.The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi recounts the dark sexual obsessions of a sixteenth-century warlord, accidentally initiated in his youth into the morbid rites attendant upon battle. Based on invented documents that overlap with historical reality, the story unfolds a masterly balance of irony and melodrama, elegance and brutality.Arrowroot also touches on the pursuit of legend, but in a very diff...
