Classics

A teenage girl's difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of war. "A school story for grownups that is also about our inability or refusal to protect children from history" SARAH MOSS "Of all Szabo's novels, Abigail deserves the widest readership...

A luminous tale of a man rejected by his first true love who refuses to forget her,Love in the Time of Cholera is another timeless masterpiece from the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. 'It was inevitable: the scent of...

A breathtaking melange of political satire, playful invention and sparkling fantasy, Marquez's bewitching chronicle of seven generations of the Buendia family is a cornerstone of the magical realist tradition. Equally tragic, joyful and comical,...

'This delicious confection will work its magic on all' Daily Telegraph. The discreet advertisement in The Times, addressed 'To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine', offers a small medieval castle for rent, above a bay on the Italian Riviera. Four...

Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother, a celebrated figure, lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, news filters...

'Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears' --Guardian. Lev Ganin is a young officer sharing a boarding house in Berlin with a host of Russian émigrés. Alone in his room, he dreams of...

Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea… Ada or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, as...

Thomas Brussig’s classic German novel, The Short End of the Sonnenallee, now appearing for the first time in English, is a moving and miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall.Young Micha Kuppisch lives on the...

Following the development of massive airships, naïve Londoner Bert Smallways becomes accidentally involved in a German plot to invade America by air and reduce New York to rubble. But although bombers devastate the city, they cannot overwhelm the...

Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Wattwas first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other 'has its place in the series' - those masterpieces running from...

Now back in print for the first time since 1969, a stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century.Dream and reality overlap in Divorcing, a book in which divorce is not just a...

he Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past...

George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon. George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with...

Twenty-four hours in the life of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s Dublin-set modernist masterclass is playful, sly, bawdy and humane and deserving of a much broader audience.   'Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the...

'A very captivating book. Wang Xiaobo's unique blend of rationality, serenity, candor, and sense of humour serves as an embodiment of the liberalism he ardently believes in' Ai Weiwei The dazzling essays of the beloved, subversive Chinese writer Wang...

An ever-topical meditation on non-conformity and the nature of guilt, Camus' existentialist masterpiece follows a man whose refusal to mourn his mother the way he is expected to sets off a tragic chain of events. 'My mother died today. Or maybe...

Okonkwo is the greatest wrestler and warrior alive, and his fame spreads throughout West Africa like a bush-fire. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial...

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster?...

The inspiration for the new film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny,...