Classics

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 'Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.' Meet the gamblers, whores, drunks, bums and artists of Cannery...

Set on a South Pacific island under Japanese control, Mailer’s uncompromising study of a band of men in extremis pulsates with brutal energy and whip-smart prose. Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during...

"An absolute treat... Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language" Nicholas Lezard, Guardian. At an end-of-season London soirée a young Hungarian scholar, Dr János Bátky, is introduced to the Earl...

Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieves peace and stability by dispensing with monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma...

Pandora has looked up to her older brother Edison since they were children. Now she revels in the anonymity of her suburban Iowa life, while her brother basks in the limelight as a New York jazz musician. But when Edison arrives in Iowa, suddenly in need...

A curse. An arranged marriage. A chance to live happily ever after. For as long as Astrid can remember she's been betrothed to a stranger. When tragedy strikes her husband-to-be emerges from the shadows ready to claim her hand in marriage. Unable to...

First published anonymously in 1929, Ursula Parrott's phenomenal bestseller of its day about a woman who has to forge a new path in life as an ex-wife combines dazzling jazz era ambience and the thrill of new found freedom with timeless themes of...

The acclaimed author of Voyage of the Sparrowhawkweaves the beautiful and compassionate tale of two friends dealt a bad hand by fate and desperate to start again on their very own island. What will two children risk to steal an island? From...

"Once upon a time there were just the gods; mortal beings did not yet exist."We are used to thinking of myths containing lines like this simply as stories, and modern myths as made up and fictitious. For the ancient Greeks, however, a myth was unveiled...

Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up, coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives from the First World War to Greenham Common and beyond. This is the ‘edited’ diary of an individual woman, born in 1901, and a story of the...

The most famous anti-war novel ever written. In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is...

Based on the true experiences of Bao Ninh and banned by the communist party, The Sorrow of War is revered as the ‘All Quiet on the Western Front for our era’. Kien’s job is to search the Jungle of Screaming Souls for corpses. He knows...

When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor...

Jane Austen's Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility' Observer Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances' love affairs...

These remarkable short stories from the 1940s and 50s depict women and men caught between the pull of personal desires and profound social change. From a remote peninsula in Cornwall to the drawing rooms of the British Raj, domestic arrangements are...

A showstopping luxury gift book to cherish for years to come.The Moomins: The World of Moominvalley is the ultimate guide for any Moomin fan, old and new. Step into the magical world of Moominvalley with this beautiful one of a kind book; a fun,...

In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her crônicas—short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces—are the delicious canapés. The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They...

Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny novel of the Roaring Twenties, with an introduction by Simon James. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair,...

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round...

Elevating a picaresque farce into a hilarious literary gem, Waugh’s anarchic debut novel is a biting satire on 1920s society that places a disgraced Oxford student in an ill-advised teaching position at an obscure Welsh school. Just work, good...