Classics

'Explosive, absurd...with plenty of oh la la and even more zut alors' The TimesWHEN IT COMES TO REVOLUTION, EVERYONE PAYSIn Paris, the Nada gang – a small cell of left-wing radicals – hatch a plan to kidnap the U.S...

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is brilliantly reinvented by Howard Jacobson, in his merciless, sharp and funny story of revenge, justice and antisemitism.With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and...

Shakespeare's Othello is ingeniously transplanted into a high school setting in this taut story about teenage friendship and racial tension.Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat’s son Osei knows he needs an ally. Luckily he...

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is revolutionised by the iconic Jeanette Winterson in her page-turning, heart-breaking story of a baby girl banished from home.A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged...

Shakespeare’s King Lear is reimagined in Edward St Aubyn's gripping story of a media mogul who has lost control.Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over...

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is completely reimagined in this unforgettable zombie love story.‘R’ is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R...

Shakespeare’s Pericles is transformed by Mark Haddon into a vivid, breathtaking adventure that zooms between antiquity and the present day.A motherless girl grows up in isolated luxury, hidden from the world by her wealthy father. She...

Welcome to Taipei, Taiwan. The Chinese Civil War is now long over, but its shadow still haunts the city’s lost souls.On the eve of her retirement, a dancer recalls the gentle boy she met in her youth. She loved him then – and never saw him...

'Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? - You think wrong!'This is the story of Jane, an orphan in Victorian England, she is relentlessly bullied and deprived by her aunt and the charity school she is...

'She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.'This is the story of Emma, trapped in a disappointing marriage with a dull country doctor, she dreams for a life more like the sentimental novels she reads. In an attempt to break from the drab reality...

'She's no good, that girl. Much too individualistic'This is the story of Fenfang who, determined to carve out a life more independent than her provincial roots, gets a job as a film extra in Beijing. But living a modern life is not as easy as it looks in...

Enter the eerie and mysterious world of The Necromancer, one of the most chilling and atmospheric novels of early Gothic literature. Set in a remote German landscape filled with dark castles and supernatural occurrences, the story follows a group of...

The son of a heinous sinner, Medardus is brought up in a monastery to atone for his father’s wicked ways. However, after succumbing to temptation, Medardus himself is lured into a life of sin. A labyrinthine plot sees him embarking on a fantastical...

Spark’s mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debut. With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil...

A new translation of the final part of Dante's Divine Comedy by a poet and psychoanalyst praised for his previous translation of Dante's Purgatorio.Paradiso is the most stylistically virtuosic book of the Divine Comedy—yet...

The hero of Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a child of Hollywood, and once his life was a glittery dream. His father starred in Westerns. His mother was a goddess of the silver screen. The family enjoyed the high life on their...

Not so long ago Emilio Brentani was a promising young author. Now he is an insurance agent on the fast track to forty. He gains a new lease on life, though, when he falls for the young and gorgeous Angiolina-except that his angel just happens to be an...

Céleste Albaret was Marcel Proust's housekeeper in his last years, when he retreated from the world to devote himself to In Search of Lost Time. She could imitate his voice to perfection, and Proust himself said to her, "You know everything...

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINALOne of the delights of Russian literature, a tour de force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha's novella Envy brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary...

The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following the World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society. Boredom, the story of a failed artist and...