We join the young Austrian teenager Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his older brother Gregor, whom he never knew. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a...

In the autumn of 1965, Bohumil Hrabal bought a weekend cottage in the countryside east of Prague. There, until his death, he tended to an ever-growing, unruly community of cats. This is his confessional, tender and shocking meditation on the joys and...

'Rumpole, like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal' P. D. James Horace Rumpole - dishevelled barrister at law, drinker of claret and smoker of cigars, inveterate quoter of Wordsworth and eternal defender of the underdog - is one of the greatest...

Gilgi knows where she's going in life: she's ambitious, determined and fearless. She's not even derailed when her parents drop a massive bombshell on her twenty-first birthday. But then she meets the charming but aimless Martin, and for the first time,...

Kerouac's last published novel, Pic is an endearing portrait of a road trip across America, seen through the eyes of one innocent, adventurous boy. 'Pic', or Pictorial Review Jackson, is a ten-year-old boy from North Carolina. When his...

'I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday' Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked...

A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020'Lovers of word games and literary puzzles will relish this indispensable anthology' The Guardian'At times, you simply have to stand back in amazement' Daily Telegraph'An exhilarating...

'This is an old and wicked island. An island of Phoenicians and merchants, of bloodsuckers and frauds'Expelled from her convent school for kicking the prioress, and abandoned by her father when her mother dies, rebellious teenager Matia is sent to live...

Winner of the Valco Fund Literary Award for Fiction and the Ghana Book Award Search Sweet Country follows the lives of an eclectic, interconnected group of Ghanaians living in and around the sprawling, chaotic city of Accra in the mid-1970s...

Over the course of his career, Tomas Tranströmer - a poet who could look on the barren isolation of Sweden's landscapes and seascapes like no other, and find in them something hauntingly transcendent - emerged as one of the 20th century's essential...

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le CarréIn this delightful holiday-themed collection of nine short stories, Inspector Maigret must solve a series of little...

'Football is a pleasure that hurts'This unashamedly emotional history of football is a homage to the romance and drama, spectacle and passion of a 'great pagan mass'. Through stories of superstition, heartbreak, tragedy, luck, heroes and villains, those...

A darkly comic dystopian odyssey, from one of Russia's leading contemporary novelists Garin, a country doctor, is desperately trying to reach the village of Dolgoye, where a mysterious epidemic is transforming the villagers into zombies. He has with him...

'New York City is very peaceful and quiet, and the pale grey mists are slowly rising, to show me the world'Pip switches identities, sexes and centuries in this punk, fairytale reimagining of Charles Dickens's original Great Expectations. Both...

The funny and moving story of the apocalypse - as seen from one small village in England'I loved this book, by turns funny and tragic ... It moves between abject despair and good old-fashioned British stoicism with ease. Magical' Jeff...

'He changed the course of history' Barack Obama 'Lightning makes no sound until it strikes' This is the momentous story of the Civil Rights movement, told by one of its most powerful and eloquent voices. Here Martin Luther King, Jr. recounts the pivotal...

Take a ringside seat next to A. J. Liebling at some of the greatest fights in history. Here is Joe Louis's devastating final match; Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback; and Rocky Marciano's rise to heavyweight glory. The heated ringside atmosphere,...

To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically to the challenge, finding...

The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heartJim and Ántonia meets as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim...

'There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.'The planet Quinta is pocked with ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network draped from spindly poles. It is a kingdom of...