Summer Reads

Human or vampire, the rules of survival are the same: never trust, never yield, and always–always–guard your heart.   The adopted human daughter of the Nightborn vampire king, Oraya carved her place in a world designed to kill her. Her...

(Available after 3-20 days) Revered in eleventh-century Persia as an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Omar Khayyam is now known first and foremost for his Ruba'iyat. The short epigrammatic stanza form allowed poets of his day to express...

Written in the thirteenth century, Njal's Saga is a story that explores perennial human problems-from failed marriages to divided loyalties, from the law's inability to curb human passions to the terrible consequences when decent men and women are swept...

(Available after 3-20 days)From the acclaimed translator of The Tale of Genji, a groundbreaking rendering of Japan’s great martial epicThe fourteenth-century Tale of the Heike is Japan’s Iliad—a moving depiction of the late twelfth-century wars between...

'His passion was for glory only, and in that he was insatiable' Although written over four hundred years after Alexander’s death, Arrian’s Campaigns of Alexander is the most reliable account of the man and his achievements we have. Arrian’s own...

The second volume in Dante's Divine Comedy Beginning with Dante's liberation from Hell, Purgatory relates his ascent, accompanied by Virgil, of the Mount of Purgatory - a mountain of nine levels, formed from rock forced upwards when God threw Satan into...

On Saturday 9th September, 1922, the victorious Turkish cavalry rode into Smyrna, the richest and most cosmopolitan city in the Ottoman Empire. What happened over the next two weeks must rank as one of the most compelling human dramas of the twentieth...

Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by John R. Williams. Goethe's Faust is a classic of European literature. Based on the fable of the man who traded his soul for superhuman powers and knowledge, it became the life's work of Germany's greatest...

'A canticle to God, and full of psychological insights that might have been written yesterday, the Confessions are the story of a soul, and also the story of God, and how he is constantly at work seeking us.' Confessions is perhaps the most important...

One of the fundamental works of Western political thought, Aristotle’s masterwork is the first systematic treatise on the science of politics. For almost three decades, Carnes Lord’s justly acclaimed translation has served as the standard English edition...

Abridged, with an Introduction by Patrick Renshaw. Democracy in America is a classic of political philosophy. Hailed by John Stuart Mill and Horace Greely as the finest book ever written on the nature of democracy, it continues to be an influential text...

A passionate witness to the colossal upheaval that has transformed her native South Africa, Gillian Slovo has written a memoir that is far more than a story of her own life. For she is the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, South Africa's pioneering...

'You will find all of life in this'--  Deborah Levy After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. Then, too, the cultural and political moment...

Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is a heart-stopping memoir, a story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny. With an introduction by the First Minister of Scotland,...

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s “late plays.” It tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian...

The Whitbread Prize–winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit delivers a novel that “transports us to something like the future of our own planet” (Washington Post Book World).On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet—pristine and...

A traumatised woman with amnesia finds her own dead body and sets out to uncover the truth of her demise in a race against time, sanity, crumbling realities and the ever-present threat of the Silhouette. What can you do when you’re reeling from trauma...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature   In Vita Nova, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that shape and...

(Available after 3-20 days) In this first full-length novel from the acclaimed Birdverse, new love blossoms between an impatient starkeeper and a reclusive poet as they try together to save their island home. Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte finalist R. B...

Praise for Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible   "A blistering little classic."— Ron Charles, Washington Post "A dystopian novel of great power."— Adam Begley, Sunday Times "To call it a generational allegory seems like an understatement. Millet is one of...