Al Murray is a Perrier Award-winning comic, TV personality and, as 'The Pub Landlord', the author of the bestselling The Pub Landlord's Book of British Common Sense and Think Yourself British. Most recently, he has taken on the leadership of the Free United Kingdom Party (FUKP).

Al Murray

Al Murray's alter ego, The Pub Landlord, is one of the most recognizable and successful comic creations of the past twenty years, and Murray, who has won numerous awards and accolades, continues to fill arenas and theatres around the world. 
 
He is also the author of many successful books including Watching War Films with My Dad and Command, a sharply entertaining analysis of the key allied military leaders in the Second World War. He is well known for co-hosting the hugely popular Second World War history podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk with fellow bestselling military author James Holland. 
 
Arnhem: Black Tuesday is his first history book about a single campaign.

Actor and director Al Pacino is a unique and enduring figure in the world of American stage and film. He grew up in New York City’s South Bronx, attended the School of Performing Art, and studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio with Charles Laughton and the Actors Studio with mentor Lee Strasberg. 
 
 
He has been nominated for the Academy Award nine times, for movies including The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Godfather Part II, and The Irishman, and won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1992 for Scent of a Woman. He has been nominated for the Golden Globe Award nineteen times, and won four, and has been nominated for three Tonys and won two. 
 
 
Pacino has been awarded the Kennedy Center Honor, the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, the National Merit of Arts from President Obama, and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement in Motion Pictures.

Al Pacino

Al Pittampalli

Al Rodin is a writer and illustrator from London. He studied children's book illustration at Cambridge School of Art and received the 2019 Sebastian Walker Prize. Al enjoys working with a wide variety of materials including acrylic, watercolour and collage. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries around Europe and Asia, and he was selected for lllustrators' Exhibition at the Bologna Children's Book Fair in 2019. Little Echo is his first book.

Al Rodin

Al Smith

Alain Gheerbrant

Alain de Botton is the bestselling author of fifteen books, including The School of Life: An Emotional Education, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel and The Course of Love. He is the founder of The School of Life (theschooloflife.com).

Alain de Botton

Alaina Urquhart is the science-loving co-host of the chart-topping show Morbid: A True Crime Podcast. As an autopsy technician by trade, she offers a unique perspective from deep inside the morgue. Alaina hails from Boston, where she lives with her wonderful husband, John, their three amazing daughters, and a ghost Puggle named Bailey. She is about 75 percent coffee, and truly believes she and Agent Clarice Starling could be friends. 
 
Before writing her first psychological horror novel, she received degrees in criminal justice, psychology, and biology. When she isn't hosting Morbid, she hosts the Parcast original show Crime Countdown, and a horror movie podcast called Scream!. Her days are usually spent either recording or eviscerating. The way she sees it, when she hangs up her microphone for the day, it's time to let the dead speak.

Alaina Urquhart

Alaine Hood

Alan Alda

Alan Ayckbourn

Born in London in 1939, Alan Ayckbourn is one of  the world's most popular and prolific playwrights. He has written 74  full length plays and more than 20 other revues and plays for children.  He is also an acclaimed director. Alan Ayckbourn was awarded a CBE in  1987. Ten years later to the day, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II  'for services to the theatre.'

Alan Baker

Alan Barker

Alan Beattie

Alan Bennett's television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for the stage, including Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, The Madness of George III (together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George) and an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows. The History Boys won the Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play, The Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and the South Bank Award.

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett is one of Britain's best-loved and most highly acclaimed writers. He has written widely for radio, television and theatre. His latest play, The History Boys, won several awards, including Evening Standard and Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. It also won six Tony Awards, including Best Play, following an extremely successful transfer to Broadway. In 2006 Bennett was named Author of the Year at the British Book Awards for Untold Stories, his collection of memoirs and diaries.

Alan Bishop

ALAN BOOTH was born in London in 1946 and travelled to Japan in 1970 to study Noh theatre. He stayed, working as a writer and film critic, until his untimely death in 1993.

Alan Booth

Alan Brazil is a Scottish broadcasting legend and former football player, most notably for Ipswich Town, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United and internationally for Scotland. He played as a forward before being forced to retire due to a recurring back injury. 
 
After retirement, Alan moved into media presentation, initially on television, before a career in radio where for many years he has presented the Alan Brazil Sports Breakfast show on TalkSPORT.

Alan Brazil

Alan Bullock

Alan Carr

Alan Carr is one of Britain's most successful and treasured comedians. His unique humour and effortless stage presence have earned him a catalogue of awards including Best Chat Show host at the publicly voted for 2015 National Television Awards, winner of the 2013 BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance and 2013 British Comedy Award for Best Comedy Entertainment Personality. In previous years he has garnered a clutch of awards, from the 2012 National Television Award for Best Talk Show and the 2012 Loaded LAFTA Award for Best Stand-up to the 2010 TV Choice Awards for Best Entertainment Show. There were also nominations for Best New British Comedy &amp; Best Comedy Entertainment Personality at the 2009 British Comedy Awards. 
 
The success of the first series of his own chat show, 'Alan Carr: Chatty Man', in the summer of 2009, led to Channel 4 commissioning 16 further series' as well as numerous Christmas Specials and New Year Specstaculars. In September 2013, the 100th episode aired with A-list guests Justin Timberlake and Rihanna. Guests from past series include: Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Cameron Diaz, Vin Diesel, Adele, Grace Jones, Naomi Campbell, Hugh Grant, Drew Barrymore, Robin Williams, David Walliams, Mariah Carey, Russell Brand, Samuel L Jackson, Miley Cyrus, Robbie Williams, Bette Midler, Sharon Osbourne, One Direction, Gok Wan and Miranda Hart. 
 
The DVD of Alan's 2007 debut stand-up show, 'Tooth Fairy Live' topped the HMV charts and was a Christmas 2007 top seller. 
 
His best-selling debut autobiography 'Look Who It Is' was published in September 2008 by HarperCollins. 
 
In 2011, Alan travelled the country with his second live tour. 'Spexy Beast Live' was a 33-date arena tour and culminated in the successful DVD of the same name. 
 
Throughout 2015, Alan hit the road once again and performed at over 150 sold-out theatre's across the UK and Ireland with his 'Yap, Yap, Yap!' live show. His third stand up DVD 'Alan Carr - Yap Yap Yap! Live' was released by Universal Pictures (UK) in November 2016. 
 
2016 has also seen Alan go global with international performances of his Yap Yap Yap! live show throughout Scandinavia, Montreal (at the prestigious Just For Laughs Comedy Festival) and can currently be seen on tour this summer in New Zealand and Australia this summer, with two shows at the iconic Sydney Opera House. 
 
Alan also hosts Channel 4's flagship fundraising show 'Stand Up To Cancer' which in 2014 went on to raise an amazing £14 million for Cancer Research. Alan returns once again to host 'Stand Up To Cancer' on Channel 4 this October. 
 
Alanatomy: The Inside Story is Alan's second memoir, and will be published by Penguin in October 2016.

Alan Clark

Alan Clements

Alan Connor has been the question editor for BBC2's Only Connect and Richard Osman's House of Games. He is the author of books for Pointless and The Traitors and is the puzzle consultant for the BBC1 drama Ludwig. He writes puzzles for various newspapers and has written for Charlie Brooker series and Have I Got News for You. His favourite quiz question is: What word was intentionally omitted from the screenplay of The Godfather?

Alan Connor

Alan Connor is the author of Two Girls, One on Each Knee: The Puzzling, Playful World of the Crossword ("witty, charming, encyclopaedic and highly readable" - Spectator) and The Joy of Quiz ("An absolute delight" - Mail on Sunday). He has made quizzes for various TV shows and newspapers and written comedy including BBC Film's The Rack Pack, A Young Doctor's Notebook (Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe) and Have I Got News For You.

Alan Cowell

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Vladimir Nabokov

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In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, mangled by it, with nowhere to escape to. Their dreams lie stifled, smothered by routine and repetition, and frustrations lurk in all the corners. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, they sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again. 
 
Two of the stories, 'First Love' and 'Mademoiselle O', are autobiographical, and 'The Assistant Producer' is based on real events, but the rest are pure flights of fantasy - or the stuff that life is weaved of?

Nabokov's Dozen

Thirteen Stories

Kathy Acker

'Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul' William S. Burroughs 
 
'Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer' Jeanette Winterson 
 
This is the story of Janey, who lived in a locked room, where she found a scrap of paper and began to write down her life. It's a story of lust, sex, pain, youth, punk, anarchy, gangs, the city, feminism, America, Jean Genet and the prisons we create for ourselves. A heady, surreal mash-up of coming-of-age tale, prose, poetry, plagiarism and illustration, Kathy Acker's breakthrough 1984 novel caused huge controversy and made her an avant-garde literary icon. 
 
Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Kathy Acker's untimely death, Blood and Guts in High School is published for the first time in Penguin Classics, acknowledging the profound impact she has had on our culture, and alongside the authors her work pulsates with the influence of: William S. Burroughs, Cervantes and Charles Dickens, among others.

Blood and Guts in High School

'Look at the harlequins ... Play! Invent the world! Invent reality'.  This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US, and, now dying, reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre 'numerical nimbus syndrome'.

Look at the Harlequins!

Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed's inspired comic fable of the ragtime era - hailed by Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred greatest books of the Western canon 
 
America, 1920s. A plague is spreading, and it's spreading fast, from New Orleans to Chicago to New York. 
 
It's an epidemic of freedom, joy and self-expression, being spread by Black artists, that makes anyone who catches it desperate to dance, sing, laugh and jive. It's the outbreak of Jazz, Ragtime and Blues onto the world scene; the spirit of Blackness overtaking America and the world. And it's threatening to dismantle the whole social order. 
 
Working to root out the plague by any means possible - even murder - are the members of The Wallflower Order, an international conspiracy dedicated to puritanism and control. But, deep in the heart of Harlem, private eye and Vodun priest Papa LaBas is determined to defend his flourishing ancient culture against their insidious plans. And so, he finds himself locked in a race against the Order to find an ancient Egyptian text which might just be the key to keeping the virus of freedom alive. 
 
Caustic, badass, comic, Mumbo Jumbo is an exuberant explosion of magic, conspiracies, music and myth. It's a novel of outrage, intrigue, and wonder - an anarchic spiritual classic, and a satire for our times.

Mumbo Jumbo

Ernesto Sabato

Sabato's dark, philosophical novel is woven around a violent crime committed by Alejandra, the daughter of a prominent Argentinian family. Alejandra's act entwines the lives of three men: her father, Fernanda Vidal, a man who believes himself hunted by a secret organization of the blind, her troubled lover, Martin and Bruno, a writer who loved her mother. Exploring the tumult of Buenos Aires in the 1950s, On Heroes and Tombs leads its reader into a world of passion, philosophy and paranoia.

On Heroes and Tombs

Bohumil Hrabal

Set in small-town Bohemia between the wars, Cutting It Short centres on the flamboyant and unpredictable Maryska, who loves food and prepares endless feasts. Until one day she scandalises the town when she cuts short her golden tresses, leading to a small revolution in gender roles.

Cutting It Short

'Folks, life is beautiful! Bring on the drinks, I'm sticking around till I'm ninety! Do you hear?' 
 
A young boy grows up in a sleepy Czech community where little changes. His raucous, mischievous Uncle Pepin came to stay with the family years ago, and never left. But the outside world is encroaching on their close-knit town - first in the shape of German occupiers, and then with the new Communist order. Elegiac and moving, Bohumil Hrabal's gem-like portrayal of the passing of an age is filled with wit, life and tenderness. 
 
'What is unique about Hrabal is his capacity for joy' Milan Kundera 
 
'Even in a town where nothing happens, Hrabal's meticulous and exuberant fascination with the human voice insists that, as long as there's still breath in a body, life is endlessly eventful' Independent

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

Thomas Cullinan

A classic slice of Southern Gothic, shot through with psychological suspense - now the basis for Sofia Coppola's highly anticipated new film (winner of Best Director at Cannes) starring Nicola Kidman, Colin Farrell and Kirsten Dunst. 
 
When an injured Union soldier is found in the Virginia woods as the Civil War rages, he is brought to the nearby Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies to recover. For the sheltered girls and their teachers, the arrival of the attractive John McBurney is a thrilling distraction from normal life. But before long, McBurney's presence will turn them against each other and upend all their lives - with potentially devastating consequences. Combining psychological suspense with humour and romantic drama, The Beguiled is a wildly entertaining novel of sexual tension and repression, and of rivalry, jealousy and, ultimately, vengeance.

The Beguiled

Truman Capote

'Breathtaking ... The stories are special. They stand in their own right as lovely vignettes of the lives of the lonely, broken and troubled' Andrew Johnson, Independent 
 
Written when Truman Capote was in his teens and twenties, these recently-discovered short stories give a rare insight into an American icon. Tales of disappointed lovers, ageing spinsters, hoboes and murderous housewives, of yearning, poverty, despair, compassion, wit and wonder, they show us the boy from Alabama who became one of the twentieth century's most celebrated literary voices. 
 
'An intriguing glimpse of Capote as a boy: precocious, provocative, spirited and strange, a "pocket Merlin" spinning tall tales' Olivia Laing, New Statesman

The Early Stories of Truman Capote

Nabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as 'the first little throb of Lolita'. The plot is similar: a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter. 
 
However, The Enchanter has an utterly different atmosphere, as time, place and even names remain a mystery. Nabokov transforms his protagonist's attempts to lull his twelve-year-old step-daughter into a state of 'enchantment' into a graceful, chilling fairytale.

The Enchanter

The darkly comic Transparent Things, one of Nabokov's final books, traces the bleak life of Hugh Person through murder, madness, prison and trips to Switzerland. One of these was the last journey his father ever took; on another, having been sent to ingratiate himself with a distinguished novelist, he met his future wife. Nabokov's brilliant short novel sinks into the transparent things of the world that surround this one Person, to the silent histories they carry. 
 
Remarkable even in Nabokov's work for its depth and lyricism, Transparent Things is a small, experimental marvel of memories and dreams, both sentimental and malign.

Transparent Things

The Gift is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. This gorgeous tapestry of literature and butterflies tells the story of Fyodor's pursuits as a writer. Its heroine is not Fyodor's elusive and beloved Zina, however, but Russian prose and poetry themselves.

The Gift

Jean Rhys

New to Penguin Classics, the remarkable, devastating collected stories by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. 
 
Some of Jean Rhys's most powerful writing is to be found in this rich, dark collection of her collected stories. Her fictional world is haunted by her own, painful memories: of cheap hotels and drab Parisian cafés; of devastating love affairs; of her childhood in Dominica; of drifting through European cities, always on the periphery and always perilously close to the abyss. Rendered in extraordinarily vivid, honest prose, these stories show Rhys at the height of her literary powers and offer a fascinating counterpoint to her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. This volume includes all the stories from her three collections,The Left Bank (1927), Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976).

The Collected Short Stories

John le Carré

Harry Pendel is the charismatic proprietor of Pendel and Braithwaite Limitada of Panama, through whose doors everyone who is anyone in Central America passes; Andrew Osnard, mysterious and fleshly, is a spy. His secret mission is two-pronged: to keep a watchful eye on the political manoeuvrings leading up to the American handover of the Panama Canal on 31st December 1999; and to secure for himself the immense private fortune that has until now churlishly eluded him.

The Tailor of Panama

Shirley Jackson

An anxious devil, a malicious old woman and a mid-century Jack the Ripper; a pursuit though a nightmarish city, a small boy's thrilling train ride with a female thief, and a town where the possibility of evil lurks behind perfect rose bushes. This is the world of Shirley Jackson, by turns frightening, funny, strange and unforgettably revealed in this collection of brilliant stories from the author of 'The Lottery'.

Just an Ordinary Day

A man at his desk is interrupted by the appearance of a woodland elf in his room; the piano maestro Bachmann ends his career; a barber shaves the face of a man who once tortured him; a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil. In these sixty-five stories of magic and melancholy, Nabokov displays an astonishing range of inventiveness, with dazzling sleight of hand, fantastical fairy tales, intellectual games and enchanting glimpses into lives of ambiguity and loss. 
 
The collection displays Nabokov's astonishing range of technical and formal inventiveness: the dazzling sleight of hand, fanciful fairy tales, ingenious puzzles, enchanting vignettes and haunting melancholic narratives full of disturbing ambiguities.

Collected Stories

John Kennedy Toole

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One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 
 
'My favourite book of all time... it stays with you long after you have read it - for your whole life, in fact' Billy Connolly 
 
A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern - this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, noble crusader against a world of dunces. The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged. Ignatius ignores them, heaving his vast bulk through the city's fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him: Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission - and now he has a pirate costume and a hot-dog cart to do it with... 
 
This stunning clothbound edition of John Kennedy Toole's savagely funny, satirical masterpiece is designed by the acclaimed Coralie-Bickford Smith. 
 
'A pungent work of slapstick, satire and intellectual incongruities ... it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue' 
The New York Times

A Confederacy of Dunces

William S. Burroughs

A stunning clothbound edition of William S. Burroughs's cult classic, designed by the acclaimed Coralie-Bickford Smith. 
 
Nightmarish and fiercely funny, William Burroughs' virtuoso, taboo-breaking masterpiece Naked Lunch follows Bill Lee through Interzone: a surreal, orgiastic wasteland of drugs, depravity, political plots, paranoia, sadistic medical experiments and endless, gnawing addiction. One of the most shocking novels ever written, Naked Lunch is a cultural landmark, now in a restored edition incorporating Burroughs' notes on the text, alternate drafts and outtakes from the original. 
 
'A masterpiece. A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely funny book that swings between uncontrolled hallucination and fierce, exact satire' Newsweek 
 
 'Naked Lunch is a banquet you will never forget' J. G. Ballard

Naked Lunch

The Restored Text

Arnold Bennett

Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness becomes a fatal illness and Bennett gives a terrifying description of its ravages. But the book's horrible situation is saved through the character of Elsie - whose life-affirming refusal to engage with the nightmarish world of the bookseller transforms the story. 
 
Bennett wished in Riceyman Steps to create an English novel as powerful as anything by Balzac, the writer he most admired, with the same sense of great human issues being played out within the confines of a household. The result is an unforgettable work which is also a gripping description of the harsh, battered London of the period just after the First World War.

Riceyman Steps

A husband forms gruesome plans for his new fridge; a government employee has a haunting experience on his commute home; prisoners serve as entertainment for wealthy party guests; an army officer suffers a monstrous tropical illness. These short stories contain some of the most groundbreaking and innovative writing in Dutch literature from 1915 to the present day, with most pieces appearing here in English for the first time. Blending unforgettable snapshots of the realities of everyday life with surrealism, fantasy and subversion, this collection shows Dutch writing to be an integral part of world literary history.

The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories

This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones. The most famous authors are here, and many others, including some magnificent stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals. The Penguin Book of the British Short Story has a permanent authority, and will be reached for year in and year out. This volume takes the story from the 1920s to the present day.

The Penguin Book of the British Short Story: 2

From P.G. Wodehouse to Zadie Smith

Written in Berlin in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading contains all the surprise, excitement and magical intensity of a work created in two brief weeks of sustained inspiration. It takes us into the fantastic prison-world of Cincinnatus, a man condemned to death and spending his last days in prison not quite knowing when the end will come. Nabokov described the book as 'a violin in a void. The worldling will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures ... The evil-minded will perceive in little Emmie a sister of little Lolita ... But I know a few readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair'.

Invitation to a Beheading

From the peerless author of The Lottery and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a treasure trove of deliciously dark and funny stories, essays, lectures, letters and drawings. 
 
Let Me Tell You brings together the brilliantly eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote about her large, rowdy family; and revelatory personal letters and drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic - dinner parties, children's games and neighbourly gossip - but one that is continually threatened and subverted in her unsettling, inimitable prose. This collection is the first opportunity to see Shirley Jackson's radically different modes of writing side by side, revealing her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist and a powerful feminist. 
 
'The stories range from sketches and anecdotes to complete and genuinely unsettling tales, somewhat alarming and very creepy ... The whole of the book offers insights into the vagaries of her mind, which was ruminant and generous ... For those of us whose imaginations, and creative ambitions, were ignited by 'The Lottery', Jackson remains one of the great practitioners of the literature of the darker impulses' - Paul Theroux, New York Times 
 
'Shirley Jackson made a reputation with a short story in 1948. Like a lot of people I read 'The Lottery' when I was young, in an anthology of short stories from the New Yorker, and never forgot it. Let Me Tell You is a rich, enjoyable compendium of her unpublished short fiction and occasional writings, kicking off with a story of a dozen pages, 'Paranoia', which I won't forget, either' - Tom Stoppard, TLS Books of the Year

Let Me Tell You

E. L. Doctorow

'I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom' 
 
It's 1930's New York and fifteen-year-old streetkid Billy, who can juggle, somersault and run like the wind, has been taken under the wing of notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. As Billy learns the ways of the mob, he becomes like a son to Schultz - his 'good-luck kid' - and is initiated into a world of glamour, death and danger that will consume him, in this vivid, soaring epic of crime and betrayal.

Billy Bathgate

The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should. 
 
Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Pale Fire

John Callahan

Ralph Ellison

Raw, lyrical and blazing with intensity, these short stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man. 
 
'He saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold' 
 
Ranging from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlour, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War, they all display the musically layered voices, soaring language and sheer ebullience that made Ellison a giant of twentieth-century American writing. Written early in Ellison's career, several of these fourteen stories were unpublished in his lifetime, including 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' which features in this collection for the first time. 
 
'Approach the simple elegance of Chekhov' Washington Post

Flying Home And Other Stories

'One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century' The Times 
 
'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves' 
 
Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans. 
 
This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel's seven-year gestation. 
 
With an Introduction by John F. Callahan 
 
'Brilliant' Saul Bellow

Invisible Man

Published after Ellison's death, this follow-up to Invisible Man is a thunderous epic of memory, faith, loss and identity. 
 
'Words are your business, boy. Not just the Word. Words are everything' 
 
'Tell me what happened while there's still time,' demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate black baptist minister he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young orphan, Sunraider was taken in and raised by Hickman, before reinventing himself as a racist politician. Now, as the two men confront the truth about their shared past in a final reckoning, Ellison's masterly novel takes in memories of a southern childhood, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and the richness of the African-American experience. 
 
'Majestic' Toni Morrison

Juneteenth

J L Carr

'But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want it to believe it.' J.L. Carr 
 
Very strange and extremely funny, this uncategorizable novel is a surreal fantasy set, vaguely, in the early 1970s, during one highly memorable football season. Steeple Sinderby Wanderers, in their new all-buttercup-yellow stripe, start it by ravaging the Fenland League and end it with a phenomenal nail-biter against Glasgow Rangers. 
 
Told through unreliable recollection, florid local newspaper coverage and bizarre committee minutes, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup is somehow both entertaining and very moving. There will never be players again like Alex Slingsby, Sid 'the Shooting Star' Swift and the immortal milkman-turned-goalkeeper Monkey Tonks.

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup

Giorgio Bassani

A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's award winning collection of novellas, which inspired his masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. 
 
A young working class woman abandoned by her bourgeois lover; the tensions of intermarriage between established classes and communities; a holocaust survivor seemingly back from the dead; a formidable socialist activist defying house arrest; the only surviving witness to the first local atrocity of the Second World War. 
 
In these five unforgettable stories, Bassani gave life to the characters that would inform the Romanzo di Ferrara, his suite of novels depicting life in the city. Moving, poetic, atmospheric and artfully observed, this collection is a distillation of Bassani's genius. It won the Strega Prize on first publication as Cinque Storie Ferraresi in 1956, and established Bassani as one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. 
 
'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian 
 
'The most uncompromising, merciful and merciless writer' Ali Smith

Within the Walls

Don’t Disturb the…

Dr Bloom

Dragon Frontier

Dragonborn

Dragoneye

Dragonlance Destinies

Dread Pirate Fleur

Dream Master

Drenai Novels

DropZone

Duggee's Little Library

Dungeon Crawler Carl Series

Duty Calls

A gripping three-part series based on real historical events. Three Roman legions massacred. Three Imperial Eagles lost. One man vies for revenge.

Eagles of Rome

For thirty years, the O’Donnels have ruled the East End, but there’s a price to pay for this power, and it’s usually in blood.

Eastend Trilogy

Easterleigh Hall

Eat Around Italy

Eat Around Spain

Eat Right For Blood Type

Ebb and Flo

Ed Reardon's Week

Elemental Emergence

Elfies Spellbook

Eliot Biographies

Emma Trilogy

Emma and James

Empire of Salt

In the Swedish town of Engelsfors, a mysterious forcedraws seven teenagers together. They are the Chosen Ones, and they have been chosen to drive back the demons that threaten to overwhelm the world

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