Alexandra McCollum grew up in rural northeast Ohio and now lives in Nevada with their husband and dog. Among other jobs, they’ve worked in a bakery in Austria, managed a coffee shop in Ohio, and taught high school in Las Vegas. When not writing, they can be found studying languages and exploring local coffeehouses in search of the perfect americano.

Alexandra McCollum

A graduate of Yale University, Alexandra Oliva grew up in a small town deep in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School University and undertook intensive wilderness survival training while researching The Last One. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and their brindled mutt, Codex. The Last One is her first novel.

Alexandra Oliva

John Peel was born the day before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. His 38-year career as a radio DJ is the stuff of legend and the bands he went on to discover too numerous to mention, though David Bowie, Roxy Music, T Rex, Genesis, Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, Radiohead and the White Stripes would do as a start. He lived in Suffolk with his wife Sheila and their children William, Thomas, Alexandra and Florence, plus various dogs and cats, until his death in October 2004.

Alexandra Ravenscroft

Alexandra Shulman

ALEXANDRA SOVERAL founded her award-winning eponymous skin care line in 2005, where she still hand-blends every product. Originally from Portugal, Alexandra moved to London 1987 to study Philosophy of Science, before dedicating her research to Anatomy, Physiology and Chemistry, becoming a respected skin specialist and product formulator for high quality brands.

Alexandra Soveral

Alexandra Wood

Born in 1986, Alexandra Zelman-Doring is a graduate of Brown, Columbia, and Oxford Universities. She is a poet, playwright, and actor, and recent co-founder of Throes Theater (www.throestheater.com). Based in New York City, she lives with her husband, clarinet player Naum Goldenstein.

Alexandra Zelman-Doring

Alexandre Antonelli is Director of Science of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he leads the work of over 350 scientists. A botanist by training, he was made Full Professor of Biodiversity at University of Gothenburg in Sweden aged 36, and founded the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre and served as Cisneros Visiting Scholar at Harvard University before joining Kew. He remains an active researcher at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford in the UK. This is his first book.

Alexandre Antonelli

Alexander Dumas was born in 1802 at Villes-Cotterets. He received very little education but when he entered the household of the future king, Louis-Philippe, he began to read veraciously and then to write. In 1839 he began writing novels dealing with the wars of religion and the Revolution, but he is most remembered for his historical novels, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

Alexandre Dumas

Alexandria Bellefleur is a bestselling and award-winning author of swoony contemporary romance often featuring loveable grumps and the sunshine characters who bring them to their knees. Her debut novel, Written in the Stars, was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner and a 2020 winner of The Ripped Bodice Awards for Excellence in Romantic Fiction.

Alexandria Bellefleur

ALEXEI NAVALNY was a Russian opposition leader, an anti-corruption campaigner, and political prisoner who won international recognition and respect. His many international honours included the Sakharov Prize, the European Parliament’s annual human rights prize. He died in 2024.

Alexei Navalny

Alexei Sayle

Alexi Zentner

Alexia Casale is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, as well as a script consultant and specialist human rights editor. Her young adult novel, The Bone Dragon, was shortlisted for the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize and her first adult novel, The Best Way to Bury Your Husband, set the darkly comic stage for her adult fiction. This is her second adult novel.

Alexia Casale

Alexina Anatole is a chef, presenter, and writer based in London. After reaching the final of MasterChef in 2021, she made a brave career change from the trading floor to the food world. Her debut cookbook – Bitter – was published by Square Peg, Vintage in September 2023 to critical acclaim from the likes of Nigella Lawson, Rukmini Iyer, and Waterstones. Anatole also writes Small Wins, a Substack newsletter that enhances your cooking and your life in small, manageable ways. She has been featured on BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen, Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, and BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme as well as social media platforms including MOB and TopJaw. She also runs sell-out events, including Sel, London’s most intimate supper club, and Cocoa POP, a chocolate-themed pop-up with chocolatier Octavia Lamb. Alexina is of mixed heritage: the granddaughter of chicken farmers from Cambridgeshire and Saint Lucian grandparents who arrived in London during the Windrush.

Alexina Anatole

Alexis Calder writes sassy heroines and sexy heroes with a sprinkle of sarcasm. She lives in the Rockies and drinks far too much coffee and just the right amount of wine.

Alexis Calder

Alexis Deacon graduated from the University of Brighton, where he studied Illustration, gaining a first class honours degree. Alexis Deacon was one of Booktrust's ten Best New Illustrators in 2008, and Beegu was a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Alexis lives in London.

Alexis Deacon

Alexis G Aïnouz

Alexis Henderson is a speculative fiction writer with a penchant for dark fantasy, witchcraft and cosmic horror. Growing up in one of America’s most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia, instilled in her a life-long love of ghost stories. When she doesn’t have her nose buried in a book, you can find her painting or watching horror movies with her feline familiar. Her acclaimed adult books include The Year of the Witching, House of Hunger and An Academy for Liars. Her debut YA novel, When I Was Death, publishes in March 2026.

Alexis Henderson

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Born and raised in Yorkshire, Alexis moved to Cardiff where she completed a degree in print-making. She went on to exhibit in and around Wales and Leeds and has had two art residencies. After a stint working as a cook, Alexis moved to London with her small, second-hand printing press and began print-making again. Alexis works in lino which she cuts by hand. For inspiration, she looks to old matchbox covers, record sleeves, tea boxes, postcards, explorers, the circus and films. She has since moved back to Yorkshire, where she works from her studio. Alexis has designed many book covers and illustrated Dr Who: Twelve Angels Weeping but The Bear in the Stars is her first book as an author-illustrator.

Alexis Snell

Alexis Soyer

Alexis Stickland is a midwife, antenatal teacher and mother of three children who has been supporting new mums and their families for over 12 years. She was motivated by her own personal experience to team up with her friend and colleague Beccy Hands to launch The Motherbox – a company that delivers beautiful boxes of nourishing treats and self-care advice to new mums.

Alexis Stickland

Alexis Tocqueville

Alexis Zegerman

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alf Proysen

Alfie Boe

Alfie Moore

PublicationStatus

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Format

AgeRange

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Jerome K. Jerome

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian 'clerking classes', it hilariously captured the spirit of its age.

Three Men in a Boat

Penguin Classics

Wyndham Lewis

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Wyndham Lewis can claim to be one of a tiny handful of British artists who had a European reach and ambition. Creator with Ezra Pound of Vorticism, editor, designer and author of the great art manifesto Blast, a great painter and portraitist, novelist, polemicist and hater of the Bloomsbury movement, through a long life Lewis remained controversial, belligerent and very funny. With Joyce, Eliot and Pound (all of whose definitive portraits he painted) he stood for a heroic engagement with art and literature - and his ultimate (and unique) achievement was to be both a spectacular novelist and a spectacular painter. 
The Wild Body showcases his most original, daring and entertaining short fiction, mainly written around the time of Blast. In amazing contrast with so much feeble British writing of the period, it shows the heady delight of modernism at full tilt.

The Wild Body

A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories

Tayeb Salih

The story of a man undone by a culture that in part created him, Season of Migration to the North, is a powerful and evocative examination of colonization in two vastly different worlds. 
 
When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger - the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven to take brutal revenge on the decadent West and was, in turn, destroyed by it. Now the terrible legacy of his actions has come to haunt the small village at the bend of the Nile.

Season of Migration to the North

Robert Louis Stevenson

Published as a 'shilling shocker', Robert Louis Stevenson's dark psychological fantasy gave birth to the idea of the split personality. The story of respectable Dr Jekyll's strange association with 'damnable young man' Edward Hyde, the hunt through fog-bound London for a killer, and the final revelation of Hyde's true identity is a chilling exploration of humanity's basest capacity for evil. The other stories in this volume also testify to Stevenson's inventiveness within the gothic genre: 'Olalla', a tale of vampirism and tainted family blood, and 'The Body Snatcher', which shows the murky underside of medical practice.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror

Primo Levi

Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century: a man who survived one of the ugliest times in history, yet who was able to describe his own Auschwitz experience with an unaffected tenderness. 
 
Levi was a master storyteller but he did not write fairytales. These stories are an elegy to the human figures who stood out against the tragic background of Auschwitz, 'the ones in whom I had recognized the will and capacity to react, and hence a rudiment of virtue'. Each centres on an individual who - whether it be through a juggling trick, a slice of apple or a letter - discovers one of the 'bizarre, marginal moments of reprieve'.

Moments of Reprieve

Julian MacLaren-Ross

The key literary figure in the pubs of post-war Fitzrovia, Maclaren-Ross pulled together his dispersed energies to write two great books: the posthumously published Memoirs of the Forties and this spectacular novel of the Depression, Of Love and Hunger - harsh, vivid, louche and slangy it deserves a permanent place alongside Coming Up for Air and Hangover Square.

Of Love and Hunger

Truman Capote

'The only four things that interested me were: reading books, going to the movies, tap-dancing and drawing pictures. Then one day I started writing . . .' Truman Capote began writing at the age of eight, and never looked back. A Capote Reader contains much of the author's published work: his brilliant and prolific oeuvre of fiction, travel sketches, portraits, reportage and essays. It includes all twelve of his celebrated short stories, together with The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's. There are vivid sketches of places from Tangiers to Brooklyn, and fascinating insights into the lives of his contemporaries, from Jane Bowles and Cecil Beaton to Marilyn Monroe and Tennessee Williams. Generous space is devoted to reportage including 'The Muses Are Heard', on his trip to Communist Europe in the 1950s with the cast of Porgy and Bess. In all, A Capote Reader demonstrates the chameleon talents of one of America's most versatile and gifted writers.

A Capote Reader

Anaïs Nin

Combining startling lyricism with what often seems like the entire breadth of human sensuality, Little Birds is Anais Nin's masterwork. Each of the volume's thirteen stories builds on the other, embracing desire in all its variety, its complexity, its paradoxical simplicity. 
 
Anais Nin's Little Birds is now a major series on Sky Atlantic.

Little Birds

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Originally published in 1967, Ngugi's third novel is his best known and most ambitious work.  A GRAIN OF WHEAT portrays several characters in a village whose intertwined lives are transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency in Kenya.  As the action follows the village's arrangements for Uhuru (independence) Day, this is a novel of stories within stories, a narrative interwoven with myth as well as allusions to real-life leaders of the nationalist struggle, including Jomo Kenyatta. At the centre of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret.  As events unfold, compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed and loves are tested.

A Grain of Wheat

THE RIVER BETWEEN explores life on the Makuyu and Kameno ridges of Kenya in the early days of white settlement.  Faced with an alluring, new religion and 'magical' customs, the Gikuyu people are torn between those who fear the unknown and those who see beyond it.  Some fellow Joshua and his fiery brand of Christianity while others proudly pursue tribal independence. In the midst of this disunity stands Waiyaki, a dedicated visionary born to a line of prophets.  He struggles to educate the tribe- a task he sees as the only unifying link between the two factions - but his plans for the future raise issues which will determine both his own and the Gikuyu's survival.

The River Between

Answered Prayers

The Unfinished Novel

H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1920s. This Penguin Classics edition brings together a dozen of the master's tales - from his early short stories 'Under the Pyramids' (originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini) and 'The Music of Erich Zann' (which Lovecraft ranked second among his own favourites) through to his more fully developed works, 'The Dunwich Horror', 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward', and 'At the Mountains of Madness. 
 
The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi's illuminating introduction and notes to each story.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories

R. K. Narayan

An enchanting collection from India's foremost storyteller, rich in wry, warmly observed characters from every walk of Indian life - merchants, beggars, herdsmen, rogues - all of whose lives are microcosms of the human experience Like Nambi in the title story, Narayan has the mesmeric ability to spellbind his audience. This he achieves with a masterful combination of economy and rhythm, creating haunting images and a variety of settings to evoke a unique paradox of reality and folklore.

Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories

James Baldwin

"Nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" First published in 1953, Baldwin's first novel is a short but intense, semi-autobiographical exploration of the troubled life of the Grimes family in Harlem during the Depression.

Go Tell it on the Mountain

Isak Dinesen

If one theme unifies the 11 tales collected here, it is that of longing. Written after her return from Kenya and during the dark days of the Nazi occupation, they derive their themes and locales from Isak Dinesen's childhood in Denmark. Isak Dinesen was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in Rungsted, Denmark in 1885. After studying art at Copenhagen, Paris and Rome, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. Together they went to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. After their divorce in 1921, she continued to run the plantation until a collapse in the coffee market forced her back to Denmark in 1931.

Winter's Tales

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s.  Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem and France, ANOTHER COUNTRY tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.

Another Country

John Steinbeck

A new volume which includes the original screenplay, with its copious director's notes, and the narrative - this has followed on from a previously undiscovered manuscript by Steinbeck being found in the UCLA Research Library - the narrative treatment of the story on which he based his screenplay.

Zapata

Jean-Paul Sartre

It is September 1938 and during a heatwave Europe tensely awaits the outcome of the Munich conference, where they will learn if there is to be a war. In Paris people are waiting too, among them Mathieu, Jacques and Philippe, each wrestling with their own love affairs, doubts and angsts &ndash; and none of them ready to fight. The second volume in Sartre&rsquo;s wartime Roads to Freedom trilogy, The Reprieve cuts between locations and characters to build an impressionistic collage of the hopes, fears and self-deception of an entire continent as it blinkers itself against the imminent threat of war.

The Reprieve

Steinbeck's last great novel focuses on the theme of success and what motivates men towards it. Reflecting back on his New England family's past fortune, and his father's loss of the family wealth, the hero, Ethan Allen Hawley, characterises successin every era and in all its forms as robbery, murder, even a kind of combat, operating under 'the laws of controlled savagery.'

The Winter of Our Discontent

Jorge Luis Borges

One of the most remarkable artists of our age.' MARIO VARGAS LLOSA THE BOOK OF SAND was the last of Borges' major collections to be published. The stories are, in his words, 'variations on favourite themes... combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot'. It includes such marvellous tales as 'The Congress', 'Undr' and 'The Mirror and the Mask'. Also included are the handful of stories written right at the end of Borges' life - 'August 25, 1983', 'Blue Tigers', 'The Rose of Paracelsus' and 'Shakespeare's Memory.

The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory

Although he is best known for his exquisite novels, E.M. Forster also wrote remarkable short stories. He referred to his stories as &lsquo;fantasies&rsquo; and his attraction to myth and magic is apparent in many of them. Like his novels, the stories &ndash; whether they are set in Italy, Greece, India, and other places Forster visited, or in England itself &ndash; contrast the freedom of paganism with the restraints of English civilization, the personal, sensual delights of the body with the impersonal, inhibiting rules imposed by society. Rich in irony and alive with sharp observations on the surprises life holds, the stories often feature violent events, discomforting coincidences, and other disruptive happenings that throw the characters&rsquo; perceptions and beliefs off balance. This volume includes all twelve stories published during Forster&rsquo;s lifetime.

Selected Stories

The Wayward Bus travelled the backroads through the lush California countryside. Its driver was a man of the land - lusty, hot-blooded and uninhibited. On the bus was a girl who danced at stag parties, a travelling salesman strictly out for fun, a boy coming into manhood and a college girl pursuing her secret, passionate quest. This is a story of crisis and passion, of love and longing. In many ways it is one of Steinbeck's most powerful novels, not least because it shows just how profound his knowledge of human beings and their emotions is.

The Wayward Bus

Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the caf&eacute;s and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000 francs to procure a safe abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. Beyond all this, filtering an uneasy light on his predicament, rises the distant threat of the coming of the Second World War.

The Age of Reason

At the centre of Music for Chameleons is Handcarved Coffins, a &lsquo;nonfiction novel&rsquo; based on the brutal crimes of a real-life murderer.Taking place in a small Midwestern town in America, it offers chilling insights into the mind of a killer and the obsession of the man bringing him to justice. Also in this volume are six short stories and seven &lsquo;conversational portraits&rsquo; including a touching one of Marilyn Monroe, the &lsquo;beautiful child&rsquo; and a hilarious one of a dope-smoking cleaning lady doing her rounds in New York.

Music for Chameleons

New Writing

'A man can't scrap his bloodline, can't snip the thread of immortality.' Such is the strength of Joe Saul's desperate longing for a child, that he feels as if a dark curse is upon him after three unfruitful years of marriage. Yet unbeknown to him, he is sterile. His beautiful, young, devoted wife loves him so much that she secretly conceives the child of another man. But when Joe discovers her deception, his anguish is greater than ever before... A powerful, tragic and deeply moving tale.

Burning Bright

A Play in Story Form

Steinbeck's only work of political satire turns the French Revolution on its head, as amateur astronomer Pippin Heristal is drafted in to rule the unruly French. Enchanting comedy ensues as Steinbeck creates the most hilarious royal court ever around the brief, bold reign of the corduroy-clad Pippin, his social-climbing wife Maria, his star-struck daughter Clotilde and her Californian beau, Todd. Featuring a motley crew of courtiers and con men, guards and gardeners, Steinbeck's late comic novel is an entrancing read about politics, power and the daily struggle not to lose one's head!

The Short Reign of Pippin IV

A Fabrication

Penguin Modern Classics

Damon Runyon

A collection of the stories of Damon Runyon who presents the 1950s world of guys and dolls on Broadway.

On Broadway

More Than Somewhat;Furthermore;take IT Easy

Evelyn Waugh

These pieces show the range of Waugh's skills: Mr Loveday's Little Outing; Cruise; Period Piece; On Guard; An Englishman's Home; Excursion in Reality; Bella Fleace Gave a Party; Winner Takes All; Work Suspended; Scott-King's Modern Europe; Basil Seal Rides Again; and Charles Ryder's Schooldays.

Work Suspended and Other Stories

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of bread or an extra bowl of soup, the incredible luxury of a book, the ingenious possibilities of a nail, a piece of string or a single match in a world where survival is all. Here safety, warmth and food are the first objectives. Reading it, you enter a world of incarceration, brutality, hard manual labour and freezing cold - and participate in the struggle of men to survive both the terrible rigours of nature and the inhumanity of the system that defines their conditions of life.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated &quot;Library of Babel&quot;.

Labyrinths

Ladybird Readers

Ladybird Sing-along Stories

Ladybird Tales

Ladybird Tales of... Treasuries

These delightful books are the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them. 
 
The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope. The subject of the books will greatly appeal to grown-ups. 
 
The eight books in the series feature original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand new text. The other books in the series are: 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Mindfulness 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Sheds 
 
- The Ladybird Book of The Hipster 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Hangover 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Dating 
 
- How it Works: The Husband 
 
- How it Works: The Wife

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