82ASK

A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Bohumil Hrabal

'Our very best writer today' Milan Kundera 
 
Ditie is a pint-sized hotel waiter with big dreams. 
 
Between pocketing stolen change from unsuspecting customers and reminiscing on nights spent at the local brothel, he fantasises about his immense - and imagined - riches. 
 
Then, ludicrously, Ditie’s dreams start to become reality. 
 
Yet while his chaotic adventures lead him to ever more glamorous hotels, beyond the sparkling dining halls, the forces of twentieth-century European history march on. 
 
A whirlwind of comic genius, a gut-punch of narrative power, this is the story of one small man’s rise and fall – or fall and rise – against the shadowy backdrop of Europe’s darkest days. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRLWELL 
 
‘An extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel’ 
New York Times 
 
‘Hrabal bounces and floats... with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail’ 
Julian Barnes 
 
‘A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude.’ 
James Wood

I Served The King Of England

Featuring an introduction by Adam Thirlwell

Magda Szabó

Nothing is more mysterious than another human soul. 
 
Magda is a writer, Emerence her housekeeper. Magda is new to their quiet Hungarian town, while Emerence, fierce and enigmatic, knows and is known by all. Though she enters Magda’s home whenever she pleases, the door to Emerence’s own strange abode remains barred. Still, somehow, over the course of twenty years, an intimate trust is built between the two, rich with secrets. 
 
Yet when this trust is betrayed one dark afternoon, the pair’s complex relationship will be left forever altered, and Magda will find herself haunted until the end of her days. For not all doors are made to be opened. 
 
'A dark domestic fairy tale' New York Times 
 
Translated by Len Rix

The Door

Copi

Welcome to the gutters of 1970s Paris – and the anarchic, darkly comic world of City of Rats. 
 
When pet rat Gouri finds himself locked out of his owner’s apartment, he has no choice but to strike out alone onto the pavements of Paris. But what begins as a strange and marvellous bedtime story - Gouri and his new friend Raka selling flour-coated worms to pigeons for spare change - soon spirals into an exhilarating whirlwind of murder, sex, unionised hamsters, courtroom drama, and, finally, Armageddon. 
 
Told through a series of letters from Gouri to Argentinian playwright Copi, City of Rats channels Copi’s lifelong fascination with society’s outcasts - queer people, immigrants, the homeless, and criminals - into a fiercely imaginative, unflinchingly provocative tale of a world hurtling into madness. 
 
'Copi is the sassiest, most decadent, poised, unpredictable, violent, galling, and marvellous of any author in the past quarter century' Charlie Hebdo 
 
TRANSLATED BY KIT SCHLUTER; WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CESAR AIRA

City of Rats

Lisa Tuttle

Deeply unnerving and utterly original - the book you will need to talk about. 
 
A writer decides to write her next book about a female author and artist unjustly forgotten by history. But what starts as an exciting research project rapidly unravels towards breakdown and horror. 
 
The subject is to be Helen Ralston, an early twentieth-century author who has been systematically written out of history. The narrator sets about investigating her story as an artist, writer and muse to a much more famous man. Amazingly Ralston turns out to be still alive, and although elderly and frail a series of interviews begin. But a tale about the historic erasure of female voices starts to break down into something even more sinister, bizarre and all-consuming as the narrator uncovers unnerving parallels between Ralston's story and her own... 
 
'An astonishing and deeply strange novella... Inspired, delicate and quite sinister' Mariana Enriquez 
 
‘Short, uncanny provocative’ Lauren Elkin, New York Times 
 
‘A slippery, endlessly unpackable novella’ Daily Mail

My Death

Mary Lavin

Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories: illuminating, moving, arrows in flight. 
 
‘This is a wonderful collection, and a reminder that Mary Lavin was – is – one of Ireland’s greatest writers’ Roddy Doyle 
 
Mary Lavin’s stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life. From rural Ireland and the streets of Dublin they charm, irritate and intrigue in complicated brilliance, appearing to us with unique freshness. Good friendships, bad deeds, frustrations, missteps, hope and laughter are all found in captivating stories where real and astonishing things happen. 
 
Few women were so consistently published in the New Yorker and yet today Lavin’s work is largely unpublished and overlooked. This collection re-establishes her as one of the most genius, irresistible and memorable voices of the last century. 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TÓIBÍN 
 
‘She is, to come right out with it, magnificent’ New York Times 
 
‘Mary Lavin’s stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other’ Sunday Times 
 
‘Lavin writes like a dream’ New York Times Book Review

An Arrow in Flight

Edward St Aubyn

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 care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him to doubt the wisdom of past decisions. 
 
Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. Who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate? 
 
‘Malevolently enjoyable… A fable of fatherly neglect and daughterly cruelty’ Financial Times 
 
‘Deeply affecting…and funny’ Observer 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Dunbar

King Lear, Retold

Margaret Atwood

Shakespeare’s The Tempest gets the Margaret Atwood treatment in this ingenious, funny, tear-jerking story about loss, revenge and remaking oneself through art. 
 
Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. 
 
His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he’s staging a Tempest like no other. It will boost his reputation. It will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. Also brewing revenge. 
 
After twelve years, revenge finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. It’s magic! But will it remake Felix as his enemies fall? 
 
'Surpassingly brilliant' The Times 
 
‘Riotous, insanely readable and just the best fun...' Observer 
 
**LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017** 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before. Nine iconic stories transformed by the best novelists of our time, celebrating the Bard’s lasting legacy.

Hag-Seed

The Tempest, Retold

Tracy Chevalier

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 hits it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players – teachers and pupils alike – will never be the same again. 
 
The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington schoolyard in this powerful drama of alienation, adolescence and friends torn apart. 
 
‘A compact and intense read full of twists, turns and intrigue’ Daily Express 
 
'New Boy, with its angsty teenagers, racial frictions and a magnificently fleshed out antagonist, is a tense and tight read... A heady rollercoaster of emotions' Observer 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

New Boy

Othello, Retold

Howard Jacobson

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is ingeniously reinvented by Howard Jacobson, in his merciless, sharp and funny story of revenge, justice and antisemitism. 
 
‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’ 
 
With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship... 
 
‘Inspired...It does what any good literary subversion should do: deepens and enhances one's appreciation of the original’ Guardian 
 
‘Jacobson’s prose has the sort of elastic precision you only get from a writer who is truly in command… There's also deep and sincere soul-searching going on here’ Independent 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Shylock is My Name

The Merchant of Venice, Retold

The Merchant of Venice Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

Jeanette Winterson

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is reimagined in Jeanette Winterson's page-turning story of a girl banished from home as a baby. How will things turn out this time? 
 
A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from – but she's about to find out. 
 
Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of Shakespeare's original and tells a story of hearts broken and hearts healed, a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that shows that whatever is lost shall be found. 
 
‘A shining delight of a novel’ 
New York Times 
 
'Clever and beautiful...it soars' 
Financial Times 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

The Gap of Time

The Winter's Tale, Retold

The Winter’s Tale Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

Mark Haddon

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 believes their life together is normal – but as time passes, she has a growing sense that something between them is very wrong. 
 
She cannot escape, so she seeks solace in her books. Her favourite tales are those that conjure ancient worlds – of angry gods and heroic mortals, one of whom will some day come to her rescue. 
 
Soon, she will forget where the page ends and her mind begins. 
 
‘Just downright brilliant... a transcendent, transporting experience’ Observer 
 
‘A full-throttle blast of storytelling mastery’ Max Porter 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

The Porpoise

Anne Tyler

Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is hilariously reimagined by one of our greatest living novelists, in this very funny, heartbreaking story of one woman, two men and unconventional happy endings. 
 
Kate Battista is stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and infuriating younger sister Bunny? Dr Battista has other problems. His brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, his new scientific breakthrough will fall through... 
 
When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Will Kate be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her round? 
 
Anne Tyler's brilliant retelling of The Taming of the Shrew asks whether a thoroughly modern woman like Kate would ever sacrifice herself for a man. The answer is as surprising as Kate herself. 
 
'A thoroughly modern love story' Guardian, Book of the Year 
 
‘The worst wedding in history...vintage Anne Tyler’ The Times 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Vinegar Girl

The Taming of the Shrew, Retold

Christopher Isherwood

With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry. 
 
On the other end of the line is temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher&rsquo;s job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project, and Hitler&rsquo;s shadow lengthens over Europe. 
 
&lsquo;A masterly novella&rsquo; Guardian 
 
&lsquo;A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence&rsquo; New Yorker

Prater Violet

Jean-Patrick Manchette

'The French noir novel you need to help you vent your frustrations right now’ LitHub 
 
Murder isn’t always ugly. 
 
Aimée is drop-dead gorgeous, razor-sharp, and lethally efficient. A killer with a cool head and a taste for chaos, she arrives in the backwater town of Bléville – a festering stew of grudges, corruption, and small-town rot – ready to make a killing. 
 
It's a game she’s played before: stir up trouble, pit the locals against one another, then disappear with blood on her hands and money in her pocket. But this time, something breaks and the game turns on her. 
 
Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the crime novel into a weapon of satire and stylish mayhem. Fatale is his bloodiest, funniest, and most brilliantly unhinged work: a riot of revenge, farce, and gleeful destruction. 
 
PRAISE FOR JEAN-PARICK MANCHETTE 
 
 
‘Manchette was Le Homme... We must revere him now and rediscover him this very instant. ’ James Ellroy 
 
'A comedic genius... I read and reread him, stunned, appalled, and laughing out loud' Rachel Kushner 
 
'Manchette is one of the greatest writers since Dashiell Hammett, his only true son and heir' David Peace 
 
‘Manchette is Camus on overdrive... He deserves much the same attention’ James Sallis 
 
‘Manchette is legend among all of the crime writers I know, and with good reason: his novels never fail to stun and thrill from page one’ Duane Swierczynski

Fatale

George Orwell

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Orwell's satirical masterpiece with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
Mr Jones, the owner of Manor Farm, is a lazy drunk. The animals decide to overthrow him in a revolution that will allow them to run the farm, liberating themselves and creating a new life of equality and freedom. But they have underestimated the pigs. Napoleon and Snowball form an elite and take control for themselves, and the tyranny of the farmer is replaced with another kind of control leaving the animals again subject to a ruthless and cruel authority. 
 
Imagined only as Orwell could, this powerful fable is instilled with humour and an underlying urgency that makes this one of the most prescient warnings ever written. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

Animal Farm

Virginia Woolf

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Woolf's great masterpiece with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
Clarissa Dalloway is preparing to give a party. Over the course of one day, as she readies her house, Clarissa is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life. Virginia Woolf started writing Mrs Dalloway in 1922 as a short story. Its publication in 1925 was met with modest commercial success but the novel went on to become one of the most vital works of literature of the last century. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

Mrs Dalloway

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Woolf's delightful, boundary-pushing classic, with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth’s court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

Orlando

Julian Barnes

History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. 
 
From the Titanic to the Amazon, the raft of the Medusa to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is no ordinary history, but something stranger: a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. 
 
'Funny, ironic, erudite, surprising, and not afraid to take a dive overboard into the depths of sorrow and loss’ Nadime Gordimer

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Marlen Haushofer

Claustrophobic and shattering, this is the story of one ordinary woman unable to save a teenager in her care. It is the story of Stella... 
 
Stella is a friend's nineteen-year-old daughter who has come to live with Anna and her family. Unloved and neglected, Stella's presence disturbs the already tense and tumultuous household. She lodges uncomfortably in their lives, whilst Anna struggles to bring warmth and welcome to the home. Her son continues to be gloomy and her daughter oblivious. Meanwhile Richard, Anna's adulterous husband, pretends not to notice Stella at all… 
 
Marlen Haushofer, author of The Wall, is the undisputed mistress of sustained dread and this gripping short novel deserves to be rediscovered. 
 
TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE 
 
'This potent 1958 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer takes the form of a mother’s agitated confession... This one hits hard' Publisher's Weekly 
 
'Chillingly unillusioned... A fable about the habitual moral inertia of educated people' London Review of Books 
 
‘Haushofer is a rather terrifying writer… Killing Stella limns a world of guilty secrets and repressions’ New Yorker

Killing Stella

We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. 
 
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, Tony Webster and Adrian Finn swore to stay friends for life. Now in middle age, a lawyer’s letter proves that Tony’s memory may be imperfect. The story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past, The Sense of an Ending is laced with Julian Barnes’ trademark precision, dexterity and insight, and won him the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011. 
 
‘A precise, poignant portrait of the costs and benefits of time passing, of friendship, of love. A small masterpiece’ Erica Wagner, The Times

The Sense of an Ending

Thomas Bernhard

'‘One of the darkest and funniest writers... A must read for everybody’ Karl Ove Knausgaard 
 
After a severe illness, the unnamed narrator of Correction returns to Austria to sift through the writings of his childhood friend, Roithamer - a brilliant but tormented scientist. The self-exiled son of a wealthy family, Roithamer dedicates his unexpected inheritance to an impossible vision: constructing a perfect Cone in the remote Kobernausser forest. His pursuit of perfection spirals into obsession, pushing him toward inevitable tragedy. 
 
Thomas Bernhard’s masterwork of precision and intensity, Correction is a haunting meditation on genius, madness, and the cost of human intellect.

Correction

David Lodge

The first of the hilarious novels in the campus trilogy, Changing Places is a funny and wise tale of academic ill-manners - David Lodge at his comic best. 
 
When Philip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sundrenched Euphoric State university and rain-kissed university of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows... 
 
‘One of the funniest but – much more importantly – one of the most truthful of postwar British novelists’ Jonathan Coe

Changing Places

Salman Rushdie

The extraordinary literary debut of Salman Rushdie: ‘A firework of a book, funny and endlessly surprising’ Ursula Le Guin 
 
Flapping Eagle is a young Axona Indian gifted with immortal life after drinking an elixir from his wayward sister. But after 777 years of sailing the world’s seas, he becomes weary of life, and sets out to find the mystical Calf Island, a place where his fellow immortals have gathered and created their own version of the human race. 
 
But Calf Island is a strange place – like its inhabitants, it is both blessed and cursed. Sensing a terrible darkness at the heart of the island, Flapping Eagle sets out to scale the island’s peak and confront its mysterious and potent creator, Grimus himself. 
 
'A mixture of science fiction and folktale, past and future, primitive and present day... Grimus is a parallel form of life, and conjuring of an alternative society' Financial Times

Grimus

'A wonderful, rich and humane novel... a classic' Guardian 
 
Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. 
 
However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other 'midnight's children' all of whom are endowed with unusual gifts. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's story is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious. 
 
*WINNER OF THE BOOKER AND BEST OF THE BOOKER PRIZE* 
 
**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK** 
 
WITH A NEW 40TH ANNIVERSARY INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Midnight's Children

A special edition of the booker-prize winning novel

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic 
 
Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar's mothers teach him to live a life without shame. And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers’ fortress and makes the fateful mistake of falling in love. For he finds himself an unwitting player in an ongoing duel between the families of two men – one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure – living in a world caught between honour and humiliation, where a moment of shame could prove fatal. 
 
‘Shame is every bit as good as Midnight's Children. It is a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives’ The Times

Shame

‘Salman Rushdie's greatest novel’ Sunday Times 
 
Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby is the last in line of a crooked and fantastical dynasty of spice merchants and crime lords from Cochin. He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As we travel with him on a route that takes him from India to Spain, he spins his labyrinthine family tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. 
 
But does the India of his parents – populated by extravagant artists, piratical gatekeepers and mysterious lost paintings – still exist? And will he ever discover what became of his fiery and tempestuous mother? Moraes’ epic quest to uncover the truth of the past is a love story to a vanishing world, and also its last hurrah. 
 
**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

The Moor's Last Sigh

Discover Salman Rushdie’s critically acclaimed magical realist study of good and evil. 
 
'A masterpiece' Sunday Times 
 
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a plane blows apart high above the English Channel and two figures tumble, clutched in an embrace, towards the sea: Gibreel Farishta, India's legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices. 
 
Washed up, alive, on an English beach, their survival is a miracle. But there is a price to pay. Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But chosen by whom? And which is which? And what will be the outcome of their final confrontation? 
 
'A great novelist, a master of perpetual storytelling' V.S. Pritchett

The Satanic Verses

Angela Carter

Short and strange, this is a story about a dark and depraved love triangle: Annabel lives with both her young, beautiful husband, Lee, and his demonic brother, Buzz. 
 
Their cohabitation produces inescapable, dangerous emotional energy, contained within two rooms. Annabel is a fearful, ethereal artist entirely in her own world. Buzz is a ragged camera-wielding man of sharp intelligence and profound self-absorption. Lee is a simple boy who understands neither his wife nor his brother. He is also having an affair with another woman, a betrayal with the power to warp even further their dark and perverse love triangle... 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY AUDREY NIFFENEGGER 
 
'A stylish tale about a fatal love triangle in provincial Bohemia' Guardian

Love

I know it in my ancient water, that something will happen today... 
 
Today is the 75th birthday of identical twin sisters, Dora and Nora. And on this day their story begins, a richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and the Chances. It is in fact, the 23rd April, Shakespeare’s birthday and as Dora’s story unfurls, over the course of a whole century, it is populated with as many sets of twins, mistaken identities and unlikely coincidences as any Shakespeare comedy. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITH 
 
'It is wise, bawdy, vulgar, eloquent and very, very funny... And the writing is often breathtakingly lyrical... A masterpiece. Please share' Guardian

Wise Children

Hitomi Kanehara

Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors.

In this darkly addictive, devious novel, love is pain. 
 
Rin is flying back from her honeymoon. She's madly in love with her husband. The future looks rosy. 
 
Then he disappears to the bathroom and Rin imagines that he has gone to seduce the flight attendant. As her thoughts spiral out of control, the phrase 'madly in love' takes on a more sinister meaning. 
 
Prizewinning author Hitomi Kanehara follows Rin's life backwards from this moment, as a picture of the dark core and violent past of this disturbed young woman gradually comes into focus. 
 
The Vintage Classics Weird Girls series: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors. Bold, disruptive, chilling and enchanting, these tales of the weird are strange enough to get lost in.

Autofiction

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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