Alan Paton

Alan Pattullo

Alan Pauls

Alan Pollock is a playwright, translator and screenwriter. His numerous plays include One Night in November, Pigs and All Tomorrow's Parties.

Alan Pollock

Alan Root was born in London in 1937 but moved to Kenya as a young boy. He dropped out of school at sixteen but soon found himself behind the camera. He married Joan Thorpe in 1961 and together they produced an array of award-winning wildlife films including Baobab: Portrait of a Tree, commissioned by David Attenborough, Safari by Balloon, The Year of the Wildebeest and Castles of Clay, which was nominated for an Oscar. Alan won over sixty awards during his career, including an Emmy, three Lifetime Achievement Awards an OBE. Alan Root died in August 2017.

Alan Root

Alan Rosenthal

Alan Ruddock

Alan Rugman

Alan Rusbridger

Alan Ryan

Alan S. Blinder

Alan Shearer CBE  grew up in Newcastle, leaving home as a  teenager to pursue a career in professional football with his first  team, Southampton. He went on to  reach football stardom, winning the Premier League with Blackburn in  1995, breaking the world transfer record by signing to Newcastle United  in 1996 and achieving international success as the Captain of England.  Alan also holds the record for most goals scored in Premier League history.

Alan Shearer

Alan Siegel

Alan Simpson

Alan Spence

Alan Stewart

Alan Taylor

Alan Tennant

Alan Thompson

Alan Titchmarsh MBE is known to millions through his career as a television presenter of shows including Love Your Weekend, Love Your Garden, Ground Force, Gardeners' World, The Alan Titchmarsh Show and Spring Into Summer. He has written more than forty gardening books, as well as twelve novels and three volumes of memoirs. He was made MBE in the millennium New Year Honours list and holds the Victoria Medal of Honour, the Royal Horticultural Society's highest award.

Alan Titchmarsh

Alan Unterman

Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer and speaker who was best known for his expertise in Eastern philosophies including Zen Buddhism and Taoism. He wrote over 25 books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, the meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the non-material pursuit of happiness.

Alan W Watts

Alan Warner is the author of eight novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven, The Stars in the Bright Sky, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, The Deadman's Pedal and Their Lips Talk of Mischief. He is Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University.

Alan Warner

Alan Watts

Alan Weisman is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including the global bestseller The World Without Us, which has been translated into 34 international languages and was nominated for numerous awards. His writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times Magazine and many other places. Alan has worked on all seven continent and reported from 58 countries, and lives in western Massachusetts.

Alan Weisman

Alanna Mitchell

Alasdair Fotheringham is a freelance journalist and writer based in Spain. He writes regularly on cycling for the ‘I’, The Independent.co.uk, The Express, ProCycling and Cyclingnews. He has been reporting on the Tour de France and other top road cycling events since 1992. His first book was The Eagle of Toledo, a biography of cycling’s greatest ever climber, Federico Martín Bahamontes. He has also written Reckless, a biography of the ill-fated Luis Ocaña, the 1973 Tour winner and considered Eddy Merck’s top Grand Tour rival, and The End of the Road, an account of the 1998 Tour de France.

Alasdair Fotheringham

Alasdair Wickham

Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire in 1957, the son of a vet. Having graduated from Cambridge University in modern languages, he went into journalism, principally with the Mirror Group. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, Campbell worked for him first as press secretary, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy from 1994 to 2003. He continued to act as an advisor to Mr Blair and the Labour Party, including during subsequent election campaigns. He now splits his time between writing, speaking, politics in Britain and overseas, consultancy and charity, as chairman of fundraising for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, and a leading ambassador for the mental health campaign Time to Change. 
 
He lives in North London with his partner of thirty-five years, Fiona Millar. They have three children. His interests include running, cycling, bagpipes and Burnley Football Club. He has published six volumes of diaries, including the number one Sunday Times bestseller, The Blair Years, a memoir on depression, The Happy Depressive, and three novels.

Alastair Campbell

Alastair Nathan Cook was born in Gloucester, December 1984. He is an English cricketer. He plays for Essex County Cricket Club and previously for England. Cook is the fifth highest Test scorer of all time. 
 
He is regarded as England's most successful batsman ever and now he is an icon and role model in sport. 
 
Outside of cricket, Alastair has written columns in the Telegraph and Metro, he is a talented saxophone player and donates his time to raising money for cancer charities and the David Randall Foundation. He is now married with three children.

Alastair Cook

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William S. Burroughs

<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>

A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs's final novel is poignant and melancholic. Blending war films and pornography, and referencing Kafka and Mailer, The Western Lands confirms his status as one of America's greatest writers. The final novel of the trilogy containing Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads, this is a profound meditation on morality, loneliness, life and death.

The Western Lands

Chinua Achebe

Okonkwo is the greatest warrior alive, famous throughout West Africa. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in the village. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy. Chinua Achebe's stark novel reshaped both African and world literature. This arresting parable of a proud but powerless man witnessing the ruin of his people begins Achebe's landmark trilogy of works chronicling the fate of one African community, continued in Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease.

Things Fall Apart

Paul Bowles

In these hauntingly beautiful stories of abandonment and vengeance, extreme situations lead to disturbing conclusions. A missionary is sent to a place so distant he finds his God has no power there; a husband abandons his wife as they honeymoon in the South American jungle; a splash of water triggers an explosion of violence; and a boy's drug-induced transformation leads to cruelty enjoyed and suffered. 
 
Masterfully written, these are chilling tales from sun-drenched and brutal climes.

Collected Stories

Let It Come Down, with its title from Macbeth, tells the story of Dyar, a New York bank clerk who throws up his secure, humdrum job to find a reality abroad with which to identify himself, and his macabre experiences in the inferno of Tangiers as he gives in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles's second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

Let It Come Down

'The Sheltering Sky is a book about people on the edge of an alien space; somewhere where, curiously, they are never alone' Michael Hoffman. 
 
Port and Kit Moresbury, a sophisticated American couple, are finding it more than a little difficult to live with each other. Endeavouring to escape this predicament, they set off for North Africa intending to travel through Algeria - uncertain of exactly where they are heading, but determined to leave the modern world behind. The results of this casually taken decision are both tragic and compelling.

The Sheltering Sky

Fez, 1954, and American ex-pat Stenham reluctantly accepts a guide for his night-time walk home through the streets of the Medina. A nationalist uprising is transforming the country, much to the annoyance of Stenham, who enjoys the trappings of the old city. His path soon crosses with the young, illiterate son of a healer, another outsider to the newly politicised life of Morocco, in this brutally honest novel of life in the midst of terrorism, violence and the ugly opportunism that accompanies both. 
 
Bowles's most masterly novel combines his classic themes: the conflict of Eastern and Western cultures and the trials of otherness.

The Spider's House

A chance encounter while holidaying in Central America leads an American couple, the Slades, to befriend the charming, handsome Grove Soto and his young Cuban mistress. But as the Slades' trip becomes prolonged and they grow increasingly dependent on their new acquaintances, an undercurrent of cruelty begins to disturb the comfort and niceties to which they are accustomed. Up Above the World shows Paul Bowles to be a master of the tension and horror of rising viciousness.

Up Above the World

Chaim Potok

Asher Lev is a gifted loner, the artist who painted the sensational Brooklyn Crucifixion. Into it he poured all the anguish and torment a Jew can feel when torn between the faith of his fathers and the calling of his art. Here Asher Lev plunges back into his childhood and recounts the story of love and conflict which dragged him to this crossroads.

My Name is Asher Lev

Following a baseball game that nearly became a religious war, two Jewish boys become friends. Danny comes from the strict Hasidic sect that keeps him bound in centuries of orthodoxy. Reuven is brought up by a father patently aware of the twentieth century. Everything tries to destroy their friendship, but they use honesty with each other as a shield and it proves an impenetrable protection.

The Chosen

Shirley Jackson

'Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written' Donna Tartt 
 
This is the definitive collection of Shirley Jackson's short stories, including 'The Lottery' - one of the most terrifying and iconic stories of the twentieth century, and an influence on writers such as Stephen King. 
 
In these stories an excellent host finds himself turned out of home by his own guests; a woman spends her wedding day frantically searching for her husband-to-be; and in Shirley Jackson's best-known story, a small farming village comes together for a terrible annual ritual. The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these tales of wasted potential and casual cruelty by a master of the short story. 
 
 Shirley Jackson's chilling tales have the power to unsettle and terrify unlike any other. She was born in California in 1916. When her short story The Lottery was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the greatest American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by five more: Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. Shirley Jackson died in her sleep at the age of 48. 
 
'Her stories are stunning, timeless - as relevant and terrifying now as when they were first published ... 'The Lottery' is so much an icon in the history of the American short story that one could argue it has moved from the canon of American twentieth-century fiction directly into the American psyche, our collective unconscious' A. M. Homes

The Lottery and Other Stories

Interzone portrays the development of Burroughs's mature writing style by presenting a selection of pieces from the mid-1950s. His outrageous tone of voice represents the exorcism of four decades of oppressive sexual and social conditioning. Burroughs's close observations of humanity - its ugliness and ignorance - invites the reader to dispense with their traditional notions of decorum, and taste the world as he sees it.

Interzone

My Education is Burroughs's last novel, first published two years before his death in 1997. It is a book of dreams, collected over several decades and as close to a memoir as we will see. The dreams cover themes from the mundane and ordinary - conversations with his friends Allen Ginsberg or Ian Sommerville, feeding his cats, procuring drugs or sex - to the erotic, bizarre and visionary. Always a rich source of imagery in Burroughs's own fiction, in this book dreams become a direct and powerful force in themselves.

My Education

A Book of Dreams

Susan Sontag

The story of In America is inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son, Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name Helena Modjeska.

In America

The Benefactor is Susan Sontag's first book and first novel. It was originally published in 1963, and introduced a unique writer to the world. In the form of a memoir by a latter-day Candide named Hippolyte, The Benefactor leads us on a kind of psychic Grand Tour, in which Hippolyte's violently imaginative dream life becomes indistinguishable from his surprising experiences in the 'real world'.

The Benefactor

Italo Calvino

Numbers in the Dark is a collection of short stories covering the length of Italo Calvino's extraordinary writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. They include witty allegories and wise fables; a town where everything has been forbidden apart from the game of tip-cat; a pitiable tribe watching the flight paths of guided missiles from outside their mud huts; a computer programmer considering the possible sequence of a series of brutal acts; and dialogues with Henry Ford, a Neanderthal and the gloomy, overthrown Montezuma ...

Numbers in the Dark

Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler's assistant, both arrogant and insecure who - while the Second World War rages - sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the grown-ups of his town - particularly jokes about his sister, who they all know as the town's 'mattress'. Among those his sister sleeps with is a German sailor, and Pin dares to steal his pistol, hiding it among the spiders' nests in an act of rebellion that entangles him in the adults' war.

The Path to the Spiders' Nests

Oscar Hijuelos

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 
 
In 1949 two young Cuban musicians, brothers Cesar and Nestor, leave Havana for New York. By day they work hard, by night they are the Mambo Kings: packing out clubs, dance halls and theatres with their sensuous, pulsing Latin music. This is the captivating story of charming, vivacious womanizer Cesar and quiet, romantic Nestor - still nursing an unrequited love for 'beautiful Maria of my soul' - and their changing fortunes as they try to make it big in America.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Norman Collins

It is 1938 and the prospect of war hangs over every London inhabitant. But the city doesn't stop. Everywhere people continue to work, drink, fall in love, fight and struggle to get on in life. At the lodging-house at No.10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, the buttoned-up clerk Mr Josser returns home with the clock he has received as a retirement gift. The other residents include faded actress Connie; tinned food-loving Mr Puddy; widowed landlady Mrs Vizzard (whose head is turned by her new lodger, a self-styled 'Professor of Spiritualism'); and flashy young mechanic Percy Boon, whose foray into stolen cars descends into something much, much worse ...

London Belongs to Me

Jack Kerouac

Moodily atmospheric, full of verve and energy, Maggie Cassidy is Kerouac's poignant tale of teenage romance in New England. The story of Jack and Maggie, in love with the idea of being in love, looking ahead to marriage with hope and trepidation, is told with touching simplicity. It skillfully captures both the intensity and the ordinariness of adolescent life, with its torments and complications and is a beautiful evocation of growing up in America.

Maggie Cassidy

Irmgard Keun

Kully knows some things you don&rsquo;t learn at school. She knows the right way to roll a cigarette and pack a suitcase. She knows that cars are more dangerous than lions. She knows you can&rsquo;t enter a country without a passport or visa. And she knows that she and her parents can&rsquo;t go back to Germany again &ndash; her father&rsquo;s books are banned there. But there are also things she doesn&rsquo;t understand, like why there might be a war in Europe &ndash; just that there are men named Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain involved. Little Kully is far more interested where their next meal will come from and the ladies who seem to buzz around her father. 
 
Meanwhile she and her parents roam through Europe. Her mother would just like to settle down, but as her restless father struggles to find a new publisher, the three must escape from country to country as their visas expire, money runs out and hotel bills mount up.

Child of All Nations

J.M.G. Le Clézio

In these nine unforgettable and impressionistic 'tales of little madness', the Nobel Prize-winning author Le Clézio explores how the physical sensations we experience every day can be as strong as feelings of love or hate, with their power to bring chaos to our lives. In 'The Day that Beaumont became Acquainted with his Pain', a man with toothache spends the night seeking ways to disown his throbbing jaw; in 'Fever', Roch finds his mind transported by sunstroke; while in 'A Day of Old Age' little Joseph tries to comprehend the physical suffering of a dying old woman. Set in a timeless, spaceless universe, these experimental and haunting works portray the landscape of the human consciousness with dazzling verbal dexterity and power.

Fever

For Chancelade, the world is teeming with beauty, wonder and possibilities. From a small boy playing on the beach, through his adolescence and his first love, to the death of his father and on to the end of his own life, he relishes the most minute details of his physical surroundings - whether a grain of sand, an insect or a blade of grass - as he journeys on a sensory adventure from cradle to grave. Filled with cosmic ruminations, lyrical description and virtuoso games of language and the imagination, Terra Amata brilliantly explores humankind's place in the universe, the relationship between us and the Earth we inhabit and, ultimately, how to live.

Terra Amata

François Besson listens to a tape recording of a girl contemplating suicide. Drifting through the days in a provincial city, he thoughtlessly starts a fire in his apartment, attends confession, and examines, with great intentness but without affection, a naked woman he wakes beside. And, as Besson moves through an ugly and threatening rain, his thoughts eventually lead to violence, first turned outward and then directed languidly against himself.

The Flood

A man, dispirited by ageing, endeavours to steal a younger man&rsquo;s face; a doctor yearns for a virus that might eliminate his discomfort by turning everyone else into doubles of himself; a Colonel lays out the precepts of the life of DE (Do Easy); conspirators posthumously succeed in blowing up a train full of nerve gas; a mandrill known as the Purple Better One runs for the presidency with brutal results; and the world drifts towards apocalypses of violence, climate and plague. The hallucinatory landscape of William Burroughs&rsquo; compellingly bizarre, fragmented novel is constantly shifting, something sinister always just beneath the surface.

Exterminator!

Burroughs&rsquo; first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, through time spent kicking, time spent dealing and time rolling drunks for money, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report (by a writer trained in anthropology at Harvard) from the American post-war drug underground. A cult classic, it has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone. This definitive edition painstakingly recreates the author&rsquo;s original text word for word.

Junky

James Salter

Rand lives free; lean, pure and defiant, the world has little influence on him. His passion is climbing &ndash; the mountains, the huge vertical faces. There, where storms, snow, or rockfall can kill, he finds his happiness, sometimes climbing with others, sometimes alone. This is a novel of obsession and where it leads. Rand, not intending it, becomes suddenly famous for a daring rescue in the Alps. What happens when passion is spent and what becomes of heroes is revealed in this terse and powerfully written novel.

Solo Faces

In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as pranksterish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army. The Wild Boys shows why Burroughs is a writer unlike any other, able to make captivating the explicit and horrific.

The Wild Boys

A Book of the Dead

Yukio Mishima

Written when Mishima was only twentysix, Forbidden Colors is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the love of a young man who is stunningly handsome but who lacks the ability to love. As in Mann's Death in Venice, the older man's longing for the beauty of youth is associated with aestheticism and death.

Forbidden Colours

Ayn Rand

Equality 7-2521 is a man apart. Since The Great Rebirth it has been a crime in his world to think or act as an individual. Even love is forbidden. Yet since his childhood in the Home of the Infants, Equality 7-2521 has felt that he is different. When he is sent by The Council of Vocations to work as a road sweeper, he stumbles upon a link to the old world that gives him the spur to break free. First published in England in 1938, Ayn Rand&rsquo;s short dystopian novel crystalises the ideas of individualism and competition that would make her name.

Anthem

Carson McCullers

The Mortgaged Heart is an important collection of Carson McCullers&quot;s work, including stories, essays, articles, poems, and her writing on writing. These pieces, written mostly before McCullers was nineteen, provide invaluable insight into her life and her gifts and growth as a writer. The collection also contains the the working outline of &quot;The Mute,&quot; which became her best-selling novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

The Mortgaged Heart

First Steps with Spot

Five Minute Mum

Flaptastic

Fluffy

Folk Art

Football Academy

Football Skills

Forbidden Spaces Trilogy

Foul Play

DICK FRANCIS was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt jockeys and author of forty-three bestselling novels, a volume of short stories (Field of 13), the biography of Lester Piggott and his own autobiography (The Sport of Queens). He was rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest thriller writers in the world. 
 
 Since his death, his son FELIX FRANCIS has taken over the literary reigns from his father and Dick's legacy lives on through the Dick Francis novels. The Francis flair is clear for all to see in these national treasure thrillers, and readers will appreciate the sporadic reappearance of beloved series characters Sid Halley and Jeff Hinkley.

Francis Thriller

Frank Behr

Once a Detective Inspector in the Nottinghamshire Force, Frank Elder has retired to an isolated cottage in Cornwall, and is trying to live the quiet life. The past, however, is never far behind him.

Frank Elder

Fred

Free Collars Kingdom

Jean Plaidy combines imagination with facts to bring the French Revolution alive in this dynamic historical fiction series. From Louis XV’s debauchery to Marie Antionette’s demise, it is clear there was only one way this was going to end.

French Revolution

French Vintage Classics

Frieda Klein

Fright Club

From Scratch

Frontline Nurses Series

Frostheart

Fun With Ladybird

Funnybones

G.F. Newman’s The Corrupted

Gabriel's Inferno

The Roman grip on Britain is growing weaker and Druids are on the rise. Emperor Nero has turned away. Boudicca is preparing to lead tribes to war. 
 
Standing in her way is Gaius Valerius Verrens, commander of the veterans legion. In this battle he earns the accolade of Hero of Rome - but where will that title lead him next?

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