Allan Grice

Allan Hall

Allan Jenkins

Allan Leighton

Allan Little

A professional solder for thirty-five years, Allan Mallinson began writing while still serving. 
His first book was a history of four regiments of British light dragoons, one of which he commanded. His debut novel was the bestselling A Close Run Thing, the first in an acclaimed series chronicling the life of a fictitious cavalry officer before and after Waterloo (The Tigress of Mysore is the fourteenth in the series). His The Making of the British Army was shortlisted for a number of prizes, while 1914: Fight the Good Fight won the British Army’s ‘Book of the Year’ Award. Its sequel, Too Important for the Generals, is a provocative look at leadership during the Great War, while Fight to the Finish is a comprehensive history of the First World War, month by month. 
Allan Mallinson reviews for the Spectator and the TLS and also writes for The Times. He lives on Salisbury Plain.

Allan Mallinson

Allan Massie

Allan Williams

Alleanna Harris

Allegra McEvedy

Allegra Taylor

Allen Anderson

Allen Bratton was born in the United States. He holds an MA in English Language and Literatures, having written a thesis on medieval English kingship. He is the winner of the 2021 Sewanee Review Fiction Contest and was longlisted for the 2021 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. Henry Henry, shortlisted for the 2025 Lammy Awards, is his debut novel.

Allen Bratton

Allen Carr was an accountant who smoked 100 cigarettes a day until he discovered EASYWAY and went on to write a series of bestselling books, most famously The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Now, over 20 million stop smoking books have been sold in over 57 countries and have been published in more than 40 different languages around the world. Allen's lasting legacy is a dynamic, on-going, global publishing programme which helps treat a range of issues including smoking, weight, alcohol and other drug addictions.

Allen Carr

Allen Crawford is an artist, illustrator, designer, and writer. Under the pseudonym 'Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy' Allen wrote, designed, and illustrated The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Volume One, which was optioned for film by Johnny Depp’s production company, Infinitum Nihil. Allen has appeared in The New York Times, Interview, Orion, Frieze, Vice, Tin House, and Art in America. He lives in a small Quaker town in central New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia. 
 
http://www.allencrawford.net

Allen Crawford

ALLEN GANNETT is the founder and CEO of TrackMaven, a marketing analytics firm whose clients have included Microsoft, Marriott, Saks Fifth Avenue, Home Depot, Aetna, Honda, and GE. He has been on the “30 Under 30” lists for both Inc. and Forbes.

Allen Gannett

Allen Ginsberg

Allen Kurzweil

Allie Brosh lives as a recluse in her bedroom in Denver, Colorado. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Hyperbole and a Half which was named the Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Best Humour Book of the Year. Brosh has also given herself many prestigious awards, including ‘fanciest horse drawing’ and ‘most likely to succeed’. HyperboleandaHalf.blogspot.com

Allie Brosh

Allie Morgan is 29-year-old librarian who lives in Scotland. She runs a secret Twitter account where she tweets about the role of libraries in community life.

Allie Morgan

Allie Oleander writes spicy contemporary, dark, and monster romances with kink exploration and characters ages thirty-five and up. She loves anything with chase scenes, the marriage-in-trouble trope, and monsters (of both the spicy and un-spicy variety). When she's not writing, she's in the woods, trying to arrange a meet-cute with Bigfoot.

Allie Oleander

Allie Spencer

New York-born illustrator Allison Black started her own stationery company, Hip Hip!, in 2015 and is experienced in creating artwork for fashion, homeware, stationery and books.

Allison Black

Allison England is a qualified and practising aromatherapist who specialises in pre- and postnatal care and women's health. She has worked with complementary therapies for the last 35 years, and writes exclusively on health and family matters. She has five children.

Allison England

Allison Havey is a journalist and television producer. Originally from New York, she now lives in London. Allison has worked for NBC News, Associated Press, ABC News and Fox Business News. She has two teenagers of her own and co-founded The RAP Project in 2012.

Allison Havey

Allison Pearson

Ally Condie

Ally Martin, Hendrick's Gin Global Ambassador, travels the world educating and inspiring curious drinkers on the intricate qualities, unique history and heritage of Hendrick's Gin. 
Originally from Edinburgh, Ally is the ideal envoy for one of Scotland's most celebrated gins and totes the signature rose and cucumber infusion from its home in Girvan, Ayrshire, to share with cocktail connoisseurs near and far. He is an award-winning gin specialist and was shortlisted for Best International Brand Ambassador at Tales of the Cocktail 2022 Spirited Awards® In New Orleans.

Ally Martin

A graduate of the Masters writing program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Alma Katsu worked briefly in advertising and PR before moving into the intelligence world, working as a senior analyst for several US agencies, including the CIA and the American equivalent of GCHQ. She was also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. Alma Katsu lives in the Washington, DC area. To find out more, visit her website almakatsubooks.com

Alma Katsu

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David Bezmozgis

'Terrific ... Combines comic brilliance with a poignant portrait of a family trapped between two worlds' Sunday Times 
 
In the summer of 1978 the Krasnansky family - bickering, tired and confused - arrive in Rome. Alongside thousands of other Soviet Jewish refugees they await passage to a new home in the West. But escaping Communism is not so easy, especially when some of the Krasnanskys insist on bringing it with them. It is harder still when their American sponsor lets them down and they find they're stuck. 
What follows is a tragic yet comic tale of reckless brothers and long-suffering sisters, ailing parents and innocent children, of love affairs and criminal liaisons, of a wonderfully troubled family and a perpetually wandering people, and their epic search for a home...

The Free World

Helen Gordon

What if one day you decided you'd had enough of your current life? 
 
Alice Robinson, art critic for a magazine so fashionable it's just gone out of business, finds herself agreeing to housesit for her parents. Moving back home to a suburbia she thought long behind her, she finds herself reconnecting with a different landscape, a fraught and painful past. 
 
For everywhere Alice turns she finds traces of her sister, who went missing as a teenager. Can she stop her old life intruding on the present? Should she even try? What does Alice's new future look like?

Landfall

Hari Kunzru

In the Californian desert a small, autistic child goes missing. A British rock star goes quietly mad. An alien-worshipping cult is born. An Iraqi teenager takes part in a war game. 
 
In an odd, remote town, near a rock formation known as The Pinnacles, lives and experiences intertwine, stories entangle and echo, and the search for meaning, pattern and connection in a dying universe continues. 
 
'Compulsively readable, skilfully orchestrated . . . this really is Kunzru's great American novel' Independent

Gods Without Men

David Almond

The extraordinary first adult novel from prizewinning author of Skellig, David Almond 
 
Billy Dean is the child of an illicit relationship between a priest and a young hairdresser. He is born on the very day that terrorists attack his town, and the fact that he survives and flourishes persuades his father that he is a special child with special gifts. Even so, Billy's birth can't be made public, and he spends his childhood in a single room, dreaming of other worlds, occasionally visited at night by his father. When the visits come to a sudden end, his mother decides it's time for Billy to come out into the world, helped by a couple of friendly townspeople, and soon he finds that his supposed gifts bring him a certain celebrity. But his father hasn't gone for good, and there's a terrible reckoning still to be made. 
David Almond's first adult novel is a brilliant account of a child long kept hidden from the world who finally finds that he can establish his place in it - only to be confronted with a past that won't go away.

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean

Ali Smith

'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party . . . ' 
 
As the hours turn to days to weeks to months and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbourhood then the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they at first appear.

There but for the

Ross Raisin

'Mick's story is one you won't forget. With this second novel Ross Raisin confirms himself as an exciting talent, a unique, gifted and generous voice, a young writer with a vision broad far beyond his years' David Vann, Financial Times 
 
Mick Little used to be a shipbuilder on the Glasgow yards. But as they closed one after another down the river, the search for work took him and his beloved wife Cathy to Australia, and back again, struggling for a living, longing for home. Thirty years later the yards are nearly all gone and Cathy is dead. And now Mick will have to find a new way to live: to get away, start again, and try to deal with the guilt he feels over her death. 
 
In his devastating new novel Ross Raisin brings vividly to life the story of an ordinary man caught between the loss of a great love and the hard edges of modern existence. Tracing Mick's journey from the Glasgow shipyards to the crowded, sweating kitchens of an airport hotel, to the streets and riversides of London, it is an intensely moving portrait of a life being lived all around us, and a story for our times.

Waterline

Joe Dunthorne

The last day on earth is coming. Bring your own booze. 
 
Kate and Albert, sister and brother, are not yet the last two human beings on earth, but Albert has high hopes. The secluded communal farm they grew up on is - after twenty years - disintegrating, along with their parents' marriage. They both try to escape: Kate, at seventeen, to suburbia and Albert, at eleven, into preparations for the end of the world. 
 
However, Don, the group's leader and their father, is convinced he can save everything, if only he can bring his followers into the modern age. How? By force of personality, strict self-sufficiency and a rave with a 10k soundsystem. Understandably, Albert and Kate have other ideas . . .

Wild Abandon

Jamil Ahmad

'The power and beauty of these stories are unparalleled in most fiction to come out of south Asia' Guardian 
 
The boy known as Tor Baz - the black falcon - wanders the tribal landscape of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. He meets men who fight under different flags, and women who risk everything if they break their society's code of honour. Where has he come from, and where will fate take him? 
 
'Shocking, hilarious. Its setting alone, in the cruel and punishing highlands, deserts and rocky altitudes where the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran meet, is worth the price of admission. Here is a book, to my knowledge the first in fiction, that gives an insider's account of the hard-bitten lives of the scores of tribes, collectively known as the Pawindas, or foot-people. The result is mesmerising' The Times

The Wandering Falcon

Penelope Lively

From Penelope Lively, winner of the Booker Prize 
 
When . . . Charlotte is mugged and breaks her hip, her daughter Rose cannot accompany her employer Lord Peters to Manchester, which means his niece Marion has to go instead, which means she sends a text to her lover which is intercepted by his wife, which is . . . just the beginning in the ensuing chain of life-altering events. 
 
In this engaging, utterly absorbing and brilliantly told novel, Penelope Lively shows us how one random event can cause marriages to fracture and heal themselves, opportunities to appear and disappear, lovers who might never have met to find each other and entire lives to become irrevocably changed. 
 
Funny, humane, touching, sly and sympathetic, How It All Began is a brilliant sleight of hand from an author at the top of her game. 
 
'Contains some of Lively's funniest and most enjoyable character studies . . . she remains a sublime storyteller'Guardian 
 
'Deeply comical, essentially kind-hearted, wonderfully written and seasoned with a rare wisdom' Literary Review 
 
'More stylish than many writers half her age . . . Lively knows a thing or two about storytelling . . . her candour is refreshing, and reminds us that you don't have to lie to yourself to live life finely until the very end' The Times

How It All Began

Sapphire

Abdul Jones is nine years old when his mother Precious dies. Parentless, he is sent first to a foster home and then to a Catholic orphanage. But the priests charged to care for him abuse his trust terribly. 
 
And Abdul, a victim, finds that he reacts in the most frightening way imaginable. Soon he is trapped in a dark cycle of sexual violence and betrayal. Yet through dance, in controlling his body, he discovers a way he might somehow break free and become himself . . . 
 
A harrowing and powerful novel set in New York, The Kid is a portrait of a boy forced to grow up in a cruel and callous world.

The Kid

Joseph Conrad

'Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.' 
 
Marlow, a seaman, tells of a journey up the Congo. His goal is the troubled European and ivory trader Kurtz. Worshipped and feared by invaders as well as natives, Kurtz has become a godlike figure, his presence pervading the jungle like a thick, obscuring mist. As his boat labours further upstream, closer and closer to Kurtz's extraordinary and terrible domain, so Marlow finds his faith in himself and civilization crumbling.

Heart of Darkness

William S. Burroughs

'Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life' 
 
William Burroughs, legendary drug addict, founder member of the Beats and author of Naked Lunch, relates with unflinching realism the addict's life: from initial heroin bliss to an unabated hunger for the needle, and the horrors of cold turkey and back again.

Junky

David Foster Wallace

The Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, 1985. Here the minutiae of a million daily lives are totted up, audited and accounted for. Here the workers fight a never-ending war against the urgency of their own boredom. Here then, squeezed between the trivial and the quotidian, lies all human life. And this is David Foster Wallace's towering, brilliant, hilarious and deeply moving final novel. 
 
'Light-years beyond Infinite Jest. Wallace's reputation will only grow, and like one of the broken columns beloved of Romantic painters, The Pale King will stand, complete in its incompleteness, as his most substantial fictional achievement' Hari Kunzru, Financial Times 
 
'Archly brilliant' Metro

The Pale King

Muriel Spark

'Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life . . .' 
 
Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of 'special girls' at Marcia Blaine School. They are the Brodie set, the crème de la crème, each famous for something - Monica for mathematics, Eunice for swimming, Rose for sex - who are initiated into a world of adult games and extracurricular activities they will never forget. But the price they pay is their undivided loyalty . . .

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Michael Cunningham

'It was the start of my second new life, in a city that had a spin of its own - a wilder orbit inside the earth's calm blue-green whirl. New York wasn't open to the hopelessness and lost purpose that drifted around lesser places . . . ' 
 
Meet Bobby, Jonathan and Clare. Three friends, three lovers, three ordinary people trying to make a place for themselves in the harsh and uncompromising world of the Seventies and Eighties. 
 
And as our threesome form a new kind of relationship, a new approach to family and love, questioning so much about the world around them, so they hope to create a space, a home, in which to live.

A Home at the End of the World

Nat Segnit

'Start by turning right out of the main entrance of Malvern Link railway station . . .' 
 
So begins Graham Underhill's guide to rambling in the West Midlands. But it is not many yards before Graham has gone completely off track, all but abandoning the route ahead to exult in his love for his beautiful if headstrong wife Sunita. 
 
Along the way Graham treats us to his intemperate views on mountain bikers, litter louts, landscape photographers, and the Highways Agency, who are intent on building a bypass through his home. At least he has Sunita. Or does he? With each walk it becomes clearer that the paths of Underhill Country lead into treacherous terrain.

Pub Walks in Underhill Country

William Trevor

The sudden death of Thaddeus Devenant's wife leaves him with the problem of childcare for baby Georgina. When none of the nannies interviewed is deemed suitable, Mrs Iveson, Thaddeus's mother-in-law, fulfils the position herself. But in rejecting one of the applicants, they have overlooked the beginnings of a fixed and unnatural obsession...

Death In Summer

Mirza Waheed

By the waters running through the valleys of Kashmir, teenage boys come to play cricket, talk about girls, and just be. But a few years later, when they are young men and violence grips the region, they are gone. 
 
Only the son of the local headman has stayed. He knows his friends have slipped over the border to Pakistan, and turned militant to bear arms against the Indian army. He would like to join them - but he cannot. 
 
Instead, put in an impossible position by an Indian army Captain, he must cross into the shadowland between the opposing sides, a ghost walking among the dead. His fate, like that of his lost brothers, unknown . . .

The Collaborator

Luke Williams

In coming into the world Evie Steppman pushed her mother out of it. 
 
Born two months late but with an extraordinary gift of hearing, Evie has an impression of the world vastly different to the experiences of other people. Taking us from Nigeria in the 1950s to 1970s America and finally on to Scotland in the early twenty-first century, she tells us the strange story of her origins and life through her unique sensory gifts. It is a story of colonialism and empire, of love and death, of hope and fear, of mystery and strangeness, and above all, of sound and an unwanted, but inevitable, silence.

The Echo Chamber

Anita Brookner

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is a poignant novella from Anita Brookner. 
 
'I rather hope I shall die at the hairdresser's, for they are bound to know what to do. At least that is what I tell myself.' 
 
Solitude is a familiar burden for Elizabeth Warner. She lives in a basement flat near Victoria and leaves the house only to go shopping and to have her hair done - until a chance encounter at the hairdresser's brings unexpected change. At the Hairdresser's is a deeply moving, unflinchingly observed story about trust and betrayal by one of the greatest writers of contemporary fiction.

At the Hairdresser's

Helen Dunmore

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is a chilling tale by Helen Dunmore. 
 
'It was nothing, she tells herself, but her body knows better.' 
 
Florence lives in the country, lapped by miles and miles of darkness. She feels safe there - until a noise wakes her in the middle of the night. 
 
Protection is a short story by bestselling author Helen Dunmore that will cause your skin to prickle and make you ask yourself how far you would go to protect your family.

Protection

H.M. Naqvi

Meet the Metrostanis, three young Pakistani men in New York City at the turn-of-the-millennium: AC, a gangsta rap spouting academic; Jimbo, a hulking Pushtun deejay from the streets of Jersey City; and Chuck, a wide-eyed, off-the-boat kid, searching for himself and the American Dream. 
 
In a city where origins matter less than the talent for self invention, they have the guts to claim the place as their own. But after the fall of the towers they embark on a road-trip to the hinterland in search of 'The Shaman', a Gatsbyesque compatriot who seemingly disappears into thin air - and then things begin to go horribly wrong. Suddenly, they find themselves in a changed, charged America . . .

Home Boy

Don DeLillo

David Bell embodies the American dream. He's twenty-eight, has survived office coups, scandals, and beaten lesser rivals, to become an extremely successful TV exec. The images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall viewers, they are of his making. 
 
But David's dream is turning sour, nightmarish. He wants reality, to touch, feel and record what is real. He takes a camera and journeys across America in a mad, roving quest to discover and capture some sense of his own and his country's past, present and future. 
 
Americana is Don DeLillo's brilliant first novel.

Americana

Helon Habila

From the desks of Nigeria's newsrooms, two journalists are recruited to find the kidnapped wife of a British oil engineer. Zaq, an infamous media hack, knows what's in store, but Rufus, a keen young journalist eager to get himself noticed, has no idea what he's let himself in for. Journeying into the oil-rich regions of the Niger Delta, where militants rule and the currency dealt in is the lives of hostages, Rufus soon finds himself acting as intermediary between editor, husband, captive and soldier. 
 
As they follow the trail of the missing woman, love for the 'story' becomes about much more than just uncovering her whereabouts, and instead becomes a mission to make sense of their own muddled lives. 
 
In a cruel twist of fate, Rufus finds himself taking on Zaq's role much more literally than he ever anticipated, and as the body count rises, and the environment burns, he learns that truth can often be a bitter pill to swallow.

Oil on Water

Vladimir Nabokov

'You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.' 
 
Humbert Humbert, a European intellectual adrift in America, is a middle-aged college professor. Haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love, he falls outrageously (and illegally) in lust with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Dolores Haze. Obsessed, he'll do anything, will commit any crime, to possess his Lolita. 
 
But once Lolita belongs to Humbert, once he has got what he wants, what next? And what of Lolita? How long is she willing to be possessed?

Lolita

Fiona Neill

Nanny required to take care of needs of busy professional London family 
 
When penniless student Ali Sparrow answers Bryony and Nick Skinner's advertisement her life changes overnight. 
 
She is catapulted into the privileged and excessive world of London's financial elite. At first everything is overwhelming - from twins who speak their own language to a teenage girl with weight issues and a son almost her own age. Then there is Bryony, who has one eye on her dazzling career and the other on Ali's failings. 
 
When boom turns to bust and a scandal erupts that suggests something corrupt has been hatched behind the Skinners' front door, their private life is suddenly public news. And as Ali becomes indispensible, she realizes she's witness to things she probably shouldn't see. 
 
But is she principled enough to keep the family's secrets when the press come prowling for the inside scoop? Or will she dish the dirt on the family who never saw her as anything other than part of the scenery?

What the Nanny Saw

Paul Theroux

Jack Flowers, saint or sinner, caught a passing bumboat into Singapore and got a job as a water-clerk to a Chinese ship chandler. Now, on the side, he offers girls (indeed 'anything, anything at all') to tourists, sailors, residents and expatriates, but he is haunted by his lack of worldly success and his fifty-three years weigh heavily on him. So when he agrees to act as blackmailer for the faintly sinister American, Edwin Shuck, in a plot against a general from Vietnam, he has high, not to mention wild, hopes of triumph. 
 
These are the outrageous confessions of an ingenious con man in the seedy and unforgettable world of expatriates amidst imperial ruins.

Saint Jack

Spencer Savage, a young American consul, is posted to Ayer Hitam, a small Malaysian town, in the 1970s. Told to close down this remote outpost in the sweltering jungle, he instead finds himself drawn to the many characters he meets among the Malays, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and the clubbable expat Brits. 
 
Through his eyes we see the rich tapestry of multi-ethnic life in post-colonial Malaysia, from adultery to murder, from ghost stories to the murky waters of diplomatic politics. 
 
It is a brilliant portrait of a vanished time, a lost landscape and scattered peoples.

The Consul's File

Hollis Hampton-Jones

Meade is nineteen and living in Paris with her twin brother, Ben Ho, far from their privileged upbringing in Nashville, Tennessee. Hers is a restless quest of balancing addictions: to her brother, her pills and her purging. But when Ben Ho falls for a girl at art school, Meade's precarious equilibrium is shaken. 
 
Meade descends into a vortex of glamour and passion with the fashion photographer who becomes her lover. As her sexual obsession shifts from her brother to her troubled Iranian lover, Meade cannot know she has made a tragic match with someone whose secrets go further, deeper and darker than anything she can fathom. 
 
A stark, unflinching novel with a dark heart, Comes the Night chronicles a fevered and tormented journey through the frothy, glossy world of fashion and the shadowy recesses of love.

Comes the Night

Robertson Davies

'I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.' 
 
So begins the story of Connor 'Gil' Gilmartin when he catches his wife in flagrante with the Sniffer, his former colleague and now his murderer. Unfortunately, death is only the first indignity Gil is about to suffer. For he lingers on as a ghost, and from this bleak vantage - made even less endurable by the fact that he must spend the afterlife sitting beside his killer at a film festival - he is forced to view the exploits and failures of his ancestors, from the forerunners who sailed up the Hudson to Canada during the American Revolution to his university-professor parents.

Murther & Walking Spirits

Esslemont's Path to Ascendancy series takes us back to the majestic and mystical Malazan Empire. This is the much anticipated origin story, chronicling the troubled continent's early history from a time when it was a land ravaged by war, with minor city states, baronies and principates fighting for supremacy.

Path to Ascendancy

Patterns of Life

Paul West

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