Almudena Solana

Alon Hilu

Alon Ziv has a degree in neuroscience and was awarded the Certificate of Distinction in Teaching in Biology from UCLA.

Alon Ziv

Alonso Cueto

Alphonse Daudet was born in Nimes in 1840. He made his name with gentle stories and novels portraying life in the French provinces, notably Lettres de mon Moulin (1869). He died in 1897. His extraordinary notebooks detailing the effects of syphilis on his life were first published under the title In the Land of Pain by Daudet's widow in 1931. The first English translation by Julian Barnes was published by Cape in 2002.

Alphonse Daudet

Alua Arthur is a death doula, a recovering attorney and the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organisation. She travels the world as a keynote speaker, addressing audiences at medical and end-of-life conferences, universities, seminaries, senior citizens’ communities, and more. She can be found @going_with_grace and @alualoveslife on Instagram. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Alua Arthur

Alun Anderson

Alun Carter

Alun Cochrane

Alun Richards

Alvar Ellegard

Alyce Faye Cleese

Alyissa Johnson is a graphic designer and lettering artist who focuses on positivity and feminism. You can find Alyissa playing with her dog Luna or selling prints at a local pop-up shop in Kansas City, Missouri.

Alyissa Johnson

Alys Cummings is a writer and journalist based on the north-east coast. She is an Emerging Creative Associate with New Writing North and a member of their North East Novelists group. As a producer and director, Alys has made documentaries for BBC Panorama on subjects including domestic abuse, the world of the UK’s conspiracy theorists, and avoidable deaths in maternity care. Her most recent film was shortlisted for Scoop of the Year at the British Journalist awards. 
 
Murder Most Cryptic is her first novel, and won Pitch Perfect at the 2024 Bloody Scotland festival.

Alys Cummings

Alys Fowler

Born in Silchester, Hampshire, Alys Fowler had a rural childhood, growing up surrounded by animals in the countryside. She was influenced by her mother's gardening talents and, after leaving school in 1996 she studied at the Royal Horticultural Society, the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, and later the New York Botanical Gardens, returning to the UK to complete a masters at UCL in 2002. 
 
Alys spent some years presenting the long-running BBC series Gardeners' World and has since become a prominent horticultural journalist, writing a popular weekly column in the Guardian.

Alyson Walsh

ALYSSA DAY is an award-winning and New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of romantasy, mystery, and romance whose books have sold more than a million copies and been translated into many languages. She is also a mental health advocate who has lived with depression since she was a teenager. 
 
 
She’s an Ohio State grad and graduated summa cum laude from Capital University Law School and practiced as a trial lawyer for a decade, when she also served as an advocate for at-risk children. She lives in Florida with her Navy Guy husband, has two amazing kids, and rescues dogs. Especially pugs. So Many Pugs.

Alyssa Day

Alyssa Villaire is a writer of young adult fantasy. While she's based in Los Angeles, most of her stories harken back to the places where she grew up—from the woods of rural Indiana to the lakeshores of Wisconsin and Michigan. She has published short stories in Luna Station Quarterly and in an anthology titled Journeys to Uncharted Lands. When she’s not writing, Alyssa is probably eating spicy food, watching horror movies, or waiting in a virtual Ticketmaster line.

Alyssa Villaire

Alyssa Wees grew up writing stories starring her Beanie Babies, in between training in ballet and watching lots of Disney movies. She earned a BA in English from Creighton University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. She lives outside of Chicago with her family.

Alyssa Wees

Alzheimer's Society

Aman Sethi

Amanda Archer

Amanda Barry

Amanda Berriman was born in Germany and grew up in Edinburgh, reading books, playing music, writing stories and climbing hills. She works as a primary school teacher and lives on the edge of the Peak District with her husband, two children and dogs.

Amanda Berriman

Amanda Berry

Amanda Brunker

Amanda Doyle is a Founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. With Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach, she authored We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, the book being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’ Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ Amanda is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. She is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light. Amanda was Vice President and General Counsel of Together Rising, a non-profit organisation which distributed more than $55 million to women, families and children in crisis. Amanda practised law at a global corporate firm and as a Legal Fellow with International Justice Mission in Rwanda, securing land rights for women and accountability for child victims of sexual violence. Her academic and political work sits at the intersection of social, institutional and interpersonal systems of violence, oppression and liberation – laser-focused on practical justice in everyday lived experience.

Amanda Doyle

Amanda Eyre Ward

Amanda Eyre Ward is the critically acclaimed author of seven novels, including How to Be Lost, Close Your Eyes, The Same Sky, and The Nearness of You. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.

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Robertson Davies

The University of St John and the Holy Ghost (known affectionately as Spook) has a problem - and an opportunity. Strange, eccentric art patron and collector Francis Cornish has died and faculty members have been made executors of his complicated will. But in the realization of their duties, they find themselves drawn into Cornish's bizarre, secretive and mystical world. In this spellbinding trilogy a host of memorable characters - defrocked, mischief-making monks, half-mad professors, gypsies and musical geniuses - become entangled in a story that involves theft, perjury, scholarship, murder, love, and the squandering of plenty of cash.

The Cornish Trilogy

What's Bred in the Bone, The Rebel Angels, The Lyre of Orpheus

When Father Hobbes mysteriously dies at the high altar on Good Friday, Dr Jonathan Hullah - whose holistic ideas have earned him the soubriquet 'cunning man' - wants to know why. But it is only through looking back at his own long life that answers are forthcoming. He recalls the dazzling intellectual high jinks of his circle of friends, from the High Church homosexual Darcy Dwyer (an expert on the theory of sin) to the curious occurrence of the Coburg Social Parlour's Seventh Annual Bad Breath Contest. Compelling and hilarious, The Cunning Man is a profound exploration of what it means to be an actor in the divine comedy of life.

The Cunning Man

At two minutes to six on December 27th 1908 the lives of three people become inextricably bound together by the trajectory of a snowball. There is ten-year old Dunstable Ramsay, intended victim of the snowball, who, fatefully, ducks; his 'lifelong friend and enemy' Percy Boyd Staunton, angered by their recent quarrel, who hurls the snowball; and Paul Dempster, prematurely born when his pregnant mother is struck by Percy's icy missile. Tracing the rich and varied lives of these three individuals, The Deptford Trilogy lures the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history and magic in one of the most beguiling, clever and cunning trilogies ever written.

The Deptford Trilogy

Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders

In the small university town of Salterton, Ontario, dreams are quietly taking shape, or falling apart. There's the Salterton Little Theatre Company, in which professional director Valentine Rich is tormented by the amateurish efforts of his actors. The families Vambrace and Bridgetower almost go to war over a fake notice of engagement in the local paper. And a family fortune is lavished on an aspiring singer because there is no male heir to claim it. Tracing the lives and incidents of a small community in the middle of the last century, The Salterton Trilogy peels off the public veneer of geniality and respectability to reveal the private passions simmering beneath.

The Salterton Trilogy

Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice, A Mixture of Frailties

Ru Freeman

Since her days in the orphanage, Latha has been a companion and servant to Thara, a more fortunate girl her own age. But since her trip to the hill country when she caught her first glimpse of a rose, Latha has known she was destined for a better life. For now, she must watch silently as Thara receives all the luxuries Latha is denied, consoled only by the rose-scented soap stolen from the bathroom of her master's house. 
 
Years and miles away, Biso, a desperate young mother, flees from her murderous husband, taking her children with her to the remote hills. As Biso and Latha journey towards their separate fates, struggling to hold on to their independence, each will betray the people they love, changing the course of their lives for ever. 
 
A Disobedient Girl is an epic, heartbreaking novel about the linked destinies of two women, set against the backdrop of beautiful, politically turbulent Sri Lanka.

A Disobedient Girl

Colm Tóibín

'I imagined lamplight, shadows, soft voices, clothes put away, the low sound of late news on the radio. And I thought as I crossed the bridge at Baggot Street to face the last stretch of my own journey home that no matter what I had done, I had not done that.' 
 
In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family Colm Tóibín delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history. 
 
From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence each of Tóibín's stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained.

The Empty Family

Stories

James Robertson

And the Land Lay Still is nothing less than the story of a nation. James Robertson's breathtaking novel is a portrait of modern Scotland as seen through the eyes of natives and immigrants, journalists and politicians, drop-outs and spooks, all trying to make their way through a country in the throes of great and rapid change. It is a moving, sweeping story of family, friendship, struggle and hope - epic in every sense.

And the Land Lay Still

Rebecca Hunt

July, 1964. 
 
In bed at home in Kent, Winston Churchill is waking up. There's a visitor in the room, someone he hasn't seen for a while, a dark, mute bulk, watching him with tortured concentration. It's Mr Chartwell. 
 
In her terraced house in Battersea, Esther Hammerhans, young, vulnerable and alone, goes to answer the door to her new lodger. Through the glass she sees a vast silhouette the size of a mattress. It's Mr Chartwell. 
 
He is charismatic and dangerously seductive, and Esther and Winston Churchill are drawn together by his dark influence. But can they withstand Mr Chartwell's strange, powerful charms and strong hold? Can they even explain to anyone who or what he is? Or why he has come to visit? 
 
For Mr Chartwell is a huge, black dog. 
 
In this utterly original, moving, funny and exuberant novel, Rebecca Hunt explores how two unlikely lives collide as Mr Chartwell's motives are revealed to be far darker and deeper than they seem.

Mr Chartwell

Laila Lalami

When a young man is given the chance to rewrite his future, he doesn't realize the price he will pay for giving up his past... 
 
Casablanca's stinking alleys are the only home that nineteen-year-old Youssef El-Mekki has ever known. Raised by his mother in a one-room home, he dreams of escape - until, one day, the father he thought dead turns out to be very much alive, and whisks him from the slums into the luxurious life of Casablanca's elite. But as he leaves the poverty of his childhood behind him, he comes up against a starkly un-glittering reality...

Secret Son

Nicole Krauss

In New York a woman spends a night with a young Chilean poet before he departs, leaving her his desk. Later, he is arrested by Pinochet's secret police ... In north london, a man caring for his dying wife discovers a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret ... In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer reassembles his father's study, plundered by the Nazis. One item remains missing ... 
 
Spanning continets and decades, weaving an intricate web of its characters' lives, Great House tells a soaring story of love, loss and survival against the odds.

Great House

John Kennedy Toole

'This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians . . . don't make the mistake of bothering me.' 
 
Ignatius J. Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much unhinged, too. But is he bothered by this? 
 
No. For this misanthropic crusader against an America fallen into vice and ignorance has a mission: to rescue a naked female philosopher in distress. And he has a pirate costume and hot-dog cart to do it with . . .

A Confederacy of Dunces

‘Probably my favourite book of all time’ Billy Connolly

Françoise Sagan

'Late into the night we talked of love, of its complications. In my father's eyes they were imaginary. . . This conception of rapid, violent and passing love affairs appealed to my imagination. I was not at the age when fidelity is attractive. I knew very little about love.' 
 
The French Riviera: home to the Beautiful People. And none are more beautiful than Cécile, a precocious seventeen-year-old, and her father Raymond, a vivacious libertine. Charming, decadent and irresponsible, the golden-skinned duo are dedicated to a life of free love, fast cars and hedonistic pleasures. But then, one long, hot summer Raymond decides to marry, and Cécile and her lover Cyril feel compelled to take a hand in his amours, with tragic consequences. 
 
Bonjour Tristesse scandalized 1950s France with its portrayal of teenager terrible Cécile, a heroine who rejects conventional notions of love, marriage and responsibility to choose her own sexual freedom.

Bonjour Tristesse

Truman Capote

'What I've found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits...' 
 
Meet Holly Golightly - a free spirited, lop-sided romantic girl about town. With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, Holly is a style sensation wherever she goes. Her apartment rocks to Martini-soaked parties and she plays hostess to millionaires and gangsters alike. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate dream - to find a real life place like Tiffany's that makes her feel at home. 
 
Full of sharp wit and exuberant, larger-than-life characters which vividly capture the restless, madcap era of 1940s New York, Breakfast at Tiffany's will make you fall in love, perhaps for the first time, with a book.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Vladimir Nabokov

'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.' 
 
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants. 
 
Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?

Lolita

Jack Kerouac

'What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.' 
 
Sal Paradise, young and innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American Dream. 
 
A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel defined the new 'Beat' generation and became the bible of the counter culture.

On the Road

Aatish Taseer

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA AWARD FOR FIRST NOVEL 2010 
A controversial No.1 bestseller in India, The Temple-goers introduces us to a sensational new story-telling talent - and a shocking new side of Indian society. It tells the story of two young men from very different sides of the tracks: one cast adrift in a world of fashion parties, media moguls and designer labels, the other who reveals to him the city's hidden and squalid underbelly. But when a body is found floating in the canal and one of them is accused of the murder, some deeply unsettling truths begin to emerge, exposing their friendship and the dark and troubled heart of the city in which they live...

The Temple-goers

Marilyn Chin

'Oh Lord! Here come the Double Happiness Twins . . .' 
 
The Double Happiness Twins are Moonie and Mei Ling. The Double Happiness is the Chinese restaurant in California where they help out their meat-cleaver-wielding grandmother - when they're not causing uproar and mayhem. And Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen is the story of the sisters, their Grandma, a lot of animals and the topsy-turvy, surreal experience of being a pair of strangers in a very, very strange land indeed.

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen

A Manifesto in 41 Tales

Angela Carter

<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>

'Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.' 
 
Angela Carter's playful and subversive retellings of Charles Perrault's classic fairy tales conjure up a world of resourceful women, black-hearted villains, wily animals and incredible transformations. In these seven stories, bristling with frank, earthy humour and gothic imagination, nothing is as it seems. 
 
This book includes Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, Cinderella: or, The Glass Slipper, Ricky with the Tuft and The Foolish Wishes.

Bluebeard

Malcolm Lowry

'Staring out at the river his agony was like a great lidless eye' 
 
In this stark, compelling and greatly autobiographical novella, Malcolm Lowry tells the story of Bill Plantagenet, a piano player and ex-sailor who has lost his band and his mind drinking in New York. As Plantagenet commits himself to a Psychiatric hospital to suffer his recovery, Lowry writes with eloquent ferocity on the delusions of madness, and the true meaning of sanity.

Lunar Caustic

Eudora Welty

'"Watch out for the mosquitoes," they called to one another, lyrically because warning wasn't any use anyway, as they walked out of their kimonos and dropped them like the petals of one big scattered flower on the bank behind them, and exposing themselves felt in a hundred places at once the little pangs.' 
 
Moon Lake is the story of a summer camp in Mississippi, a surly lifeguard, a rebellious orphan girl, and the fateful day when they learn the secrets of life and death. Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty's extraordinary short story is a lushly atmospheric and acutely observed portrayal of the strange, surreal time between childhood and adulthood.

Moon Lake

Robert Coover

'Paul stepped off the curb and got hit by a truck. He didn't know what it was that hit him at first, but now, here on his back, under the truck, there could be no doubt.' 
 
One of 50 original and exciting books of short stories, publishing in February to celebrate half a century of Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
This book contains Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady, The Babysitter, and A Pedestrian Accident.

Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady

Donald Barthelme

'I said that although hanging Colby was almost certainly against the law, we had a perfect moral right to do so because he was our friend, belonged to us in various important senses, and he had after all gone too far.' 
 
Donald Barthelme is a puckish player with language, a writer of short but endlessly rewarding comic gems, a thinker and an experimenter. In these nine short stories, whether writing about a hairy, donkeyish king or a touching, private gesture of city-sized proportions, his is a surreal, deadpan genius. 
 
This book includes Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, The Glass Mountain, I Bought a Little City, The Palace at Four A.M., Chablis, The School, Margins, Game and The Balloon.

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

Frank O'Connor

'Father,' I said, feeling I might as well get it over while I had him in a good humour, 'I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother.' 
 
Praised as Ireland's Chekhov, Frank O'Connor was a modern master of the short story. From an amateur brass band divided by partisanship to English soldiers who befriend their Irish captors, and from a child's comic confession to the end of a small-town friendship, these four humorous and tragic stories refract universal truths through the prism of 20th-century Ireland. 
 
This book contains The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland, Guests of the Nation, A Story by Maupassant, and First Confession.

The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland

Paul Bowles

'And then one day a solitary figure appeared, moving toward them across the lifeless plain from the west.One man on a camel... ' 
 
Paul Bowles's unforgettable short stories portray people facing hostile environments and the innate savagery of humanity. These three unbearably tense tales from sun-drenched and brutal climes tell of vengeance, abandonment, violence and cruelty enjoyed and suffered, in a surreal realm of horror. 
 
This book includes The Delicate Prey, A Distant Episode and The Circular Ruins.

The Delicate Prey

Margaret Drabble

'Her feelings for the child redeemed her from bitterness, and shed some light on the dark industrial terraces and the waste lands of the city's rubble.' 
 
One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation, Margaret Drabble is an unmatched observer of postwar English lives, portraying social change, sexual liberation, landscape, class and the messy complications of human relationships with intricacy and honesty. In these two stories of lives colliding, a mother buying a birthday gift has her dreams destroyed, and a honeymoon leads to an unexpected epiphany. 
 
This book contains The Gifts of War and Hassan's Tower.

The Gifts of War

Paul Theroux

'Nothing on the shelf has quite prepared the reader for My Secret History . . . Parent saunters into the book aged fifteen, shouldering a .22 Mossberg rifle as earlier, more innocent American heroes used to tote a fishing pole. In his pocket is a paperback translation of Dante's Inferno . . . He is a creature of naked and unquenchable ego, greedy for sex, money, experience, another life' Jonathan Raban, Observer

My Secret History

A Novel

'No one ever sees me write. One of the triumphs of fiction is that it is created in the dark. It leaves my house in a plain wrapper, with no bloodstains. Unlike me, my stories are whole and indestructible.'  Theroux's canvas stretches from London to South-East Asia, from Boston to Paris, from Africa to Eastern Europe and from Moscow to the tropics in this vibrant collection. Full of suspense and the unexpected, the stories delve into the worlds of a vast spectrum of characters and display throughout a flair that shows Theroux to be a master of the form.

The Collected Stories

World's End; Sinning with Annie; Jungle Bells; the Consul's File; the London Embassy;

David Vann

On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, a marriage is unravelling. 
 
Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, and Irene, haunted by a tragedy in her past, are trying to rebuild their life together. Following the outline of Gary's old dream, they're hauling logs out to Caribou Island in good weather and in terrible storms, in sickness and in health, to patch together the kind of cabin that drew them to Alaska in the first place. 
 
Across the water on the mainland, Irene and Gary's grown daughter, Rhoda is starting her own life. She fantasizes about the perfect wedding day, whilst her betrothed, Jim the dentist, wonders about the possibility of an altogether different future. 
 
From the author of the massively-acclaimed Legend of a Suicide, comes a devastating novel about a marriage, a couple blighted by past shadows and the weight of expectation, of themselves and of each other. Brilliantly drawn and fiercely honest in its depiction of love and disappointment, David Vann's first novel confirms him as one of America's most dazzling writers of fiction.

Caribou Island

Olga Grushin

Anna is on her way home from work on a cold winter's day when she sees a crowd queuing at a kiosk. Though a queue is not an unusual sight in a Russian city, this appears different. There's a rumour that famous exiled composer Selinksy is returning to conduct his last symphony for one night only - and this kiosk is selling tickets. 
 
The acquisition of tickets to this concert becomes an obsession in Anna's small family. Her husband, a tuba player in a state band, sees the ticket as a way of embarking on an illicit affair. Their son thinks going to the concert will help him flee to the West on Selinksy's coattails. And Anna? She secretly hopes the ticket will make her husband love her again. 
 
The Concert Ticket is a heartbreaking novel about the secret, profound longings at the heart of a family struggling in a time of great repression.

The Concert Ticket

Joshua Ferris

In an America gone awry with strange weather, New York lawyer Tim Farnsworth suffers a peculiar affliction: the inability to stop walking. While his wife, Jane, struggles to keep their family together in the face of the unfathomable, Tim alone must battle to survive pitiless surroundings, encounters with hostile strangers, and the unrelenting demands of his own body. These challenges force Tim to ask life's most pressing questions, which he answers in a final return on foot across country to reunite with his wife and daughter. 
 
Stripped of all defences, and the sense of hope that lies at the very heart of the American dream, Farnsworth is compelled to confront the terrifying reality of what it is to be a human being.

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