Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Saul Bellow

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Expecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Dangling Man is his journal, a wonderful account of his restless wanderings through Chicago's streets, his musings on the past, his psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him, and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.

Dangling Man

Georges Bataille

L'Abbé C is a shocking, unnerving narrative about the intense and terrifying relationship between twin brothers. Charles is a modern libertine, dedicated to vice and depravity, while Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed 'l'Abbé'. When the sexually wild Eponine intrudes upon their suffocating relationship, anguish, delirium, and death ensue. Charged with sensuality and a heightened, dreamlike atmosphere, this novel portrays the darkest and most profound aspects of human experience.

L'Abbé C

John Steinbeck

Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel, follows the interwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of indentity; the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence.

East of Eden

Penguin Modern Classics

John Mortimer

When Simeon Simcox, a socialist clergyman, leaves his entire fortune not to his family but to the ruthless, social-climbing Tory MP Leslie Titmuss, the Rector's two sons react in very different ways. Henry, novelist and former 'angry young man' turned grumpy old reactionary, decides to fight the will and prove their father was insane. Younger brother Fred, a mild-mannered country doctor, takes a different approach, quietly digging in Simeon's past, only to uncover an entirely unexpected explanation for the legacy. 
 
An exquisitely drawn saga of ancient rivalries and class struggles, featuring a glorious cast of characters, Paradise Postponed is a delicious portrait of English country life by a master satirist.

Paradise Postponed

Penelope Lively

Claudia Hampton, a beautiful, famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But, as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work: 'a history of the world ... and in the process, my own'.  Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There is Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt. Penelope Lively's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves an exquisite mesh of memories, flashbacks and shifting voices, in a haunting story of loss and desire.

Moon Tiger

James Joyce

Dubliners, Joyce's first major work and written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. From 'The Sisters', a vivid portrait of childhood faith and guilt, to 'Araby', a timeless evocation of the inexplicable yearnings of adolescence, to 'The Dead', in which Gabriel Conroy is gradually brought to a painful epiphany regarding the nature of his existence, Joyce draws a realistic and memorable cast of Dubliners together in an powerful exploration of overarching themes. Writing of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, he creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.

Dubliners

Penguin Classics

The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist's 'eternal imagination'. Both an insight into Joyce's life and childhood, and a unique work of modernist fiction, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a novel of sexual awakening, religious rebellion and the essential search for voice and meaning that every nascent artist must face in order to fully come into themselves.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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

Jack Kerouac

It's 1948, and when ten-year-old Pictorial Review Jackson's guardian dies, his older brother Slim appears. Together, the two hitch and bum from North Carolina to New York City, observing the strange lifestyles of people they encounter.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Two small boys stand on a rubbish heap and look into the future. One boy is excited, he is beginning school; the other, his brother, is an apprentice carpenter. Together, they will serve their country – the teacher and the craftsman. 
 
But this is colonial Kenya and times are against them. In the forests, the Mau Mau are waging war against the white government, and the two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau, and the rest of their family, need to decide where their loyalties lie. For the practical man, the choice is simple, but for Njoroge, the scholar, the dream of progress through learning is a hard one to give up. 
 
The debut novel from a giant of African literature, Ngugi wa Thiong'o’s powerful story about the tragic effects of colonialism on the lives of ordinary people continues to resonate strongly today.

Weep Not, Child

Yukio Mishima

The Osugi family have come to a realization. Each of them hails from a different planet. Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. Already seen as oddballs in their small Japanese town in the 1960s, this extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together; they climb mountains to wait for UFOs, study at home together and regard their human neighbours with a kindly benevolence. 
 
But Father, Juichiro, is worried about the bomb. He writes letters to Khrushchev, trying to warn everyone he can of the terrible threat. After all, humans may be terribly flawed, but aren't they worth saving? He sends out a coded message in the newspaper to find other aliens. But there are other extra-terrestrials out there, ones who do not look so kindly on the flaws and foibles of humans. And a charming young man, who claims to be from Venus too, tempts daughter Akiko away from the family . . .

Beautiful Star

Hans Fallada

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ...

Alone in Berlin

Evelyn Waugh

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

Brideshead Revisited

The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Paul Bowles

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

Yasunari Kawabata

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two half sisters - born to the same father but different mothers - struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time, while Momoko, their father's first child - haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together - seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan's greatest writers.

The Rainbow

James Baldwin

We are in Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Lao She

Mr Ma and his son Ma Wei run an antiques shop nestled in a quiet street by St Paul's Cathedral in London, where, far from their native Peking, they struggle to navigate the bustling pavements and myriad social conventions of 1920s English society. The Mas must negotiate love, money, misunderstandings and the London smog, aided and hindered by a cast of brilliantly drawn characters: their well-meaning landlady Mrs Weddeburn, her carefree daughter Mary, old China hand Reverend Ely and his formidable wife. 
 
Both a bitingly funny satire of Sino-British relations, and an emotionally powerful story of the experience of Chinese immigrants to the United Kingdom at the turn of the twentieth century, Mr Ma and Son is a compelling, witty novel from one of China's most celebrated writers.

Mr Ma and Son

Hubert Selby Jr.

Harry White is the man other men want to be: admired by his peers, talented, rich, and desired by countless women. His steady rise to a position of unprecedented influence in a New York investment firm seems inevitable to those who know him, and on the way he acquires a beautiful wife and children. But with every achievement the desire to destroy what is his grows stronger. A demon within drives him to sexual excess, petty crime and eventually murder. 
 
The Demon explores the dark side of a man's ambitions with unflinching determination. Harry White's story is a gripping twentieth-century tragedy.

The Demon

Mario Benedetti

They met when they were teenagers. Quiet, poor, perhaps even a little dull, Miguel fell for languid Alicia during their long walks back from school. Then Lucas arrived and changed everything, entrancing Alicia with his confident bohemian charm. Miguel could not compete. But he stuck around and, against all the odds, was the one Alicia ended up marrying. 
 
Now, eleven years later, their marriage has begun to fray, and Alicia sets out to see Lucas again. Yet gnawing at each member of the ménage a trois is the knowledge that, somewhere along the line, something has gone badly awry. 
 
In a final heady whirl of sex and obsession, treachery and blame, they all struggle to ascertain: who among them is to blame?

Who Among Us?

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

Kingsley Amis

At Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage in the English countryside, five elderly people live together in rancorous disharmony. Adela Bastable bosses the house, as her brother Bernard passes his days thinking up malicious schemes against the baby-talking Marigold and secret drinker Shorty, while kindly George lies bedridden upstairs. The mismatched quintet keep their spirits alive by bickering and waiting for grandchildren to visit at Christmas. But the festive season does not herald goodwill to all at Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage. Disaster and chaos, it seems, are just around the corner ... 
 
Told with Amis's piercing wit and humanity, Ending Up (1974) is a wickedly funny black comedy of the indignities of old age.

Ending Up

Willa Cather

Jim and Ántonia meets as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself to her farm and family. As the years roll by, Jim will come to view Ántonia as the embodiment of the prairie itself - tough, spirited and enduring, despite the hardness and loneliness of pioneer life. Willa Cather's beautiful novel is a celebration of the Nebraskan prairie she loved she much, and a powerful depiction of a pivotal era in the making of America.

My Ántonia

Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, is his masterpiece of the night, as Ulysses is of the day. Supreme linguistic virtuosity conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream. Joyce undermines traditional storytelling and all official forms of English and confronts the different kinds of betrayal – cultural, political and sexual – that he saw at the heart of Irish history. Dazzlingly inventive, with passages of great lyrical beauty and humour, Finnegans Wake remains one of the most remarkable works of the twentieth century.

Finnegans Wake

James Salter

Nedra and Viri are a married couple whose favoured life is centred around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But fine cracks are beginning to spread through the shimmering surface of their life - flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, tender and resonant, Light Years is an exquisite novel of lost lives and the elusiveness of happiness.

Light Years

Peter Handke

We join the young Austrian teenager Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his older brother Gregor, whom he never knew. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian-German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. To piece together an image of his brother, he pours over Gregor's notebook and marked dictionary. In the latter, he discovers new words which translate into timeless images of the earth and its people. Filip finds he can associate himself with this discovery. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world around him.

Repetition

Joanne Greenberg

Two young deaf people, Abel and Janice, leave their punitive school and begin their life as a married couple &lsquo;Outside&rsquo; &ndash; in the unwelcoming world of the hearing. A misunderstanding about the payment plan on a car kickstarts years of debt, hard labour and ostracization; but they find solace and expression in the richness of Sign, in their hard-won independence and in the birth of their daughter Margaret. 
 
First published in 1970, only a decade after ASL&rsquo;s formal recognition as a language, In This Sign is a rare, compassionate portrait of the deaf community and a moving family saga that spans the twentieth century. 
 
With an introduction by Sara Novic and a new afterword by the author.

In This Sign

'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it' 
 
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, we see the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the world of the theatre lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that seems poised on the brink of racial war. In this tender, angry 1968 novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters: a man struggling to become himself.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Oh Jung-hee

In this emblematic selection of her stories, Oh Jung-hee probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by desertion, psychosis, and death. In ‘Chinatown’ a young girl living on the edge of the city’s Chinese community comes of age among mundane violences, collisions with adult sexuality and the American occupation; in ‘The Garden Party’ a woman grapples with her conflicting identities of wife, mother and writer at an alcohol-fuelled gathering. Throughout a career spanning six decades, Oh Jung-hee has drawn comparisons to Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates, and is assuredly a trailblazing writer.

Chinatown

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

Gun-Britt Sundström

‘I want to have him, I really do. I just don’t want him to have me.’ 
 
Martina and Gustav, students in 1970s Stockholm, meet and fall immediately into coupledom. But what is coupledom? A route to marriage? A declaration of co-dependency? A new dimension of commitment and responsibility? A sexual confrontation? Or is it a habit that an intelligent person must consider breaking? Martina and Gustav discuss their relationship endlessly, between themselves and with others, as they try to make it work. 
 
Engagement, set during a time of social change and political upheaval, sees Martina trying to engage with the world on her own terms. Unwilling to marry, she finds herself in a state of permanent engagement while her friends settle down to marriage and children; uncertain of the world’s future, she engages with demos, sit-ins and philosophy seminars in her quest for a new blueprint for joy. First published in 1976, when it was heralded as an instant classic, Engagement remains as relevant, hilarious and heartbreaking today.

Engagement

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