About 	 Lucy Rycroft: Lucy is the founder of The Hope-Filled Family, a ministry encouraging Christian parents, carers and all those investing in the younger generation. She is the author of several books for adults and children, including Busy Family Devotional and the Mighty Girl, Mighty God series. She is mum to four children ages 11 to 16, who arrived by birth and adoption, and is married to Al, a church leader in York, England.

	 Lucy Rycroft

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A A Gill

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

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

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

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

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

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

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

A K Benjamin

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

A L Berridge

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

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

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

A S Webb

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

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

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

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

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

A. C. Grayling

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

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

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Len Deighton

<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 high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped. A secret British intelligence agency must find out why. But as the quarry is pursued from grimy Soho to the other side of the world, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister. With its sardonic, cool, working-class hero, Len Deighton's sensational debut The Ipcress File rewrote the spy thriller and became the defining novel of 1960's London.

The Ipcress File

Tove Ditlevsen

Life in Tove's neighbourhood in Copenhagen is confusing and difficult: her father can't find work, her mother is angry and remote, and Tove herself sometimes thinks she's been exchanged at birth. But 'inside of me long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul' and she soon realizes that she has a vocation, something unknowable and secret within, and that if she can only find the right words, she will one day succeed in forging a true life of her own - somewhere beyond the narrow streets of her childhood. 
 
The first volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Childhood captures the triumphs and tragedies of girlhood with intense vividness and a poet's clarity of vision.

Childhood

Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet and wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, but she has no idea of the struggles that lie ahead - love affairs, an unwanted pregnancy, physical pain and crippling opioid addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living life freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms. 
 
The final volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy and perhaps her masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.

Dependency

Unable to stay on to high school, Tove starts her first job (which lasts only one day) and soon embarks on a varied and chequered career: as au pair, cleaner, stock-room assistant and office worker. But Tove is hungry, for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As she navigates exploitative bosses, uninspiring boyfriends and a Nazi landlady, she struggles to keep her poetic vocation in sight - until she finally realizes the 'miracle' that she has always dreamed of. 
 
The second volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Youth is a sensitive, often funny and almost painfully truthful portrayal of adolescence.

Youth

D. H. Lawrence

For D. H. Lawrence the novel was the pinnacle, 'the one bright book of life', yet his non-fiction shows him at his most freewheeling and playful. This is a selection of his brilliantly varied essays, on subjects including art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and the narcissism of photographing ourselves. Arranged chronologically to illuminate the patterns of Lawrence's thought over time, and including many little-known pieces, they reveal a writer of enduring freshness and force.

Life with a Capital L

Essays Chosen and Introduced by Geoff Dyer

Patrizia Cavalli

Two hours ago I fell in love 
and trembled, and tremble still, 
and haven't a clue whom I should tell. 
 
Any hall she reads her poetry in is invariably filled to the gills. In Italy, Patrizia Cavalli is as beloved as Wislawa Szymborska is in Poland, and if Italy were Japan she'd be designated a national treasure. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said of Cavalli that she has written 'the most intensely ethical poetry in Italian literature of the 20th century'. One could add that it is, easily, also the most sensual and comical. Though Cavalli has been widely translated into German, French, and Spanish, she remains little known in Britain; My Poems Won't Change the World is the first substantial gathering of translations of her work into the English language. 
 
The book is made up of poems from Cavalli's collections published by Einaudi from 1974 to 2006, here translated by an illustrious group of poets including Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Galassi and Gini Alhadeff. Thoughtful, sly and full of life, these are poems of the self, the body, pasta, cats, the city traversed on foot or by car, and - always, and above all - love.

My Poems Won't Change the World

Anna Kavan

The world is threatened by encroaching ice, creeping down day by day from the polar ice caps. The imminent catastrophe has thrown the world's governments into chaos, and no one knows whether the disaster has an environmental or nuclear cause, or how soon the end will come. One man pursues his sylph-like, silver-haired ex-fiancée ('the girl') as she flees from country to country, away from her husband; away from the malevolent 'warden' of one of the proto-territories that have sprung up as traditional societies crumble; away from him.

George Orwell

'England is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family.' 
 
'England Your England' is one of the most compelling and insightful portraits of the nation ever written. Shot through with Orwell's deeply felt sense of patriotism and love for his homeland, the essay is at the same time unfailingly clear-eyed about the nation's failings: entrenched social inequality, a dishonest press and a class system that only works for those at the top. Written during the Second World War, as the bombs were falling on England, the essay today speaks to the nation's current moment of crisis just as urgently as it did in Orwell's own time. It is a crucial read for anyone who wants to understand who we are, and where we've come from.

England Your England

Georges Simenon

A new translation of George Simenon's taut, devastating psychological novel set in American suburbia. The inspiration for the new play by award-winning playwright David Hare. 
 
'I had begun, God knows why, tearing a corner off of everyday truth, begun seeing myself in another kind of mirror, and now the whole of the old, more or less comfortable truth was falling to pieces' 
 
Confident and successful, New York advertising executive Ray Sanders takes what he wants from life. When he goes missing in a snow storm in Connecticut one evening, his closest friend begins to reassess his loyalties, gambling Ray's fate and his own future. 
 
'The romans durs are extraordinary: tough, bleak, offhandedly violent, suffused with guilt and bitterness, redolent of place . . . utterly unsentimental, frightening in the pitilessness of their gaze, yet wonderfully entertaining' John Banville 
 
'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian 
 
'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independen

The Hand

John le Carré

A box set of John le Carré's exceptional and thrilling first five novels, collected together for the first time: 
 
Call for the Dead 
A Murder of Quality 
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 
The Looking Glass War 
A Small Town in Germany

John le Carré, Novels (Box Set)

Volume 1

Stefan Zweig

The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Impatience of the Heart, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings. 
 
Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host's lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.

Impatience of the Heart

'The father of contemporary European detective fiction' Ann Cleeves 
 
An omnibus edition containing four titles featuring Inspector Maigret: The Saint-Fiacre Affair (where Maigret goes back to the place of his birth), The Misty Harbour (where Maigret is left tied up on a rainy quayside all night), Maigret (where Maigret comes back from retirement) and The Judge's House (where Maigret is exiled to a mussel farming community). 
 
Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels. 
 
'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray 
 
'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian 
 
'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent

Inspector Maigret Omnibus 2

Emmanuel Carrère

Limonov is not a fictional character, but he could have been. He's lived a hundred lives. He was a hoodlum in Ukraine, an idol of the Soviet underground, punk-poet and valet to a billionaire in Manhattan, fashion writer in Paris, lost soldier in the Balkans, and now, in the chaos after the fall of communism a charismatic party leader of a gang of political desperados.

Limonov

A new translation of Simenon's gripping novel about lives transformed by deceit and the destructive power of lust. 
 
It was all real: himself, the room, Andrée still lying on the ravaged bed. 
 
For Tony and Andrée, there are no rules when they meet in the blue room at the Hôtel des Voyageurs. Their adulterous affair is intoxicating, passionate - and dangerous. Soon it turns into a nightmare from which there can be no escape. Simenon's stylish and sensual psychological thriller weaves a story of cruelty, reckless lust and relentless guilt. 
 
'A wondrous achievement, brief, inexorable, pared to, and agonisingly close to, the bone, and utterly compelling; in short, a true and luminous work of art.' John Banville 
 
'A double crime, a dark provincial scandal, and a dreadful sort of triumph . . . presented with shattering power' San Francisco Chronicle 
 
'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian 
 
'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent

The Blue Room

Introducing Inspector Maigret, the literary character behind the major ITV drama starring Rowan Atkinson 
 
The first four titles from the new Penguin Inspector Maigret series: Pietr the Latvian, The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, The Carter of La Providence and The Grand Banks Cafe. 
 
Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels in new translations. 
 
'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray 
 
'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian 
 
'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent

Inspector Maigret Omnibus 1

Pietr the Latvian, The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, The Carter of 'La Providence', The Grand Banks Café

Robert Graves

"There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As Blighty, Great Britain was a quiet, easy place to get back to out of the present foreign misery, but as a nation it was nothing." 
 
This is the original version of Robert Graves's intense memoir of the First World War, restoring this raw, emotionally truthful, darkly comic work to the way it was first written, by a young man still reeling from the trenches. 
 
 'We see the dark heart of the book even more clearly, and hear it beating even more loudly, in this original edition than we do in the comparatively careful and considered terms of the later one' Andrew Motion 
 
 
'One of the most candid self-portraits, warts and all, ever painted' TLS

Good-bye to All That

An Autobiography

Paul Bowles

A linguistic professor arrives in Ain Tadouirt seeking to study the local dialects. Confident, condescending and culturally aloof, he is led that night to a quarry and left there. He begins to descend. Met with horror upon horror as his journey continues, he is stripped of dignity, humanity and worth. In this dark short story, language takes a central role as Paul Bowles vividly consigns the Professor to his fate amidst evocative smells, haunting sights and lurking sensations. Incisive and commanding, it is an exploration of the definition of identities, cultural differences and the shifting natures of cultural supremacy.

A Distant Episode

Kingsley Amis

Boarding the train at Euston, Alec begins the journey to his former lover's funeral. Theirs was an affair acknowledged and so permanent that they called themselves 'the Trio', but now only two of them remain. Returning, 'Uncle Alec' will be welcomed by his lover's children, her husband, Jim, and the suburban world that he left behind. As memories are rehashed and acquaintances re-met, this is a short tale of regret, old age and the lies that we tell ourselves. Through conversations, half-hung sentences and painful allusions, Kingsley Amis contemplates the purpose of love, the myriad ways of loving, and the complex web of relationships and distortions that make up our humanity.

All the Blood Within Me

Varlam Shalamov

Narrated in the first person, this short story is one episode in the life of a Russian labour-camp inmate. Written by Varlam Shalamov after his own experiences at a gulag, it describes the apathy of prisoners as they steadily approach death, the assuredness of betrayal and duplicity, and the constant craving for material satisfaction to lessen the empty, scorched feeling inside. When an old acquaintance lays out an escape plan, that satisfaction is offered in the form of condensed milk: a sweet, delicious extravagance - a small element of joy in the midst of impending death.

Condensed Milk

John Updike

John Updike's fictional antihero, Henry Bech, could not be more different from his creator. A self-confessed composite of Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger, he cannot help but flatter himself. In this 'foreword' Updike presents us with a conceited and satirical manifestation of what it means to be an American and a writer.

Foreword

Donald Barthelme

"I Bought a Little City [is] a take on the role that a writer has in writing a story - playing god, in a certain way." Donald Antrim, novelist. 
 'Got a little city, ain't it pretty'. 
 Galveston, Texas, has been bought. It suits its new owner just fine. So he starts to change it. He creates a new residential area in the shape of a Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle, shoots six thousand dogs, and reminds those who complain that he controls the jail, the police and the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. But, playing God has its limitations, which he soon discovers when he starts to covet Sam Hong's wife. With Donald Barthelme's unmistakeable ability to blend absurdity and the recognisable details of ordinary life, this is an uncanny tale about urban planning, capitalism and God.

I Bought a Little City

John Steinbeck

Roark is a bad man. His pig is a bad pig. They match in devilish temperament and violent deeds. Roark laughs at a drowned monk; his pig eats its own young and turns a boar sterile. As a spiteful tithe, the pig is given to the local monastery. The pig becomes a Christian. The pig is Saint Katy the Virgin. Fantastical and farcical, this short story parodies religious tropes and stereotypes. With a lively imagination and piercing wit, John Steinbeck delivers an absurd tale that amuses and entertains whilst asking powerful, revealing questions.

Saint Katy the Virgin

Merzlakov, once a robust stable-hand, now fights hunger, pain and exhaustion after a year and a half at a labour camp. An enormous man given little food, he sees the larger men dying first, their bodies conquered by starvation. In his desperation for survival, he begins a yearlong struggle of pain and injury. It ends with the inscrutable and punctilious Dr Peter Ivanovich. In a curious mix of empathy and haunting objectivity, this short story describes a snapshot of life in a Russian labour-camp. Written after Varlam Shalamov's own experiences at a gulag, it is one episode in the many that make up Kolyma Tales.

Shock Therapy

Vladimir Nabokov

'Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull'. With his senses wide open, Victor wanders the streets. He meets Nina. Again. For fifteen years, their fleeting, chance encounters have made Nina a faint but constant presence in the margins of his life. As they happen upon one another once again, his mind wanders back into the past and relives each brief memory: their kiss in Russia, when she met his wife, when he met her husband, their affair in Paris. Each time she captivated him, each time she seemed to almost forget him, each time he noticed a lurking sense of apprehension that began to grow.

Spring in Fialta

Robert Coover

'She arrives at 7.40, ten minutes late...' She babysits for Mr and Mrs Tucker. She has left a boyfriend alone for the evening. From this seemingly simple start Robert Coover masterfully explores the subtle barrier between 'reality' and thought. As the babysitter triggers the men's sexual fantasies, their erotic imaginations twist into alternative narratives simultaneously experienced by the reader: she does or does not take a bath; she does or does not invite her boyfriend over; she does or does not get caught unawares by Mr Tucker. In a profusion of happenings and imaginings, Coover layers moment upon moment, narrative upon narrative, to shatter the timeline of one evening into a multiplicity of events - contradictory, simultaneous, but all equally 'real'.

The Babysitter

Elisa Allen is tending her chrysanthemums. Strong, with a handsome face she skilfully and proudly cultivates the best in the valley. Tonight, her husband is taking her to town. While she works, a squeak of heels and a plod of hoofs bring a curious vehicle, curiously drawn: a tradesman looking for directions and a job. He is met with curt replies and a hardened resistance. Then he notices her chrysanthemums. 
 With his characteristic insight and evocative language, John Steinbeck creates a short story of a brief but striking encounter. Set in Salinas Valley, where he grew up, it dissects the myriad complexities of humanity, society and hidden longings.

The Chrysanthemums

In the Circular Valley lives a spirit, a mute presence: Atlajala. Thirsting for sensation, this spirit enters a moth, a panther, an eel, and feels what they feel - the cool darkness of water, the pleasure of a kill. Centuries old and indifferent to time, it enters man and discovers obsession for the first time. Yearning to be incarnate as man, it enters priests, soldiers and bandits. When an adulterous couple arrives in the valley, it slips into a woman. Finally, it feels complete. But as it possesses her, she grows restless and extreme, and her affair takes a darker, more sinister turn.

The Circular Valley

After multiple postings in various armies, Nikolay Galatov, an itinerant soldier, is living in Berlin. Every now and then he remembers Olga Kind, a woman he left behind in St. Petersburg seven years ago. He decides to go and find her. 
 
Filled with teasing plot lines, misrepresentations and narrative traps, The Doorbell is an exploration of character, interaction and awkward suspense. Once again examining the themes of loss, separation and exile, Vladimir Nabokov weaves a tale of unexpected turnings and non-happenings, playing with the conventions of traditional, predictable fiction.

The Doorbell

A glass mountain sits in the middle of a city and at the top sits a 'beautiful, enchanted symbol'. Seeking to disenchant it, the narrator must climb the mountain. Confronted by the jeers of acquaintances, the bodies of previous climbers and the claws of a guarding eagle he, slowly, begins to ascend. In true postmodernist form, subject and purpose collide as Donald Barthelme uses one-hundred fragmented statements to destabilise a symbol of his own - literature's conventional forms and practices. With a quest, a princess and an array of knights, Barthelme subverts that most traditional of genres, the fairy-tale; irony, absurdity, and playful self-reflexivity are the champions of this short story.

The Glass Mountain

Shirley Jackson

At a post-war suburban party, a man retreats to the kitchen and unexpectedly meets a teenage girl. There is the usual coffee and small talk, but then the conversation takes a startling turn. He resists it with condescending statements, but she calmly persists, and visions of a post-apocalyptic America follow one after another - destruction and chaos coolly, but vividly, described by her youthful voice. 
Shirley Jackson's ability to create a sense of unease is masterfully displayed in this commonplace but haunting exchange. Blending horror with the ordinary, it disrupts the comfort of the familiar and introduces a lurking disquiet that endures well beyond the close of the conversation.

The Intoxicated

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

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

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

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

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

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