Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

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Alice Munro

When Queenie elopes with a recently widowed neighbour her family are uniformly shocked, and a window on adult life and relationships is opened for her step-sister. A summertime stay with the newlyweds in Toronto yields further insight into the lives of couples, but also causes confusion. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Queenie (Storycuts)

Wesley Stace

By George is the utterly original story of a flawed but formidable family - and of two very different boys. One is an eleven-year-old schoolboy, the other a ventriloquist's dummy. With no voice of his own but plenty to say, the dummy tells his life story; from his humble beginnings in the 1930s to his rise in fame as force's favourite during the war and the horrible secret he's been made to keep. 
 
Years later, his self-possessed but vulnerable namesake finds himself packed off to boarding school, far from his mother Frankie, dynamic actress and Principal Boy; his grandma Queenie, children's party entertainer extraordinaire; and his bed-ridden but redoubtable great-grandmother. 
 
While the dummy lies dusty, silent and forgotten, his young counterpart sets out to learn about his dead grandfather's past as a world-famous ventriloquist, his magical powers and their family's curious history.

By George

Matthew Baylis

Alastair Strange is having trouble.  His girlfriend Martha, tired of late night telly and takeaway pizzas, has reinvented herself as the real estate princess of Putney. His dream job has turned into a nightmare and his Dad's been arrested for burglary.  Just when things couldn't get worse, along comes Alastair's old friend, society It-girl Tara, with a tantalising job offer. Alastair finds himself teaching media studies in an Ealing school.  A cushy number, he thinks, but that's before Tara calls the favour in- The derelict Ealing Studios are next to the school - their presence haunts Alastair and acts as a continual motif for his story, combining the quirky wit and eccentricity of the Ealing films with an eye for the absurdities of modern urban life.  Flat-sharing with the impossible Davenport, dealing with mysterious girls on the bus and disastrous blind dates, it would seem that there is, perhaps, one last comedy left in Ealing.

The Last Ealing Comedy

Donald Ray Pollock

In 'Hair's Fate', when Daniel's father chops off his hair with a kitchen knife for meddling with his younger sister's doll, he decides to leave home. He hitches a ride with a trucker by the name of Cowboy Roy who plies him with liquor and pills, before suggesting a disquieting solution for Daniel's hair problem. 
 
In 'Knockemstiff', Hank has been sweet on Tina Elliot for some time. When he hears that she's planning on lighting out for Texas with her boyfriend, he allows himself to get a little pensive-even if it makes a long day's work at the store feel that little bit longer. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Hair's Fate / Knockemstiff (Storycuts)

Norman Longmate

In a brilliantly imaginative blend of military, social and diplomatic history, Norman Longmate retells our island story from the perspective of its defenders, in a narrative which stretches from the Celtic tribes who unsuccessfully fought against Ceasar to the great seabourne defence against the Armada of Philip of Spain. 
 
He has gone back to the original sources and investigated the original battlegrounds and weak spots in Britain's defences. But the real strength of his book is its seamless narrative of history, which uncovers the truth behind the legends. A mass of solidly researched fact, not readily found elsewhere, is seasoned with lively, humorous and occassionally gruesome anecdote. 
 
The result, providing at once an invaluable sourcebook for the specialist and an enthralling narrative for the general reader, is by far the most comprehensive and accessible history of England versus invasion ever published.

Defending The Island

From Caesar to the Armada

Susan Coolidge

'I mean to do something grand. I don't know what, yet; but when I'm grown up I shall find out' 
 
Katy Carr is the longest girl that was ever seen. She is all legs and elbows, and angles and joints. She tears her dress every day, hates sewing and doesn't care a button about being called 'good'. Her head is full of schemes and one day she plans to do something important. But a great deal is to happen to Katy before that time comes... 
 
BACKSTORY: Learn some splendiferous vocabulary and find out which character you most resemble.

What Katy Did

John Hartley Williams

The long poem at the centre of John Hartley Williams' new collection is a dramatic monologue narrated by a laconic, possibly lamed, forest dweller, a lowly crewmember on a barge travelling an unnamed waterway. Some of his remarks are addressed to his talisman, the shrunken head of an African tribesman. The barge carries a sinister cargo and its captain has a preference for sadistic sex. Other poems in the book undertake journeys - to Northern Cyprus, China, medieval France, Florida - but like 'The Barge' they're not exactly travel poems, more poems which travel. Welcome to the unsettling world of John Hartley Williams, whose restless, inexhaustible imagination, originality and maverick humour have enlivened contemporary poetry for years. Paranoid, erotic, disturbed and disturbing, these are bulletins from a dislocated, parallel world that excites, entertains and terrifies - and often feels more real to us than our own.

Spending Time With Walter

Charles Dickens

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW 
 
Wealthy old Martin Chuzzlewit is surrounded by a host of grasping, unscrupulous relatives and suspects the family vices of selfishness and greed are already showing in his grandson. The younger Martin is therefore cast out upon the world to learn to fend for himself. Apprenticed to the oily hypocrite Peckniff, he meets both the sweet-tempered Tom Pinch and the irrepressible Mark Tapley, with whom he sets forth to America to find his fortune. Dickens created some of his most gleefully repulsive and enduring characters in this tale of corruption and virtue, murder and unrequited love.

Martin Chuzzlewit

In 'Blessed', a thief's career is cut short when he falls from a rooftop. Since the accident he has been subsisting on a disability cheque, a potent painkiller prescription and having his wife sell her blood. 
 
In 'The Fights', Bobby has been off the sauce for five long months. On the advice of his Alcoholics Anonymous mentor, he pays his family a visit in Knockemstiff-where even the wood smoke reminds him of whiskey. While his father and brother amuse themselves by watching pre-recorded boxing and his mother mopes in the kitchen, the inertia infusing his old home threatens to take hold. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Blessed / The Fights (Storycuts)

Stephen L Carter

Summer, 1952. Twenty powerful men gather in secret and devise a plot to manipulate the President of the United States. 
 
Soon after, writer Eddie Wesley leaves a party hosted by affluent and influential members of black society, and discovers a body. The murdered man had an unusual gold cross gripped between his hands and Eddie is determined to find out why he was killed and what the cross signifies. 
 
But then Eddie's sister Junie becomes entangled in an underground movement and vanishes... 
 
Is her disappearance connected to the conspiracy to control the President of the United States?

Palace Council

Rachel Cohen

Each chapter in this remarkable consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. 
 
In 1854, as a boy, Henry James has his daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady. We encounter Brady again as he photographs Walt Whitman and then Ulysses Grant. Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather... 
 
Cohen brilliantly reanimates these unforgettable pairings and those of Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz; Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein; Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston; Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore; Richard Avedon and James Baldwin; and John Cage and Marcel Duchamp; Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell. Ultimately, Cohen reveals and long chain of friendship, rebellion and influence stretching from the moment before the Civil War through a century that had a profound effect on our own time. A Chance Meeting is an intimate and original act of biography and cultural history that makes its own contribution to the tradition about which Cohen writes.

A Chance Meeting

Harry Ricketts

Strange Meetings provides a highly original account of the War Poets of 1914-1918, written through a series of actual encounters, or near-encounters, from Siegfried Sassoon's first, blushing meeting with Rupert Brooke over kidneys and bacon at Eddie Marsh's breakfasts before the war, through famous moments like Sassoon's encouragement of Owen when both are in hospital at the same time; on to the poignant meeting between Edward Thomas's widow and Ivor Gurney in 1932; and the last, strange lunch and 'longish talk' of Sassoon and David Jones in 1964, half a century after the great war began. 
 
Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. Ricketts's unusual approach allows him to follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other's work and showing how these affected their own poetry - one potent strand, for example, is the profound influence of Brooke, both as a model to follow and a burden to reject. The stories become intensely personal and vivid - we come to know each of the poets, their family and intellectual backgrounds and their very different personalities. And while the accounts of individual lives achieve the imaginative vividness of a novel, they also give us an entirely fresh sense of Georgian poetry, conveying all the excitement and frustration of poetic creation, and demonstrating how the whole notion of what poetry should be 'about' became fractured and changed for ever by the terrible experiences of the war.

Strange Meetings

The Poets of the Great War

Allan Massie

The Royal Stuarts ruled for over 300 years in Scotland and for a century as the Royal Family of Britain and Ireland. They were leading actors in the foremost political dramas of British history - the Scottish Wars of Independence, the Union of the Crowns, the English Civil War and the Restoration - and remain the most controversial and divisive of royal families. 
 
Drawing on the accounts of historians past and present, novels and plays, Allan Massie tells the family's full story, from the salt marshes of Brittany to the thrones of Scotland and England, and then eventual exile. A book which gets beyond the received generalisations, The Royal Stuarts takes us deep into the lives of figures like Mary Queen of Scots, Charles I and Bonnie Prince Charlie, uncovering a family of strong affections and fierce rivalries, the brave and capable, the weak and foolish. 
 
Told with panache and pace, adventurous and opinionated, this is a nuanced history of that remarkable family who, for better or worse, shaped our history and made our country what it is.

The Royal Stuarts

A History of the Family That Shaped Britain

André Brink

In early 1749 a white woman and a black man are stranded in the wilderness of the South African interior. She is an educated woman, totally helpless in the wilds. He is a runaway slave. They know only each other. At first their relationship is guarded, poisoned by the black and white in them both. But hesitantly there emerges between them a fellowship that engulfs their most private selves, as they face the long trek back to civilisation.

Instant In The Wind

In 'Dynamite Hole', Jake has been living wild in the hills of Knockemstiff since he took exception to the drafting process in World War II. When he witnesses an act of sexual transgression by the pond, things start swirling around inside him 'like a storm cloud', and Knockemstiff is soon to have a few more empty beds. 
 
In 'Real Life', a trip to the drive-in with his parents winds up in bathroom brawl and a hasty departure for seven year-old Bobby. Looking back on his childhood, Bobby finds in that evening an isolated piece of paternal pride. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Dynamite Hole / Real Life (Storycuts)

William Boyd

This new collection of stories is William Boyd's second, appearing some fourteen years after his first, On the Yankee Station. Once again the stories range widely across the time and space of the twentieth century. 'The Destiny of Nathalie "X" 'is a modern fable about Hollywood; 'Cork' tells of a bizarre love affair between an Englishwoman and a Portuguese poet in 19305 Lisbon; Transfigured Night' is set in Vienna during the First World War and is concerned with the problematic relationship between a wealthy patron (who bears a curious resemblance to Ludwig Wittgenstein) and his indifferent benefactor. Fantasy and farce, rueful longing and the bitter acknowledgement of life's relentless ironies all feature in these nine stories by one of our most celebrated and imaginative writers.

Destiny Of Nathalie X

Frances Woodsford

Dear Mr Bigelow is an enchanting selection of weekly 'pen-pal' letters written between 1949 and 1961 from an unmarried woman working at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth, to a wealthy American widower, living on Long Island, New York. Frances Woodsford and Commodore Paul Bigelow never met, and there was no romance - she was in her forties when he died aged ninety-seven - yet their epistolary friendship was her lifeline. 
 
The 'Saturday Specials' as Frances dubbed them, are brilliantly-packed missives, sparked with comic genius, from post-war England. We follow her travails at the Baths (and her ghastly boss Mr Bond); the hilarious weekly Civil Defence classes as the Cold War advances; her attempts to shake off Dr Russell, an unwanted suitor; life at home with Mother, and Mac, her charming ne'er-do-well brother; and escapades in their jointly-owned car, a 1934 Ford 8 called Hesperus. 
 
Most importantly, we get to know Frances - and her deep affection for Mr Bigelow. She started to write to him as a way of thanking his daughter for the clothes and food parcels she sent. But what had begun as a good turn offered Frances the chance to escape a trying job, and to expound with elegance, wit and verve on topical subjects from home and abroad, bringing us a beady commentary on her life and times that leaps vividly from the page. Her letters to Mr Bigelow during his final illness are a tender and moving farewell, a touching conclusion to a unique record.

Dear Mr Bigelow

A Transatlantic Friendship

Andrew Motion

‘I always liked your father – he was a lad of spirit. He was clever enough to know the value of an adventure, at any rate, and brave enough to carry it out!’ 
 
‘What adventure?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer. 
 
‘Why the map of course, boy!’ Long John Silver’s voice rose into something of a scream. ‘The map and then the treasure across the sea! All the beautiful silver we left there. Your father and I only took what we could carry. But there’s more. Silver lying in the ground and the map will tell you where. Think of the fortune waiting for you’ 
 
With that encouragement, young Jim Hawkins and Silver’s daughter Natty set off in the footsteps of their fathers. They are determined to find Captain Flint’s hidden treasure. But the thrill of the ocean journey soon gives way to terror as the Nightingale reaches its destination. Treasure Island is not uninhabited as it once was…

Silver

Return to Treasure Island: Young Adult Edition

Rose Tremain

From the author of The Gustav Sonata 
 
A stunning collection of stories: wide-reaching in subject and setting, each beautifully evoked and brilliantly imagined. 
 
Renowned opera singer Antonio Mollini begins construction on what he hopes will be the most beautiful garden in Italy, unaware that its development will have tragic consequence for both him, and his series of lovers. Elsewhere, a farmer's son has high hopes for his inheritance, a young girl dreams of following in the footsteps of a famous arsonist, and the pressure of the annual Gardening Cup exerts a heavy toll on seventeen-year-old Dougie. 
 
Over a million Rose Tremain books sold 
 
‘A writer of exceptional talent ... Tremain is a writer who understands every emotion’ Independent I 
 
‘There are few writers out there with the dexterity or emotional intelligence to rival that of the great Rose Tremain’ Irish Times 
 
‘Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect’ The Times 
 
‘Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists’ Salman Rushdie 
 
‘Tremain is a writer of exemplary vision and particularity. The fictional world is rendered with extraordinary vividness’ Marcel Theroux, Guardian

The Garden Of The Villa Mollini

Lynn Coady

Guy Boucher, a fatherless teenager oppressed by the boredom and poverty of rural Nova Scotia, is dominated by his monstrous uncle, Isadore - alcoholic, capriciously violent and preternaturally vital. Isadore, who is permitted to board with Guy and his mother in exchange for the use of his red pick-up truck, is determined to make a man of Guy by forcing him to drink and play hockey. 
 
Guy dreams that access to the truck will be enough to attract a girlfriend from nearby Big Harbour. But when an awkward courtship turns sour, Guy touches off a sluggish tumult of violence fuelled by malice, booze and suffocating ennui.

The Saints Of Big Harbour

Tim Moore

The spangled insanity, the stubborn reinforcement of crude national stereotypes, the scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border friendship and hatred... throughout those long post-ABBA decades, the Eurovision Song Contest has been drawing 450 million of us to the sofa for all the wrong reasons. And the most gloriously wrong of all: our enduring fascination with the unfortunates left to wander the desolate summit of Mount Fiasco without a point to their names. 
 
From Lisbon to Liverpool, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Tim Moore travels the continent to track down the thirteen Eurominstrels who suffered the entertainment world's prime humiliation.

Nul Points

Emma Gerstein

In the early 1960s Anna Akhmatova encouraged Emma Gerstein to record her own memories of the renowned Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam.  But Gerstein's vivid and uncompromising account was not at all what she had expected. When first published in Moscow in 1998 Gerstein's memoirs provoked responses from condemnation to rapturous praise amongst Russian readers. A shrewd observer, a close member of the Mandelstam and Akhmatova family circles, and a serious literary specialist in her own right, Gerstein is uniquely qualified to remove both poets from their pedestals without diminishing them, or their work, and to bring back to life the Soviet 1930s. Part biography, part autobiography, this book radically alters our view of Russia's two greatest 20th century poets, providing memorable glimpses of numerous other figures from that partly forgotten and misunderstood world, and offers several unforgettable vignettes of Boris Pasternak.  Gerstein's integrity and perceptive comment make her account compulsively readable and enables us to re-examine that extraordinary epoch.

Moscow Memoirs

Anne Tyler

No other writer captures like Anne Tyler, with acerbic affection and compassionate clarity, the shifts and defences of the average family struggling to keep life under control. This first omnibus edition of three full-length novels, all set in the respectable Baltimore streets she has made so particularly her own, encompasses the range of eccentricities and compromises to which they are driven. 
 
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant follows the disintegration and eventual reaffirmation of the Tull family – fierce, embittered Pearl, left by Beck to raise handsome, thrusting Cody, Jenny, the pediatrician losing herself in devotion to others, and docile Ezra, whose attempts to unite them all around a table at his eccentric Homesick Restaurant are the focus of their differences and their bond. 
 
In The Accidental Tourist, Macon – a man of habit and routine, who writes guide books for businessmen who hate to leave home – is confronted by chaos in his own family life. Between aching sadness and glorious absurdity, Macon hesitantly emerges from his sage cocoon into the vibrant, unpredictable world of the outrageous Muriel… 
 
And Breathing Lessons, which won the Pulitzer Prize, lays bare the anatomy of a marriage. On the round trip to a friend’s funeral, Maggie and Ira Moran make detours literal and metaphorical – into the lives of grown children, old friends, total strangers and their own past – and, despite Ira’s disappointments and Maggie’s optimistic determination to rearrange life as she would like it to be, an old married couple fall in love all over again.

Anne Tyler Omnibus

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist,Breathing Lessons

Iris Murdoch

'I feel there are demons around.' 
 
Everyone is thinking about Julius King. For comfortable, long-married Hilda and Rupert, he is a mystery. For Morgan, Hilda's tormented sister, he is an obsession. For Morgan's abandoned husband, Tallis, he is the source of ruin. For Simon and Axel, deeply in love, he stirs up jealousy and unease. What is Julius thinking about? He's thinking about Hilda, Rupert, Morgan, Tallis, Simon and Axel, and they will not all survive his malevolent attention. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GARTH GREENWELL 
 
 VINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

In 'Bactine', a toothless layabout takes a break from nursing his crippled uncle and spends the evening abusing solvents with an acquaintance. The fumes only serve to exacerbate his dismay, though, and a trip to an all-night coffee shop causes some unpleasant recollections to surface. 
 
In 'Giganthomachy', Teddy and William are two nine year-old boys who like to argue over whether they'll play nuclear war or Vietnam games in the yard. William's more fantastic suggestions rile Teddy, who suffers enough deranged fantasy when he retreats inside every evening. 
 
In 'Pills', Bobby and Frankie take a notion to leave Knockemstiff for California and a new life amongst the film stars. But the four stolen bottles of pharmaceutical grade speed they'd intended to fund the trip with prove mighty alluring, and the road out of the township grows ever more elusive. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these three short stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Bactine / Giganthomachy / Pills (Storycuts)

Kitty Aldridge

In July 1934, Walter Brown went alone to the woodland pond. He saw his girl swimming there. He watched her floating and saw how white her skin was in the green water, her belly, her breasts, her pond-tangled hair. Then she turned over like an otter and dived down. She did not come up again. In July 1969, Sean Matthews finds himself in the very same woodland, where he witnesses an event he later cannot bear to remember. Two boys, growing up in the same village thirty-five years apart, have each seen something they shouldn't. 
 
Hailed by Salman Rushie on the publication of her first novel, Pop, Cryers Hill confirms Kitty Aldridge as a writer of immense talent, possessing the rare gift of enabling us to see the world anew.

Cryers Hill

When her sick husband carries out a long-agreed-upon plan in her absence, Nina is unable to deny shock and grief from taking hold. This story recounts the married life of the couple, the aftermath of a death, and the stubbornness present in both. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Comfort (Storycuts)

Fred D'aguiar

Airy Hall – a collection of linked short stories and a new long poem – will confirm and enhance D'aguiar’s reputation: its bold mingling of public and private themes, its skilful counterpointing of Britain and Guyana, and its combination of graceful evocation with tough argument, engage to produce poems which are tightly-worked, generously inclusive and powerfully arresting.

Airy Hall

In 'Lard', Duane's virginity is getting to be a problem. Not so much for Duane as it is for his friends and his father-whose workmates rib him mercilessly about his son's frigidity. Deciding that his friends' regular outlets are not to his taste, Duane sets about fabricating an encounter. 
 
In 'Schott's Bridge', Todd has 'too much sugar in him' for Knockemstiff. Even so, he ignores his grandmother's dying wish that he use the two thousand dollars she'd bequeathed him in a coffee jar to get himself out of town. Kicked out of the house by his uncle, he takes to living by the creek with Frankie Johnson and a daunting supply of hallucinogenic drugs. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Lard / Schott's Bridge (Storycuts)

Elaine di Rollo

Lilian and Alice are the bright young twin daughters of the eccentric Mr Talbot, who resides in a huge mansion stuffed full of fossils, inventions, suits of armour, botanical specimens and other specimens of his sprawling collection of curiosities. 
 
When Lilian rebels against Victorian standards of morality she is packed off to India as the bride of a dreary missionary, leaving Alice alone and in danger of falling victim to her father's bizarre and hair-raising schemes. 
 
This lively and entertaining novel follows the two girls on their very different paths to freedom and is set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Indian Mutiny. 
 
Shortlisted for the Saltire First Book prize, the Scottish Arts Council First Book Award and the Guildford Literary Festival First Book Award.

A Proper Education for Girls

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