Dougie Poynter has been obsessed with dinosaurs ever since visiting the Natural History Museum when he was about three. He is passionate about the natural world and a keen conservationist, working with charities such as WWF and Greenpeace to get harmful products banned and to clean up the planet. 
 
Dougie wrote songs together with Tom Fletcher for years in bands McFly and McBusted; they now write their bestselling Dinosaur that Pooped books in the same way that they write their song lyrics. The books have sold over a million copies!

Dougie Poynter

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Thomas Pynchon

Discover Thomas Pynchon’s brilliant writing in this postmodern literature classic. 
 
 ‘The greatest, wildest author of his generation’ Guardian 
 
We could tell you the year is 1944, that the main character is called Tyrone Slothrop and that he has a problem because bombs are falling across Europe and crashing to the earth at the exact locations of his sexual conquests. But that doesn’t really begin to cover it. 
 
Reading this book is like falling down a rabbit hole into an outlandish, sinister, mysterious, absurd, compulsive netherworld. As The Financial Times said, ‘you must forget earlier notions about life and letters and even the Novel.’ Forty years since its publication, Gravity’s Rainbow has lost none of its power to enthral.

Gravity's Rainbow

William Maxwell

The path to adulthood is littered with broken relationships. 
 
In the suburbs of 1920s Chicago two boys form an unlikely friendship. Spud Latham is slow at school but quick to fight and a natural athlete - Lymie Peters, thin, pigeon-chested and terrible at games, is devoted to him. As they graduate from school to college, tensions start to surface. It is Lymie who first meets Sally Forbes, but it is Spud she falls in love with. This signals the end of their friendship and the rift is almost more than Lymie can bear.

The Folded Leaf

Who, where or what is V.? 
 
Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel follows discharged Navy sailor Benny Profane as he reconnects with an eclectic collection of artists known as the ‘Whole Sick Crew’, all while Herbert Stencil looks to find the woman described in his father’s diary: ‘V.’ 
 
Sweeping through sixty years, meandering across the globe and brimming with madcap characters, V. is the bawdy, sometimes sad and frequently hilarious modern classic that introduced the world to the one-of-a-kind brilliance of Thomas Pynchon. 
 
'The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation' Ian Rankin, Guardian 
'To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew' New Yorker

Iris Murdoch

Annette runs away from her finishing school but learns more than she bargained for in the real world beyond; the fierce and melacholy Rosa is torn between two Polish brothers; Peter is obsessed by an indecipherable ancient script. This is a story of a group of people under a spell, and the centre of it all is the mysterious Mischa Fox, the enchanter.

The Flight From the Enchanter

Louisa May Alcott

Discover the classic tale behind the hit film and one of the most beloved, comforting, charming stories of all time. 
 
Life in the March household is full of adventures as the four very different March sisters follow their varying paths to adulthood, always maintaining the special bond between them. Sensible Meg, impetuous Jo, shy Beth and artistic Amy each have to confront different challenges as they grow up together and attempt to learn how to be both happy and good. 
 
‘Deals with life's big questions - love and death, war and peace, and ambition versus family responsibility - in a way that is inspiring and realistic. Use a hankie as a bookmark - tears are guaranteed’ Marie Claire

Little Women and Good Wives

Graham Greene

Author William Harris is spending the fag-end of the season at Antibes finishing his first attempt at historical biography, but he becomes more and more interested and involved in the antics of two homosexual interior decorators intent on stealing Poopy Travis's honeymoon husband.  Which leaves him free to fall in love with Poopy himself. A widow and a divorcee tipsily discuss the inadequacy of men, deciding that women have much more to offer each other by way of variety in sexual love. A wife holidays alone in Jamaica's cheap season idly hoping for excitement but finding the only man she can have an affair with is far too old and frightened of the dark..  Affairs, obsessions, grand passions and tiny ardours this collection contains some of Greene's saddest observations on the hilarity of sex.

May We Borrow Your Husband?

George Grossmith

Weedon Grossmith

‘The funniest book in the world’ Evelyn Waugh 
 
 Mr Charles Pooter is a respectable man. He has just moved into a very desirable home in Holloway with his dear wife Carrie, from where he commutes to his job of valued clerk at a reputable bank in the City. Unfortunately neither his dear friends Mr Cummings and Mr Gowing, nor the butcher, the greengrocer's boy and the Lord Mayor seem to recognise Mr Pooter's innate gentility, and his disappointing son Lupin has gone and got himself involved with a most unsuitable fiancee... 
 
George and Weedon Grossmith's comic novel, perfectly illustrated by Weedon, is a glorious, affectionate caricature of the English middle-class at the end of nineteenth century.

The Diary of a Nobody

Copi

Welcome to the gutters of 1970s Paris – and the anarchic, darkly comic world of City of Rats. 
 
When pet rat Gouri finds himself locked out of his owner’s apartment, he has no choice but to strike out alone onto the pavements of Paris. 
 
But what begins as a strange and marvellous bedtime story - Gouri and his new friend Raka selling flour-coated worms to pigeons for spare change - soon spirals into an exhilarating whirlwind of murder, sex, unionised hamsters, courtroom drama, and, finally, Armageddon. 
 
Told through a series of letters from Gouri to Argentinian playwright Copi, City of Rats channels Copi’s lifelong fascination with society’s outcasts—queer people, immigrants, the homeless, and criminals—into a fiercely imaginative, unflinchingly provocative tale of a world hurtling into madness. 
 
TRANSLATED BY KIT SCHLUTER; WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CESAR AIRA 
 
'Copi is the sassiest, most decadent, poised, unpredictable, violent, galling, and marvellous of any author in the past quarter century' Charlie Hebdo

City of Rats

Mark Twain

The classic boy-hero of American literature. 
 
 Impish, daring young Tom Sawyer is the bane of the old, the hero of the young. There were some in his dusty old Missippi town who believed he would be President, if he escaped a hanging. For wherever there is mischief or adventure, Tom is at the heart of it. During one hot summer, Tom witnesses a murder, runs away to be a pirate, attends his own funeral, rescues an innocent man from the gallows, searches for treasure in a haunted house, foils a devilish plot and discovers a box of gold. But can he escape his nemesis, the villainous Injun Joe? 
 
 'In this book Twain anticipates every modern American novel, from Salinger to Pynchon' Guardian

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Kurt Vonnegut

'Although it is set in the near future, Hocus Pocus is the most topical, realistic Vonnegut novel to date, and shows the struggle of an artist a little impatient with allegory and more than a little impatient with his own country' - New York Times Book Review 
 
Some get all the luck – but not Eugene Debs Hartke. Ex-Vietnam vet, ex-college professor, and now a TB-stricken inmate at Tarkington State Reformatory, his life has been warped by one ludicrous farce after another. Here, on scraps of paper pilfered from the prison library, he recounts his own story for posterity, revealing the hypocrisy and injustices of a world that just doesn’t want him to thrive.

Hocus Pocus

Gripping, terrifying, an unputdownable read. Discover Graham Greene's most iconic novel. 
 
A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Greene's gripping thriller exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the 'dangerous edge of things.' 
 
In this gripping, terrifying, and unputdownable read, discover Greene's iconic tale of the razor-wielding Pinkie. 
 
'Brighton Rock when I was about thirteen. One of the first lessons I took from it was that a serious novel could be an exciting novel - that the novel of adventure could also be the novel of ideas' Ian McEwan 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY J.M. COETZEE

Brighton Rock

Elizabeth Bowen

Cecilia, capricious and unable to love, inches reluctantly towards a second marriage to the kind, passionless Julian Tower. Meanwhile, her sister-in-law, Emmeline, is surprised to find the calm tenor of her life disturbed by her attraction to the predatory Mark Linkwater. Markie's appearance disrupts the lives of both women, but in the pain of misunderstanding, it is Emmeline who reveals her vulnerability in a violent and tragic act. 
 
Reissued alongside The Hotel and The Little Girls

To The North

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAMES WOOD 
 
Scobie, a police officer serving in a war-time West African state, is distrusted, being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in doing so he is forced to betray everything he believes in, with drastic and tragic consequences.

The Heart of the Matter

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. 
 
Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).

Vineland

William Styron

In this novel, the South looms dark and ominous in the background with its Biblical rhetoric, its conflict between a tradition of religious fundamentalism and modern scepticism, racial contrasts and the industrialisation of a rural society. But more than a novel of time and place, it is the story of a tormented family submerged in infidelity and driven by a vengeful love that is blocked, hurt and perverted. Peyton Loftis, who frantically needs a husband precisely because she loves her father; the decadent Milton, whose infidelity has made his marriage no more than a stage drama; and Helen, his wife, who loves only what she can control - her crippled daughter Maudie, or the childish part of her husband. This extraordinarily powerful novel is the portrait of a family who, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne in his URN BURIAL, 'all lie down in darkness'.

Lie Down In Darkness

Elizabeth Gaskell

In this witty and poignant story the railway is pushing its way relentlessly towards the town from Manchester, bringing fears of migrant workers and the breakdown of law and order. The arrival of handsome young Doctor Harrison causes yet further agitation not just because of his revolutionary methods but also because of his effect on the hearts of the ladies. Meanwhile Miss Matty Jenkyns nurses her own broken heart after she was forced to give up the man she loved when she was a young girl.

The Cranford Chronicles

Oedipa Maas has been made executrix of her former lover’s estate. 
 
The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oedipa in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting the crying of lot 49. 
 
Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 is by far the shortest of Pynchon’s great, dazzling novels – and one of his most iconic. 
 
‘The best American novel I have read since the war’ Frank Kermode 
 
‘Remarkable... The Crying of Lot 49 resembles metaphysical poetry in the range of its allusions and the curiosity of its creator’ Washington Post

The Crying of Lot 49

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The pogrom that swept through Poland was interpreted as a sign of the Coming of the Lord. In the little town of Goray, laid waste by murder and famine, grief becomes joy as good news arrives of the second coming of the Messiah. Once the town’s pious rabbi is usurped, the townspeople are free to look forward to the End of Days, when they will wear golden jackets and dine on marzipan candy. But such perilously high hopes pave the way to hysteria, and a panic which could threaten the very existence of Goray.

Satan in Goray

Marcel Proust

THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATION 
 
In Sodom and Gomorrah Proust's narrator not only depicts the class tensions of a changing France at the beginning of the twentieth century but also exposes the decadence of aristocratic Parisian society and muses upon the subjects of homosexuality and sexual jealousy.

In Search of Lost Time, Vol 4

Sodom and Gomorrah

William Faulkner

The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires, fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South, Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the Old Testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn.

As I Lay Dying

Walter Greenwood

In Hanky Park, near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty, exploited by bookies and pawnbrokers, bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. His love affair with a local girl ends in a shotgun marriage, and, disowned by his family, Harry is tempted by crime. Sally, meanwhile, falls in love with Larry Meath, a self-educated Marxist. But Larry is a sick man and there are other more powerful rivals for her affection.

Love On The Dole

Mervyn Peake

Equipped with love, Mr Harold Pye lands on the island of Sark, his mission to convert the islanders into a crusading force for the undiluted goodness that he feels within. The extraordinary inhabitants of the island range from the formidable Miss George in her purple busby to the wanton, raven-haired Tintagieu, 'five foot three inches of sex'. Mr Pye, however, is prone to excess and in the increasingly personalised struggle between good and evil, excess is very nearly his downfall.

Mr Pye

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is…we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. 
 
Thomas Pynchon’s literary career was launched not with the release of his widely acclaimed first novel, V., but with the publication in literary magazines of the five stories collected here. In his introduction to Slow Learner, the author reviews his early work with disarming candour and recalls the American cultural landscape of the early post-Beat era in which the stories were written 
 
‘Thomas Pynchon is the Gargantua of modern fiction... In Slow Learner he breaks cover for the first time with a remarkable open-handed portrait of the writer as a young man’ Sunday Times 
 
‘An exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers’ New Republic 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Slow Learner

Early Stories

Colette

THE STORIES THAT INSPIRED THE FILM COLETTE, out Jan 2019. 
 
The second book in Colette's enchanting Claudine series. 
 
Seventeen-year-old Claudine is in despair having left her beloved village Montigny for a new life in Paris. Comforted by her devoted maid Melie, her slug-obsessed Papa, and the trustworthy cat Fanchette, Claudine’s instinctive curiosity gradually leads to an awakened interest in the city. Ruthless and sensual, Claudine records her sharp observations and adventures amongst the intriguing characters that surround her, evoking all the glamour and excitement of Parisian life. 
 
Written with striking realism Claudine in Paris is an inspiring portrait of a precocious young girl on the brink of transformation into a woman for her, and our, time.

Claudine In Paris

Bruno, dying, obsessed with spiders and preoccupied with death and reconciliation, lies at the center of an intricate spider's web of relationships and passions: Bruno's estranged and grieving son Miles; Danby, Bruno's widowed son-in-law, consoling himself with the Adelaide the maid, one of Murdoch's finest comic creations; creepy Nigel the nurse and his besotted twin Will, fighter of duels. The flooding Thames brings about the climax, and all are left changed by love and forgiveness before the old man's death.

Bruno's Dream

Honoré de Balzac

'This brilliant but devastatingly sad novel moved me so much, I began it again the moment I got to the end' Rose Tremain 
 
 Monsieur Grandet is a very rich man whose chief care is his gold. He runs his household with exacting miserly attention and his wife and daughter suffer a Spartan existence. On the evening of his daughter Eugénie's twenty third birthday his foppish nephew Charles suddenly arrives from Paris. 
 
Eugénie has never known passion. Now, in an instant, she falls in love and her life is changed forever. Monsieur Grandet will not countenance his daughter's marriage to her penniless cousin and Eugénie's determination to follow her heart leads her into direct conflict with her father.

Eugenie Grandet

Kingsley Amis

Hubert Anvil is a 10 year old boy blessed with the voice of an angel. The Church hierarchy decrees that Hubert should be turned into a castrato - an alteration that could bring Hubert fame and fortune, but would also cut him off from an adult world he is curious to discover. In a dystopian world where Martin Luther never reformed and where the Holy Office's power is absolute, where will Hubert turn if he decides to defy their wishes?

The Alteration

Margaret Kennedy

Romilly Brandon was heir to  a fortune and the handsomest and liveliest young man in the county. But in his twenty-first year, the pretty daughter of the local parson, Jenny Newbolt broke his heart, and he left to live a dissipated life in London. Returning years later, Romily finds many surprises - his one-time sweetheart grown old and withered, and in possession of a great secret that shakes him to his core. When Romily finally learns the truth, is it too late to atone?

A Night in Cold Harbour

W E Bowman

An outrageously funny spoof about the ascent of a 40,000-and-a-half-foot peak, discover this laugh-out-loud cult favourite. 
 
 Led by the reliably under-insightful Binder, a team of seven British men including Dr Prone (constantly ill); Jungle the route finder (constantly lost), Constant the diplomat (constantly arguing) and 3,000 Yogistani porters, set out to conquer the highest peak in the Himalayas. 
 
 
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

The Ascent Of Rum Doodle

Vintage Voyages

Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political and major caffeine abuse. 
 
We follow the mismatch'd pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic - from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the stange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

Mason & Dixon

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