Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Louis de Bernières

25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION - WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 
 
'A true diamond of a novel, glinting with comedy and tragedy' Daily Mail 
 
It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals but over time he proves himself to be civilised, humorous &ndash; and a consummate musician. 
 
When Pelagia, the local doctor's daughter, finds her letters to her fiancé go unanswered, Antonio and Pelagia draw close and the working of the eternal triangle seems inevitable. But can this fragile love survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender? 
 
'Louis de Bernières is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh...he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste' Evening Standard

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Mary Wesley

Seventeen-year-old Juno Marlowe has just waved off to war the two young men she has loved for the best part of her life when the air raid sirens begin to wail out across London. She is rescued from this nightmare by a gaunt stranger called Evelyn, frail and older than his years, who offers her the protection of his house and his family before dying suddenly in the night. 
 
Determined to avoid being sent to Canada to join her mother and new step-father, and still grieving for her lost lovers, Juno instead finds herself on a train to Cornwall in search of Evelyn's family. There she discovers the blossoming of an English spring into which the war only occasionally intrudes and finds at last a peace for herlself and a world in which she is more than simply part of the furniture.

Part Of The Furniture

Donald Pfarrer

The mission is Vietnam in microcosm: a quest to find and destroy a secret cache of enemy weapons. Leading this fateful journey is Captain MacHugh Clare, a draftee who has become the consummate soldier. Unconcerned with death, each morning he shifts immediately from unconsciousness to action. His reward at the end of the mission is the possibility of seeing his wife. 
 
Beside Mac is his opposite. Chaplain Paul Adrano, who knows only doubt and disillusion. He has come to Vietnam to kill his fear, to find his faith again on the field of battle, and he will soon know the forbidden power of violence and the pull of sexual temptation. 
 
Meanwhile, in America, Mac's Sarah wife fights her own battle - against a feeling of uselessness. Struggling with notions of a woman's proper role, Sarah begins to see possibilities beyond merely waiting for the man she loves. 
 
The Fearless Man is an epic novel of all the wars we wage to occupy ground, forge a future, and save our souls.

The Fearless Man

A Novel of Vietnam

David J Schwartz

A party in a college flat in May 2001. A case of dodgy home-brewed beer. A violent storm. Next day: the mother of all hangovers. What would you do if you the morning after the night before brought a banging head, a raging thirst... Oh, and your very own superpower? 
 
Meet the All-Stars: Harriet, Charlie, Caroline, Mary-Beth and Jack. Harriet can make herself invisible, Charlie can read your mind, Caroline can fly, and Jack, well, Jack can run faster than a speeding bullet. 
 
Determined to become costumed crime-fighters, but baffled by the lack of super-villains to tackle, the quintet soon finds that the ramifications of their new powers are more complicated than they anticipated, and that humans (even themselves) are much more fragile than they'd realised.

Superpowers

Irène Némirovsky

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Pierre and Agnès marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud which cascades down the generations. Even when war is imminent and Pierre is called up, the old man is unforgiving. Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, All Our Worldly Goods points up with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, tragically, shockingly... 
 
'A remarkable novel...beautifully translated... Her voice, compassionate yet always shrewd, with its sharp portrait of France at war and during the optimistic and confused Twenties and early Thirties, is always distinctive' Literary Review

All Our Worldly Goods

William Boyd

*The Sunday Times Bestseller* 
 
 It is 1969 and James Bond is about to go solo, recklessly motivated by revenge. 
 
 A seasoned veteran of the service, 007 is sent to single-handedly stop a civil war in the small West African nation of Zanzarim. Aided by a beautiful accomplice and hindered by the local militia, he undergoes a scarring experience which compels him to ignore M’s orders in pursuit of his own brand of justice. Bond’s renegade action leads him to Washington, D.C., where he discovers a web of intrigue and witnesses fresh horrors. 
 
 Even if Bond succeeds in exacting his revenge, a man with two faces will come to stalk his every waking moment.

Solo

A James Bond Novel

Arnost Lustig

Fifteen-year-old Hanka Kaudersová has ginger hair and clear, green eyes. When her family is deported to Auschwitz, her mother, father and younger brother are sent to the gas chamber. By a twist of fate, Hanka is faced with a simple alternative: follow her family, or work in an SS brothel behind the eastern front. She chooses to live, her Aryan looks allowing her to disguise the fact that she is Jewish. As the German army retreats from the Russian front, Hanka battles cold, hunger, fear and shame, sustained by her hatred for the men she entertains, her friendship with the mysterious Estelle, and her fierce, burning desire for life. 
 
Lovely Green Eyes explores the compromises and sacrifices that an individual may make in order to survive, the way a woman can retain her identity in the face of appalling trauma, and the value of human life itself. This is a remarkable novel, which soars beyond nightmare, leaving the reader with a transcendent sense of hope.

Lovely Green Eyes

Amos Oz

As the Germans advance into Poland in 1939, Elisha Pomeranz, a Jewish mathematician and watchmaker, escapes into the wintry forest, leaving behind his beautiful, intelligent wife, Stefa. 
 
After the war, having evaded the concentration camps, they begin to build new lives - Stefa in Stalin's Russia and Elisha in Israel, where, as they seek their reunion, another war is brewing.

Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

Amin Maalouf

A graceful story of love across an insuperable gulf and a powerful allegory for the conflict that has beset the Middle East for the last half century. 
 
To call your son Ossyane is like calling him Rebellion. For Ossyane’s father it is a gesture of protest by an excited Ottoman prince, for Ossyane himself it is a burdensome responsibility. At eighteen he leaves Beirut to study in Montpellier, far away from his father’s revolutionary aspirations for him. But it is 1938, and when war breaks out in Europe, Ossyane is drawn into the Resistance. His return to Beirut is a rebel hero’s welcome after all, and a joyful reunion with Clara, whom he first met in France. But if one war has brought the Jewish-Muslim couple together, another, much closer to home, is destined to separate Ossyane from the people and the world that he loves.

Ports of Call

Umberto Eco

An extraordinary epic, brilliantly-imagined, new novel from a world-class writer and author of The Name of the Rose. Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention. 
 
It is 1204, and Constantinople is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.

Baudolino

Barbara Keating

Stephanie Keating

'And to my daughter in France, I bequeath the remainder of my Estate' 
 
These words, read from the will of Irish academic Richard Kirwan, come as a complete surprise to his grieving family. Solange de Valnay's perfectly ordered world is shattered when she discovers the identity of her true father for the first time. She loves the man who has always been 'Papa' and the Languedoc vineyard in which she had the happiest of childhoods; Celine, her adored mother, is dead. But the truth of Richard Kirwan's liaison with her mother cannot remain buried, and the Kirwan children and their half-sister must overcome their differences and confront the past that unites them. 
 
What emerges is an extraordinary tale of an impossible but irresistible love affair, of passion and blind heroism, of sacrifices made for love and honour and of four families whose resistance to the German forces occupying France during WWII binds them across the borders and cultures through war and peace.

To My Daughter In France

Julia Franck

The moving story of a brother and a sister caught in the tide of the Cold War 
 
Käthe is a Jewish sculptor living in East Berlin. A survivor of the Nazi era, she is a fervent socialist who has been using her political connections to secure more significant commissions. Devoted entirely to success, she is a cruel and abrasive mother to her children. She barely acknowledges Ella’s vulnerable loneliness and Thomas’s quiet aspirations, and her hard-nosed brutality forces her children to build an imaginary world as a shelter from the coldness that surrounds them. 
 
As the Berlin Wall goes up, dreams are shattered, lives fall apart and this dark fairytale of East Germany unfolds.

Back to Back

Douglas Westerbeke

PARIS, 1885. On an otherwise ordinary night, Aubry Tourvel – spoiled, stubborn and nine years old – is suddenly struck down by a mysterious illness at the family dinner table. 
 
When a visit to a doctor only makes her worse, Aubry flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realises that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. 
 
She has no choice: she must run from this curse. And so begins her incredible lifelong journey across the world. 
 
But with risk at every turn, what will it take for Aubry to survive?

A Short Walk Through a Wide World

'De Bernieres is a singular, cherishable voice' Mail on Sunday 
 
From the master of historical fiction, this book follows war hero Daniel Pitt and his unforgettable family after the Second World War. 
 
Some bonds are hard to break... 
 
Daniel Pitt was an RAF fighter in the First World War and an espionage agent for the SOE in the Second. Now the conflicts he faces are closer to home. 
 
Daniel's marriage has fractured beyond repair and Daniel's relationship with his son, Bertie, has been a failure since Bertie was a small boy. 
 
But after his brother Archie's death, Daniel is keen for new perspectives. He first travels to Peshawar to bury Archie in the place he loved best, and then finds himself in Canada, avoiding his family and friends back in England. Daniel and Bertie's different experiences of war, although devastating, also bring with them the opportunity for the two to reconnect. 
 
If only they can find a way to move on from the past... 
 
For more adventures with flying ace Daniel Pitt, see The Dust That Falls From Dreams and So Much Life Left Over.

The Autumn of the Ace

David Grossman

An epic, deeply moving novel about the power of love and loving with courage - from the Man Booker International Prize-winning author of A Horse Walks into a Bar 
 
 On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili is celebrating the ninetieth birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. But festivities are interrupted by the arrival of Nina: the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera's care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby. 
 
 Nina's return to the family after years of silence precipitates an epic journey from Israel to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, and that permanently altered the course of their lives. 
 
 More Than I Love My Life is a sweeping story about the power of love and loving with courage. A novel driven by faith in humanity even in our darkest moments, it asks us to confront our deepest held beliefs about a woman's duty to herself and to her children. 
 
 'Grossman's work resonates with emotional intelligence, humanity and truth' Irish Times

More Than I Love My Life

Matthew Hooton

In the intense August heat, three local kids, Matthew, Andy and Josh, spend their time exploring the woods and secret places of Deloume Road and ignoring the ghostly boy Miles Ford, who's almost invisible anyway. Soon though, a chance discovery sets off a terrible sequence of events, forever entwining these young lives with that of Gerard Deloume, the town's long-dead founder... 
 
Winner of the Guardian Not-The-Booker Prize and the Greene &amp; Heaton Prize for Best Novel.

Deloume Road

Nico Walker

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM APPLE TV+ STARRING TOM HOLLAND 
 
Cleveland, Ohio, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily. They share a passion for Edward Albee and ecstasy and fall hard and fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school and joins the army. 
 
Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him. His fellow soldiers smoke; they huff computer duster; they take painkillers; they watch porn. And many of them die. He and Emily try to make their long-distance marriage work, but when he returns from Iraq, his PTSD is profound, and the drugs on the street have changed. The opioid crisis is beginning to swallow up the Midwest. 
 
Soon he is hooked on heroin, and so is Emily. They attempt a normal life, but with their money drying up, he turns to the one thing he thinks he could be really good at - robbing banks. 
 
Hammered out on a prison typewriter, Cherry marks the arrival of a raw, bleakly hilarious, and surprisingly poignant voice straight from the dark heart of America.

Cherry

Now a Major Film Starring Tom Holland

Jennie Rooney

At Niagara Falls, Toby O'Hara offers rides over the rushing water in a red and blue striped hot air balloon. The balloon is a day job for Toby, his night work is to continue to perfect his father's design for a flying machine. 
 
On the other side of the Atlantic, Ursula Bridgewater, an independent woman from Liverpool, is ungraciously dumped by her fiancé. Ursula turns to the thrill of travel as an escape, and chooses a young orphan, Sally Walker, as her travelling companion. But Sally is never going to be quite as prepared for the land of freedom and opportunity as Ursula - and certainly not ready to accept Toby O'Hara's invitation to see Niagara from a great height. 
 
Together these indomitable characters are lifted by small acts of bravery to find - surprised and heartened - that what once seemed terrifying is in fact the opposite...

The Opposite of Falling

Atiq Rahimi

Earth and Ashes is a story of such spareness and power it leaves the reader reeling. Set during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, it is a fable about war, family, home and tradition. An old man and his grandson sit in a deserted landscape of dusty roads and looming mountains. What are they waiting for? As we watch them we learn their story... 
 
Atiq Rahimi has managed to condense centuries of Afghan history into his short tale of three very different generations. At the same time, he has created a story that is universal in its power.

Earth and Ashes

A return to the epic romance, heroism, history and warm and eccentric cast of characters that made CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN such an extraordinary hit (2.5 million copies sold). 
 
The very first adventure with flying ace and war hero Daniel Pitt. 
 
In the brief golden years before the outbreak of World War I, Rosie McCosh and her three very different sisters are growing up in an eccentric household in Kent, with their neighbours the Pitt boys on one side and the Pendennis boys on the other. But their days of childhood adventure are shadowed by the approach of the conflict that will engulf them on the cusp of adulthood. 
 
When the boys end up scattered along the Western Front, Rosie is left confused by her love for two young men - one an infantry soldier and one the flying ace Daniel Pitt. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War? 
 
For more adventures with flying ace Daniel Pitt, see The Autumn of the Ace and So Much Life Left Over.

The Dust that Falls from Dreams

William Palmer

Working as a news photographer in 30s Berlin, Walther Klinger becomes - by a vicious twist of fate - a society photographer for the new aristocracy of the Nazi party. Walther's complicity makes him increasingly cynical and guilty, so that - for him - the coming of war is almost a relief. In a lonely Brittany farmhouse, just before the Allied invasion, Klinger meets Julia. They begin an affair and, against the background of the horrors and normalities of the Occupation, Walther attempts to make a refuge for himself and Julia. THE PARDON OF ST ANNE is about how he succeeds, triumphantly and tragically.

The Pardon Of St Anne

C. K. Stead

'A vivid and engrossing historical novel' Daily Telegraph 
 
Spanning three years in the life of the writer Katherine Mansfield during the First World War, Mansfield follows the ups and downs of her relationship with Jack Middleton Murry and her struggle to write the 'new kind of fiction' which she felt the times demanded. She is restless, constantly on the move, in and out of London, to and from France, even into the war zone, to be with her French lover, novelist Francis Carco. 
 
For a short time, Mansfield is able to behave as though the war is merely 'background', but her ardent relationship with her brother, who arrives from New Zealand to fight in France, makes detachment impossible - as does her love for Jack's Oxford friend Frederick Goodyear, also a soldier. The war's shadow remorselessly darkens all their lives, but only increases Mansfield's determination to break through as a writer. 
 
Mansfield is a sharp, subtle and appealing portrait of the person of whose work Virginia Woolf wrote: "It was the only writing I was ever jealous of."

Mansfield

A Novel

It is September 1944; the war is going badly for the Germans, and they are in a hurry to complete their 'final solution'. Compromises are being made on all sides, conditions are unspeakable, rumours are rife, but nothing definite is known of the Nazis' intentions. 
 
On the outskirts of a concentration camp in northern Bohemia three people - two eighteen-year-old men and a desperately lost young woman, Leah - are thrown together, sharing their precarious existence in an attic room. While the world disintegrates around them their relationships are charged with passion, their days filled with erotic and spiritual attraction. Caught in the web of their relationships, their futures are uncertain and any choices they have left to make will be made in the face of almost certain death...

Waiting For Leah

Julian Barnes

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 
 
Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her probing of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China and we cannot fail to be moved by the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides.

Staring at the Sun

Stella Tillyard

Newly-wed Harriet stands poised on the threshold of the adult world. Her husband, James, is setting off to join the Duke of Wellington's troops in Spain and left alone in London, Harriet is taken under the wing of Lady Wellington. While Harriet plunges into a new life of freedom at home, James faces the bloody reality of the battlefield. 
 
As war rages abroad and England stands on the brink of change, Harriet and James face hope and heartache in equal measure. From the mantillas and palms of Seville to the gas lamps of foggy London, Tides of War returns us to the vivid, lost world of the past.

Tides of War

Michael Ondaatje

Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of a bloody civil war. Enter Anil Tissera, a young woman and forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka but educted in the West, sent by an international human rights group to identify the victims of the murder campaigns sweeping the island. 
 
When Anil discovers that the bones found in an ancient burial site are in fact those of a much more recent victim, her search for the terrible truth hidden in her homeland begins. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity - a story driven by a riventing mystery.

Anil's Ghost

Opening in 1939, this novel spans 50 years and depicts the central character's life as a political emigre in a run down part of London. He is invited to return to his home city by the renascent nationalist movement where he learns the price of remaining an "innocent" in history.

The Good Republic

Martin Amis

THE NOVEL THAT INSPIRED THE OSCAR WINNING FILM 
 
Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. 
 
But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll. 
 
As Thomsen and Doll&rsquo;s wife pursue their passion &ndash; the gears of Nazi Germany&rsquo;s Final Solution grinding around them &ndash; Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his own hands and bring order back to the chaos that reigns around him. 
 
&lsquo;It is exceptionally brave&hellip;. Shakespearean&hellip;. It&rsquo;s exciting; it&rsquo;s alive; it&rsquo;s more than slightly mad. As the title suggests, it is dreadfully interesting.&rsquo; Sunday Times

The Zone of Interest

Anthony Quinn

Summer of 1911. English society is on the brink of change. The streets of London ring with cheers for a new king's coronation and the cries of increasingly violent suffragette protests. 
 
Connie Callaway, fired up by the possibilities of independence, wants more than the conventional comforts of marriage. Spirited and courageous, she is determined to fight for 'the greatest cause the world has ever known'. 
 
Will Maitland, the rising star of county cricket, is a man of traditional opinions. He is both intrigued and appalled by Connie's outspokenness and her quest for self-fulfilment. 
 
Their lives become inextricably entangled just as the outbreak of war drives them further apart. Buffeted and spun by choice and chance, Connie and Will struggle against the aftershocks of war and the changes it wreaks. This is a deeply affecting story of love against all the odds.

Half of the Human Race

Stefan Hertmans

WINNER OF THE VONDEL PRIZE 2017 
 
 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 
 
 Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2016 in the New York Times 
 
Shortly before his death, Stefan Hertmans' grandfather Urbain Martien gave his grandson a set of notebooks containing the detailed memories of his life. He grew up in poverty around 1900, the son of a struggling church painter who died young, and went to work in an iron foundry at only 13. Afternoons spent with his father at work on a church fresco were Urbain’s heaven; the iron foundry an inferno. 
 
During the First World War, Urbain was on the front line confronting the invading Germans, and ever after he is haunted by events he can never forget. The war ends and he marries his great love, Maria Emelia, but she dies tragically in the 1919 flu epidemic. Urbain mourns her bitterly for the rest of his life but, like the obedient soldier he is, he marries her sister at her parents' bidding. The rest is not quite silence, but a marriage with a sad secret at its heart, and the consolations found in art and painting. War and Turpentine is the imaginative reconstruction of a damaged life across the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century; a deeply moving portrayal of family, grief, love and war.

War and Turpentine

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