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

Anne Tyler

The glorious Sunday Times bestseller follows one family's joys and heartbreaks, mistakes and secrets, from the 1950s right up to today 
 
When Mercy Garrett moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice. 
 
All she wants is space and silence. No clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond. 
 
But it turns out family life is impossible to escape - particularly when it's in your past. For Mercy it all begins in 1959, with a holiday to a cabin by a lake. It's the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations 
 
 
'Gorgeous, charming, profound, and written with such lightness of touch' MARIAN KEYES 
 
'A perfect work of fiction' MEG MASON 
 
'She is and always will be my favourite author' LIANE MORIARTY 
 
'Exquisitely crafted, tender, hilarious, devastatingly precise, I loved this powerful meditation on the small and often unvoiced moments that can make up a life' RACHEL JOYCE 
 
'Anne Tyler really is the best... Her sheer brilliance makes it all seems so effortless' GRAHAM NORTON 
 
'A faultless novel, effortlessly profound. I read it in two sittings, totally immersed' VICTORIA HISLOP 
 
 
 
 
French Braid appeared in the Sunday Times bestseller list on on 03.04.2022, 10.04.2022 and 17.04.2022

French Braid

Rose Tremain

'The best thing from Denmark since Hamlet.' John Julius Norwich 
 
In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish Court to join King Christian IV's Royal Orchestra. From the moment when he realises that the musicians perform in a freezing cellar underneath the royal apartments, Peter Claire understands that he's come to a place where the opposing states of light and dark, good and evil, are waging war to the death. 
 
Designated the King's 'Angel' because of his good looks, he finds himself falling in love with the young woman who is the companion of the King's adulterous and estranged wife, Kirsten. With his loyalties fatally divided between duty and passion, how can Peter Claire find the path that will realise his hopes and save his soul? 
 
'The best historical novelist of her generation. She evokes the past with sensuality, wit and superb sleights of hand... The plot is ingenious...an unforgettable tapestry of Eros and art.' A. N. Wilson

Music & Silence

Elizabeth McCracken

‘A big, glorious novel in every sense, this sprawling family saga…is a funny and big-hearted epic from a seriously gifted wordsmith’ 
Marie Claire 
 
Read the sweeping and enchanting new novel from the author of The Giant’s House 
 
Bertha is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts – ever since she was discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery with nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin and fifteen pounds of gold on her person. She has no past to speak of, and her mysterious origin scandalises the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. 
 
But Bertha is plucky and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford’s most defining landmark. As she changes the town forever, her singular spirit resonating through every board and brick and bone, an epic family saga unfolds, set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America.

Bowlaway

D J Taylor

Glamorous Alice Keach is one of 1930s London's foremost hostesses. Despite humble American origins, she has secured her place in high society through marriage to one of England's wealthiest bachelors. 
 
But Alice has a secret. Its roots run years back, and miles away, to the dust-blasted prairies of Kansas. It corncerns a lost little boy left under the haphazard guidance of an eccentric uncle. Now, a visit from America looks set to blow apart Alice's glittering pre-eminence forever.

Ask Alice

Elaine Feeney

THE INSTANT IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 
WINNER OF AUTHOR OF THE YEAR AT THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 
 
Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. She spends her days getting lost online, going to work and minding her own business. 
 
But Claire is thrown back into a love she thought she’d left behind when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby, stirring up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house. As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make a future for herself.

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

Tom Crewe

Discover Tom Crewe's magnificent debut novel about forbidden desire and the search for freedom in Victorian England... 
 
'Beautifully written' Graham Norton 
'Subtle, sexy and beautifully crafted' Sarah Waters 
'Lavishly imagined' Sunday Times 
______________ 
 
After a lifetime spent navigating his desires, John has finally found a man who returns his feelings. Meanwhile, Henry is convinced that his new unconventional marriage will bring freedom. 
 
United by a shared vision, they begin work on a revolutionary book arguing for the legalisation of homosexuality. 
 
Before it can be published however, Oscar Wilde is arrested and their daring book threatens to throw them, and all around them, into danger. How high a price are they willing to pay for a new way of living? 
______________ 
 
'A very fine new writer' Kate Atkinson 
'I loved this book' Zadie Smith 
'Some of the best writing on desire I've read' Douglas Stuart 
'Extraordinary' Jonathan Bailey 
'Filled with nuance and tenderness . . . charting the lives of men and women who inspired not only political progress but an entire new way of living and loving' Colm Tóibín

The New Life

J M Coetzee

After his piano recital in Barcelona, Witold Walczykiewicz – white-haired virtuoso, controversial interpreter of Chopin – becomes infatuated with Beatriz, his designated companion at dinner. Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, is at first unmoved. But as the stranger’s letters, music, and poetry flood into her home, a dream of love begins that surprises them both.

The Pole and Other Stories

Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. 
 
The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in Baltimore, he was smitten, and in the heat of World War II fervour, they marry in haste. From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counter-culture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayers of later years, we watch their lives unspool and see the consequences of their very mismatched marriage. 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

The Amateur Marriage

When, on the night of their wedding, Ned asks his new wife Rose to promise that she will never leave him, Rose is quick to give her aristocratic husband her word: keeping it, however, proves harder. 
 
For even on the day when she has promised to forsake all others, Rose's heart is with the true love of her life, Mylo, the penniless but passionate Frenchman who, within five minutes of their meeting declared his love and asked her to marry him. 
 
Whilst Rose remains true to her promise never to leave Ned, not even the war, social conventions, nor the prying of her overly inquisitive and cheerfully immoral neighbours, can stop her and Mylo from meeting and loving one another.

Not That Sort Of Girl

Michael Ondaatje

**LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018** 
 
An elegiac novel set in post-WW2 London about memory, family secrets and lies, from the internationally acclaimed author of The English Patient 
 
 It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women all who seem determined to protect Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel journeys through recollection, reality and imagination to uncover all he didn’t know or understand in that time, to piece together a story that feels something like the truth. 
 
 ‘A novel of shadowy brilliance’ The Times 
 
 ‘Fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself, written in the visionary language of memory’ Observer 
 
 ‘Ondaatje brilliantly threads the mysteries and disguises and tangled loyalties and personal yearnings of the secret world... I haven’t read a better novel this year’ Telegraph

Warlight

Vesna Goldsworthy

'A beautiful haunting novel… looking at a familiar London through a frosty, snowy lens. Wonderful' Caryl Phillips 
 
The London winter of 1947 is as cold as St Petersburg during the Revolution. Albertine, the wife of a British army officer often abroad on covert government business, finds herself increasingly lonely. Eager to distract herself with work, she takes a job as companion to the mysterious 'Monsieur Ka', a Russian émigré. As she is drawn into Ka’s dramatic past, her own life is shaken to its foundations. For in this family of former princes, there are present temptations which could profoundly affect her future.

Monsieur Ka

Margaret Forster

London 1844, and a shy young woman has arrived to take up a new position in the grandeur of No. 50, Wimpole Street. Subtly and compellingly, Lady's Maid gives voice to Elizabeth Wilson's untold story, her complex relationship with her mistress, Elizabeth Barrett, and her dramatic role in the most famous elopement in history.

Lady's Maid

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE** 
 
'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon...' 
 
This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer's day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. 
 
From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red's father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red's grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century - four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home... 
 
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 
 
'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 
 
'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 
 
'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 
 
'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson

A Spool of Blue Thread

Nicholas Shakespeare

A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students and falls for an East German girl who is only just beginning to wake up to the way her society is governed. Her situation touches him, but he is too frightened to help. He spends decades convincing himself that he is not in love until one day, with Germany now reunited, he decides to go back and look for her. But who was she, how will his actions have affected her, and how will her find her? All he knows of her identity is the nickname he gave her - Snowleg. 
 
Snowleg is a powerful love story that explores the close, fraught relationship between England and Germany, between a man who grows up believing himself to be a chivalrous English public schoolboy and a woman who tries to live loyally under a repressive regime.

Snowleg

Irvine Welsh

Rebecca Navarro, best-selling authoress of Regency romances, suffers a paralysing stroke. Assisted by her nurse, Rebecca plans her revenge on her unfaithful husband. But will Freddy Royle, hospital trustee, celebrity and necrophiliac, thwart those plans? Dave Thornton, soccer thug, has lost his heart to flawed beauty Samantha Worthington. Together they go in search of the man who marketed the drug that crippled her - in order to cripple him. Lloyd from Leith has a transfiguring passion for the unhappily married Heather. Together they explore the true nature of house music and chemical romance. Will their ardour fizzle and die in the grim backstreets of Edinburgh, or will it ignite and blaze like a thousand suns?

Ecstasy

Three Tales of Chemical Romance

Pauline Delabroy-Allard

An intoxicating and evocative novel about the all-consuming love affair between two women in Paris and the ruin it leaves in its wake. 
 
'Captivating...intense...seductive' Guardian 
 
A thirty-something teacher drifts through her life in Paris, raising a daughter on her own, lonely in spite of a new boyfriend. Then one night, at a friend's tepid New Year's Eve party, Sarah enters the scene like a tornado. A talented young violinist, she is loud, vivacious, appealingly unkempt in a world where everyone seems preoccupied with being 'just so'. It is the beginning of an intense relationship, tender and violent, that will upend both women's lives. 
 
A literary sensation in France, All About Sarah perfectly captures the pull of a desire so strong that it blinds us to everything else. 
 
'All About Sarah moves impressively from the chaos and noise of love, to silence and solitude, like a spun coin settling' Observer

All About Sarah

Simi Bedford

Abiola is raised as an aristocratic African warrior in a highly developed civilisation, but when he is betrayed and sold into slavery in America he is forcibly transformed into the property of a French immigrant. Renamed Cornelius, he and fellow slave Delilah begin a relationship which culminates in the birth of their daughter, Epiphany, and the new family plan to escape their servitude and find a better life for themselves... 
 
But can they return to Africa and find true freedom?

Not With Silver

Linda Jaivin

Julia is a photographer; Chantal edits a fashion magazine; Helen is an academic, and Philippa is writing a novel. The best of friends, they meet at trendy cafes and restaurants to eye the passing talent and to swap stories about their wilder sexual encounters. But what is fiction and what is fact in these wild erotic exploits? Can we believe the tales these women are telling?

Eat Me

Jennifer Close

Ever feel like everyone but you has their life under control? 
 
Isabella, Mary and Lauren feel like everyone they know has a plan, a good job, and a nice boyfriend. 
 
Isabella, on the other hand, thinks she might hate her own boyfriend, Mary is working so hard she's hoping to get hit by a car just so she can have some time off work and Lauren is dating a man who can't spell her first name. 
 
All three of them have been friends since college, and now - more than ever - they need each other, as they struggle through those thrilling, bewildering, what-on-earth-am-I-doing years when everyone else is getting married and they're just getting drunk.

Girls in White Dresses

Ian McEwan

Discover the modern classic that has sold over two million copies. 
 
&lsquo;A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended&rsquo; 
 
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. 
 
Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever, as Briony commits a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone. 
 
'The best thing he has ever written' Observer 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Atonement

Ingrid Hill

A dangerous rescue attempt in Michigan has captured the attention of the entire country. A two-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft. Ursula Wong is the only child of a poor family and referred to by one member of the TV audience as 'half-breed trailer trash', not worth all the expense. 
 
But Ursula is the last of her family line and her story explodes into a gorgeous saga of culture, history and heredity. Ursula's forebears include a second-century BC Chinese alchemist; an orphaned consort to a Swedish queen; and Ursula's great-great-grandfather, Jake Maki, a miner who died in a cave-in aged twenty-nine. 
 
Ursula's fate echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that any given individual's life comes to seem a miracle.

Ursula Under

Matilda Poliport, recently widowed and largely estranged from her four adult children, has decided to End It All. She has cleaned her cottage, given away her beloved pet goose and burnt any incriminating letters. Now all that remains for her to do is eat her picnic, take her pills and swim out into the ocean. But her meticulously planned bid for graceful oblivion is interrupted when she foils the suicide bid of another lost soul - Hugh Warner, on the run from the police - and life begins again for them both. 
 
Life, however, is never that simple and awkward questions demand answers. What, for example, was Matilda's husband Tom doing in Paris? Why does Matilda's next door neighbour see UFOs in the skies of Cornwall? And why did Hugh kill his mother?

Jumping The Queue

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

Jennie Rooney

Stephanie Stanford, recently widowed, must tell her family the truth. But the past is complicated and difficult to untangle. Meanwhile, Michael's memories are squashed into a shoebox (along with Queen Mathilda's Dickin Medal for Bravery - for pigeons) ready for his move to hospital. Michael has never been good at putting things into words; he's more comfortable with the click of Morse code. But Anna, a young healthcare assistant, has the patience - and rare tenderness - to eke out his story. And so he begins.

Inside the Whale

Flora Trevelyan is a ten-year-old misfit, despised by her selfish and indolent parents, and left to wander the streets of a small French town whilst her parents prepare to depart for life in colonial India. There she befriends the locals, acquires an extensive vocabulary of French foul language and encounters the privileged lifestyle of the elegant, middle-class British families holidaying in 1920s France. 
 
Introduced for the first time to kindly, civilised and, above all, caring people Flora falls helplessly and hopelessly in love with not one but three young men. 
 
Over the next forty years Flora will grow from an awkward schoolgirl into a stunning beauty and explore, consummate and finally resolve each of these affairs.

A Sensible Life

Ewan Morrison

Impotent Scottish HR employee David leaves his family and begins a relationship with an American woman named Alice. With David teetering on the brink of unemployment, Alice decides they need help, and a remedy that starts out with sexy bedtime stories ends up right in the thick of Glasgow's swinging scene. And there, in the 'Black Room' along with nine other couples, where you can feel everything but see nothing, each of them finally finds what they are looking for...

Swung

Linea Maja Ernst

Five friends from university; seven summer days in a lakeside cabin in Denmark. A chance to swim, sunbathe, flirt, read and recreate the magic of their youth. 
 
At least that’s what Sylvia had hoped. But then her friends arrive with real jobs, kids and partners. Worse, Esben (her decades-long crush) and Karen announce their plan to get married at the end of the week. As desire and anxiety swirl, and the wedding day approaches, will the group achieve their arcadian dreams or will everything come tumbling down?

Waist Deep

Susan Hill

After just a year of close, loving marriage, Ruth has been widowed. Her beloved husband, Ben, has been killed in a tragic accident and Ruth is left, suddenly and totally bereft. 
 
Unable to share her sorrow and grief with Ben's family, who are dealing with their pain in their own way, Ruth becomes increasingly isolated, burying herself in her cottage in the countryside as the seasons change around her. Only Ben's young brother Jo, is able to reach out beyond his own grief, to offer Ruth the compassion which might reclaim her from her own devastating unhappiness. 
 
The result is a moving, lyrical exploration of love and loss, of grief and mourning, from a masterful writer.

In the Springtime of the Year

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