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P.G. Wodehouse

P G Wodehouse is widely recognized as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. 
 
His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. The first ever collected edition (Wodehouse had many publishers in his lifetime), the Everyman Wodehouse, will contain all the novels and stories, newly edited and reset from the first British edition. 
 
Printed on cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, each Everyman volume is already recognized as the finest edition of the master ever published.

The Honourable Galahad Threepwood has decided to write his memoirs and England's aristocrats are all diving for cover, not least Galahad's formidable sister Lady Constance Keeble who fears that her brother will ruin the family reputation with saucy stories of the 1890s. But Galahad's memoirs are not the only cause for concern. Yet again Lord Emsworth's prize pig has been stolen and, as usual, the castle seems to be buzzing with imposters all pretending to be one another. Love and natural justice triumph in the end, but not before Wodehouse has tangled and unangled a plot of Shakespearean complexity in a novel which might as well be subtitled 'The Price of the Papers'.

Summer Lightning

These are strange times for the English aristocracy. When hard-up William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers, Lord Dawlish – otherwise known as Bill – sets off for America to make a fortune, he does not expect to be left one by an American millionaire with whom he strikes up a passing acquaintance. Honour demands that Bill Dawlish should restore this unexpected windfall to the rightful heirs, but this involves him in complicated adventures with greedy relations, haughty dowagers, dogs, chickens and an angry monkey. Calm is eventually restored but not before Bill has met the woman of his dreams and married her in the church on Fifth Avenue.

Uneasy Money

The thought of being cooped up in Blandings Castle with Clarence, the Earl of Emsworth, the perennially youthful Galahad and with the Earl's younger son, Freddie Threepwood, openly appalled Colonel Wedge. It was, he grimly asserted, like being wrecked on a desert island with the Marx Brothers. But the arrival of Tipton Plimsoll at Blandings Castle considerably brightened the Colonel's horizon. For Tip-ton was a rich young American and rich young Americans were, in the Colonel's opinion, quite the most desirable companions for his daughter, Veronica, the dumbest beauty listed in the pages of Debrett. The stage was set for a great romance, or so the Colonel thought, and so it might have been had the knowledge of Freddie's erstwhile engagement to Veronica been withheld from the jealous Tipton, or if Prudence, the Earl's niece, had not been forcibly parted from her unsuitable lover, Bill Lister. On such incidents do great issues depend. However, Uncle Gaily, who combined the ready resource of a confidence trickster with the zeal of a cheerful crusader, intervened with an ingenious scheme to reunite the young lovers. It was a master-plan. How the plot miscarried at the crucial stage and in doing so caused a social and domestic revolution unparalleled in the history of Blandings Castle, is revealed in this most hilarious of chronicles.

Full Moon

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

This wide-ranging anthology pays tribute to fathers young and old. At one end of the spectrum, a touching story by Ann Packer tells of a man preparing for the wonder and terror of his first child’s birth, and from Frank O’Connor’s comes a hilarious tale of a small boy’s war against his paternal rival in ‘My Oedipus Complex’. At the other, John Updike’s ‘My Father’s Tears’ and Jim Shepard’s ‘The Mortality of Parents’ bring us face to face with a loss that is like no other. Maupassant, Kakfa, Nabokov, Edith Wharton, Raymond Carver, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Helen Simpson …all these and more offer a wonderful assortment of fictional takes on the paternal bond.

Stories of Fatherhood

A Pocket Classics hardcover anthology of stories of Africa from centuries past to the present, selected by the Booker Prize–winning Nigerian novelist Ben Okri. Award-winning writer Ben Okri, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road, curates this one-volume overview of classic stories of Africa, past and present. This collection includes stories by contemporary voices like Jamal Mahjoub and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie along with a pantheon of greats from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Ousmane Sembène, J. M. Coetzee, and Abdulrazak Gurnah and many more.

African Stories

Junichiro Tanizaki

Hailed as the greatest Japanese novel of the Twentieth century, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS is a subtle tale of domestic oppression worthy of Balzac or Chekhov, In this saga of the once prosperous but now declining Makioka family struggling to marry off one of their daughters, Tanizaki presents the picture of a family and a society striving to preserve their self-respect as they come to terms with disturbing new ways in a classic confrontation of innovasion and tradition. A wonderful portrait of Japanese life in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Makioka Sisters

Freddie Widgeon wants the money to buy shares in a coffee plantation in Kenya so that he can marry Sally Foster. Soapy and Dolly Molloy want to get their hands on a cache of stolen jewels hidden in the house of Freddie's neighbour in the suburb of Valley Fields. When their paths cross, the ensuing misunderstandings lead to vintage Wodehouse comedy.

Ice in the Bedroom

Edward St Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels hilariously dissect the English upper class, conjuring a world of decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty, but never without the possibility of grace. Taken together, they are one of the most thrilling reading experiences in contemporary fiction. 
 
Edward St. Aubyn chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose across five short novels, painting an acrid portrait of a beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. Never Mind unfolds over a day and an evening at the family&rsquo;s chateau in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his rich and unhappy American wife, Eleanor, and their five-year-old son, Patrick. 
Bad News opens as Patrick, now twenty-two years old, sets off to collect his father&rsquo;s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. 
Back in England, Some Hope offers Patrick the possibility of recovery (and the most debauched and riotous dinner party in contemporary fiction). 
The Booker-shortlisted Mother&rsquo;s Milk returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother&rsquo;s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home. 
At Last, set over the single day of a funeral, is the stunning final volume.

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Marcel Proust

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.” 
 
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).

In Search Of Lost Time Volume 2

Kazuo Ishiguro

As children, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy attended an exclusive boarding-school in the English countryside. Idyllic in some ways yet vaguely sinister, 'Hailsham' was a place of intense friendships, mysterious rules, and 'guardians' who constantly reminded the students how special they were. Now thirty-one, Kathy looks back on their shared past and tells how she and her friends gradually came to understand the shocking reason for the careful nurturing they had received. An affecting meditation on friendship, love and mortality.

Never Let Me Go

Following the death of Carmen Flores, the lubricious Mexican star, Adela Cork buys her Hollywood house. Hoping to escape from the domineering Adela, her brother-in-law Smedley, who has lived with her since losing his money, searches the house for Carmen's legendary lost diary, in the belief that its scorching revelations about the sex life of her fellow stars will make him millions. He is helped and hindered by a safe-blowing butler, a pompous movie mogul, a posse of unemployed scriptwriters, and the redoubtable Adela herself. Fortunately, Adela's sister, 'Bill' Shannon, not for nothing nicknamed 'the Old Reliable', is on hand to ensure a satisfactory outcome. A light comedy which is also a sharp satire on Hollywood mores.

The Old Reliable

Edith Wharton

Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something&mdash;fastidiousness or integrity&mdash;prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.

The House Of Mirth

Henry James

When a beautiful, spoilt, aristocratic woman with revolutionary ambitions meets an idealistic young proletarian conspirator who dreams of a better life, the stage is set for The Princess Casamassima in which Henry James explores the London underworld and the political unrest seething there in the later nineteenth century. In the end, Christina Light’s waywardness proves fatal for the fancifully named Hyacinth Robinson, but not before the typically Jamesian encounter of instinct and intelligence has been explored in all its tragi-comic potential.

The Princess Casamassima

Robert Graves

Robert Graves, aged nineteen, left school within a week of the outbreak of World War I, and immediately volunteered with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His experiences as a junior officer form the heart of this compelling autobiography. Beginning with an ironic overview of his Edwardian childhood, he proceeds to a tongue-in-cheek account of a young poet's life at public school (not helpful to be half-German, but handy to take up boxing), progressing to caricatures of military stereotypes he encounters in training, and the devastating farce of the War itself, the blundering and mismanagement, and the appalling human consequences. Graves's handling of the horrors of war is always deadpan, honest and unadorned. It is wholly in line with his sense of the absurd that his commanding officer should write to inform his parents that he had died of wounds during the battle of the Somme. He soon found that patriotism was meaningless to the men in the trenches; loyalty to comrades alive and dead drove him back to active service though still suffering from shell-shock. 
 Goodbye to All That takes Graves through his convalescence in England, his efforts to protect the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a friend and fellow officer, from the consequences of his public denunciation of the war; marriage to artist and feminist Nancy Nicholson, postwar undergraduate years at Oxford and a decade as a struggling writer with four young children, beset with money problems and neurasthenia. It is written in a spirit of defiance as he prepared to put 'all that' behind him and begin a new life in Majorca with the American poet Laura Riding.

Goodbye to all that

Monty Bodkin has returned to London from Hollywood, leaving Sandy Miller, his secretary there, heartbroken, because Monty loves English hockey international Gertrude Butterwick instead of her. Holding down a job for a year was the condition laid down by Gertrude’s father before Monty and Gertrude could be married, a condition Monty has unexpectedly fulfilled by blackmailing Hollywood movie mogul Ivor Llewellyn. Back in England, he intends to claim his bride, but the path to true love never runs smooth, as Monty is about to find out.

Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin

Typical. Just when Bertie thinks that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, things start to go wrong again... 
There's young Bingo Little, who's in love for the umpteenth time and needs Bertie to put in a good word for him with his uncle; Aunt Agatha, who forces Bertie to get engaged to the formidable Honoria Glossop; and the troublesome twins, Claude and Eustace, whose antics when let loose in London know no bounds. 
Add to that some friction in the Wooster home over a red cummerbund, purple socks and some snazzy old Etonian spats, and poor Bertie's really in the soup... 
Only one man can save the day - the inimitable Jeeves. 
 
Characters Bertie Wooster - Narrator who went to school with Bingo. Won a prize at his first school for the best collection of wild flowers. 
Jeeves - Bertie's valet who has an aunt who loves the romantic novels of Rosie M. Banks 
Bingo Little - Mortimer's nephew who loves Mabel. Tells his uncle that Bertie is really Rosie M. Banks. 
Mabel - Waitress in a tea shop 
Mortimer Little - Retired fat businessman who owned Little's Liniment - "It Limbers Up the Legs." He is a gourmet. 
Jane Watson - Mortimer's cook engaged to Jeeves, but not for long

The Inimitable Jeeves

This early novel, written in collaboration with a friend, is a fascinating curiosity which suggests that Wodehouse might have become a very different, experimental sort of writer, had he continued to write in the same vein. 
 
Using multiple narrators, playing with literary stereotypes and identities, it tells the story of an aspiring young writer, James Orlebar Cloyster, prepared to do almost anything, first for success and then for gratification. By making Cloyster a mild, affable young man of the sort so familiar in his later novels, Wodehouse creates a comic disparity between the character’s lofty professions of virtue and his unscrupulous behaviour. As the story progresses, we realise that he is not unusual: all the main characters are unscrupulous in one way or another, ready to cheat and lie in pursuit of their ends, hence the title of the book. 
 
Not George Washington contains many fine scenes, and Cloyster’s narrative displays the calm mastery of story-telling Wodehouse had already made his own. If awkwardly executed, it is cleverly plotted, springing several surprises along the way. Clearly autobiographical in origin, it also invites readers to reflect on the nature of talent, fame, failure and success, villainy and honour - themes which continued to recur in the author’s work for another sixty years.

Not George Washington

Willa Cather

Of Antonia, the passionate heroine of Willa Cather's greatest novel, the narrator says that she left 'images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time'. The same could be said of the novel itself. On one level it is a straighforward story, beautifully written, of the struggle for survival of a family of pioneers on the vast Nebraska plains. On another it encompasses history, the relationship ofhuman beings and the natural world, and the destiny of the individual - even as it lovingly and unsentimentally portrays a woman whose robust spirit and enduring warmth make her emblematic of what Cather most admired in the American people. 
 
'The time will come when Willa Cather will be ranked above Hemingway.' - Leon Edel

My Antonia

A damsell in distress - an Almost Blandings novel set in Belphi Castle, Hampshire and a two week house party for the son-and-heir's 21st.

A Damsel In Distress

Isabel Archer is a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is free to make her own choice about her destiny. Yet in the intoxicating worlds of Paris, Florence, and Rome, her fond illusions of self-reliance are twisted by the machinations of her friends and apparent allies. What had seemed to be a vista of infinite promise steadily closes around her and becomes instead a 'house of suffocation'.

The Portrait Of A Lady

It wasn't Archie's fault, really. It's true he went to America and fell in love with Lucille, the daughter of a millionaire hotel proprietor . . . and if he did marry her -- well, what else was there to do? From his point of view, the whole thing was a thoroughly good egg; but Mr. Brewster, his father-in-law, thought differently, Archie had neither money nor occupation, which was distasteful in the eyes of the industrious Mr. Brewster; but the real bar was the fact that he had once adversely criticized one of his hotels. Archie did his best to heal the breach; but, being something of an ass, genus priceless, he found it almost beyond his powers to placate the "man-eating fish" whom Providence had given him as a father-in-law. . . .

Indiscretions of Archie

Virginia Woolf

The beautiful Everyman gift edition in hardback. 
 
The Lord Orlando's country seat has 365 rooms. An exquisitely beautiful youth, he is a favourite of the ageing Queen Elizabeth and enjoys all that Court and tavern have to offer. He falls passionately in love with the intriguing Sasha, an androgynous Russian princess, who jilts him. Stricken, he takes up Literature, penning huge quantities of poems and plays, 'all romantic, and all long'. A few decades later a still youthful Orlando is appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Charles II. Here he wakes up one day and finds he has the body of a woman. "Different sex, same person", she observes, unphased. 
In London, it is the eighteenth century, and she can hobnob with "men of genius" Pope and Swift, Johnson and Boswell. She has affairs with both women and men, but before long it is the nineteenth century, oppressively gloomy and moral and probably time to find a husband. Fortunately, in a Brontësque moment on a moor, the gender- nonconforming Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, newly back from Cape Horn, gallops past and scoops her up into bliss. 
 
Woolf's most unusual and joyous novel was inspired by her affair with the dashing author and aristocrat, Vita Sackville West.

Orlando

Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.

The Age Of Innocence

Much married American movie mogul Ivor Llewellyn depends on his friends at Bachelors Anonymous to keep him out of romantic entanglements on his trip to London. First, they arrange for Joe Pickering to be his bodyguard. Then his lawyer, Ephraim Trout, is sent to England to help fend off the actress Vera Dalrymple who is determined to ensnare Llewellyn. All seems to be going well. But when devoted bachelor Trout takes it upon himself to thwart a romance between Pickering and a beautiful journalist, he sets in train a series of events which end in more than one marriage including his own

Bachelors Anonymous

Katherine Mansfield

This selection of stories by Katherine Mansfield has been chosen by Claire Tomalin and emphasize the stronger, feminist side of her writing rather than the popular, more sentimental view. The 21 stories are presented in chronological order and include &quot;Prelude&quot;, &quot;The Garden Party&quot; and &quot;At the Bay&quot;.

The Garden Party And Other Stories

Ivan Turgenev

"So ... you were convinced of all this and decided not to do anything serious yourselves." 
"And decided not to do anything serious," Bazarov repeated grimly. ... 
"But to confine yourselves to abuse?" 
"To confine ourselves to abuse." 
"And that is called nihilism?" 
"And that is called nihilism," Bazarov repeated again, this time with marked insolence. 
 
The book examines the conflict of attitudes in mid-19th-century Russia, as distant pre-echoes of the Revolution continue to rumble through the remote rural landscape. The story follows the Kirsanov family, representatives of the old regime, and the violent character of the anti-hero Bazarov. 
 
Introduced by Michael R Katz who was born in New York City and educated at Horace Mann School, Williams College, and Oxford University. He is the author of two books and over fifteen translations of Russian novels into English, including works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.

Fathers And Children

The Coming of Bill (1920) is the nearest Wodehouse ever came to a serious novel, although the influence of the musical comedies he was writing at the time is never far away. Bill is the child of Ruth, a spoilt heiress, and Kirk, an impecunious artist of perfect physique. Their marriage has been arranged by Ruth's aunt, a believer in eugenics who then takes charge of the baby. The story, set entirely in New York and Connecticut, concerns the young couple's campaign to retrieve their child from the overbearing Mrs Porter and establish a normal family life. They are eventually successful, but only after a series of comic mishaps in a story which features a galaxyof vintage Wodehouse characters, including the bossy aunt, a tetchy millionaire, a good-natured ex-boxer and an orotund English butler.

The Coming Of Bill

A classic musical comedy plot turned into a novel, The Prince and Betty is the story of a man who gives up everything for his girl. Fortunately, she chances to be the step-daughter of a millionaire. John Maude and Betty Silver are in love, but when John turns out to be heir to the principality of Mervo, a small Mediterranean island not a thousand miles from Monte Carlo, he finds himself ensnared in the establishment of a new casino on the island, much to his beloved’s high-minded disgust. She leaves him and takes a job with an American family in London; he abandons his post to follow her. Eventually their misunderstandings are disentangled: the pair are reunited, betrothed and bound for a new life in the United States. And so it is that, in the process of telling their story, published early in his career, Wodehouse constructs the critique of Europe versus America, privilege versus enterprise, decadence versus adventure, which was to underpin many of his later tales.

The Prince and Betty

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The illegitimate son of a landowner and his common-law peasant wife, Arkady Dolgoruky has scarcely seen these parents during his nineteen years of life. In a narrative combining farce and pathos, Dostoevsky describes Arkady's visit to St Petersburg in search of the 'accidental family' who have dominated his dreams. The confrontation with them does not turn out quite as he imagined it. This relatively late novel, written in the last decade of the author's life, nevertheless captures the exuberance and embarrassments, the bliss and bale of adolescence in all its volatility and uncertainty.

The Adolescent

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY is probably Edith Wharton's most savage satire on the manners of late nineteenth-century America. It is the story of the exquisitely beautiful but brutally ambitious Undine Spragg who marries her way into the high aristocracy of Europe, abandoning several husbands along the way. This novel, which has scences of comedy and even farce, is a commentary on both certain aspects of feminisim and certain aspects of capitalism in Edith Wharton's time. The novel makes a fitting companion to THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and shows Wharton to be one of the greatest American novelists.

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