Heidi Perks is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Now You See Her, which was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, Come Back for Me, Three Perfect Liars, The Whispers and The Other Guest. The Last Resort is her sixth novel. Heidi is a voracious reader of crime and thrillers and is fascinated by the darker side of our closest relationships. Heidi lives in Bournemouth with her husband and two children.

Heidi Perks

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Rosemary Tonks

Fun, witty and sun-soaked – literary cartwheels and seaside capers from the astoundingly brilliant mid-century writer who destroyed her own books. 
 
Great friends, Mimi and Caroline, are off on holiday to a beautiful Italian island. There they find themselves part of an eccentric cast of characters including their debonair host and his mistress, a relentless venture capitalist and a villain in the form of the local dentist. There is also Beetle, with whom Mimi is completely and simply in love. As everyone relaxes into island living and the demands of real life drift away, the holiday hijinks culminate in a very Mediterranean prank – the cutting down of the dentist’s prize lemon tree. 
 
Back in print after many decades, this is a glorious novel by an extraordinary and little-known writer, the inimitable Rosemary Tonks. 
 
'Everyone could do with a bit of Tonks in their lives' Stewart Lee 
 
‘Tonks throws out aphorisms, and scorn, like loose change’ London Review of Books

Businessmen as Lovers

Brilliantly funny and brutal, this is the story of one woman’s escape from the clutches of polite society, by the incredible mid-century writer who destroyed her own books. 
 
‘No matter her insistence that she just dashed them off to make ‘a lot of red-hot money’ – Tonks's novels are thrillingly strange things. She had the knack’ London Review of Books 
 
Sophie’s mother knows exactly how to needle her. Sophie’s lover Philip knows how to stab her in the heart. She may be clever, charming and smart but is Sophie destined to be an eternal bit-part? 
 
After a particularly callous throwaway remark from Philip, Sophie knows she must break away – from him, from her mother, from the snobbery of her Hampstead Heath upbringing. Being good and agreeable has brought nothing but loneliness; setting out alone might finally bring Sophie satisfaction. 
 
Back in print after many decades, this novel is a piece of dynamite, written by an extraordinary and little-known writer, the inimitable Rosemary Tonks. 
 
'A bubbly, empathetic and ultimately lovely novel of a belated coming-of-age' New York Times 
 
'Nobody writes about angsty women like Tonks' The Millions

The Halt During the Chase

Gut-wrenching, ingenious, absolutely hilarious, this is the rediscovered story of woman's desperate quest for freedom. 
 
'I'm thirty, and I'm stuck' 
 
Arabella is on an increasingly desperate quest for freedom from her overbearing father and her conspicuously absent brother. But her desire for self-actualisation only ends up leading her into the orbit of a happily married man. A spiky, self-conscious love affair begins, complete with awful dinner dates, devastating kisses and agonising introspection. Can Arabella realise what she wants? Can she escape the trap of being sexy, good and likable? 
 
Back in print after many decades, this is an outstanding novel by an extraordinary and little-known writer, the inimitable Rosemary Tonks. 
 
'Salted with wit and peppered with clever images' Guardian 
 
‘At their best, the novels are feats of Tonks’s earlier personality, shining and acrid in its ‘fierce hot-blooded sulkiness’… the glittering triumph of an unscathable ego’ London Review of Books 
 
‘Writing like this…is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf. It catches like nothing else the smogs, the rodentine genes, the murky post-War grays, the lurking sexual violence of London’ Michael Hoffman, Poetry Foundation

The Way Out of Berkeley Square

Nevil Shute

When Tom Cutter hires Constantine Shaklin as an engineer in his air freight business, he little realises the extraordinary gifts of his new recruit. Shaklin possesses a religious power which inspires everyone he meets to a new faith and hope for humanity. As Cutter's business grows across Asia, so does Shaklin's fame, until he is widely regarded as a unifying deity. Though he struggles to believe Shaklin is indeed divine, the friendship will transform Cutter's life.

Round the Bend

William Faulkner

Spolit, feckless Temple Drake, the daughter of a judge, runs away from school with an unsuitable man. Abandoned by him with a gang of moonshiners, Temple falls into the clutches of the psychotic Popeye, one of the most grotesque characters of Faulkner's imagination. A compelling, shocking tale of perverted justice in the Deep South, Sanctuary is also a moving plea for courage in the darkest of circumstances.

Sanctuary

Margaret Kennedy

Betsy Canning is dissatisfied with life. She has always taken pains to be healthy, popular and well-treated, but despite her wealth, her comfortable homes and beautiful children, happiness eludes her. The problem must lie, she thinks, in her marriage to Alec, and a neat, civilised divorce seems the perfect solution. 
 
But talk of divorce sparks interference from family and friends, and soon public opinion tears into the fragile fabric of family life and private desire. Alec and Betsy's marriage will not be the only casualty, and in this newly complicated world, happiness is more elusive than ever.

Together and Apart

Richard Yates

Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional and her love affairs never really satisfy her. Although the bond between them endures, gradually the distance between the two women grows, until a tragic event throws their relationship into focus one last time.

The Easter Parade

Sebastian Faulks

In this unique and compelling anthology, Sebastian Faulks and Jorg Hensgen have collected the best fiction about war in the twentieth century.  Ranging from the First World War to the Gulf War, these stories depict a soldier's experience from call-up, battle and comradeship, to leave, hospital and trauma in later life.  Truly international in scope, this anthology includes stories by Erich Maria Remarque and Pat Barker, Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Boll and Norman Mailer, JG Ballard and Tim O'Brien, Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernieres.  Together they form a powerful and moving evocation of the horrors of war.

War Stories

Ernest Hemingway

'This is a hell of dull talk...How about some of that champagne?' 
 
Paris in the twenties: Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Jake is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, with an abandoned, sensuous nature that she cannot change. When the couple drift to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the Bullfight, their affair is strained by new passions, new jealousies, and Jake must finally learn that he will never possess the woman that he loves. 
 
VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

Fiesta

The Sun Also Rises

W. Somerset Maugham

Julia Lambert is in her prime, the greatest actress in England. Off stage, however, she is bored with her handsome husband, coquettish and undisciplined. She is at first flattered and amused by the attentions of a shy and eager young fan, but before long Julia is amazed to find herself falling wildly, dangerously, in love.

Theatre

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

Arthur Koestler

This was the third novel of Arthur Koestler's trilogy on ends and means - the other two are THE GLADIATORS and DARKNESS AT NOON - and the first he wrote in English.  The central theme is the conflict between morality and expediency, and in this novel Koestler worked it out in terms of individual psychology.  Peter Slavek starts out as a brave young revolutionary, but suffers a breakdown.  On the analyst's couch he is made to discover, in Koestler's own words, 'that his crusading zeal was derived from unconscious guilt'.

Arrival and Departure

Henry Green

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS 
 
Henry Green, whom W. H. Auden called 'the finest living English novelist', is the most neglected writer of the last century and the one most deserving of rediscovery by a new generation. This volume brings together three of Henry Green's intensely original novels. 
 
Loving explored class distinctions through the medium of love and brilliantly contrasts the lives of servants and masters in an Irish castle during World War Two, Living of workers and owners in a Birmingham iron foundry. Party Going is a brilliant comedy of manners, presenting a party of wealthy travellers stranded by fog in a London railway hotel while throngs of workers await trains in the station below.

Loving, Living, Party Going

Martin Amis

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CLAIRE LOWDON 
 
Charles Highway is every mother's worst nightmare. 
 
Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets the aloof, wildly unattainable, Rachel. 
 
As Charles's twentieth birthday - and the Oxford entrance exams - loom, his plans for seducing Rachel will draw him into a private collection of obsessional notes and observations: the eponymous 'Rachel Papers'. 
 
WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD 
 
'Scurrilous, shameless and very funny' The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving' Peter Ackroyd

The Rachel Papers

50th Anniversary Edition

Hammond Innes

Karen and Trevor have seen too many oil tankers run aground near Land's End, their poisonous cargo turning the waters black and suffocating all natural life for miles around. The Petros Jupiter is the latest devastating wreck, and tired of local committees that have no effect, Karen resolves on more drastic measures. It is left to her husband to unravel the tragedy and mystery that follow.

The Black Tide

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM ANDREW O'HAGAN 
 
John Self is a consumer extraordinaire. 
 
Rolling between London and New York he closes movie deals and spends feverishly, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography and mountains of junk food. But John's excesses haven't gone un-noted. Menaced by a phone stalker, his high-wire, hoggish lifestyle is about to bring him face-to-face with the secret of his success. 
 
'Turbo-charged with savage humour from first to last page... A voice that mesmerised a generation' Guardian

Money

Evan Shepard is a young man with a chequered past when he first meets the Drakes, after his car breaks down outside their house. Behind him, he has a troubled adolescence, a failed marriage and a little daughter, but his meeting with the quiet and beautiful Rachel heralds a new start. However, after their swift marriage, things don't work out quite as planned and the stresses of living with Rachel's family, in their shared house in Cold Spring Harbor, begin to take their toll on the new couple.

Cold Spring Harbor

Wilkie Collins

'The first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels' T S Eliot 
 
When Rachel Verinder receives a gift of an astonishing yellow diamond from her bitter old uncle for her eighteenth birthday, she has no idea that the stone brings great danger with it. When the diamond goes missing during the night the ensuing investigations gradually bring to light the sinister history of the jewel and the passions and plots of those close to Rachel. 
 
 
'Probably the very finest detective story ever written' Dorothy L. Sayers 
 
**AS DISCUSSED ON BBC2'S BETWEEN THE COVERS**

The Moonstone

Toni Morrison

'Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter' New York Times 
 
As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. 
 
Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is a story of fear - the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend. Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula is a woman of uncompromising power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down. 
 
'What a force her thoughts have been and how grateful we must be that they were offered to us in this extremely challenging age' Alice Walker, Guardian 
 
**AS FEATURED IN OPRAH&rsquo;S BOOK CLUB** 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Sula

A.L. Kennedy

Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, Hannah Luckraft is starting to realise that her lifestyle is not sustainable. Her soul is unwell, her family is wounded, her friends are odd, her body is unreliable and her drinking is out of control. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of her problem. From Scotland to Dublin, from London to Montreal, to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels in search of the ultimate altered state – her paradise.

Paradise

Stella Gibbons

Thrown out of her long-established office job, Miss Christine Smith takes up a new role as housekeeper for a group of middle-aged artists. Charmed by a previous mystical experience, her spirituality is nurtured further by the tenants, who seem stuck in their own personal lull. Written in the 1960s, surrounded by social and political transitions, the novel focuses on change, or the lack thereof.

The Charmers

Jean-Patrick Manchette

Murder isn’t always ugly. 
 
Aimée is drop-dead gorgeous, razor-sharp, and lethally efficient. A killer with a cool head and a taste for chaos, she arrives in the backwater town of Bléville – a festering stew of grudges, corruption, and small-town rot – ready to make a killing. 
 
It's a game she’s played before: stir up trouble, pit the locals against one another, then disappear with blood on her hands and money in her pocket. But this time, something breaks and the game turns on her. 
 
Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the crime novel into a weapon of satire and stylish mayhem. Fatale is his bloodiest, funniest, and most brilliantly unhinged work: a riot of revenge, farce, and gleeful destruction. 
 
PRAISE FOR JEAN-PARICK MANCHETTE 
 
 
‘Manchette was Le Homme... We must revere him now and rediscover him this very instant. ’ James Ellroy 
 
'A comic genius... I read and reread him, stunned, appalled, and laughing out loud' Rachel Kushner 
 
‘Manchette is Camus on overdrive... He deserves much the same attention’ James Sallis 
 
‘Manchette is legend among all of the crime writers I know, and with good reason: his novels never fail to stun and thrill from page one’ Duane Swierczynski

Fatale

Graham Greene

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MONICA ALI 
 
The love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy two years later, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.

The End of the Affair

A young English woman leaves her ageing parents to visit friends living in the Australian outback. She falls in love, both with the country and with Carl, a doctor and Czech refugee. Brought together through dramatic encounters and strange twists of fate, their relationship hangs in the balance when Jennifer is called back to England.

The Far Country

Alison Lurie

Brian and Erica Tate appear to have every advantage in life: academic careers, two children, nice friends and money. But when Brian begins an affair with one of his students the disintegration of their lives is swift and shocking. Things spiral when a protest against a sexist professor at the university ramps up and Brian, hopelessly compromised by split loyalties, gets caught up in the action. 
 
Can the Tates marriage survive? Lurie skewers both sides in this brilliant campus satire of 1960s feminism, parenthood, infidelity and academic pomposity. 
 
'Her humour is a delight and she writes with an almost unholy relish' Irish Times

The War Between the Tates

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

'Delightful... Her characters are, as always, wonderfully imperfect' New York Review of Books 
 
Alan has changed because he's injured his back. Pain has altered his appearance and made him glum, demanding and resentful. His wife Jane has to do everything for him - fetching, carrying, shopping, cooking, even dressing and undressing him. Sometimes she longs for escape. 
 
Delia is a writer and researcher specialising in fairy tales - she is, in her own estimation, a 'Great Artist'. Her husband, Henry, manages her every need making certain Delia gets everything she desires including spectacular doses of adulation. 
 
Can Delia coax Alan out of his grumpiness? Can Henry stop Jane feeling guilty? Can the two couples break out of their fixed roles? 
 
'I am re-reading with enormous delight and greed. If you're new to [Lurie], lucky you: marvellously astute comedies of social, moral and sexual manners, her witty exuberance is nothing short of inspirational' Helen Simpson

Truth and Consequences

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY RACHEL CUSK 
 
Writer, Samson Young, is staring death in the face, and not only his own. 
 
Void of ideas and on the verge of terminal decline, Samson’s dash to a decaying, degenerate London has brought him through the doors of the Black Cross pub and into a murder story just waiting to be narrated. 
 
At its centre is the mesmeric, doomed Nicola Six, destined to be murdered on her 35th birthday. Around her: the disreputable men who might yet turn out to be her killer. All Samson has to do is to write Nicola’s story as it happens, and savour in this one last gift that life has granted him. 
 
'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent

London Fields

Simone de Beauvoir

Laurence is a woman who appears to live an ideal life. 
 
Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – her life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind unbidden writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office. 
 
But Laurence is a woman whose experience of life has always been overwritten by the expectation of perfection. It is only when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world that Laurence begins to act, finally grappling with a life that prizes image over truth. 
 
TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN

The Image of Her

Bertha Ley comes of age, inherits her father's money and promptly marries a handsome, calm and unimaginative man. Bertha is wildly in love with Edward and believes she can be happy playing the role of a dutiful wife in their country home. But, intelligent and sensual, she quickly becomes bored by her oppressively conventional life, and finds her love for her husband slipping away. 
 
Originally rejected by publishers, Mrs Craddock was first published only on condition that certain 'shocking' passages were removed. It was thirty years before the full text could be published.

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