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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Willa Cather

How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . 
 
Marian Forrester enchants everyone around her: her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her unwavering confidant. Yet, her irresistible charm and dazzling wit conceal a dangerous vulnerability – and her greatest secret. A significant inspiration for The Great Gatsby, this exquisite novella is a poignant elegy for a bygone era, fading into history.

A Lost Lady

Nikolay Leskov

'I decided that my trip had evidently been in vain, since nothing of interest could possibly occur on this visit. I was mistaken.' 
 
Condemned to sleeplessness by the chatter permeating his guesthouse room, a forlorn traveller turns his ear to the riotous tale spun by the garrulous, meddlesome, inane and utterly unprincipled Márya Martýnovna next door. Her exuberant deformations of morality and language scandalized Tsarist society, and she remains one of Russian literature’s most uproarious anti-heroes.

Night Owls

Romain Gary

‘Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale’ 
 
In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull of a mysterious pavilion in the lush grounds, and the terrible secret she buried there many years ago . . .

Lady L.

Karen Blixen

‘As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories’ 
 
Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen’s short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal lord sets a peasant woman a deadly task, and a young woman resists against her captors, in the midst of conflict.

The Dreaming Child

Irmgard Keun

Arrested in Cologne for remarking that the Fuhrer looked sweaty, nineteen-year-old Sanna has fled to Frankfurt. But her troubles are far from over. Her best friend Gerti has fallen for a Jewish boy, her brother writes books that have been blacklisted, and her own aunt could turn her in to the authorities at any moment. Darkly humorous and utterly heart rending, this gripping novel vividly captures the terror and hysteria of pre-war Nazi Germany.

After Midnight

Kate Chopin

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name 
 
Nuns, maidens, adventurers – with electricity, The Story of an Hour collects stories of female freedom, as Kate Chopin asks the question: what will emancipation feel like for her, looking at the horizon and the future, to the frontier?

The Story of an Hour

Clarice Lispector

'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' - Colm Tóibín 
 
A housewife’s life is shattered by a sudden epiphany. A simple tale of killing cockroaches fragments into multiple narratives, each uncovering new truths. In this selection of haunting short stories, Lispector reveals the permeable boundaries between past and present, the real and the surreal, showing ordinary moments to contain the deepest existential truths.

The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels

Katherine Mansfield

She drew a long, soft breath, as though the paper daffodils between them were almost too sweet to bearKatherine Mansfield was a magician of the short story, whose work was described by Virginia Woolf as ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of’. These eight tales show her gift for transforming fleeting moments – a chance meeting, a letter received, a careless remark – into small miracles of language and feeling.

A Dill Pickle

Tove Ditlevsen

‘Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by chance or infrequently.’ 
 
Longing shimmers from these spare but profoundly moving short stories by one of Denmark’s most fearless and sharp-eyed authors. In these tales of inarticulate desire and repression, Ditlevsen pulls to the surface our deepest interiorities in devastating, exacting prose.

The Umbrella

Søren Kierkegaard

'What does love fear? Limitation.' 
 
Johannes stealthily pursues Cordelia through the streets of Copenhagen, and through an intricate, manipulative courtship contrives to possess her. Motivated not by love or sex but by sensation and experiment, he seeks to make the object of his desire desire him – and then to retreat. At once a captivating story and philosophical exploration of existence’s entanglements, The Seducer's Diary is also an excoriating reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s own romantic failures.

The Seducer’s Diary

Sarah Orne Jewett

A young writer leaves the city to complete her manuscript in a small coastal town, but finds herself writing about the lives of its inhabitants instead – their occupation with memory and tradition, their vibrant female friendships, and the idyll of the landscape that informs their sense of togetherness. A classic of American fiction adored by Willa Cather and Henry James, The Country of the Pointed Firs seems woven from the fabric of community itself.

The Country of the Pointed Firs

Margaret Cavendish

‘I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security’ 
 
In 1666, Margaret Cavendish had a vision: there was a crack in reality at the North Pole leading to a utopian parallel universe, where gender roles, scientific orthodoxy and political norms had been razed to the ground. She slipped through the portal and returned with the first science fiction novel in English – an explosive account of the Blazing World.

The Blazing World

June Jordan

‘we are the ones we have been waiting for’ 
 
These poems of radical love, urgency and global consciousness reach across borders to break open the silence of oppression and the taboo, liberating both body and soul. 
 
Lively and enigmatic, Passion is June Jordan’s most accomplished and animated collection. Her virtuosic, resolute words have inspired generations of readers and activists across the world, from Nobel Laureates to US Presidents.

Passion

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark claimed The Driver’s Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise – heading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily garish dress and with violence on her mind – you will understand why.

The Driver's Seat

Andy Warhol

‘People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don’t look.’ 
 
From Warhol’s romantic relationships to his thoughts on interior design, these candid, highly entertaining musings - on love, sex, beauty, work and space – give an intimate glimpse into the mind of one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century culture.

Beauty

Carson McCullers

On a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain’s wife in the nude and becomes obsessed with her. But Captain Penderton – unhappily married to the unfaithful Leonora – in turn erotically fixates on Williams. Spare, muscular and sensual, with the dramatic vision of a Greek myth, Carson McCullers’ novella is a timeless work about the alienation of forbidden desire.

Reflections in a Golden Eye

Maryse Condé

‘I walked in a daze of illusions toward my future.’ 
 
Deeply felt and told with an intrepid spirit, Tales from the Heart are the intimate, formative stories from the childhood of the legendary Caribbean writer, Maryse Condé. 
 
These affecting vignettes follow Condé’s early encounters with love, grief, friendship, as she navigates the pernicious legacy of slavery and colonialism in her home of Guadeloupe and as a student in Paris.

Tales from the Heart

True Stories from my Childhood

Charles Dickens

Trotty Veck, an elderly porter, has read so many newspaper reports about crime and immorality that he believes the working classes are irredeemable. But, on New Year’s Eve, summoned to the church tower by a mysterious chiming, Trotty witnesses his own death, and is taken on a ghostly journey that will force him to reassess his conviction. One of Dickens’ ‘Christmas stories’, The Chimes is charming and surprising manifesto for empathy for our fellow man.

The Chimes

Mikhail Bulgakov

What would happen if a doctor implanted the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into the body of a stray dog? In Mikhail Bulgakov’s topsy-turvy world, the dog starts to walk on two legs, drink, smoke, thieve, chase women and recite every swear word in Russian. The perfect candidate for a government official, in other words. This rude, riotous send-up of the Soviet Union, banned immediately on publication, is satire red in tooth and claw.

A Dog's Heart

H. P. Lovecraft

‘Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before’ 
 
After five years of 'strange amnesia', Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee remains haunted by madness and memories that cannot be real. Desperate for answers he travels to Western Australia, joining an archaeological excavation into Earth’s deep past. 
 
Journey with Peaslee to discover his fate in the story described by author Lin Carter as ‘Lovecraft’s single greatest achievement in fiction’.

The Shadow out of Time

Dorothy Parker

What can you say, when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you. I’ll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, I’d like to awfully, but I’m having labor pains.Acerbic, pithy and vibrant, Dorothy Parker’s writings capture the dizzying decadence of Jazz Age New York. Though Parker refuses to be swept along: she gleefully deconstructs its hypocrisy, prejudice and taboos with style and precision.

Horsie

Elizabeth Gaskell

Beware the self-righteous man of faith, the wicked-eyed child, the jealous lover. For this is Salem, in 1691, where rumours fly on the wind and witchcraft is abroad. Lois Barclay, cursed in childhood, is a stranger in a strange land – and the devil will work his mischief on Lois’s neighbours before the season of madness is out.

Lois the Witch

Christina Rossetti

One of the finest poets of the Victorian age, Christina Rosetti is known today for the directness, clarity and unmatched lyricism of her works. This selection brings together some of her finest verses, love lyrics and sonnets for the contemporary reader. Spanning themes like love, death, loss, womanhood and devotion to pleasures both earthly and divine, these are poems of startling beauty, as evocative and relevant today as when they were first published.

To Read and Dream

Epictetus

‘I must die. But must I die bawling?’ 
 
What does it mean to live a virtuous life? How can we rise above pain and anguish? In these teachings from Book 1 of his Discourses, ancient philosopher Epictetus outlines a practical approach to Stoicism that has inspired thinkers for centuries, from Marcus Aurelius to Theodore Roosevelt, offering enduring wisdom on resilience, virtue and the pursuit of meaning.

Whatever is Rational is Tolerable

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I am a ridiculous man. They call me mad now. That would be a promotion in rank 
 
A delusional man whose strange dream changes his life; a self-justifying husband who causes his wife’s suicide; a witness to a young girl’s ruin; a writer who stretches out on a gravestone and listens to the gossip of the dead … the narrators of these four confessional tales show how little we understand ourselves.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Gertrude Stein

“All Frenchmen know you have to become civilised between eighteen and twenty-three and that civilisation comes upon you by contact with an older woman, by revolution, by army discipline, by any escape or any subjection, and then you are civilised and life goes on normally in a latin way.” Gertrude Stein’s Paris France, published in 1940 on the day Paris fell to Nazi Germany, is a witty account of Stein’s life in France, and the perfect introduction to her work.

Paris France

Mary Shelley

'He stretched out his two long, lank arms, that looked like spider’s claws, and seemed to embrace with them the expanse before him' 
 
His inheritance squandered and engagement severed, Guido di Cortese stalks the desolate Genoese coast. A monstrous creature, shipwrecked by a ferocious storm, offers him unimaginable wealth to exchange bodies, entwining their fates. Transformation, with two further tales of striking and eerie power here, shows how Mary Shelley haunts us still.

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