Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following decades. These varied from historical fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly). 
 
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré.

Len Deighton

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J. D. Salinger

In May of 1942, Buddy Glass, second son of the eccentric Glass family, comes home on leave from military service. He is back in New York City to attend the wedding of his eldest brother, Seymour. But the celebration is overcast by a sense of suspended weight, a strange and muted dread. Perhaps everyone is aware, on some level, of what is to come. And in the years after the tragedy, Buddy is haunted by memories of Seymour, turning over in his mind everything that came to pass with his unhappy older brother. 
 
In two communicating stories from his acclaimed Glass series, J. D. Salinger unfolds a subtle and poignant story of family tragedy.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Seymour - an Introduction

Read stories inspired by the four Underground lines that run around and through areas of London - part of a series of twelve books tied to the twelve lines of the London Underground, as Tfl celebrates 150 years of the Tube with Penguin. 
 
Family, passion and fashion come together in four tales: 
 
The Circle Line: From Lucy Wadham, the bestselling author of The Secret Life of France, an autobiographical tale of bohemians, punk, the King's Road in the 1970s and family. 
 
The Metropolitan Line: Richard Mabey, one of Britain's leading nature writers, looks in A Good Parcel of English Soil at the relationship between city and country, and how this brings out the power of nature 
 
The East London Line: London is a centre of cutting-edge fashion - here, the creators of 'the best fashion mag out there', Fantastic Man, tell the story of London style through the history of the button-down shirt. 
 
The Waterloo &amp; City Line: Leanne Shapton, author of Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris and Swimming Studies, creates an authorly and artistic response to travel, work and being a passenger.

Circles and Diagonals: Penguin Underground Lines

Circle, Metropolitan, East London Line, Waterloo & City

Donald Barthelme

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'I said that although hanging Colby was almost certainly against the law, we had a perfect moral right to do so because he was our friend, belonged to us in various important senses, and he had after all gone too far.' 
 
Donald Barthelme is a puckish player with language, a writer of short but endlessly rewarding comic gems, a thinker and an experimenter. In these nine short stories, whether writing about a hairy, donkeyish king or a touching, private gesture of city-sized proportions, his is a surreal, deadpan genius. 
 
This book includes Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, The Glass Mountain, I Bought a Little City, The Palace at Four A.M., Chablis, The School, Margins, Game and The Balloon.

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

Sinéad Moriarty

A SPECIAL SHORT STORY FROM THE WINNER OF THE IRISH BOOK AWARD FOR POPULAR FICTION 2015 - A STANDALONE PREQUEL TO THE NO 1 BESTSELLING THE WAY WE WERE 
 
It's Valentine's Day and Alice's house is a sea of elaborate cards and billowing heart-shaped balloons. These gifts are not from her husband, Ben, but from a gaggle of boys madly in love with their fifteen-year-old daughter. 
 
After nearly two decades together, Alice and Ben barely have time for romance. Their roles are clear: Alice is a busy GP who also keeps their home and girls on track. Ben has the more exciting if demanding career as a surgeon. 
 
Much as she knows Ben loves his family, Alice feels he is restless and preoccupied. But what is causing him to neglect her and their daughters? 
 
Then, at a Valentine's dinner with friends, a dramatic revelation causes Alice to see Ben in a new light - and to wonder if they still have a future together. Because it is clear - their family cannot stay the way they are. 
 
Praise for The Way We Were: 
 
'Heartfelt and deeply moving ... I couldn't put it down.' Susan Lewis 
 
'Intriguing and thought provoking ... a great read.' Katie Fforde 
 
'Gripping and thought-provoking - I was desperate to discover how it would pan out!' Paige Toon

The Way We Are

Gervase Phinn

For eleven-year old James Joseph Johnson (or Jimmy for short) life is not always straightforward. In fact, things can be quite complicated, and don't always turn out as he'd planned . . . 
 
Born in 1946, Jimmy lives with his Mum and Dad in a shiny red brick terraced house in South Yorkshire near the steel works. Sometimes the air is thick and metallic tasting, with bits of soot floating around like little black snowflakes. Despite all this, Jimmy wouldn't want to live anywhere else. 
 
His very best friend, Ignatius Plunkett, is a scrawny boy with a sharp beak of a nose, ears like jug handles and a mop of jet black hair. Micky is his rather 'posh' friend from the big houses down the road. The boys get into a few scrapes in the year leading up to the eleven-plus exams, but will they come out on top in the end? 
 
Will Jimmy survive a week looking after Butch, the temperamental, barrel-bodied bull terrier? Will the truth about the trip to buy Dad's tripe ever come out? What really happens to Jimmy's Mum's coffee and walnut cake, and will the mystery of the missing locket ever get solved?

A Load of Old Tripe

Colm Tóibín

'I imagined lamplight, shadows, soft voices, clothes put away, the low sound of late news on the radio. And I thought as I crossed the bridge at Baggot Street to face the last stretch of my own journey home that no matter what I had done, I had not done that.' 
 
In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family Colm Tóibín delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history. 
 
From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence each of Tóibín's stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained.

The Empty Family

Stories

Jess Walter

In this dazzling collection of stories, a son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place that will care for the old man. An elderly couple confronts the note-taking fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the beautifully romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during "the year of my reinvention" finds himself face-to-face with the gorgeous Italian actress of his adolescent dreams. 
 
Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection takes the reader to Italy and Idaho, Washington and Mississippi. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch.

The Angel of Rome

Paul Theroux

A family watches, horrified, as their patriarch transforms into the wise-cracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. An art collector gleefully destroys his most valuable pieces. A young artist devotes himself to a wealthy, malicious gossip, knowing that it's just a matter of time before she turns on him. 
 
In this new collection of short stories, Paul Theroux explores the tenuous leadership of the elite and the surprising revenge of the overlooked. He shows us humanity possessed, consumed by its own desires, always with his carefully honed eye and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life.

Mr Bones

Twenty Stories

Salley Vickers

'A wonderful book. Salley Vickers spins a spellbinding account of a family in distress' Elizabeth Strout on 'Cousins' 
 
Spring, 1918. Nine-year-old Charlotte Tye wakes up unusually early the night before her brother's wedding, and steals out down the familiar track leading from her house to the seashore. There, she meets a local man, standing alone amid the eider ducks, who carries a mysterious message for her... 
 
Read more about three generations of the Tye family from the First World War to the present day in the first two chapters of Salley Vickers' powerful new novel, 'Cousins', included in this e-book.

The Message from Lindisfarne

Alison MacLeod

Sexy, tender, funny and haunting by turns, the stories in Alison MacLeod's daring new collection are tales of lovers, would-be lovers and lovers gone wrong.  Here we discover ECT patient Gloria, who falls for her anaesthetist, 'Dr Numb'; the cerebral Nick, who chases after the heavily pregnant Katie at an Ikea sale; and the legendary lovers Heloise and Abelard re-imagined for the twenty-first century.  With settings that range from a cheap Paris café to London's Hayward Gallery, and from the Brighton seafront to the Nova Scotia coast, these stories are at times magical, at times grittily real, but always affecting.

Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction

Gregg Hurwitz

DISCOVER YOUR EXCLUSIVE, FREE ORPHAN X SHORT STORY NOW! 
 
In the latest short story from bestselling author Gregg Hurwitz, discover the teenage missions of Orphan X . . . 
 
Before he was the feared black ops government assassin Orphan X, operating in the shadows and spoken about in whispers, Evan Smoak was a teenager, undergoing the most rigorous of training. At 17, Evan is sent off by his handler, ex-CIA station agent Jack Johns, to take the most intense U.S. military training course. But that is only part of the challenge before him - Evan has to get there and back, safely and quietly, maintaining operational security. And along the way, facing unexpected challenges, Evan must use everything he's learned since the day he was taken from the foster home in East Baltimore, lessons that Jack Johns has drilled into him, laws of life and death that are to become The Code.

The Code

A Free Orphan X Short Story

Gabriel García Márquez

Their nostalgic memories of home, their sense of anonymity in a foreign land, the terrifying pang of vulnerability they feel as they step over the threshold into an alien world... 
 
These pilgrims - the ageing prostitute preparing for death, the panicked husband scared for the life of his injured wife, the old man who allows his mind to wander on a long-haul flight from Paris - experience what it is to be an outsider living far from home. 
 
Strange Pilgrims is re-issued on Gabriel García Márquez 's birthday to celebrate the publication of his books as ebooks for the first time.

Strange Pilgrims

Kate Riordan

Marjorie knows that James has had affairs in the past. She knows that when he works late, he can't attend a party, he seems to be deep in thought, his heart, mind or body might be with another woman. But that doesn't stop her breath catching in her throat when she sees the letter inked into his diary. A red A - unassuming and yet dominating, all powerful. Unquestionable. 
 
She was a clever, witty and independent woman once. Not someone's second best with a broken spirit. And as Marjorie looks at the red letter A - Amy? Angela? - she realises that it's is time to rediscover herself.

The Red Letter

Kim Edwards

Young, fiery and bright, Eshlaini has her whole future ahead of her &ndash; until her father condemns her to a life of spinsterhood. 
 
Joyce has settled into Malaysian life after thirty years as an ex-pat wife &ndash; or so she thinks, until a newcomer arrives and reveals just how little of her home she knows. 
 
Jade Moon wants the best for her family &ndash; but, surrounded by Americans who reject her Korean traditions, she must first work out what &lsquo;the best&rsquo; means. 
 
Though cultures and distances separate them, their experiences reflect our universal fears and desires. From a breathtaking island off Singapore to upstate New York and France, Kim Edwards takes in the world, compassionately and gracefully exploring the obstacles of time, place and circumstance in all of our quests for love, happiness and acceptance.

The Secrets of a Fire King

Kit de Waal

As she walks out of her marriage, a woman remembers the day her husband rescued a boy from drowning. 
A blind man on his wedding day celebrates the pursuit of love. 
And a young man leaves prison with only one desire - to see his son again. 
 
Kit de Waal's characters light up the page in vivid stories of thwarted desire, love and loss. With power and precision, humanity and insight, Supporting Cast captures the extraordinary moments in our ordinary lives, and the darkness and the joy of the everyday.

Supporting Cast

Henry James

The stories in this collection were written mostly between 1888 and 1897, a time when Henry James&rsquo;s writing was concerned with the art of fiction and the position of the artist in society. The motif and title story, &lsquo;The Figure in the Carpet&rsquo;, is an inspired joke, a masterpiece of double-entendre that demands the reader&rsquo;s undivided love and attention and continues to baffle its critics. Also included are &lsquo;The Author of Beltraffio&rsquo;, an absorbing story of family infighting, authorship and tragedy, and &lsquo;The Private Life&rsquo;, a spirited tale that considers the contrast between the artist alone and at work. While many of these stories appear to be elaborate Jamesian games, all employ irony and humour to allegorize artistic creation.

The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories

Edith Wharton

Seth

When Lady Jane Lynke unexpectedly inherits Bells, a beautiful country estate, she declares she'll never leave the peaceful grounds and sets about making the house her home. But she hasn't reckoned on the obstinate Mr Jones, the caretaker she's told dislikes her changes, yet never seems able to be found.

Mr Jones

Frank O'Connor

'Father,' I said, feeling I might as well get it over while I had him in a good humour, 'I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother.' 
 
Praised as Ireland's Chekhov, Frank O'Connor was a modern master of the short story. From an amateur brass band divided by partisanship to English soldiers who befriend their Irish captors, and from a child's comic confession to the end of a small-town friendship, these four humorous and tragic stories refract universal truths through the prism of 20th-century Ireland. 
 
This book contains The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland, Guests of the Nation, A Story by Maupassant, and First Confession.

The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland

Nancy Mitford

'How lovely - green velvet and silver. I call that a dream, so soft and delicious, too.' She rubbed a fold of the skirt against her cheek. 'Mine's silver lamé, it smells like a bird cage when it gets hot but I do love it. Aren't you thankful evening skirts are long again?' 
 
Ah, the dresses! But oh, the monotony of the Season, with its endless run of glittering balls. Even fabulously fashionable Polly Hampton - with her startling good looks and excellent social connections - is beginning to wilt under the glare. 
 
Groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, fearsome Lady Montdore, Polly instead scandalizes society by declaring her love for her uncle 'Boy' Dougdale, the Lecherous Lecturer, and promptly eloping to France. But the consequences of this union no one could quite expect . . . 
 
Love in a Cold Climate is the wickedly funny follow-up to The Pursuit of Love and explores the mystery of sexual attraction.

Love in a Cold Climate

The wickedly funny sequel to The Pursuit of Love

The Turn of the Screw tells the story of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans. Unsettled by a sense of intense evil in the house she soon becomes obsessed with the idea that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. Meanwhile The Aspern Papers explores obsession of a more worldly kind, with its tale of a literary historian determined to get his hands on some letters written by a great poet. Such is his drive, he is quite prepared to use trickery and deception to achieve his aims...

The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers

Roald Dahl

A wife pawns her lover's parting gift with unexpected consequences, an unusual painting proves to be more valuable than anyone, especially its owner, could ever have predicted, a husband and wife, unable to get their new baby to feed, hit upon a disturbing solution . . . Cruelty highlights a domestic familiarity always on the edge of something much, much darker. 
 
Collected together for the first time, stories include The Butler, The Great Automatic Grammatizator, Royal jelly, Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat,The Swan, Poison, Skin, The Princess and the Poacher, Genesis and Catastrophe and Mr Feasey.

Cruelty

William Trevor

A remarkable collection of twelve new stories,mostly set in Ireland,which was greeted with universal acclamation when published in hardcover in 1996. The title story is a small, sad masterpiece, about a woman holidaying alone in an Italian hotel. 
 
&quot;A dazzling collection of short stories&quot; SUNDAY TIMES

After Rain

In William and Mary, Roald Dahl, one of the world's favourite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a wronged woman takes revenge on her dead husband . . .

William and Mary (A Roald Dahl Short Story)

Andrew Fox

A young man rushes to the bedside of his ex, knowing the baby she's having is not his own. Travelling colleagues experience an eerie moment of truth when a fire starts in their hotel. A misdirected parcel sets off a complex psychodrama involving two men, a woman and a dog ... 
 
Andrew Fox's clever, witty, intense and thoroughly entertaining stories capture the passions and befuddlements of the young and rootless, equally dislocated at home and abroad. Set in America and Ireland - and, at times, in jets over the Atlantic - Over Our Heads showcases a brilliant new talent.

Over Our Heads

William Trevor's new collection of stories is his first since the highly acclaimed AFTER RAIN. It contains a dozen new stories, mostly set in Ireland, that show Trevor at the height of his powers. With understatement and precision he writes about the lonely and the sad, about those that barely have control over their lives and those who have something to hide. In 'Three People' a father waits for the proposal for his daughter that will never come; in 'Against the Odds', a con-woman has businessthat takes her all across the Six Counties; and in the poignant title-story, a youngest son returns home for his father's funeral and stays to run the farm.

The Hill Bachelors

In Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat, Roald Dahl, one of the world's favourite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a wife pawns her lover's parting gift with unexpected consequences . . .

Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat (A Roald Dahl Short Story)

Elizabeth Strout

Anything is Possible tells the story of the inhabitants of rural, dusty Amgash, Illinois, the hometown of Lucy Barton, a successful New York writer who finally returns, after seventeen years of absence, to visit the siblings she left behind. 
 
Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout's place as one of America's most respected and cherished authors.

Anything is Possible

Michiko Aoyama

DISCOVER THE TWO-MILLION-COPY UPLIFTING WORD-OF-MOUTH HIT 
A Top Ten Times bestseller 
 
The NEXT read for lovers of The Midnight Library and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this feel-good story shows how the perfect book recommendation can change a life. 
 
'I ADORED this uplifting, hopeful novel ' Daily Mail 
'A quirky slice of feel-good fiction that you could recommend to anyone' Mail on Sunday 
'A tribute to the transformative power of books and libraries' Irish Times 
'An undeniable page-turner' New York Times 
________________ 
What are you looking for? 
 
So asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. 
 
But she is no ordinary librarian. 
 
Sensing exactly what someone is searching for in life, she provides just the book recommendation to help them find it. 
 
We meet five visitors to the library, each at a different crossroads: 
 
- The restless retail assistant eager to pick up new skills 
- The mother faced with a demotion at work after maternity leave 
- The conscientious accountant who yearns to open an antique store 
- The gifted young manga artist in search of motivation 
- The recently retired salaryman on a quest for newfound purpose 
 
Can she help them find what they are looking for? Which book will you recommend? 
_________________ 
 
READERS ADORE THIS BOOK: 
'I definitely want to visit this library. I feel kinder after this book' 5***** Reader review 
'It made me laugh and cry and feel comforted' 5***** Reader review 
'Wonderful. It made me look for connection in my life' 5***** Reader review 
 
BOOKSELLERS ADORE THIS BOOK: 
'Perfect for anyone who's obsessed with Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Definitely a must-read' ***** 
'I can wholeheartedly recommend this!' ***** 
 
Times bestseller, August 2023. Cover may vary.

What You Are Looking for is in the Library

Leonora Brito

Leonora Brito was a writer of exceptional stories. In Dat's Love, she soaks up the sights, sounds and colours of Cardiff to boldly explore race and history. 
 
With each electric story, Brito introduces a unique cast of characters, vibrantly elevating their everyday lives. From 59-year-old Dorothy taking up nude modelling to black aristocrat Dido Elizabeth Belle, from the assassination of JFK to what's going down at the Blue Bayou, Brito blends the surreal and the mundane to redress history and immerse the reader in a vibrantly painted world. 
 
Containing an unusual exactness and sense of place, Brito's stories are unique in Welsh fiction in presenting an insider's perspective on a black Welsh history only alluded to by other writers. Full of wry humour and startling originality, this collection features some of Brito's most acclaimed work.

Dat's Love

An American soldier has a strange encounter with an orphaned English teenager the night before he leaves for war. A four-year-old boy runs away from home in a dinghy. A missionary's child is kidnapped by Chinese bandits. A honeymoon in Florida goes awry with tragic consequences. 
 
 Including the first stories to feature J. D. Salinger's beloved Glass family characters, this brilliantly varied collection offers a vivid introduction to the work of one of the most admired and widely read American novelists of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane and frequently affecting, For Esmé - with Love and Squalor is a gem to be passed down for many generations to come.

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