Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. His previous books include A History of the World in 100 Objects, Shakespeare's Restless World and Germany: Memories of a Nation, all available in Penguin and now between them translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK's highest civil honour. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal and the German National Prize. In 2018 the radio series Living with the Gods received the Sandford Saint Martin Award for Religious Broadcasting.

Neil MacGregor

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Virginia Woolf

Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. But as time passes, bringing with it war and death, the summer home stands empty until one day, many years later, the family return to make the long-postponed visit to the lighthouse

To The Lighthouse

Peter Carey

OSCAR AND LUCINDA is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century England and Australia where the two potential lovers lead parallel lives until chance brings them together on board ship. 
A narrative tangle of love, religion, gambling, commerce and colonialism culminates in a nightmare expedition – the result of a wager – to transport a glass church across the Australian wilderness. 
 
 In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself in a voice that is direct, colloquial, theatrical, and utterly magical. To his pursuers he is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero, defying British imperial authority in support of the poor Irish settlers who are its victims. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Carey brings the famous bushranger unforgettably to life.

Oscar and Lucinda

True History of the Kelly Gang

V. S. Naipaul

Post-colonial Africa is dissected with pitiless lucidity in this disturbing novel about an outsider, the young Indian trader, Salim, who has moved from the coastal settlement where he grew up to an unnamed country in the African interior (largely based on the Democratic Republic of Congo), settling on that very bend in the river where Conrad had set his Heart of Darkness some seventy years before. Salim enters a ghost town, once a flourishing European outpost, which is fast returning to the bush. A new dictator 'the Big Man' is about to impose his regime with the assistance of Raymond, 'The Big Man's White Man', whose humanitarian concerns have won him international acclaim, but whose plans for the country's future are arrogant and delusional. Salim becomes obsessed by Raymond's wife, Yvette, and begins and affair with her. Personal and political tragedy follow, civil war returns, and Salim, contemplating the disastrous course of his life since leaving home, speaks for the powerlessness of ordinary people everywhere in the face of historical upheaval: 'I couldn't protect anyone [and] no one could protect me... we could only in various ways hide from the truth... One tide of history has brought us here ... Another tide of history was coming to wash us away.'.

A Bend in the River

James Baldwin

'Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils...' 
 
Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

Giovanni's Room

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

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

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett is the greatest Irish novelist of the later twentieth century, and this trilogy of novels is his masterpiece -which makes it perhaps the outstanding literary work of our time. Because Beckett has a reputation for being difficult, even obscure, readers of the trilogy are bound to be struck not only by the verbal brilliance and inventiveness of the three novels, but also by their extraordinary humour which ranges from wit to broad comedy and even farce in a recognizably Irish way. Each story records an episode of human endurance in the face of metaphysical adversity with compassion and wisdom and each is a compelling narrative in itself in the great tradition of European fiction from Flaubert to Joyce.

Samuel Beckett Trilogy

Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable

W. Somerset Maugham

After a lonely boyhood, and the painful ordeal of his schooldays, Philip's yearning for adventure takes him to Germany and later Paris where he tries to make his mark as an artist before returning to London to study medicine. Here, a tortured and one-sided love affair with Mildred, a vulgar yet irresistible waitress, changes the course of his life for ever. 
 
Commenting later on the novel’s autobiographical aspects, Maugham recalled how in writing the book he mingled fact and fiction and 'found myself free from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented me'.However, like Dickens’s David Copperfield to which it is often compared, Of Human Bondage goes far beyond autobiography, and is Maugham’s most ambitious and unsparing novel, revealing the author’s undoubted gift for storytelling as he explores the timeless theme of human freedom - freedom to act, to think and to love.

Of Human Bondage

John Banville

The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1989 and The Sea, which won the Booker prize in 2005, take us into the hauntingly confused worlds of two ageing male protagonists - washed- up scientist Freddie Montgomery, desperate to explain why he is being held in an Irish prison for murder (The Book of Evidence) and recently widowed art historian Max Morden, who has returned to a sleepy seaside boarding house to relive the events of his first adolescent awakenings (The Sea). With spellbinding virtuosity, Banville piles ambiguity upon ambiguity to construct tense tales of sex, betrayal and self-deception, which keep us turning the page, while questioning our own certainties about memory and identity. In both works, the acclaimed Irish novelist is revealed at his masterful best, conjuring dark wit, suspense and drama from the stunning lyrical beauty of his near-perfect prose.

The Book of Evidence & The Sea

Penelope Fitzgerald

Sixty-one when she published her first novel, Penelope Fitzgerald based many subsequent books on the experiences of a long and varied life. 
 
Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979, explores her time living on a barge at Battersea Reach. 
 
Human Voices takes place in the BBC where she worked during World War II. Both are vivid, intimate pictures of ordinary life, startling, sad and funny by turns, conjuring up complex worlds with the economy of poetry. 
 
The Beginning of Spring is an historical novel operating on a larger canvas. It presents a life unknown to the author through a story of English émigrés in pre-Revolutionary Russia and has been described by one critic as the best ‘Russian’ novel of the twentieth century. 
 
Written with energy, passion and wit, and each quite different from the others, all three of these masterpieces reveal a lightness of touch with the most serious matters unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning Of Spring

J G Farrell

Inspired by the Indian Mutiny of 1857, The Siege of Krishnapur is set in the fictional town of that name where a British garrison withstands a four-month siege by mutineers. Eventually rescued after undergoing terrible privations, the leading characters all find their ideals tested and their smug assumptions of military and moral superiority severely shaken. 
In Troubles Major Brendan Archer travels to Ireland in the aftermath of World War I in order to meet his fiancée Angela in a remote seaside hotel owned by her father. Angela dies unexpectedly, but Archer remains in Kilnalough, captivated by the Majestic and its inhabitants, and seemingly unaware of the approaching political storm as Ireland dissolves into revolt and civil war. 
Both novels combine high comedy with vivid realism and reveal Farrell as 'one of the finest post-colonial novelists' - John Sutherland.

Troubles

The Siege of Krishnapur

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

Mikhail Bulgakov

Kiev - Kyiv - is in chaos. Russia has withdrawn from World War I but the Germans have set up a puppet government in Ukraine. Civil war rages: the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia, but the anti-revolutionary White Guard who have fled to Ukraine, are rallying to resist. In the meantime, Ukrainian nationalists are camped outside the capital, and a Red army is on its way to bring everyone to heel. While all this is going on, the Turbin family try to eke out their existence in Kyiv and discuss what they should do. They are exactly the sort of family - monarchist intelligentsia - for whom the future looks particularly menacing. 
Bulgakov's brilliant and evocative prose brings the city and the moment unforgettably to life and sheds some fascinating light on the complex interwoven histories of Ukraine and Russia.

The White Guard

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

With effortless grace, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates in her second novel a 
seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to 
establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. 
We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: 
Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor 
full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has 
abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm, and Richard, a 
shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s wilful twin sister Kainene. These 
characters are pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them imagined 
possible. Half of a Yellow Sun is an electrifying modern masterpiece about the ways in 
which love complicates everything.

Half of a Yellow Sun

Vasily Grossman

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, 'two poles of one magnet', as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal - an unexpected and short-lived moment of freedom. Grossman himself was on the front line as a war correspondent at Stalingrad - hence his gripping battle scenes, though these are more than matched by the drama of the individual conscience struggling against massive pressure to submit to the State. He knew all about this from experience too. His central character, Viktor Shtrum, eventually succumbs, but each delay and act of resistance is a moral victory. Though he writes unsparingly of war, terror and totalitarianism, Grossman also tells of the acts of 'senseless kindness' that redeem humanity, and his message remains one of hope. He dedicates his book, the labour of ten years, and which he did not live to see published, to his mother, who, like Viktor Shtrum's, was killed in the holocaust at Berdichev in Ukraine in September 1941.

Life and Fate

The story of a house and two sisters, Howards End is also a subtle meditation on national, sexual and social identities. Half German by birth and middle-class English by upbringing, Helen and Margaret Schlegel struggle to come to terms with the problems of their inheritance in Edwardian England. If the contrasting temperaments of the heroines often recall Sense and Sensibility, the comparison with Jane Austen is fully justified by the power of Forster’s irony and the brilliance of his wit.

Howards End

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is celebrated as a novelist and man of action. He is perhaps most famous for WHOM THE BELL TOLLS and A FAREWELL TO ARMS. But he was equally prolific as a writer of short stories which touch on the same themes as the novels: war, love, the nature of heroism, reunciation, and the writer's life. The present collection includes all Hemingway's shorter fiction arranged chronologically from 'Up in Michigan' (1923) to 'Old Man at the Bridge (1938) and contains stories not currently available in any other UK edition of Hemingway's work's

The Collected Stories

"My favorite novel -it's just the greatest explosion of imagination, craziness, satire, humor, and heart." Daniel Radcliffe. 
 
The devil with his retinue, a poet incarcerated in a mental institution for speaking the truth, and a startling re-creation of the story of Pontius Pilate, constitute the elements out of which Mikhail Bulgakov wove The Master and Margarita, the unofficial masterpiece of twentieth-century Soviet fiction. Long suppressed in its native land, this account of strange doings in Moscow in the 1930s provides us with the essence of the sceptical, trenchant, unadulterated voice of dissent

The Master and Margarita

Martin Amis

Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. And this is a love story. 
 
But the murderee - Nicola Six - is searching for something and someone else: her murderer. She knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means. She just doesn't know the man. 
 
London Fields is a brilliant, funny and multi-layered novel. It is a book in which the narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life...all Samson has to do is write it as it happens.

London Fields

Ben Okri

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story.

The Famished Road

Günter Grass

THE TIN DRUM presents Hitler's rise and fall through the eyes of the dwarfish narrator whose magic powers become symbolic of the dark forces dominating the German nation in the period. Like Thomas Mann's DOCTOR FAUSTUS, Grass's novel explores the dark roots of power and creativity. An early advocate of 'magic realism'. Gunter Grass is the most powerful and celebrated novelist to appear in post-war Germany. His home city of Danzig is a powerful presence in this novel.

The Tin Drum

Naguib Mahfouz

The books' titles are taken from actual streets in Cairo, the city of Mahfouz's childhood and youth. 
The trilogy follows the life of the Cairene patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family across three generations, from World War I to the overthrow of King Farouk in 1952.

Mahfouz Trilogy Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

James Weldon Johnson

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards - and double consciousness - experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. 
 
Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to 'pass' for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century - from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of Ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but colour.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Elizabeth Bowen

A brilliant and much admired novelist, Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) surpassed herself as a writer of short fiction: 'the supreme genius of her time', writes John Banville in his introduction; 'There is not a story in this substantial volume ... that is not brought off beautifully.'  A substantial volume indeed, Including 79 stories written over four decades, ranging in setting from the County Cork of the author's Anglo-Irish childhood to bomb-ravaged London where she coolly sat out the War, evoked with vivid and impeccable artistry. She has a disturbing sense of the uncanny, an acute eye for social comedy and her often emotionally secretive characters are depicted with penetrating psychological insight. She is good at houses, ghosts, children, animals ... 900 pages of sheer delight

Collected Stories

Toni Morrison

It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony. The world of Sethe, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death - the death of Sethe's baby daughter Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone, who died at her mother's hands, and who will return to claim retribution.

Beloved

The Sun Also Rises is both a tragic love story and a searing group portrait of hapless American expatriates drinking, dancing, and chasing their illusions in post-World War I Europe. The man at its centre, world-weary journalist Jake Barnes, is burdened both by a wound acquired in the war and by his utterly hopeless love for the extravagantly decadent Lady Brett Ashley. When Jake, Brett and their friends leave Paris behind and converge in Pamplona for the annual festival of the running of the bulls, tensions among the various rivals for Brett's wayward affections build to a devastating climax. 
 Hemingway, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, has exerted a lasting influence on fiction in English. His signature prose style, tersely powerful and concealing more than it reveals, arguably reached its apex in this modernist masterpiece.

The Sun Also Rises

Joyce Cary

From her prison cell, the irrepressible, magnetic Sara Monday looks back on the past half-century of her life in Herself Surprised. Born into a poor family, her employment while still a young girl as a cook in a middle-class household set her on a colourful and picaresque path. In To Be a Pilgrim, Tom Wilcher, a wealthy and disgraced lawyer who has been both Sara’s employer and her lover, has retreated to his estate near the end of his life to wrestle with his tormented conscience. And the centre of The Horse's Mouth, a charming, talented, 
impoverished artist named Gulley Jimson–also a lover of Sara Monday–is a restless, rebellious, and self-serving scoundrel whose antics verge on the appalling and farcical. 
 
Read together, these three vigorous and unforgettable narrative voices offer a sweeping vision of the first half of the twentieth century that is lyrical, profane, tragic, and comic all at once. 
 
Published in 1941, 1942, and 1944, the novels in Cary’s trilogy were designed to reveal three complex characters, not only as they see themselves, but as they are seen by one another, resulting in a work of three-dimensional depth and force. 
 
'Family life just goes on. Toughest thing in the world. But of course it is also the microcosm of a world. You get everything there—birth, life, death, love and jealousy, conflict of wills, of authority and freedom, the new and the old. And I always choose the biggest stage possible for my theme...' Joyce Cary

Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, The Horse's Mouth

Isaac Asimov

It is the story of the Galactic Empire, crumbling after twelve thousand years of rule. And it is the particular story of psycho-historian Hari Seldon, the only man who can see the horrors the future has in store: a dark age of ignorance, barbarism and violence that will last for thirty thousand years. Gathering together a band of courageous men and women, Seldon leads them to a hidden location at the edge of the galaxy where he hopes they can preserve human knowledge and wisdom against all who would destroy them. 
Asimov went on to add numerous sequels and prequels to the trilogy, building up what has become known as the Foundation series, but it is the original three books, first published in the Forties and Fifties, which remain the most powerful, imaginative and breathtaking.

Foundation Trilogy

Halldór Laxness

Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Independent People is a masterly realist novel evoking in rich detail a family and a rural community struggling to survive in the starkest of landscapes. At the same time it is infused with an intense awareness of Iceland's saga tradition and folklore. Bjartur of Summerhouses is a hard and sometimes cruel man, but his flinty determination to achieve independence is both genuinely heroic and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude before managing to purchase an isolated piece of land rumoured to be cursed, Bjartur wants nothing more than to tend his flocks unbeholden to any man. But his daughter wants to live unbeholden to him, and what ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. 
An utterly compelling read.

Independent People

Langston Hughes

One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston 
Hughes may be best known as a poet, but he was also a brilliant storyteller, blending 
elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. 
Perhaps more than any other writer, Langston Hughes made the white America of the 
1920s and 1930s aware of the Black culture thriving in its midst. Hughes's poetry and 
fiction works are messages from that America, sharply etched vignettes of its daily life, 
cruelly accurate portrayals of Black and white collisions. 
 
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, 
with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, 
European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

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