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Robert Graves

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Claudius has survived the murderous intrigues of his predecessors to become, reluctantly, Emperor of Rome. Here he recounts his surprisingly successful reign: how he cultivates the loyalty of the army and the common people to repair the damage caused by Caligula; his relations with the Jewish King Herod Agrippa; and his invasion of Britain. But the growing paranoia of absolute power and the infidelity of his promiscuous young wife Messalina mean that his good fortune will not last forever. In this second part of Robert Graves's fictionalized autobiography, Claudius - wry, rueful, always inquisitive - brings to life some of the most scandalous and violent times in history.

Claudius the God

Maryse Condé

The year is 1797, and the kingdom of Segu is flourishing. The people of Segu, the Bambara, are guided by their griots and priests while their lives are ruled by nature. But change is about to come: from the east comes a new religion, Islam, and from the West, the slave trade. Segu follows the life of Dousika Traore, the king's most trusted advisor, and his four sons: Tiekoro, who embraces Islam; Siga, a merchant; Naba, who is kidnapped by slave traders; and Malobali, a mercenary and half-hearted Christian. Based on historical events, Segu captures the struggle of a growing nation trying to cope with jihads, national rivalries and racism.

Segu

Penguin Modern Classics

Marie Powell is sixteen when her father marries her to the poet John Milton in payment of a debt. They move to a pretty garden-house in London, but she struggles to adjust to her new life. Her husband is high-minded and unyielding, and only makes Marie long for the man she really loves. As Civil War sweeps across England and the King is killed, a battle starts to rage between husband and wife - one that only the powerful can win. 
 
Told through the fictional journals of Milton's wife, Robert Graves's sympathetic and sensitive reconstruction of her tragic life is also a convincing, linguistically rich portrait of seventeenth-century England as it is ravaged by war.

Wife to Mr Milton

Susan Sontag

Where the Stress Falls is divided into three sections: the first, 'Reading', includes ardent pieces on writers from Sontag's own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva and Elizabeth Hardwick. In the second, 'Seeing', she shares her passions for film, dance, photography, painting, opera and theatre. And in the final section, 'There and Here', Sontag explores her own commitments to the work (and activism) of conscience and to the vocation of the writer.

Where the Stress Falls

Len Deighton

Goodbye Mickey Mouse is a vivid evocation of wartime England, the story of a group of American fighter pilots flying escort missions over Germany in the winter of 1943-4. 
 
At the centre of the novel are two young men: the deeply reserved Captain Jamie Farebrother, estranged son of a deskbound colonel, and the cocky Lieutenant Mickey Morse, well on his way to becoming America's Number One Flying Ace. Alike only in their courage, they forge a bond of friendship in battle with far-reaching consequences for themselves, and for the future of those they love.

Goodbye Mickey Mouse

Aharon Appelfeld

The teenage Katerina flees her abusive home in a poor, Christian village in the 1880s, finding work and shelter in the home of a Jewish family, and in the warmth of their family life and beauty of their Jewish rituals she begins to know safety for the first time. Their life is brutally disrupted when a pogrom is wrought upon the family, and Katerina finds herself alone again. Decades later, having suffered and retaliated for that suffering, she looks out of the window of her prison cell and sees the trains carrying Jews across Europe. 
 
Released from prison into the chaos following the end of World War II, a now elderly Katerina is devastated to find a world that has been emptied of its Jews and that is not at all sorry to see them gone. Ever the outsider, Katerina realizes that she has survived only to bear witness to the fact that they had ever existed at all. 
 
A rare glimpse into Jewish and gentile life in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, Katerina explores the long origins of the Holocaust, alongside darkness and light, cruelty and mercy.

Katerina

In Homer's Daughter Robert Graves recreates the Odyssey. This bold retelling of the ancient epic imagines that its author was not the blind and bearded Homer of legend, but a young woman in Western Sicily who calls herself Nausicaä. In Robert Graves's words, Homer's Daughter is 'the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father's throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.'

Homer's Daughter

Despised for his weakness and regarded by his family as little more than a stammering fool, the nobleman Claudius quietly survives the intrigues, bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the imperial Roman dynasties. In I, Claudius he watches from the sidelines to record the reigns of its emperors: from the wise Augustus and his villainous wife Livia to the sadistic Tiberius and the insane excesses of Caligula. Written in the form of Claudius' autobiography, this is the first part of Robert Graves's brilliant account of the madness and debauchery of ancient Rome, and stands as one of the most celebrated, gripping historical novels ever written.

I, Claudius

Giorgio Bassani

This is a haunting, elegiac novel which captures the mood and atmosphere of Italy (and in particular Ferrara) in the last summers of the thirties, focusing on an aristocratic Jewish family moving imperceptibly towards its doom. Vittorio De Sica turned the book into a film in 1970, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Marguerite Yourcenar

In her magnificent novel, Marguerite Yourcenar recreates the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world. The Emperor Hadrian, aware his demise is imminent, writes a long valedictory letter to Marcus Aurelius, his future successor. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing his accession, military triumphs, love of poetry and music, and the philosophy that informed his powerful and far-flung rule. A work of superbly detailed research and sustained empathy, Memoirs of Hadrian captures the living spirit of the Emperor and of Ancient Rome.

Memoirs of Hadrian

And Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian

George Orwell

Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives - interesting, no doubt, but finally only a "subject" people, an inferior people with black faces'. Against the prevailing orthodoxy, Flory, a white timber merchant, befriends Dr Veraswami, a black enthusiast for Empire. The doctor needs help. U Po Kyin, Sub- divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada, is plotting his downfall. The only thing that can save him is European patronage: membership of the hitherto all-white Club. While Flory prevaricates, beautiful Elizabeth Lackersteen arrives in Upper Burma from Paris. At last, after years of 'solitary hell', romance and marriage appear to offer Flory an escape from the 'lie' of the 'pukka sahib pose'.

Burmese Days

Computer games run in a classified war studies centre in London. Nuclear submarines prowl beneath Arctic ice. And war games go into real time. Patrick Armstrong - possibly the same reluctant hero of The IPCRESS File - is sent to investigate. 
 
Patrick Armstrong is a tough, dedicated agent and war-games player. But in Armstrong's violent, complex world, war-games are all too often played for real. Soon the chase (or is it escape?) is on. 
 
From the secretive computerized college of war studies in London via a bleak, sinister Scottish redoubt to the Arctic ice cap where nuclear submarines prowl ominously beneath frozen wastes, a lethal web of violence and double-cross is woven. And Europe's whole future hangs by a deadly thread... 
 
Spy Story is the most authentic and brilliant novel of espionage yet from the world's greatest writer of spy thrillers.

Spy Story

Of all the mysteries Bernard Samson has encountered, the greatest is his wife Fiona. Dedicated agent of the Service and a woman of secrets, she will risk everything to play the long game. As the truth about the decision that shattered their marriage is gradually revealed, the web of deception that has snared Bernard for ten years begins to unravel. In the gripping, tragic finale of the Hook, Line and Sinker trilogy, everything we thought we knew is brought into question. 
 
A BERNARD SAMSON NOVEL

Spy Sinker

E. L. Doctorow

As Cold War hysteria inflames America, FBI agents pay a surprise visit to a Communist man and his wife in their New York apartment. After a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the electric chair for treason. Decades later, in 1967, their son Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of their lives. But while he is tormented by his past and trying to appreciate his own wife and son, Daniel is also haunted, like millions of others, by the need to come to terms with a country destroying itself in the Vietnam War. A stunning fictionalization of a political drama that tore the United States apart, The Book of Daniel is an intensely moving tale of martyrdom and the search for meaning.

The Book of Daniel

J L Carr

A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years. 
 
Adapted into a 1987 film starring Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson and Kenneth Branagh, A Month in the Country traces the slow revival of the primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War.

A Month in the Country

First published in 1967, Death Kit is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, Susan Sontag's second novel offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience. 
 
The novel is a narrative of the suffering of Dalton 'Diddy' Harron, told through his own observations. He works in advertising for a microscope manufacturer, is thirty-three and divorced and a month ago tried to commit suicide. The haphazard events of his life, including killing a railway worker and falling in love with a blind girl, are brought to us through the lens of Diddy's own mind. We follow him through his journey to justify his actions and exorcise his inner demons, but we can see what is happening to Diddy only from inside his head, in the present, and the balance of his mind does not always bear close scrutiny.

Death Kit

'I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom' 
 
It's 1930's New York and fifteen-year-old streetkid Billy, who can juggle, somersault and run like the wind, has been taken under the wing of notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. As Billy learns the ways of the mob, he becomes like a son to Schultz - his 'good-luck kid' - and is initiated into a world of glamour, death and danger that will consume him, in this vivid, soaring epic of crime and betrayal.

Billy Bathgate

A high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped. A secret British intelligence agency must find out why. But as the quarry is pursued from grimy Soho to the other side of the world, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister. With its sardonic, cool, working-class hero, Len Deighton's sensational debut The Ipcress File rewrote the spy thriller and became the defining novel of 1960's London.

The Ipcress File

Russell Hoban

It is 1097 and a traveller arrives in the great, walled city of Antioch with a vision of a beautiful and mysterious geometric design that will change the lives of all those who see it. Pilgermann is a mesmerising recreation of the world of the Crusades, following its unlikely hero and those he meets on a journey of picaresque horror across a Europe of hatreds, visions and a desperate wish for salvation.

Pilgermann

The story of In America is inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son, Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name Helena Modjeska.

In America

Evelyn Waugh

The Empress Helena made the historic pilgrimage to Palestine, found pieces of wood from the true Cross, and built churches at Bethlehem and Olivet. Her life coincided with one of the great turning-points of history: the recognition of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. The enormous conflicting forces of the age, and the corruption, treachery, and madness of Imperial Rome combine to give Evelyn Waugh the theme for one of his most arresting and memorable novels.

Helena

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Vienna, 1939. Count Wallmoden, an officer and veteran of the First World War, is preparing to take part in a mysterious ‘military exercise’. One evening, while off duty, he meets the austere and beautiful Baroness Pistohlkors, whose secretive nature and elusive circle of acquaintances suggest that things – including the ‘military exercise’ – are not quite what they seem. Forced to leave the Baroness, Wallmoden promises to return for a tryst once his tour of duty is over, only to discover his unit has been mobilised for war. He finds himself over the border, marching across Europe – and, more seductively, stumbling to and fro over the border that separates the living from the dead. One constant remains: in this world or the next, he must keep his tryst with Baroness Pistohlkors. 
 
Simultaneously a ghost story drawing on the phantasms of the unconscious mind, a thriller where the erotic and the supernatural converge, and a shockingly realist account of the German Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, the novel Mars in Aries was refused a publishing permit by the Nazis, hinting as it did at the existence of an Austrian resistance. The book’s entire print run was put into storage and subsequently destroyed by an Allied air raid. Reprinted from the author’s proofs after the war, Mars in Aries is one of Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s finest and most celebrated novels.

Mars in Aries

A high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped. A secret British intelligence agency must find out why. But as the quarry is pursued from grimy Soho to the other side of the world, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister. With its sardonic, cool, working-class hero, Len Deighton's sensational debut The IPCRESS File rewrote the spy thriller and became the defining novel of 1960's London.

The IPCRESS File

Sylvia Townsend Warner

The story of a young English aristocrat, who - cut adrift by tragedy - is led by her husband's former mistress deep into the fervour, chaos and bloodshed of the French revolution, Summer Will Show is a fearless and wildly entertaining tale of loss and self-discovery.

Summer Will Show

L. P. Hartley

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

The Go-between

Carlo Emilio Gadda

'The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict.' Italo Calvino 
 
At the height of Fascist rule in Italy and following the death of his mother, Carlo Emilio Gadda began work on his first novel, The Experience of Pain. This portrait of a highly educated young man whose anger and frustration frequently erupt in ferocious outbursts directed towards his ageing mother is a powerful critique of the society of his time and the deep wounds inflicted on his generation. Set in a fictional South American country, The Experience of Pain is at once richly imaginative and intensely personal: the perfect introduction to Gadda's innovative style and literary virtuosity. 
 
Translated by Richard Dixon

The Experience of Pain

Patrick Süskind

Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in Paris. Yet there is one odour he cannot capture. It is exquisite, magical: the scent of a young virgin. And to get it he must kill. And kill. And kill ...

Perfume

John Updike

Taking its title from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES traces one family's profound journey through four generations--and across the spiritual landscape of twentieth-century America. It is one of John Updike's fullest and finest work of fiction.

In the Beauty of the Lilies

Long-suffering spy Bernard Samson has, against all the odds, enticed a Soviet agent to defect to London - but this proves to be the start of something even bigger. For he learns that there is treachery within his own Service, and no one is free from suspicion. To discover who really controls the game of spies, he must attempt a desperate gamble. As the Game, Set and Match trilogy reaches its shattering finale, who will make the winning move?

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