Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

The Ottoman Sultan has commissioned the best artists in the land to create a book celebrating the glories of his realm: but he wants them to illuminate it in the European style. Because figurative art is deemed by many to be an affront to Islam, the project must be kept secret. Panic and scandal erupt when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears, along with a crucial page of the manuscript. The surviving artists - bitter rivals variously motivated by pride, greed, jealousy, faith and love - are all under suspicion of murder, and the only clue to the mystery lies in the half-finished illustrations themselves. My Name is Red reveals the clash between two views of artistic meaning and the chasm between two world civilizations. In this special edition the author includes a chronology of Islamic and Western art history to provide valuable context for his story, and has contributed a fascinating introduction throwing light on his methods, his aims and his inspiration

p-Included here are famous tales like 'Sound of Thunder', in which the carelessness of a group of time-travellers leads to disastrous consequences, and 'The Veldt', in which two seemingly innocent young children transform their nursery into a lethal trap. Here are the Martian stories, tales that vividly animate the red planet with its brittle cities and double-mooned sky. Here are stories which speak of a special nostalgia for Green Town, Illinois, the perfect setting for a seemingly cloudless childhood - except for the unknown terror lurking in the ravine. Here are the Irish stories and the Mexican stories, linked across their separate geographies by Bradbury's astonishing inventiveness. Here, too, are thrilling, terrifying stories such as 'The Fog Horn' - perfect for reading under the covers.
Read for the first time, these stories are a feast for the imagination; read again - and again - they reveal new, dazzling facets of a master storyteller's extraordinary art.

Chinua Achebe is considered the father of African literature in English, the writer who 'opened the magic casements of African fiction' for an international readership. Following the 50th anniversary of the publication of his ground-breaking Things Fall Apart, Everyman republish Achebe's first and most famous novel alongside No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God, under the collective title The African Trilogy.
In Things Fall Apart the individual tragedy of Okonkwo, 'strong man' and tribal elder in the Nigeria of the 1890s is intertwined with the transformation of traditional Igbo society under the impact of Christianity and colonialism. In No Longer at Ease, Okonkwo's grandson, Obi, educated in England, returns to a civil-service job in colonial Lagos, only to clash with the ruling elite to which he now believes he belongs. Arrow of God is set in the 1920s and explores the conflict from the two points of view - often, but not always, opposing - ofEzuelu, an Igbo priest, and Captain Winterbottom, a British district officer.
In spare and lucid prose,Achebe tellsa universal tale of personal and moral struggle in a changing world which continues to resonate in Africa today and has captured the imaginations of readers everywhere.

For George MacDonald Fraser the bully Flashman was easily the most interesting character in Tom Brown's Schooldays, and imaginative speculation as to what might have happened to him after his expulsion from Rugby School for drunkenness ended in 12 volumes of memoirs in which Sir Harry Paget Flashman - self-confessed scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward -'and, oh yes, a toady' - romps his way through decades of nineteenth-century history in a swashbuckling and often hilarious series of military and amorous adventures. In Flashman the youthful hero, armed with a commission in the 11th Dragoons, is shipped to India, woos and wins the beautiful Elspeth, and reluctantly takes part in the first Anglo-Afghan War, honing a remarkable talent for self-preservation.Flash for Freedom! finds him crewing on an African slave ship, hiding in a New Orleans whorehouse and fortuitously running into rising young American politician Abraham Lincoln...

The contents have been intriguingly divided into eight narrative threads that influenced and informed O'Connor's oeuvre. War includes the famous 'Guests of the Nation', set during the Irish War of Independence; Childhood draws on autobiographical writings to present a revealing picture of the author as a boy, the only child of an alcoholic father and doting mother; Writers bears witness to his literary debt to Yeats and Joyce. The stories in Lonely Voices movingly demonstrate O'Connor's theory that in this genre can be achieved 'something we do not often find in the novel - an intense awareness of human loneliness'; yet they are counterparted by his wonderfully polyphonic tales of family, friendship and rivalry in Better Quarrelling. In Ireland come poems, stories and articles inspired by the native land he loved but never sentimentalized, while from Abroad the writer in exile discourses upon universally relevant themes of emigration, hardship, absence and return. Finally, Last Things contains O'Connor's thoughts on religion, the church, the soul and its destiny, but remains above all a celebration of humanity 'who for me represented all I should ever know of God'.

A trilogy of brilliant novels-The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land-that charts the life and times of one of the most beloved and enduring characters in modern fiction.When we meet Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, his unguarded voice instantly wins us over and pulls us into a life that has been irrevocably changed-by the loss of a marriage, a career, a child. We then follow Frank, ever laconic and observant, through Independence Day and The Lay of the Land.

"In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems. Shaded lawns lie still and damp in the early a.m." - Independence Day

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humour.

Included are seminal stories like 'To Room Nineteen'; in which a woman reacts against the oppression of her banal marriage with dreadful results; 'One off the Short List', which traces the surprising conclusion to a seduction gone awry, and 'The Habit of Loving' in which a lonely older man who takes a vivacious young wife witnesses an unexpected reversal of intimacy.
Here also are two classic novellas, The Temptation of Jack Orkney and The Other Woman, exemplifying Lessing's impressive understanding of human psychology. Rich and various in mood and background - the settings range across England and France - these stories powerfully convey the uncompromising insight, intelligence and vision of one of the most ardently admired writers of our time.

Set in her native southwest Ontario, they include 'Royal Beatings', in which a young girl, her father and her stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; 'Friend of My Youth', in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and 'The Love of a Good Woman', in which, when an old crime resurfaces, a woman has to choose whether to believe in the man she intends to marry.
Like the World War I soldier of the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn't know change her life for ever, Munro's unassuming characters take permanent hold of our imaginations. Her incomparable empathy for the people she writes about, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction.

Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française. But Suite Française was only a coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, yet hugely talented novelist, who fled Russia for Paris after the Revolution and died at Auschwitz at the age of 39. Here in one volume are four of Némirovsky's other novels - all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra Smith, and all, except David Golder, available in English for the first time.

David Golder is the book that established Némirovsky's reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and loneliness, the story of an ageing Russian Jewish businessman,an exile in France, learning to confront death and the knowledge that wealth has not brought him happiness. The Ball is both a sensitive exploration of adolescenceand a mercilessexposure of bourgeois social pretension. Snow in Autumn is an evocative tale of White Russian emigrés in Paris, while in The Courilof Affair a retired Russian revolutionary recalls an infamous assassinationcommitted in his youth. Introduced by novelist Claire Messud.

This handsome edition of McCarthy's completed Border Trilogy in one volume gives the reader one of the most important works of American fiction of the last decades. McCarthy's work is far more than a western, but crosses the borders between fiction and philosophy, the real and the world of dream. With influences ranging from the traditional western; the coming-of-age story; the courtly romance; classical tragedy; and magical realism, McCarthy's masterpiece is a work to be read and read again. This new volume containing all three of the novels, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain, is a welcome addition to the canon of McCarthy's works in print.

Poet, artist and mystic Kahlil Gibran was born in 1883 to a poor Christian family in Lebanon and emigrated to the United States as an adolescent. His masterpiece, The Prophet, a book of poetic essays written in his youth, has sold over eight million copies in more than twenty languages since its first publication in 1923. But all Gibran's works - essays, stories, parables, prose poems - are imbued with equally powerful simplicity and wisdom, whether meditating upon love, marriage, friendship, work, pleasure, time or grief. Perhaps no other twentieth-century writer has touched the hearts and minds of so remarkably varied and widespread a readership.Included in this volume are The Madman, The Forerunner, The Prophet, Sand and Foam, Jesus the Son of Man, Earth Gods, The Wanderer, The Garden of the Prophet, Prose Poems, Spirits Rebellious, Nymphs of the Valley and A Tear and a Smile.

With his diamond-sharp prose and artfully handled intrigue, Dashiell Hammett virtually invented hard-boiled crime fiction. This omnibus edition includes four linked stories - 'The House in Turk Street', 'The Girl with the Silver Eyes', 'The Big Knockover' and '$106,000 Blood Money - featuring the Continental Op, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective. In The Dain Curse, the Op takes on a wealthy young woman who appears to be the victim of a deadly family curse. And in The Glass Key - Hammett's own favourite among his works - we encounter his most cynical, morally ambiguous hero and a hard-boiled version of a love triangle. In the works collected here, we can observe the process by which Hammett both stripped crime fiction down to its most subtle and searing essentials and elevated it to high literature.

In the five novels by Ireland's greatest comic writer we can explore the full range of his invention, from the multi-layered madness of At Swim-Two-Birds to the piercing realism of The Hard Life and the surreal logic of The Third Policeman. This is a world where bicycles listen to conversations, inventors search formethods of 'diluting' water, and characters play truant while novelists sleep; a world where spiteful fairies wreak havoc and heroes from legend blunder into suburban sitting-rooms. This is recognizably the Ireland of Joyce and Beckett - rowdy, high-spirited, by turns sensual and and cerebral -transformed by O'Brien's unique vision.

Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and Proustian in detail but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and the growing campaign for Indian independence. Book one, The Jewel in the Crown, describes the doomed love between an English girl and an Indian boy, Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. This affair touches the lives of other characters in three subsequent books, most of them unknown to Hari and Daphne but involved in the larger social and political conflicts which destroy the lovers.
On occasions unsparing in its study of personal dramas and racial differences, the Raj Quartet is at all times profoundly humane, not least in the author's capacity to identify with a huge range of characters. It is also illuminated by delicate social comedy and wonderful evocations of the Indian scene, all narrated in luminous prose.

Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and Proustian in detail but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and the growing campaign for Indian independence. Book one, The Jewel in the Crown, describes the doomed love between an English girl and an Indian boy, Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. This affair touches the lives of other characters in three subsequent books, most of them unknown to Hari and Daphne but involved in the larger social and political conflicts which destroy the lovers.
On occasions unsparing in its study of personal dramas and racial differences, the Raj Quartet is at all times profoundly humane, not least in the author's capacity to identify with a huge range of characters. It is also illuminated by delicate social comedy and wonderful evocations of the Indian scene, all narrated in luminous prose.