'The only four things that interested me were: reading books, going to the movies, tap-dancing and drawing pictures. Then one day...

Tender and bittersweet, these stories by Truman Capote, the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's, are a captivating tribute to the...

Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied...

Fifteen-year-old Alex doesn't just like ultra-violence - he also enjoys rape, drugs and Beethoven's ninth. He and his gang of...

A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern - this is Ignatius...

'Yes, bastard, you're the one I love'

A pair of lovers - a young female journalist and an older man who owns an isolated farm...

Margaret Drabble is one of the major literary figures of her generation. In this collection of her complete short fiction from...

Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work...

Mailer's superb account, written as it was happening, of the first attempt to land men on the moon

'Houston, Tranquility Base...

As Martin Luther King, Jr. prepared for the Birmingham campaign in early 1963, he drafted the final sermons for Strength to Love,...

A masterly story of myth, rebellion, love, friendship and betrayal from one of Africa's great writers, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A...

Taking its title from T.S. Eliot's modernist poem The Waste Land, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is a chronicle of Britain's...

Is it possible to die a happy death?This is the central question of Camus's astonishing early novel, published posthumously and...

A Heart so White is the breathtaking international bestseller and IMPAC Award-winning masterpiece by Javier Marias, whose...

The first volume of Steven Runciman's classic, hugely influential trilogy on the history of the Crusades

'On a February day in...

The second volume of Steven Runciman's classic, hugely influential trilogy on the history of the Crusades

'There was magic...

The third volume of Steven Runciman's classic, hugely influential trilogy on the history of the Crusades
'The whole tale is one...

With prose that is every bit as raw, intense and bitingly honest as the world it depicts, Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave...

The last time anyone saw Lucia Bernardi, she was driving at top speed away from a Swiss villa - leaving the body of her murdered...

Sybille Bedford's first novel, A Legacy is a savage indictment of the brutality and anti-Semitism spawned in German officer-cadet...

With such varied correspondents as T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender and Anthony Powell, for nearly forty years George Orwell wrote...

'Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.' Waugh begins his story...

Whether celebrating Hogarth or savaging Hollywood, mocking modern manners or defending traditional English architecture, inviting...

As Minister for Culture, the Honourable M. A. Nanga is 'a man of the people', as cynical as he is charming, and a roguish...

A Moment of War is the powerful and harrowing final book in Laurie Lee's acclaimed trilogy that began with Cider with Rosie...

An illegal Muslim immigrant arrives in Hamburg with a traumatic past and the key to a fortune held in a private bank. He says his...

Stella Rode has twice disturbed the ancient cloisters of Carne School: firstly by being the wrong sort, with her doilies and...

Jackson's woman has found him a foolproof way to make money - a technique for turning ten dollar bills into hundreds. But when...

A Small Circus is a powerful 1931 portrayal of a German town on the brink of chaos, from bestselling author Hans Fallada (writer...

West Germany in the 1960s is a simmering cauldron of radical protests. Amid the turmoil Leo Harting, a Second Secretary in the...