Primo Levi's The Periodic Table is a collection of short stories that elegantly interlace the author's experiences in Fascist...

When Kino, a poor Indian pearl-diver, finds 'the Pearl of the world' he believes that his life will be magically transformed. He...

Steinbeck's first major critical and commercial success, Tortilla Flat is also his funniest novel. Danny is a paisano, descended...

Jody Tiflin has the urge for rebellion, but he also wants to be loved. In The Red Pony, Jody begins to learn about adulthood -...

A witty account of Waugh's time in Abyssinia as a war correspondent

In 1935 Italy declared war on Abyssinia and Evelyn Waugh...

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...

Fictionalising his experience of service during the Second World War, Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour is the complete one-volume...

Framed as a letter from the Roman Emperor Hadrian to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian is...

A timeless travelogue from the leading light of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveller is a jubilant celebration...

Leo Percepied, aspiring writer and self-styled freewheeling bum, gravitates to the subterraneans, impoverished intellectuals who...

A witty, moving philosophical novel, Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums is a journey of self-discovery through the lens of Zen...

A penniless and parentless Chicago boy growing up in the Great Depression, Augie March drifts through life latching on to a wild...

Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish...

Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays showcasing one of Latin America's most influential and...

Bringing into harsh focus the daily struggle for existence in a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of...

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

These pieces show the range of Waugh's skills: Mr Loveday's Little Outing; Cruise; Period Piece; On Guard; An Englishman's Home;...

George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a...

My part of Ireland had a poet at one time, a poor ragged fellow whom no respectable person whom no respectable person would be...

From one of the major innovators of New Journalism, Norman Mailer's The Fight is the real-life story of a clash between two of...

Upper-class rogues, bohemians, dowagers, socialites, bureaucrats and delinquent evacuees prepare for England to change forever,...

'We are Progress and the New Age. Nothing can stand in our way.'

When Oxford-educated Emperor Seth succeeds to the throne of...

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...

'It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known,' says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to...

A brilliant, yet brutal, portrait of a woman struggling to retrieve both life and love, from the author of Wide Sargasso...

Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight is an unforgettable portrait of a woman bravely confronting loneliness and despair in her quest...

Jean Rhys's first novel, a heartbreaking and disturbingly intimate portrayal of an isolated woman in Paris

Set in a...

Primo Levi was among the greatest witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In this gripping novel, based on a true story, he...

The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral. In these eleven short stories the quality of his...

Borges' first collection of stories (1935). In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with a wicked sense of fun....