'It was a puzzle with no solution. But he did not lose heart.'

In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and...

'For personal reasons, or for reasons I don't know myself, I began feeling old, and I began keeping notebooks. I was nearing the...

Italo Calvino once said that he preferred to give false details about his biography since he felt that even the genuine data of a...

A brilliant companion piece to Wide Sargasso Sea, this is Jean Rhys's beautifully written, bitter-sweet autobiography, covering...

The cult classic from one of France's most stylish writers

'Don't give a damn,' says Zazie, 'what I wanted was to go in the...

My Happy Days in Hell (1962) is Gyorgy Faludy's grimly beautiful autobiography of his battle to survive tyranny and oppression....

Part manifesto, part artistic joke, Fillippo Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook is a provocative work about art disguised as an...

The concluding part in Javier Marias' spy trilogy masterwork

Jacques Deza is back in London and once again working for the...

In the third volume of his acclaimed examination of sexuality in modern Western society, Foucault investigates the Golden Age of...

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

The final major work by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century

In the fourth and final volume of his...

The bestselling epic novel of family, treachery, rivalry, religious fervour and the turbulent fate of a royal African...

Set in Italy in the summer of 1940, this trio of stories explores the relationships between the different generations caught up...

Le Carre's post-Cold War masterpiece, filled with suspense, betrayal, desire and drama

The Cold War is over and retired secret...

One of fiction's greatest chancers - the story of Denry Machin and his unceasing, ingenious efforts to become a great man

Set...

One man hunts obsessively for his lost identity, in this intoxicating noir masterpiece from the winner of the Nobel Prize in...

A highly entertaining and moving journal chronicling J. R. Ackerley's time in India

In the 1920s, the young J. R. Ackerley...

'Perhaps that moment had been exceptional, but still, I felt alive. That pressure on my chest means being alive.'

Forty-nine,...

'They are memorials to times and countries whose best is probably past and gone . . . I was lucky to have known them when I did,...

Hailed as the greatest modern lyrical poet of Germany, Rainer Maria Rilke’s genius lies in his passion for perfection, artistic...

Selected Poems brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English,...

Georges Simenon's chilling portrayal of tragic love, persecution and betrayal.

'One sensed in him neither flesh nor bone,...

In Vichy France, 1942, a group of men sit outside an office, waiting to be interviewed. The reason they have been pulled off the...

John Healy's The Grass Arena describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play...

'To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom' - Andre Gide

Michel had...

The greatest expression of his talent for witty, observant explorations of what it means to 'live well', Henry James's The...

'Every man had not only a weak spot but also a criminal one'

At his wife's insistence, upstanding citizen and artillery...

Obi Okonkwo is an idealistic young man who, thanks to the privileges of an education in Britain, has now returned to Nigeria for...

A historical romance, Sontag's book is based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson in the final...

'Absolutely, definitively alone', a young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn't...