Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin begins in Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different w...
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from...
Lou Clark has lots of questions.Like how it is she's ended up working in an airport bar, spending every shift watching other people jet off to new places.Or why the flat she's owned for...
Anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century will still have to read Orwell' Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of BooksWhether puncturing the lies of politicians, wittil...
A colourful, multi-facted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental m...
Franny Glass and Lane Coutell are the perfect campus couple: beautiful, intelligent, their whole lives ahead of them. But one weekend when Franny is visiting, amid the excitement of the big Yale ga...
Steinbeck's first major critical and commercial success, Tortilla Flat is also his funniest novel.Danny is a paisano, descended from the original Spanish settlers who arrived in Montere...
'A virtuoso storyteller ... a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age' The New York Times'He was a robot-hypochondriac. On his squeaking cart he carried a complete set of spare parts.'
A story of sexual and spiritual awakening, Tropic of Capricorn shocked readers as much as Henry Miller's first novel, Tropic of Cancer. A mixture of fiction and autobiography, it is the story of He...
In 1929 Robert Graves went to live abroad permanently, vowing 'never to make England my home again'. This is his superb account of his life up until that 'bitter leave-taking': from his childhood a...
George Orwell's first published work, Down and Out in Paris and London, is a vivid, sensitive account of the time he lived as one of the poor in the late twenties. In a bug-infested hotel, survivin...
Burroughs’ first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever ...
A chemist by training, Primo Levi became one of the supreme witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In these haunting reflections inspired by the elements of the periodic table, he ranges from you...
Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her b...
Andy Warhol kept these diaries faithfully from November 1976 right up to his final week, in February 1987. Written at the height of his fame and success, Warhol records the fun of an Academy Awards...
The first rock-star writer'GuardianWith ‘long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, chain whips … and Harleys flashing chrome’, the Hell&rsq...
Ayn Rand's story of Howard Roark, a brilliant architect who dares to stand alone against the hostility of second-hand souls. First published in 1943, this best-selling novel is a passionate defense...
In this thoughtful and moving novel, four men find themselves inextricably bound together by their past histories. The aged Judge Clane dreams of resurrecting the confederacy, while his grandson, J...
'No true Democracy has ever existed, nor ever will exist.'In this selection from The Social Contract, Rousseau asserts that a state's only legitimate political authority comes from its ...
In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, an...