Holden Caulfield, a seventeen-year-old dropout, has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmast...
Thoreau's account of his solitary and self-sufficient home in the New England woods remains an inspiration to the environmental movement - a call to his fellow men to abandon their striving, materi...
In Soviet Moscow, God is dead, but the devil - to say nothing of his retinue of demons, from a loudmouthed, gun-toting tomcat, to the fanged fallen angel Koroviev - is very much alive. As death and...
Funny Girl - the latest novel from Nick Hornby, the million-copy bestselling author of About a BoyMake them laugh, and they're yours forever . . .Barbara Parker is Miss Blac...
In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of 'twenties Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocenc...
Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives – interesting, n...
The most beautiful and powerful of Milosz's poems from across his writing lifeThis selection brings together the most beautiful and powerful of Czeslaw Milosz's poems, spanning his writ...
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...
Jacob, a Jewish slave held in a mountain village after escaping a massacre by Cossacks, will be killed if he tries to escape. The one saving grace is his love for his master's daughter, Wanda. They...
A Room with a View is a romance and a social critique of Edwardian society. A young woman is chaperoned to Italy by her bitter aunt. There she meets an intriguing, but eccentric young man. Back in ...
This collection of speeches from one of the great modern orators includes Churchill's famous words on the declaration of war with Germany, as well as his rousing call to the British in June 1940 af...
Jack Kerouac's classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of natureA witty, moving philosophical novel, Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums is a journey of self-d...
In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminde...
A charming, mind-bending and anarchic book of imagined civilizations'Most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly admit to...'<...
Immanuel Kant was one of the most influential philosophers in the whole of Europe, who changed Western thought with his examinations of reason and the nature of reality. In these writings he invest...
'It would not do to be found in the desert under these circumstances: firing wildly into the cactus from a car full of drugs'Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the evolution o...
One of Zola's darkest and most violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration of the criminal mind, as a murder is committed on the new railways of the Second Em...
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ... Dr Felix Hoenikker,...
The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalising, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promi...
Aprofound influence not only on Christian theology but on the psychology and political philosophy of the West since the Dark Ages. One of the greatest explorations of sin, epiphany and redemption e...