'I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday'Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and em...
One night, my little sister went missing.There were searches, appeals. Everyone thought the worst.And then, miraculously, she came back.She couldn't, or wouldn't, say what had hap...
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party.Yet he inwardly rebels against the tota...
Malcolm grew up in the shadow of the Homecoming Queen's death.His older brother was the prime suspect and left Echo Ridge in disgrace.His mother's remarriage vaulted them to Echo ...
The exquisite last novel from Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari KawabataIneko has lost the ability to see things. At first it was a ping-pong ball, then it was her fiancé. The ...
'Wonderfully poetic ... extraordinary freshness ... a Virginia Woolf quality' Margaret DrabbleTerritory of Light is the radiant story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her tw...
'Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.'America, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The winning Axis powers have divided their spoils: the Nazis...
Child of Fortune is deceptively gentle and dreamlike, teetering on the edge of tragedy. It covers a year in the life of a single mother with an eleven-year-old daughter, combining a complex interio...
A timeless travelogue from the leading light of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveller is a jubilant celebration of human discoveryAs he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, P...
When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cun...
An expedition to Antarctica goes horribly wrong as a group of explorers stumbles upon some mysterious ancient ruins, with devastating consequences. At the Mountains of Madness ranks among...
In Stephen Fry's vivid retelling we gaze in wonder as wise Athena is born from the cracking open of the great head of Zeus and follow doomed Persephone into the dark and lonely realm of the Underwo...
When 'The Awakening' was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. But a century after her de...
Walter Mitty is an ordinary man living an ordinary life. But he has dreams - vivid, extraordinary day dreams - in which the life he leads is one of excitement and even adventure, in which he - a we...
'His first novel is a revelation ... the writing is vivid, serious and extraordinary ... wonderful' The TimesThe Sea is My Brother is Jack Kerouac's very first novel, begun shortly afte...
Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary thinkers in Western philosophy. Here he sets out his subversive views in a series of aphorisms on subjects ranging from art to arrogance, bored...
Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself.Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana...
The Meditations of the great Roman Philosopher-Emperor Marcus Aurelius are simple yet profound works of stoic philosophy that continue to offer guidance and consolation to many with their eloquence...
The Father of Existentialism, Kierkegaard transformed philosophy with his conviction that we must all create our own nature; in this great work of religious anxiety, he argues that a true understan...
Beginning with a dilemma about whether he spends more money on reading or smoking, George Orwell's entertaining and uncompromising essays go on to explore everything from the perils of second-hand ...