In July 1914, Franz Kafka's fiancée Felice broke off their engagement in a humiliating public tribunal, surrounded by her friends and family, and the other woman with whom Kafka had recently...
How I Came to Know Fish (1974) is Ota Pavel's magical memoir of his childhood in Czechoslovakia. Fishing with his father and his Uncle Prosek - the two finest fishermen in the world - he takes a pe...
Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako ...
A daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning glory of Joyce's life. The Peng...
With a dangerous blend of chemistry and magic, secret agent Lee has the ability to change bodies - his own, or with anyone he chooses. Also able to time travel, he finds himself forced to use his s...
A chance encounter while holidaying in Central America leads an American couple, the Slades, to befriend the charming, handsome Grove Soto and his young Cuban mistress. But as the Slades' trip beco...
Saki is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for England's 'Golden Afternoon' - the slow and peaceful years before the First World War. Although, like so many of his generation, he died tragically y...
Reminiscent of her classic story 'The Lottery', Jackson's disturbing and darkly funny first novel exposes the underside of American suburban life.'Her books penetrate keenly to the terr...
The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before, and discovers tha...
Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita,...
An eerily prescient foreshadowing of current affairs' Guardian'Not only Lewis's most important book but one of the most important books ever produced in the United States' New Yorker
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life'Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing ...
From the peerless author of The Lottery and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a treasure trove of deliciously dark and funny stories, essays, lectures, letters and drawings.Le...
'The most important thing is probably always precisely the thing you can't have. That's where all the happiness is'In these brief, acid-sharp stories of love, marriage and family from o...
A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling ...
Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is a tragic masterpiece of the inexorable unravelling of a man, set in a close-knit Italian-American community in 1950s New York.Eddie Carbon...
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''A sublimely funny book ... it is a book to be read by all ... unforgettable and universal' Candia McWilliamRomantic, hero...
In 1613 the missionary Father Pedro Velasco's dream comes true. For the first time, the Japanese are going to cross the Pacific Ocean. And he is going with them. As he sets sail with a group of Sam...
Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his li...
His first novel, Don DeLillo's Americana passionately articulates the neurotic landscape of contemporary American life through a disintegrating embodiment of the American dream.Prospero...