'It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them'Huck Finn spits, swears, smokes a pipe and never go...
When it comes to death, is there ever a best case scenario? In this disarmingly witty book, Julian Barnes confronts our unending obsession with the end. He reflects on what it means to miss God, wh...
Mowgli, the man-cub who is brought up by wolves in the jungles of Central India, is one of the greatest literary myths ever created. As he embarks on a series of thrilling escapades, Mowgli encount...
Irvine Welsh, 'poet laureate of the chemical generation', exposes the seamy underbelly of rave's utopian dream. Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point a...
Lucie Manette has been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris's most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes' fortunes become inextricably int...
Kim is an orphan who earns his living begging on the streets of Lahore. One day he befriends an aged Tibetan Lama who, although content to live simply in India, is a rich and powerful abbot in his ...
The Communist Manifesto was first published in London in 1848, by two young men in their late twenties. Its impact reverberated across the globe and throughout the next century, and it has come to ...
Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. W...
Against the backdrop of nineteenth century Dublin, a boy becomes a man: his mind testing its powers, obsessions taking hold and loosening again, the bonds of family, tradition, nation and religion ...
A young governess is sent to a great country house to care for two orphaned children. To begin with Flora and Miles seem to be model pupils but gradually the governess starts to suspect that someth...
'Rich or poor, we will keep together and be happy in one another'Christmas won't be the same this year for Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, as their father is away fighting in the Civil War, and ...
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's; that as men busied themselves about ...
In this powerfully influential series of short stories, James Joyce captures uneasy souls, shabby lives and innocent minds in the dark streets and homes of his native city. In doing so, he conjures...
When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he has no idea of the horrors awaiting him out on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship's strange captain, Ahab, is in the...
Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her so...
Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog’s-eye view of the country’s best bathing holes - the rivers, rock po...
When a tornado crashes through Kansas city, Dorothy and her dog Toto are whisked far away, over the rainbow, to a strange land called Oz. How will they ever get home? And what is at the end of the ...
In the Time Traveller's miraculous new machine, we will be carried from a Victorian dinner table to 802,701 AD, when the Earth is divided between the gentle, ineffective Eloi, and the ape-like Morl...
A soldier falls asleep on duty and is threatened with being court-martialled. An officer lies in mud, fighting for his life and the life of his men. A young man walks across Waterloo Bridge, explos...
A high-pitched laugh echoes in an empty church. Servants discover their master dead in his bed, the only sign of disturbance an open window. The coffin of a woman hanged as a witch is found to be e...