Salman Rushdie's dazzling novel The Enchantress of Florence takes inspiration from the city's gilded Renaissance past, while Mary McCarthy's masterful travelogue captures a bustling 20th century market city.

Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Independent People is a masterly realist novel evoking in rich detail a family and a rural community struggling to survive in the starkest of landscapes.

The language of flowers is as old as language itself.

Containing drafts of stories later rewritten for other collections (including Carry On, Jeeves), My Man Jeeves offers a fascinating insight into the genesis of comic literature's most celebrated double-act.

Messages of hope in the midst of pain - in such masterpieces as Adam Zagajewski's 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World', Wislawa Szymborska's 'The End and the Beginning' and Stevie Smith's 'Away, Melancholy' - make this a perfect gift for anyone on the road to healing.