When the spoilt and haughty Dona Constanza tries to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, she starts a running battle with the locals. The skirmishes are so severe that the Government dispatches a squadron of soldiers led by the fat, brutal and stupid Figueras to deal with them.

Selected from the books Birdsong, A Possible Life and A Week in December by Sebastian FaulksVINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series:Home by Salman RushdieFatherhood by Karl Ove KnausgaardWork by Joseph HellerDreams by Sigmund Freud

'R' is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape.

From Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the allure of communism, to his rebuke that the West should not abandon its age-old concepts of 'good' and 'evil', the speeches collected in Warning to the West provide insight into Solzhenitsyn's uncompromising moral vision.

A book of poems that is at once personal and political. It registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of social and civic drama.

Drawing on a multiplicity of contemporary voices and viewpoints, this book brings into focus the sights, sounds and smells of the battlefield, of conquest and defeat, of celebration and riot.

Young Edward Waverley is caught in the middle: son of a Hanoverian yet nephew and heir to a Jacobite, a captain in the King's army yet drawn to the brave Highlanders and their romantic history. Edward must choose where his loyalties lie, even as his heart is torn between gentle Rose Brawardine, and the passionate, principled Flora Mac-Ivor.

The sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the most powerful novels of the First World War and a twentieth-century classic. If All Quiet on the Western Front was a lament for a lost generation, this sequel speaks with the same resonant voice for those who came back.