It is January 1719 and Daniel Defoe, almost sixty, sits at a table, writing "Robinson Crusoe", for which he will principally be remembered. Several miles south, an old man, Robert Knox, is bent over a heavy volume. This title explores the intertwined lives of two real men - Daniel Defoe and Robert Knox.

Tells the story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. This work talks about love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.

Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation.

Acknowledged as a masterpiece of materialist criticism in the English language, this collection cover topics from British literary history to George Eliot and George Orwell to enquire about the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination.

By examining the rise of curiosity from the dawn of modern science to today, this book examines how it functions in science, how it is spun, packaged and sold, and how the changing shape of science influences the kinds of questions it may ask.

Narrated by a 15-year-old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, this dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions.

Marion and Shiva Stone, born in a mission hospital in Ethiopia in the 1950s, are twin sons of an illicit union between an Indian nun and British doctor. Bound by birth but with widely different temperaments they grow up together, in a country on the brink of revolution, until a betrayal splits them apart. But fate has not finished with them.

The brutal murder of the Reverend George Parker in the rural village of Oddingley on Midsummer's Day in 1806 - shot and beaten to death, his body set on fire and left smouldering in his own glebe field - gripped everyone from the Home Secretary in London to newspapermen across the country. It was a strange and stubborn case.