Bjorn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town and to dabble in amateur dramatics.

While Bruce Chatwin is best known as a master of travel literature, his three acclaimed novels must not be overlooked. And in The Viceroy of Ouidah, an ambitious slave trader makes a choice that could threaten his ultimate dream.

1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain shrouded in confusion and controversy. 1992, Milan. Colonna takes a job at a fledgling newspaper financed by a powerful media magnate.

Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home - a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse - but not with John. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.

The author rediscovered America thirty-five years after her first Greyhound trip across the country. She returns in turbulent midlife to trace the steps of six women who fled various sorts of trouble in nineteenth-century England and went to the United States to reinvent themselves. This book tells her story.

The first novel in Willa Cather's acclaimed Great Plains Trilogy, followed by The Song of the Lark and My Antonia. In spite of her brothers' doubts, her ambitious vision for the land comes to fruition, but the price of success appears to be a small, quiet life.

The final work of Nobel Prize-winning writer Gunter Grass - a witty and elegiac series of meditations on writing, growing old, and the world. In a striking interplay of poetry, lyric prose and drawings, Grass creates his final, major work of art.

After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as would-be artist, Philip Carey settles in London to train as a doctor. And that is where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a formative, tortured and masochistic affair which very nearly ruins him.