How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and infuriating younger sister Bunny? Dr Battista has other problems. His brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, his new scientific breakthrough will fall through...

An anthology of the work of the most important and influential Indian writers of the last 50 years. This volume is published to coincide with the anniversary of India's independence.

Stampedes follow her arrival in town. But as she approaches middle age, the attention turns to scrutiny. Her adoring husband Sir Kenelm Digby - philosopher, alchemist and time-traveller - wishes she would age naturally, but Venetia discovers a potent and addictive elixir of youth, Viper Wine.

A biography of Virginia Woolf which moves freely between a detailed life-story and attempts to understand significant questions. She is presented as occupying a distinct and even uneasy position within the Bloomsbury Set, and also as a radically sceptical, subversive, courageous feminist.

Claire Zachanassian, now a multimillion heiress and an older woman, returns to the impoverished town of her youth with a dreadful bargain: in exchange for returning the town to prosperity through her vast wealth, she wants the townspeople to kill the man who jilted her.

Hurtle Duffield is incapable of loving anything except what he paints. The people who court him are, above all, the victims of his art, and he dissects their weaknesses with cruel precision. The Australian author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.

Alan Garner is an exceptional lecturer and essayist. Alan Garner's account of his mental illness will become a classic, and each strand of the book will be a source of fascination to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of an Alan Garner story, as also to all who concern themselves with the craft of writing.

The meeting of Voltaire, successful financier, famous poet and troublemaker, and the enchanting amateur physicist and countess Emilie du Chatelet, was a meeting of both hearts and minds. In the Chateau de Cirey, the two brilliant intellects scandalised the French aristocracy with their passionate love affair.