The scene is London, in 1399. The streets of London are rife with rumour, heresy, espionage and murder and at the centre of the confusion is the nun, Sister Clarice, who has been vouchsafed visions of the future. As one critic has put it, 'he is our age's greatest London imagination'.

Peter Ackroyd brings Victorian London to life in all its guts and glory, as we travel from the glamour of the music hall to the slums of the East End, meeting George Gissing and Karl Marx along the way.

In this stellar collection of short stories, Helen Simpson explores independence, solitude, marriage, sex and babies with her characteristic blend of comedy and lyricism.

A masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Adrian Leverkuhn is a young man destined for success.

Brilliant, funny and tragic, Four Bare Legs in a Bed is an outstanding and invigorating collection of short stories. From a bed that transforms the lives of a struggling couple to a chorus of midwives telling the dramatic story of a birth, this is a playful, unique set of stories to treasure.

Offers a biography of Shakespeare, this book reads like the work of a contemporary meeting Shakespeare. It is a depiction of the world Shakespeare inhabited.

It is still a man's world in the Indian town of Malgudi, where Savitri has submissively endured more than her fair share of humiliations in a long-standing marriage. When her husband insists on employing an elegant female in his company, however, Savitri realizes that he has gone too far.

In the shade of a banyan tree sits Margayva, self-styled adviser on the complex minor transactions which are an integral part of Indian life. But a scrape with officialdom in the form of an unplanned interview with the Co-operative Bank's secretary temporarily curtails a lucrative career.