Deals with the underworld of society. In this book, the author documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris' vile 'Hotel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and more.

Tells the story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. In this book, the author from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual.

Using experimental montage techniques borrowed from the cinema, descriptions and bursts of overheard conversation, and jumbled case histories of a picaresque cast of characters from dockside crapshooters to high-society flappers, the author constructs a portrait of New York City as a futuristic machine filled with motion, drama and human tragedy.

Self-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with a man he believes to be his double reveals a frightening 'split' in Hermann's nature.

Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied housekeeper. Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London.

A collection of short stories and essays showcasing one of Latin America's influential and imaginative writers. It was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes.

In 1930s Paris, where one cheap hotel room is very like another, a young woman is teaching herself indifference. She has escaped personal tragedy and has come to France to find courage and seek independence. She tells herself to expect nothing, especially not kindness, least of all from men. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will dye her hair blonde.

After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set.

Offers accounts of 'Funes the Memorious', the man who can forget nothing; 'Pierre Menard, Author of the "Quixote"', who recreates Miguel de Cervantes' epic word-for-word; a society run on the basis of an all-encompassing game of chance in 'The Lottery in Babylon'.

A collection of Carson McCullers' stories, including her novella "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" and "Wunderkind".

Capturing a single day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom, his friends Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus, his wife Molly, and a cast of supporting characters, the author pushes Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes.

Stresses the author's humanistic philosophy.

Exiled to a remote and barren corner of Italy for his opposition to Mussolini, Carlo Levi entered a world cut off from history and the state, hedged in by custom and sorrow, without comfort or solace, where, eternally patient, the peasants lived in an age-old stillness and in the presence of death - for Christ did stop at Eboli.

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?

Reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. In this title, the author's study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved.

Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons - as long as Jim can stave off the unwelcome advances of fellow lecturer Margaret, survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England'.

Tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit.

Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins his hero Dean Moriarty, a traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream.

The undergraduate narrator lives with his uncle in Dublin, drinks too much with his friends and invents stories peopled with hilarious and unlikely characters, one of whom, creates a means by which women can give birth to full-grown people.

A group of people have little in common except that they are all hopelessly lonely. A young girl, a drunken socialist and a black doctor are drawn to a gentle, sympathetic deaf mute, whose presence changes their lives.

The 'first man' is Jacques Cormery, whose poverty-stricken childhood in Algiers is made bearable by his love for his silent and illiterate mother, and by the teacher who transforms his view of the world. This book gives profound insights into his life and the powerful themes underlying his work.

The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous?

When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see. This title expresses many of the political concerns of its time: the Cold War, the fear of biological experimentation and the man-made apocalypse.

Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a troubled teenager growing up in the small Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley. Treated as a failure at school, and unhappy at home, Billy discovers a new passion in life when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk.