Meet Bobby, Jonathan and Clare. Three friends, three lovers, three ordinary people trying to make a place for themselves in the Seventies and Eighties. And as our threesome form a new kind of relationship, a new approach to family and love, questioning so much about the world around them, so they hope to create a space, a home, in which to live.
London, 1940. As the bombs fall on the city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three of them reach out for quick consolation.
A novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the public and private worlds and how they affect us. It is about: the legacy of war and the end of innocence; how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won; and living in a city where bankers need cinemas in their basements and others need food banks down the street.
With titles like 'A Story of Stolen Salamis', 'Letters to a Frozen Pea Manufacturer', 'A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates', and 'Can't and Won't', this title features stories that illuminate particular moments in ordinary lives and find in them the humorous, the ironic and the surprising.
Meet Maud. Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn't remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable - or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger. But there's one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so.
When author first left his country village aged nineteen, he discovered a delight in the outside world that remained undiminished throughout his writing life. In this book, he brings together pieces including recollections of his Gloucestershire childhood celebrated in Cider With Rosie.
Offers a horrifying glimpse of an alternative world - one where the Allies have lost the Second World War. In this nightmare dystopia, the Nazis have taken over New York, the Japanese control California and the African continent is virtually wiped out.
Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, the author and other women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. This book tells how they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, and share their own stories, dreams with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom.
With three husbands in her past, one in her present and a numberless army of children, Mrs Armitage is astonished to find herself collapsing one day in Harrods.
The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world' Abandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin.
Leningrad, September 1941. Hitler orders the German forces to surround the city at the start of the most dangerous, desperate winter in its history. For two pairs of lovers - Anna and Andrei, Anna's novelist father and banned actress Marina - the siege becomes a battle for survival.
Holden Caulfield is a dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Navigating his way through challenges of growing up, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.
Franny Glass is a pretty, effervescent college student on a date with her intellectually confident boyfriend, Lane. They appear to be the perfect couple, but as they struggle to communicate with each other about the things they really care about, slowly their true feelings come to the surface.
Gaskell's depiction of a fallen woman as her heroine shocked contemporary readers. Ruth is seduced and heartlessly abandoned but finds shelter and love with her illegitimate child until a twist of fate brings her past back to haunt her. This new edition explores the novel's radicalism and cultural influence.
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's last great novel, charts the intertwined lives of spirited Gwendolen Harleth and the idealistic Deronda. Both are damaged by their pasts, and alienated from the society around them, in a story set against the backdrop of economic crisis, political uncertainty, and proto-Zionism.
Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.
A young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn't belong. This is the chronicle of resilience and despair, broken layers of memory and the terrible forces of history.
Tells a story of crazed road trips fuelled by bourbon and black acid, of insane judges and giant porcupines, of girls, guns, explosives and, of course, bikes.
Features K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.'s struggles in the labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveals a truth about the nature of existence.
When Adela Quested and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced 'Anglo-Indian' community. Determined to escape the parochial English enclave and explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim.
Eugene Gant, born in 1900 to hard-drinking stone-cutter Oliver and entrepreneurial Eliza, grows up in small-town America. Both lonely outsider and passionate chronicler of American life, Eugene experiences upheaval and family tragedy before coming to realise that he must leave his home behind if he is to forge his own path in the world.
The devil makes a personal appearance in Moscow accompanied by various demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order in disarray. Only the Master, a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil's onslaught.