Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides.

York Notes for GCSE offer an approach to English Literature that aims to help readers achieve a better grade. This series has been completely updated to reflect the needs of today's students. The new editions are filled with detailed summaries, commentaries on key themes, characters, language and style, illustrations, exam advice and much more.

Each title in the "York Notes" series offers an approach to English literature that should help students achieve a better grade. This book provides detailed summaries and commentaries, advice, facts and an extended resources section on "The Catcher in the Rye".

In 1975, Viv Albertine was obsessed with music but it never occurred to her she could be in a band as she couldn't play an instrument and she'd never seen a girl play electric guitar. A year later, she was the guitarist in the hugely influential all-girl band the Slits, who fearlessly took on the male-dominated music scene.

Something strange is happening in the town of Stepford where the men spend their nights doing something secret and the women act like every man's dream of a "perfect" wife. One young woman watches the dream turn into a nightmare which engulfs her best friend, and realizes that her turn is coming.

A perfectly-crafted, funny and moving masterpiece about love, family, passion and whether or not one should play by the rules.

Set amid the corrupt glamour and multiplying intrigues of Alexandria in the 1930s and 1940s, the novels of Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet" (of which this is the first) follow the shifting alliances - sexual, cultural and political - of a group of quite varied characters.

An unscrupulous Parisian art dealer tries to pass off some of Halifax's paintings as Old Masters. When the ruse is uncovered, Halifax is arrested. As the Nazis converge on Paris, he is press-ganged by the Resistance to forge a number of great artworks so that the originals are safe. He faces a terrible dilemma, there seems no way out.

In the cabin of an ancient, stinking warship bound for Australia, a man writes a journal to entertain his godfather back in England. With wit and disdain he records mounting tensions on board, as an obsequious clergyman attracts the animosity of the tyrannical captain and surly crew.

Set in the coastal hills of northern California between 1880 and the present, this story revolves around three characters - two humans and a duck. Jim Dodge's other novels include Not Fade Away and Stone Junction.

Laura is happily married, a mother and a successful novelist. Interweaving memory and reflection, this novel telescopes the whole of Laura's life - childhood, marriages, triumphs and disappointments - into one day. The author's novel "Circles of Deceit" was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008 WINNER OF THE GALAXY BRITISH BOOK AWARDS 'AUTHOR OF THE YEAR' 2009 '[An] extraordinary and brilliant first novel... Adiga is a real writer - that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision.' Sunday Times

A dramatic and fascinating novel based on a notorious breakout by Japanese prisoners from an Australian POW camp in 1944, encapsulating the impact of war on ordinary lives.

'Beautiful...richly melancholy like those hot summer days when it is so full of that calm before the Autumn, it quite ravished me. When I read it, the tears stream down my face.' STEVIE SMITH

Far from the Madding Crowd was the first of Hardy's novels to give the name of Wessex to the landscape of the south-west of England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity. The story of the wooing of Bathsheba Everdene by three suitors is here presented in a critical text with a new introduction, bibliography and chronology.

With her satire on Anglo-Irish landlords in Castle Rackrent (1800), Maria Edgeworth pioneered the regional novel and inspired Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814).

Having been persuaded to view the match as imprudent, Anne Elliot broke off her engagement to a naval officer with no prospects. Seven years later, when they meet again, Anne has the chance to recover the happiness she had forgone. This new edition examines Persuasion against the background of the Napoleonic Wars and includes fuller notes and appendices on social rank, dancing, and the Navy.

Fighting for the Allies are Will Walker, an ambitious English Field Security Officer and Ray Marfione, a wide-eyed Italian-American infantryman who dreams of home and the movies. Meanwhile in Sicily, Angilu, a young shepherd caught up in corruption and Ciro Albanese, a sinister Mafioso, are fighting their own battles with devastating consequences.