Ireland was too small for Ginger Coffey. No matter how hard he tried to get on, he just ended up as a glorified errand boy. That was why he emigrated to Canada with his wife and daughter. But even there his manifold talents were slow to be recognized. By the author of "The Colour of Blood".

This work includes excerpts from "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man", "Dubliners" and "Exiles", and shorter extracts from his other works.

aeo Provides a unique collection of some of the most powerful and innovative works in the history of American Literature. aeo Offers uncomfortable and challenging parallels with the present. aeo Collects work by women and men, black and white.

After years of sailing the seas, Joseph Conrad emerged to become one of the world's greatest writers. This biography explores how Conrad's experiences of exile and his choice of career at sea shaped some of the major themes of his writing.

Narcissus is a teacher at Mariabronn, a monastery in medieval Germany, and Goldmund is his favourite pupil. While Narcissus remains detached from the world in prayer and meditation, Goldmund runs away from the monastery in pursuit of love. Then, he lives a picaresque wanderer's life, his amatory adventures resulting in pain as well as ecstasy.

"First published in Japanese by Kodansha in 1962"--Title page verso.

Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.

From the author of "Witchcraft" comes this black comedy about an unsuccessful solicitor who decides to murder his wife, with devastating results.

Mr Warde, an apparently respectable Victorian country gentleman, is accused by his neighbours of seducing the local girls of the village and is brought to trial. Based on a real life trial that took place in 1847, the book explores sexual hypocrisy.

For all the promise of his name Jack Skeat cannot be a poet. His friend, Rex Petley - eel-catcher, girl-chaser, motorcycle maniac - takes that prize. But is he also a murderer? Maurice Gee is the author of "The Burning Boy".

Robert Wilson is aimless and feckless, and has passed himself off as a Muslim in order to get a job at the Wimbledon Independent Islamic Boys Day School. His decline and fall is as inevitable as it is hilarious, as everything Islamic baffles him.

A story featuring the foul-mouthed Kinky Friedman, ace private eye. Little old ladies are dropping dead at an alarming rate in the vicinity of the family's ranch/summer camp in Texas, and Kinky is asked to investigate. A faded photograph of ten pretty girls is just the clue he needs.

Three novels by Emma Tennant. "The Bad Sister" relates the extraordinary events surrounding the life and death of a wealthy Scottish landowner, and "Two Women in London" and "Faustine" are modern-day reworkings of the Jekyll and Hyde story and the Faust legend, respectively.

A collection of short stories set mainly in Scotland. They feature the foibles of characters at all levels of society, who show an independent mind more concerned with behaviour and incident than national virtues. The award-winning author's other books include "Secret Villages".

A second novel by the author of "The Duchess's Dragonfly". Told as if by a natterjack toad, it is an old man's story of his life, recounted as he sits in a room overlooking the Mediterranean. Born abroad, he was sent away to school in Scotland, where he was teased, bullied and silenced.

In the iron-hulled trawlers which plough the ocean off New England, James Pfeiffer gains insights into the truths behind stories he heard as a child - rumours of killer whales and sharks, and ghost ships in the fog. He also learns the truth about his father's terrible fear of the sea.

Jan works in a small country bookshop in the south of England and instigates a strange and unsettling relationship with a man who wanders in one day to buy a book. She describes and explores the relationship, interweaving the account with her experiences of an affair many years earlier.

The longest of these stories explores the Japanese underworld. Other topics include a young father's inability to eradicate the ghostly memories of his little twins who have died; and a group of children daring each other in a game of depravity while their parents sip drinks.

In these conversations Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, speaks about his Colombian family background, his early travels and struggles as writer, his literary antecedents, and his personal artistic concerns.