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.

'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...' This is the story of Cassandra, precocious and charming, who begins a journal detailing her life with her bohemian family in a crumbling old castle.

Cassandra Mortmain lives with her impoverished family in a crumbling castle. Her journal records her life with her bored sister Rose, her stepmother Topaz, her little brother Thomas and her novelist father who suffers from a financially crippling writer's block. However, all their lives are turned upside down when American heirs to castle arrive.

A divorced mother in Florida reflects on the life that is slipping away from her. A zoologist sees the world from the business end of his zebras. A writer, charged with entertaining an unruly mob, pays the consequences for his (in)sensitive choice of material. And Pythagoras explains just what exactly was his problem with triangles.

The author of Down the Rabbit Hole delivers a hilarious and prize-winning tale of immigrants, students and gangsters in Barcelona

A stylish and raw exploration of bodies, trauma and 1960s cinema

This never happened to Jack Kerouac. A startlingly honest and ridiculously funny book, I Left My Tent in San Francisco tells the miraculous story of how the hapless pair made it back alive to tell the disastrous tale.

The cult novel adored by feminists and fashionistas alike, now in paperback.

In his heyday as a star - and as a zealous, bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes - Ira marries Hollywood's beloved leading lady, Eve Frame. This book charts the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, an American roughneck who begins life as a ditchdigger in 1930s New Jersey, becoming a big-time radio hotshot in the 1940s.

Okay are a Canadian indie/rock band who sound a little like the Velvet Underground on quarter-speed. This book presents their story. It follows years of life on and off the road with the band: the gigs and groupies, the tunes and tours, the fall outs and fuck ups, the overdoses and the sweet, sweet soul-damage of it all.

After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London to start again. Living on a quiet street in Hampstead, he develops a close bond with the Nelson family next door: Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters. The friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a devastating event changes all their lives...

Ditie is a hotel waiter who rises to become a millionaire and then loses it all again against the backdrop of events in Prague from the German invasion to the victory of Communism.

Set in Prague and the wooded landscape of Bohemia, this is the story of a sharp-witted waiter. He learns his trade in pre-war Prague, marries an Arian beauty as the Germans invade, makes and loses a fortune and achieves a kind of serenity among the ruins of post-war Europe.

Meet Maggie Fortenberry. Her life seems pretty much perfect - she's beautiful, charming and successful, just as you'd expect of a former Miss Alabama. But in fact, Maggie is perfectly miserable. By now she should have been living in an elegant house with an adoring husband and 2.5 children. Instead, she makes a living selling that dream to others.

"A man climbs into Ferdinand Sponer's cab, gives the name of a hotel, and before he reaches it has been murdered: shot through the throat. And though Sponer has so far committed no crime, he is drawn into the late Jack Mortimer's life, and might not be able to escape its tangles and intrigues before it is too late..."--