This Norton Critical Edition includes thirty-five of Katherine Mansfield's short stories with explanatory annotations.

Tells the story of author's parents - their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903 after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father's death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960.

Lydia's London life lacks purpose. Her discovery of mystical Islam, with its Arabic language and Shia rituals, offers her a new beginning. Lydia becomes Kauthar. When she falls in love with Rafiq, an Iraqi-born doctor, her life appears complete. Then Rafiq decides to return to war-torn Baghdad. For Kauthar love of God replaces love of her husband.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the finest and most accomplished contemporary writers of his generation. The short story author, television writer and novelist, has produced a body of work which is just as critically-acclaimed as it is popular with the general public. This book presents critical essays on Kazuo Ishiguro.

"Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success." Gordon Comstock decides to live in poverty rather than compromise with the 'money god'. Disgusted by society's materialism, he leaves his job in advertising to pursue an ill-fated career as a poet.

Part of Alma Classics Evergreens series, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a tragically witty account of the struggle to escape from a materialistic existence. This edition is enriched by an extensive critical apparatus, notes and extra reading material, as well as a selection of photographs.

Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit.

A new collection of Alan Bennett's diaries and more

A bewitching debut novel, at once a family saga and a tale of the London underworld.

Rediscover the joy of Fay: A tale of murder, sex, redemption, remorse and ghosts from the 'mistress of warped suburbia'

This is the authoritative biography of writer, poet, and beat generation icon Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), whose novel On the Road catapulted him to the forefront of the literary world and influenced budding writers for generations to come.

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.

Billy Casper is a boy with nowhere to go and nothing to say; part of the limbo generation of school leavers too old for lessons and too young to know anything about the outside world. He hates and is hated. His family and friends are mean and tough and they're sure he's going to end up in big trouble.

Essential to Virginia Woolf's development as a novelist, these short stories are among the most interesting and accomplished fictions she wrote.

This is the diary of a middle-aged man who is deeply in love with his younger wife, Ikuko. In spite of that love, the pair have grown physically apart, each unsure of the other's desires...until the day Ikuko discovers her husband's diary with its desperate hints of jealousy and voyeurism. Ikuko realises she has found the key to his very soul.

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.