In 1940 Steinbeck sailed in a sardine boat with his great friend the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, to collect marine invertebrates from the beaches of the Gulf of California. The expedition was described by the two men in Sea of Cortez, published in 1941.

This extremely clever novel sees life imitating art and art imitating life.

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, fastidious college professor. He also likes little girls. And none more so than Lolita, who he'll do anything to possess. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? ...Or is he all of these?

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? Or is he all of these?

A fifteen year-old boy meets a middle-aged woman on the internet. When his long-term girlfriend and first love Alice, betrays him at a house party, Etgar goes looking for cyber solace in the arms of Macy, a stunning but bored housewife he meets online. What could possibly go wrong...?

Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel, published in 1926, is magical and subversive, anticipating the ficton of writers like Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

Paul Rainey is a 40-year-old functioning alcoholic on anti-anxiety medication who commutes into London every day from Hove to sell advertising space in non-existent trade publications. Perceiving through a fog of psychoactive substances his own dissatisfaction with where his life is going - he only wishes there were something to be done about it.

Written in Celine's trademark style - a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation and quirky lyricism, delivered in machine-gun bursts of prose and ellipses - London Bridge recreates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity.

The narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life... all Samson has to do is to write it as it happens.

A scintillating near-future police procedural for fans of high-concept crime like The City and The City, The Last or Afterland.

This is the only edition in print of this entertaining and important early novel, which is written from the perspective of a seventeenth-century prostitute.

Encircling London like a noose, the M25 is a road to nowhere, but when the author sets out to walk this asphalt loop - keeping within the 'acoustic footprints' - he is determined to find out where the journey will lead him. This book deals with the author's voyage of discovery into the unloved outskirts of the city.

Explores modern London through a day's hike around the London Overground route.

First published in 1952 and with its setting based on Brand's own home, the author cited this mystery as her favourite among her many classics.

May, 1937, and London prepares to crown a new king. Bestselling writer Josephine Tey is in town to oversee a BBC radio production of her play, Queen of Scots. At the height of the Coronation celebrations, Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose is called in to investigate the murder of one of the BBC's best-known broadcasters.

Often controversial, the "London Review of Books" informs and entertains its readers with a fortnightly dose of all things cultural. Bringing together some of the choicest pieces from recent years, this anthology presents contemporary discursive journalism.

The fifth book in the Sunday Times bestselling, award-winning, Slough House series, featuring Mick Herron's much loved band of disgraced spies and their notorious leader, Jackson Lamb, 'the most fascinating and irresistible thriller series hero to emerge since Jack Reacher' (Sunday Times)

Charles Webster, an impoverished photographer working at the Lyceum Theatre, has been sucked into a shadowy demi-monde which exists beneath the surface of civilized society. It is a world of pornographers and prostitutes, orchestrated by master manipulator Marlow, for whom Webster illicitly provides theatrical costumes for pornographic shoots.