A brilliant exposition of loneliness, failure and the experience of living as a foreigner abroad in Thatcher's Britain

The Odyssey tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus' epic ten year journey home after the end of the Trojan War of the Iliad. Its epic sweep has gripped generations of readers.

A Hay Festival and Aarhus European Capital of Culture Project. Aarhus 39 is a collection of the best emerging writers for young people from across wider Europe.

After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as would-be artist, Philip Carey settles in London to train as a doctor. And that is where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a formative, tortured and masochistic affair which very nearly ruins him.

'One of the genre's very few genuinely comic, genuinely incisive writers' THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE

Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except the clothes on their back - and a dream that one day they will have some land of their own.

Whether the stories are based in reality or fantasy, Of Myths and Mothers is a magical collection that sweeps across decades, embracing both folklore and futurism. From the remote hillsides of Settle to the dark caves of Pabellon, these stories make you believe in legends and question conventions.

Marcelino lives alone on his parents' farm, set deep in the beautiful but impoverished countryside of northern Spain.When his brother tricks him out of his house and land, a moment of anger sparks a chain of events that can't be reversed. Marcelino flees to the wild peaks of rural Asturias, becoming a cult hero as he evades authorities.

'Compact, irreverent, enigmatic, savage and tender... it is impossible to look at the world the same way after reading Babel... one of the enduring jewels of 20th-century Russian literature' - Financial Times

It is 1920 and Eugene Gant leaves the American South for Harvard, New York and Europe, determined to make his way as a writer. On the boat home, he meets Esther Jack, the woman who is to dominate his life. Autobiographical, vital and passionate, Wolfe's second novel blazes with energy and life.

A poetic meditation on life and death, by one of the most renowned and respected film-makers and intellectuals of our time. It is a remarkable narrative - part pilgrimage, part meditation, and a confrontation between a great German Romantic imagination and the contemporary world.

Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize-winning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames and has a new introduction from Alan Hollinghurst.

Sixty-one when she published her first novel, Penelope Fitzgerald based many subsequent books on the experiences of a long and varied life. It presents a life unknown to the author through a story of English emigres in pre-Revolutionary Russia and has been described by one critic as the best `Russian' novel of the twentieth century.

Bestselling author of The Waiting Rooms, Eve Smith returns with an authentic, startlingly thought-provoking, nail-biting blockbuster of a thriller that provides a chilling glimpse of a future that's just one manipulation away...

Collects five years of intimate, wide-ranging conversations with many of today's most prominent writers, taken from the pages of the "Believer".