'A wonderfully warm tale of weddings, funerals, marathon sauna contests - and the incomparable thrill of your first kiss, from 'the Nick Hornby of the Arctic' (Marina Warner, Sunday Times)

Ten years on from Trainspotting Sick Boy is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London.

Her favourite tales are those that conjure ancient worlds - of angry gods and heroic mortals, one of whom will some day come to her rescue.Soon, she will forget where the page ends and her mind begins. 'A full-throttle blast of storytelling mastery' Max Porter

Beginning in the late 1940's, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was "beat." This book collects the significant writings of the fellow members of the Beat Generation. In poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs, it captures the triumphant rudeness, energy, and exhilaration of a movement that swept through American letters.

A great novelist of the sea, a poet of the tropics, a harbinger of the modern spy novel, and an observer of the moments in which people are stripped of their illusions, Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This title features some of the best known and most enduring of Conrad's works.

Porterhouse is a backwoods institution which is supported by fee-paying students who buy their degrees. Sir Godber Evans, the new Master, is determined to make radical changes, provoking the wrath of the Dean, the Senior Tutor and, most intransigent of all, Skullion the Head Porter.

Portnoy's Complaint is a disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. In this book, the author states that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

A collection of stories that is set in Portobello, on the edge of Dublin city centre, just inside the canal. It reflects on characters on the edge of life, personalities that do not quite fit in: Michael, the country boy who drowns himself; Harry, the old Jewish dealer living alone; Liam, the crude emigrant returning to Ireland for a visit.

Isabel Archer's main aim in life is to protect her independence. She is not interested in settling down and compromising her freedom for the sake of marriage. But, on a trip around Europe, she finds herself captivated by the charming Gilbert Osmond, who is very interested in the idea of adding Isabel to his collection of beautiful artworks.

Considered by many as one of the finest novels in the English language, The Portrait of a Lady is both a dramatic Victorian tale of betrayal and a wholly modern psychological study of a woman caught in machinations she only comes to understand too late. This new edition usefully tracks the major textual changes James made for his New York Edition.

Hardback edition with an additional essay by President of the Detection Club, Martin Edwards. Adrian Gray was born in May 1862 and met his death through violence, at the hands of one of his own children, at Christmas, 1931. This fascinating and unusual novel tells the story of what happened that dark Christmas night; and what the murderer did next.

One of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, and one of the most innovative. Young Irish Catholic, Stephen Dedalus, rejects religion and national ties to develop unfettered as an artist. Stronly autobiographical, the novel is one of the founding texts of Modernism and the precursor of Ulysses.

Ten marvellously evocative short stories inspired by the events of Dylan Thomas' youth. Featuring a bold new livery in celebration of the Dylan Thomas centenary.

First published in 1940, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog has proven to be second only in popularity to the author's masterpiece, Under Milk Wood, demonstrating that Thomas was as much a master of prose as he was of poetry. Included in this volume is the complete body of fiction produced by the Welsh poet in his short and turbulent life.

Against the backdrop of nineteenth century Dublin, a boy becomes a man: his mind testing its powers, obsessions taking hold and loosening again, the bonds of family, tradition, nation and religion transforming from supports into shackles; until young man devotes himself to celebration of beauty, and reaches for independence and life of an artist.

Rome, one January afternoon in 1943. A young German woman is on her way to listen to a Bach concert at the Lutheran church. Innocent and naive, the war is for her little more than a daydream, until she realizes that her husband might never return.

An epic novel from the master of historical fiction, author of ALEXANDER: GOD OF WAR 'Brilliantly evoked' Sunday Times

Mankind has reached the stars. Now we are trying to unravel the heart of the universe, but all discoveries are dangerous and some mysteries might be safest left unexplored...

Tells the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. This book features a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, this novel describes the romance between two 19th-century poets and the parallel relationship of their two biographers and includes passages of "Victorian verse". It is structured in the form of a literary and biographical treasure hunt.

Three respected Scottish doctors - psychiatrist Steve Hartford, paediatric surgeon Grey Lochran and cosmetic surgeon Robert Forrest - have been close friends since their Edinburgh boyhoods, and now live handsomely in suburban London. But for each, midlife has brought certain discontents, especially for Forrest, a reformed womaniser.

The appearance of any new work by Tibor Fischer is a cause for celebration. Here are two dazzling new stories that show why he is so admired.

Henry Chinaski is a lowlife loser with a hand-to-mouth existence. His menial post office day job supports a life of beer, one-night stands and racetracks.

A young Austrian woman, Christine, toils away in a provincial post office when, out of the blue, a telegram arrives inviting her to join an American aunt she's never known in a fashionable Swiss resort. She accepts and is swept up into a world of almost inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed.