How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? The author - lifelong sceptic of all things spiritual - finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question. In this book, he recounts his journey from disbelief to something approaching inner peace and tackles one of the great mysteries of our time.

The long-awaited new collection of stories from David Sedaris, America's favourite humorist.

A survey of Defoe's career and writings aimed at students, with readings of his major works.

Oliver is just back from the Spanish Civil War and world-weary at only nineteen. Calypso is gorgeous, utterly selfish and determined to marry for money. Polly and Walter, brother and sister, play their cards close to their chests.

He was a man without hope, until a lawyer and a crazy inheritance spurred him to one last desperate roll of the dice. The old man was convinced, against all evidence, that there was oil in the Rocky mountains.

This collection of radical, now humorous now dark and pessimistic short stories was conceived as a whole, and some characters populate more than one story. Stylistically bold and varied, the books challenges the conformism that dominates so much witing in this consumerist age.

Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey - and finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn.

The first of Trollope's six Palliser novels, Can You Forgive Her? explores the dilemma of Alice Vavasor, torn between two suitors, and the choices faced by two other independent women. The tensions within Victorian society highlighted by the plot are illuminated in the introduction and notes to this new edition.

Solzhenitsyn's celebrated novel describes the lives of people in the Soviet Union under Stalin who were condemned on health grounds to "internment" or death. It also give a psychological insight into the intensified experience of people under varying degrees of pressure and deprivation.

Candide is the most famous of Voltaire's 'philosophical tales', in which he combined witty improbabilities with the sanest of good sense. This edition includes four other prose tales - Micromegas, Zadig, The Ingenu, and The White Bull - and a verse tale based on Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale,: What Pleases the Ladies.

To the young Lady Margaret Dacre, raised in the rich security of Queen Elizabeth's court, the Scottish border was a land of blood and brutal violence, and her broad inheritance lay at the mercy of the outlaw riders and feuding tribes of England's last frontier. This title presents a tale from the bestselling author of the "Flashman Papers".

Daniel and Nathan were six years old when they first met and became best friends. Thirty years later Dan is convicted of Nathan's murder ...

The long-awaited sibling novel to Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. A fierce and exhilarating testament to the transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, privacy and redemption.

Originally published in 1923, Cane is a literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. The growing interest in African-American literature that began in the 1960's led to the rediscovery of earlier African-American writers, one of whom is Jean Toomer, author of Cane. It is an innovative literary work part drama, part poetry, part fiction.

Lee Chong, the owner of the well-stocked grocery store, is also the proprietor of the Palace Flophouse that Mack and his troupe of good-natured 'boys' call home. Dora runs the Bear Flag Restaurant with clockwork efficiency and a generous heart, and Doc, secreted away in his home at Western Biological Laboratories, is the fount of all wisdom.

With titles like 'A Story of Stolen Salamis', 'Letters to a Frozen Pea Manufacturer', 'A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates', and 'Can't and Won't', this title features stories that illuminate particular moments in ordinary lives and find in them the humorous, the ironic and the surprising.