Richard Cantrell is an American colonel living in Venice just after the Second World War. The fighting has left him scarred and embittered, a middle-aged man with a heart condition. It seems that only the love of Renata, a nineteen-year-old countess can save him.

She's twenty-three and in love with love. The affair is quickly consuming. But this relationship is unpredictable, and behind his perfect looks is a mean streak. The search for a fix is frantic, and taking a dangerous turn... We're all looking to get what we want - but do we know what we need?

A son investigates his mother's past in this moving novel of family, lies, betrayal and forgiveness.

A provocative debut exploring sex and sexuality as a twentysomething New Yorker pursues a sexual freedom that follows no lines other than her own desire

A romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, as they cross continents, are continually parted and reunited, come to learn the strange truth about their singular relationship.

Pretty Hetty Sorrel is loved by the village carpenter Adam Bede, but her head is turned by the attentions of the fickle young squire. His dalliance with the dairymaid affects the lives of many in their small rural community. This new edition of Eliot's pioneering classic of social realism uses the definitive Clarendon text.

This collection of playful, deadly febles is populated with waifs and strays, a gluttonous thief and a mischievous gardener. The grimly comic story The Argentine Ant moved Gore Vidal to declare 'if this is not a masterpiece of twentieth-century prose writing, I cannot think of anything better'.

Addlands is a sweeping tale of rural family life set in the Welsh borders.

An exuberant work of popular history: why something as seemingly mundane as an address can save lives or serve the powerful.

The author of Fight Club takes America beyond our darkest dreams in this timely satire. and professors propound theories that offer students only the bleakest future. In this mind-blowing novel, Palahniuk fearlessly makes real the logical conclusion of every separatist fantasy, alternative fact, and conspiracy theory lurking in the American psyche.

From his timeless first poem - The Tap - via classic odes to his muse, first and only true love Pandora (I adore ya) as well as his burgeoning political anger in Mrs Thatcher (Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?) and on through late works examining the hollow shell of masculinity and his declining libido - such as To My Organ - Adrian Mole moves readers in ways they cannot expect. --

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart. The author's writing confronts the great philosophical dilemmas of our time with piercing clarity.

Linda knows she's lucky. Yet every morning when she opens her eyes to a so-called new day, she feels like closing them again. Her friends recommend medication. But Linda wants to feel more, not less.

A penniless and parentless Chicago boy growing up in the Great Depression, Augie March drifts through life latching on to a wild succession of occupations, including butler, thief, dog-washer, sailor and salesman. He is a 'born recruit', easily influenced by others who try to mould his destiny.

First published in 1668, Simplicissimus tells the picaresque, brilliantly described adventures of a boy swept up in the Thirty Years War and the terrible things that he experiences. Some of it is realistic, some fantastical but the overall effect is an unmatched picture of Europe torn apart by an endless, sadistic, futile war from which nobody can escape.

An experimental account of Sir Thomas Browne, the 17th century physician, philosopher and writer, from the acclaimed author of Periodic Tales and Anatomies

In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark Twain combines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer, resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious, has long been a defining figure in the American cultural imagination.