The most ambitious of Woolf's novels, and the last one to be published during her lifetime, The Years is a work suffused with a haunting, melancholy sense of time and history, and a stylistic tour de force.
At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.
In this haunting illustration of the treatment of mental health and chilling Gothic tale, a woman is confined to a room and forbidden to do anything interesting, and loses her mind. In 1887, following a nervous breakdown, Gilman had been sent to a leading neurologist, she explains in 'Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper', also included in this volume.
In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior - an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the 'scandalous girl' of her youth. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux's relationship to time, memory and writing.
Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. As Thomsen and Doll's wife pursue their passion - the gears of Nazi Germany's Final Solution grinding around them - Doll is riven by suspicion.
Tells the story of M Francisco Fabrigas, explorer, philosopher, heretical physicist, who took a shipful of children on a frightening voyage to the next dimension, assisted by a teenaged Captain, a brave deaf boy, a cunning blind girl, and a sultry botanist, all the while pursued by the Pope of the universe and a well-dressed mesmerist.
Nearing sixty and needing to plan for his and his children's future, the author employed an accountant from a reputable firm. When the accountant recommended investing in a property scheme, he followed his advice - only to find out that the accountant was a fraudster and his entire life savings had vanished. This book tells his story.
Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece is perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature. Published as part of a beautifully designed series to mark the 40th anniversary of the Virago Modern Classics.
High up in the Conrad Flats that loom bleakly over Acton, two future stars of the literary scene - or so they assume - are hard at work, tapping out words of wit and brilliance between ill-paid jobs writing captions for the Cat Calendar 1985 and blurbs for trashy novels with titles like Brothel of the Vampire.
Heartlessness has become the law. In the wasted ruins of London, a woman pieces together fragments of her memory. As her past emerges, her own apocalypse begins. This is a novel of singular invention and bravery.
For decades, hobbits and the other fantastical creatures of Middle-earth have captured the imaginations of a fiercely loyal tribe of J R R Tolkien readers, all enhanced by the immense success of Peter Jackson's films: first 'The Lord of the Rings', and now his new 'The Hobbit'. This book explores the chief influences on J R R Tolkien's work.
Eight-year-old Pepper sees the world a little differently from most people. During a school field trip, Pepper is kidnapped by a stranger and driven to rural Arkansas. The man claims that Pepper's mother has died and they are to live together from now on - but the boy is absolutely certain his mother is alive, and he's going to find her
'There once was a man who, one night at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party...'. As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country.
A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife's face.
One of Barack Obama's best books of 2018, the New York Times bestselling novel about contemporary America from a bold new Native American voice`A thunderclap' Marlon James`Astonishing' Margaret Atwood, via Twitter`Pure soaring beauty' Colm ToibinJacquie Red Feather is newly sober and hoping to reconnect with her estranged family.