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THE EXTRAORDINARY LOST NOVEL FROM THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA AND ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE Sitting alone, overlooking the still and blue lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach surveys the men of the hotel bar. She is happily married and has no reason to escape the world she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Amid sultry days and tropical downpours, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire, and the fear that sits quietly at her heart. Constantly surprising and wonderfully sensual, Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, and the mysteries of love, from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon; a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals; while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight - and we feel 'the unbearable lightness of being'. The Unbearable Lightness of Being encompasses passion and philosophy, infidelity and ideas, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy - in fact, all of human existence.
WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD Charles Highway is every mother's worst nightmare. Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets the aloof, wildly unattainable, Rachel. As Charles's twentieth birthday - and the Oxford entrance exams - loom, his plans for seducing Rachel will draw him into a private collection of obsessional notes and observations: the eponymous 'Rachel Papers'. Click here to find out about our BOOKCLUB
The Wasp Factory is a bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath - one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels. 'Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.' Enter - if you can bear it - the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least.
Celebrating 50 years of Tove Jansson's classic, bestselling novel. Featured in the BBC 2 Between the Covers Bookclub Special (Eurovision series 2023) The Worldwide Classic about a tiny island and larger love. An elderly artist and her six-year-old grand-daughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. As the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself. Written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own life and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of her adult novels. With a foreword by Esther Freud and an afterword by Sophia Jansson (on whom the child 'Sophia' is based) who returns to the island during the pandemic at the point of becoming a grandmother herself.
**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK** 'A sinister tale' Guardian The classic, atmospheric Australian thriller about the mysterious disappearance of a group of young girls. A cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred... Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared. They never returned. Is Picnic at Hanging Rock fact or fiction? Only you can truly decide.
Fully restored edition of Anthony Burgess' original text of A Clockwork Orange, with a glossary of the teen slang 'Nadsat', explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviews Edited by Andrew Biswell With a Foreword by Martin Amis 'It is a horrorshow story ...' Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean? A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters. This critical edition restores the text of the novel as Anthony Burgess originally wrote it, and includes a glossary of the teen slang 'Nadsat', explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviews, shedding light on the enduring fascination of the novel's 'sweet and juicy criminality'. Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He spent six years in the British Army before becoming a schoolmaster and colonial education officer in Malaya and Brunei. After the success of his Malayan Trilogy, he became a full-time writer in 1959. His books have been published all over the world, and they include The Complete Enderby, Nothing Like the Sun, Napoleon Symphony, Tremor of Intent, Earthly Powers and A Dead Man in Deptford. Anthony Burgess died in London in 1993. Andrew Biswell is the Professor of Modern Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. His publications include a biography, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, which won the Portico Prize in 2006. He is currently editing the letters and short stories of Anthony Burgess.
Birdsong is a mesmerising story of love and war spanning three generations between WW1 and present day. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 1910. Amiens, Northern France. Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman, arrives in the French city to stay with the Azaire family. He falls in love with unhappily married Isabelle and the two enter a tempestuous love affair. But, with the world on the brink of war, the relationship falters. With his love for Isabelle forever engraved on his heart, Stephen volunteers to fight on the Western Front and enters the unimaginable dark world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land. From award-winning writer Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong is an exceptionally moving and unforgettable portrait of the ruthlessness of war and the indestructability of love.
Discover the cult classic behind the major new TV adaption from the creators of Westworld, starring Chloe Grace Moretz. ----- 'Big-screen, popcorn-chewing thrills' Guardian Flynne Fisher lives in the rural American South, working at the local 3D printing shop, while earning much needed extra money playing VR games for rich people. One night she dons a headset and finds herself in futuristic London-a sleek and mysterious world, alluringly different from her own hardscrabble existence. But this isn't like any game she's ever played before: Flynne begins to realize it isn't virtual reality... it's real. Someone in London, seventy years in the future, has found a way to open a door to Flynne's world. And as utterly beguiling as London is... it's also dangerous. As Flynne searches to discover who has connected their worlds, and for what purpose, her presence here sets dangerous forces into motion...forces intent on destroying Flynne and her family in her own world. The Peripheral is master storyteller William Gibson's dazzling, hallucinatory glimpse into the fate of mankind - and what lies beyond.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Anne Rice, this sensuously written spellbinding classic remains 'the most successful vampire story since Bram Stoker's Dracula' (The Times) In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life - the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood. When Interview with the Vampire was published the Washington Post said it was a 'thrilling, strikingly original work of the imagination . . . sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, always unforgettable'. Now, more than forty years since its release, Anne Rice's masterpiece is more beloved than ever. ***The Vampire Chronicles is soon to be a major TV show***
An exhilarating satire of Eighties excess that captures the effervescent spirit of New York, from one of the greatest writers of modern American prose Sherman McCoy is a WASP, bond trader and self-appointed 'Master of the Universe'. He has a fashionable wife, a Park Avenue apartment and a Southern mistress. His spectacular fall begins the moment he is involved in a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. Prosecutors, newspaper hacks, politicians and clergy close in on him, determined to bring him down. Exuberant, scandalous and exceptionally discerning, The Bonfire of the Vanities was Tom Wolfe's first venture into fiction and cemented his reputation as the foremost chronicler of his age. 'The quintessential novel of The Eighties' - The Guardian
Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and Pen Faulkner prize. Made into an Oscar-winning film, 'The Hours' is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of 'Mrs Dalloway'. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the stories of three unforgettable women.
Five decades after it was first published, Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat novel On the Road finally finds its way to the big screen, in a production from award-winning director Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries) starring Sam Riley (Control, Brighton Rock), Garret Hedlund (Friday Night Lights), Kristen Stewart (Twilight), Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen. Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), a young innocent, joins his hero Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), a traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream. A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion. One of the most influential and important novels of the 20th century, On the Road is the book that launched the Beat Generation and remains the bible of that literary movement. 'The most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat"' The New York Times 'Pop writing at its best. It changed the way I saw the world, making me yearn for fresh experience' Hanif Kureishi, Independent on Sunday 'On the Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road' William Burroughs
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. The animals at Manor Farm have had enough of Farmer Jones - he's drunk, reckless and cares little for their welfare. When the boar, Old Major, shares his revolutionary plans, the animals are convinced they can thrive on their own once the despot Jones is overthrown. But as the pigs vie for power, they begin to bear an uncanny resemblance to the tyrants they have overthrown... George Orwell's renowned fable became an instant success on publication after the Second World War. The novel has continued to captivate readers of all ages, and has secured Orwell's position as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.
A towering philosophical novel that is the summation of her Objectivist philosophy, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is the saga of the enigmatic John Galt, and his ambitious plan to 'stop the motor of the world', published in Penguin Modern Classics. Opening with the enigmatic question 'Who is John Galt?', Atlas Shrugged envisions a world where the 'men of talent' - the great innovators, producers and creators - have mysteriously disappeared. With the US economy now faltering, businesswoman Dagny Taggart is struggling to get the transcontinental railroad up and running. For her John Galt is the enemy, but as she will learn, nothing in this situation is quite as it seems. Hugely influential and grand in scope, this story of a man who stopped the motor of the world expounds Rand's controversial philosophy of Objectivism, which champions competition, creativity and human greatness. Ayn Rand (1905-82), born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, emigrated to America with her family in January 1926, never to return to her native land. Her novel The Fountainhead was published in 1943 and eventually became a bestseller. Still occasionally working as a screenwriter, Rand moved to New York City in 1951 and published Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Her novels espoused what came to be called Objectivism, a philosophy that champions capitalism and the pre-eminence of the individual.
WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST ALL-TIME SERIES The Foundation series is Isaac Asimov's iconic masterpiece. Unfolding against the backdrop of a crumbling Galactic Empire, the story of Hari Seldon's two Foundations is a lasting testament to an extraordinary imagination, one that shaped science fiction as we know it today. The First Foundation survived two centuries of barbarism as the once-mighty Galactic Empire descended into chaos. Now it mist prepare for war against the remnants of the Empire as the Imperial fleet advances on their planet, Terminus. Hari Seldon predicted this war; he even prepared his Foundation for it. But he couldn't foresee the birth of the mutant Mule. In possession of a power which reduces fearsome opposition to devoted slaves, the Mule poses a terrible threat to Seldon's Foundation.
WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST ALL-TIME SERIES The Foundation series is Isaac Asimov's iconic masterpiece. Unfolding against the backdrop of a crumbling Galactic Empire, the story of Hari Seldon's two Foundations is a lasting testament to an extraordinary imagination, one that shaped science fiction as we know it today. The Galactic Empire has prospered for twelve thousand years. Nobody suspects that the heart of the thriving Empire is rotten, until psychohistorian Hari Seldon uses his new science to foresee its terrible fate. Exiled to the desolate planet Terminus, Seldon establishes a colony of the greatest minds in the Empire, a Foundation which holds the key to changing the fate of the galaxy. However, the death throes of the Empire breed hostile new enemies, and the young Foundation's fate will be threatened first.
A cult classic, adapted into a film starring Christian Bale. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? Patrick Bateman has it all: good looks, youth, charm, a job on Wall Street, reservations at every new restaurant in town and a line of girls around the block. He is also a psychopath. A man addicted to his superficial, perfect life, he pulls us into a dark underworld where the American Dream becomes a nightmare . . . With an introduction by Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is one of the most controversial and talked-about novels of all time. A multimillion-copy bestseller hailed as a modern classic, it is a violent black comedy about the darkest side of human nature.
Winston Smith rewrites history. It's his job. Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, he helps the Party, and the omnipresent Big Brother, control the people of Oceania. Winston knows what a good citizen of Oceania must do: show his devotion for Big Brother and the Party; abstain from all vices; and, most importantly, possess no critical thoughts of their own. The new notebook he's begun to write in is definitely against the rules - in fact, the Thought Police could arrest him simply for having it. Yet, as Winston begins to write his own history, a seed of rebellion begins to grow in his heart - one that could have devastating consequences. In George Orwell's final and most well-known novel, he explores a dystopian future in which a totalitarian government controls the actions, thoughts and even emotions of its citizens, exercising power through control of language and history. Its lasting popularity is testament to Orwell's powerful prose, and is a passionate political warning for today.
Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a powerful novel about a man who so far has never felt love from Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the One Hundred Years of Solitude. 'The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin' On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a newspaper columnist in Colombia decides to give himself 'a night of mad love with a virgin adolescent'. But on seeing this beautiful girl he falls deeply under her spell. His love for his 'Delgadina' causes him to recall all the women he has paid to perform acts of love. And so the columnist realises he must chronicle the life of his heart, to offer it freely to the world. . .
Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel was a global phenomenon when it was first released, selling over one million copies in its first week of sale, and it has captivated readers worldwide ever since. They had only one thing in common . . . William Lowell Kane and Abel Rosnovski, one the son of a Boston millionaire, the other a penniless Polish immigrant - two men born on the same day on opposite sides of the world, their paths destined to cross in the ruthless struggle to build a fortune. Kane and Abel is the marvellous story, spanning sixty years, of two powerful men linked by an all-consuming hatred, brought together by fate to save . . . and finally destroy . . . each other.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a compelling, moving story exploring injustice and mob hysteria by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. 'On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on' Santiago Nasar is brutally murdered in a small town by two brothers. All the townspeople knew it was going to happen - including the victim. But nobody did anything to prevent the killing. Twenty seven years later, a man arrives in town to try and piece together the truth from the contradictory testimonies of the townsfolk. To at last understand what happened to Santiago, and why. . .
This classic science fiction masterwork by Isaac Asimov weaves stories about robots, humanity, and the deep questions of existence into a novel of shocking intelligence and heart. "A must-read for science-fiction buffs and literature enjoyers alike."--The Guardian I, Robot, the first and most widely read book in Asimov's Robot series, forever changed the world's perception of artificial intelligence. Here are stories of robots gone mad, of mind-reading robots, and robots with a sense of humor. Of robot politicians, and robots who secretly run the world--all told with the dramatic blend of science fact and science fiction that has become Asimov's trademark. The Three Laws of Robotics: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. With these three, simple directives, Isaac Asimov formulated the laws governing robots' behavior. In I, Robot, Asimov chronicles the development of the robot from its primitive origins in the present to its ultimate perfection in the not-so-distant future--a future in which humanity itself may be rendered obsolete.
A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Greene's gripping thriller exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the 'dangerous edge of things.' In this gripping, terrifying, and unputdownable read, discover Greene's iconic tale of the razor-wielding Pinkie.
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