(Paperback)

In 1945, in Kostelec, Danny is playing saxophone for the best jazz band in Czechoslovakia. Their trumpeter has just got out of a concentration camp, their bass player is only allowed in the band since he owns the bass, and the love of Danny's life is in love with somebody else.

(Paperback)

Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse.

(Paperback)

Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, Corde is troubled: at home the centre is not holding firm, in Eastern Europe authority is cruel and dehumanising.

(Paperback)

At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people. When the deadly disease hits Britain, society starts to descend into barbarism.

(Paperback)

Harry White is the man other men want to be: admired by his peers, talented, rich, and desired by countless women. His steady rise to a position of unprecedented influence in a New York investment firm seems inevitable to those who know him, and on the way he acquires a beautiful wife and children.

(Paperback)

It's not easy being a Provincial Lady in Devonshire in the 1920s, juggling a grumpy husband, mischievous children and a host of domestic dilemmas - from rice mould to a petulant cook. But this Provincial Lady will not be defeated; not by wayward flower bulbs, not by unexpected houseguests, not even by the Blitz.

(Paperback)

When Maude Slocum - beautiful, frightened and angry - comes to Lew Archer's office with a poison pen letter intended for her husband, he reluctantly agrees to help her. As he follows the Slocums around, Archer finds that Mrs Slocum might have the least of the family's troubles. But why is their handsome ex-chauffeur still hanging around

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

Gives us a portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its 'middle ground', interrogating both the author's happy memories of reading English adventure stories in secondary school and also the harsher truths of colonial rule.

(Paperback)

Offers a collection of short stories that satirizes the life in Poland under a totalitarian regime.

(Paperback)

Explores the issues facing theatrical performances. This work describes important developments in theatre from the last century, as well as smaller scale events, from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting. It also shows how theatre defies rules, builds and shatters illusions and creates lasting memories for its audiences.

(Paperback)

A novella in which a middle-aged man weds an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter.

(Paperback)

Combining fact and fiction, epic and miniature, horror and comedy, this book tells stories about love and death, truth and lies, myth and reality range across many epochs and settings.

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

Presents various examples of Groucho, one of the influential and well-loved figures in the history of comedy. From early scripts to complete screenplays, from magazine funnies to personal correspondence, via books, greedy banks, even greedier lawyers and the coming of television, this collection captures the essence of Groucho's comic genius.

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

Smurov, a fussily self-conscious Russian tutor, shoots himself after a humiliating beating by his mistress' husband. Unsure whether his suicide has been successful or not, Smurov drifts around Berlin, observing his acquaintances, but finds he can discover very little about his own life from the opinions of his distracted, confused fellow-emigres.

(Paperback)

The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident - a man who has lost his face and, with it, connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him. His only entry back into the world is to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. But soon he finds that such mask is more than a disguise.

(Paperback)

In eighteenth century France, Charles Perrault rescued from the oral tradition, fairy tales that are known and loved even today by virtually all children in the West. This book adapts the stories for modern readers of English.

(Paperback)

Harry Caldecote is a convivial academic who devotes his life to others. He is on call when his alcoholic niece falls into strange hands, when his brother threatens to emulate Wordsworth, when his son's lesbian lodger is beaten up by her girlfriend. He endures misplaced seductions just to keep the peace at the King's pub in Shepherd's Hill.

(Paperback)

Nineteenth century is drawing to a close, and the upper middle classes, with their property and propriety, are becoming a dying section of society. As Soames Forsyte struggles to uphold the old moral code in the face of the social revolution resulting from the Great War, his wife Irene's beauty causes even more disruption.

(Paperback, 2nd edition)

In this second part of John Galworthy's trilogy of love, power, money and family feuding, a new generation has arrived to divide the Forsyte clan with society scandals and conflicting passions

(Paperback, 3rd edition)

For centuries, the Cherrell sons have left their home of Condaford Grange to serve the state as soldiers, clergymen and administrators, but the 1930s bring uncertainty in a world of rapidly altering morals and unemployment.

(Paperback)