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Michael Byrne is an Irish Don Juan - a composer, a charmer, a bigamist and a thug. He moves from country to country, from bed to bed, selling his talents and leaving a trail of children in his wake. His twin sons travel across the troubled face of Europe to pursue their father for one final apocalyptic reckoning.

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but since his death he has come to be recognised and widely enjoyed as one of the great poets of the twentieth century in any language celebrated for his elegant formal structures, for his brilliant reanimation of myth and for his subtle treatment of erotic experience.

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This anthology presents five previously unpublished stories by Raymond Carver, in addition to five early stories, part of an unfinished novel, and all his non-fiction prose. The works are introduced by his partner.

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Gunder Jomann, a quiet, middle-aged man from a peaceful Norwegian community, thinks his life has been made complete when he returns from a trip to India a married man.

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A is for Anxiety, Alcohol and awful Activities. B is for Bedtime, Baking and Boredom. C is for Childcare and Cooking With Your Coat on. This book puts two fingers up to the pervasive notion that parenthood is an eternally rewarding experience. It taps into the very normal, but hard-to-admit ambivalence that so many parents feel about raising kids.

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Unique and highly erotic, Cannibals is a novel of eighty-eight bulletins that reveal the fractured essence of our age. Characters wallow in bad jokes and bad sex, and trade happiness and pain as we enter their lives and then abruptly leave again, seemingly at random.

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As he listens he grows convinced they are predicting London's future.

Meepers, homeless and dishevelled, yet an enlightened and mystically knowing amateur archeologist, seeks to understand the destruction of London in the Dark Ages, hoping to predict the capital's future.

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Contains stories with a mix of humour, pathos, dysfunctional families and disappointed lives, as well as dazzling moments of illumination, and intimations of mortality (in 'A Ford Mondeo' and 'Gardening').

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Modelled on the Austrian grandmaster Karl Schlechter, this novel brings to life both the events surrounding the ten-match world championship and the atmosphere of the cafes and chess clubs of Vienna and Berlin in the years before the First World War.

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When Mr Shaw meets Caroline on his summer holiday she turns his world upside down. She plays chess magnificently, charms his colleagues and, most importantly, Caroline re-awakens in Mr Shaw an appetite for life he thought he'd lost.

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A haunting story of what happens when family secrets collide with history, Casa Rossa moves from the duplicity of Italy's role in the 1930s to the dark years of Red Brigade's terrorism in the seventies.

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In the dark days of the Spanish Inquisition, such a claim to blessedness has serious consequences, especially when Catalina seems more inclined to obey her heart than the demands of the Church.

The last of Maugham's novels, Catalina is a romantic celebration of Spain and a delightfully mischievous satire on absolutism.

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Desmond Morris considers the cat in myth and history, and answers questions he received from cat owners after the publication of the internationally best-selling Catwatching.

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This book is written to satisfy the needs of the increasing numbers of cat lovers who are interested in alternative methods to treat the illnesses to which their pets may fall prey. There are informative sections on treating the different feline bodily systems and the specific diseases that cats may suffer from.

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When war breaks out, Roe volunteers for the Auxillary Fire Service in London, and is trained under a professional fire officer, Pye. The two men discover that a quite different link exists between them. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz, the relationship between the two men develops.

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These days, entertainers no longer just entertain: they advocate dubious 'religions', work for the United Nations, get face-time with heads of state and monopolise problems they are infinitely qualified to solve - problems like Africa, the Middle East, and AIDS.

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When Gillian Tindall discovered a cache of tightly folded letters in a deserted house in central France, recently emptied of 150 years of a family's possessions, she uncovered the obscure and moving life of one woman, Celestine Chaumette. This is Tindall's brilliantly original recreation of the vanished world of a French village.

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It is 1825 and high in the mountains of South Africa a group of slavesstand accused of the murder of their owner, Nicolass van der Merwe, a wealthy Afrikaner farmer.

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Set in pre-war Paris, Julie de Carneilhan tells of the complex relationship between proud but impoverished Julie and her former husband, the Comte d'Espivant, who has remarried a wealth widow.

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But when a minor heart episode convinces Oliver that it's time for him to take more interest in the lives of those close to him, further shocks are in store- Change of Heart is a glittering jewel of a book, an audacious mixture of comic invention and human insight that is Barbara Anderson at her very best.

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The author was born and brought up in the Forest of Dean. This title presents his personal study of that small area - its people, traditions, ceremonies and institutions - at a time of profound cultural and social change in the late 1950s and early '60s.

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The night before brilliant but erratic composer Charles Jessold's opera - about a betrayed husband who murders his wife and her lover - is due to open, Jessold is found dead, having apparently murdered his wife and her lover.

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Charles Waterton was the first conservationist who fought to protect wild nature against the destruction and pollution of Victorian industrialisation. Using his surviving papers, Julia Blackburn has redressed the balance in a biogr aphy that restores Waterton to his place as the first conservationist of the modern age.

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Charlie Johnson is a veteran war correspondent who thinks he has seen it all - until he makes one rash expedition into a war zone in the Balkans.