Item category 1: Classics

With an introduction by Michael Irwin. The young Thomas Hardy was working as an architect, but fired with literary ambition, tried for years to get into print. He finally succeeded with Desperate Remedies, a sensation novel in the mode of Wilkie Collins. Here was a racy specimen of the genre, rep...

In Delta of Venus, Anais Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of f...

A tie-in edition of Waugh's first and funniest novel to accompany the new BBC adaptation starring Jack Whitehall. Sent down from Oxford University for indecent behaviour, Paul Pennyfeather embarks on a series of bizarre adventures that start in a minor public school and end in one of Her Majesty'...

Revised for the seven hundredth anniversary of the author's birth, this tale of medieval Italian life details how ten young Florentines retreat to the countryside to escape the plague-infested city and entertain themselves by telling stories.

This book charts the complex personal relationships in an upper middle class Anglo-Australian family. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1956.

Mr Charles Pooter is a respectable man. He has just moved into a very desirable home in Holloway with his dear wife Carrie, from where he commutes to his job of valued clerk at a reputable bank in the City. Unfortunately neither his dear friends Mr Cummings and Mr Gowing, nor the butcher, the gre...

She pouts. I was expecting more of a story, she says. It is difficult to get into the swing when the subject keeps changing. An ageing writer fills his journal: he has opinions about everything. He is challenged by Anya, the smart, irreverent young woman he hires to type his notes.