Item category 1: Classics

Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep is the definitive hardboiled detective story and Philip Marlowe the perfect expression of the cynical, world-weary gumshoe.

Readers who are entranced by sweeping historical sagas will devour Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks' drama set during the first world war. The book's hero, a 20-year-old Englishman named Stephen Wraysford, finds his true love on a trip to Amiens in 1910. Unfortunately, she's already married, the wife o...

Written during the same period as Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, and banned in the English-speaking world upon its publication in Paris in 1936, Black Spring is one of Miller's finest achievements, and arguably his most distinguished book from a stylistic point of view. It consists of ...

T̀he one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself' 'Jarndyce and Jardyce' is an infamous lawsuit that has been in process for generations. Nobody can remember exactly how the case started but many different individuals have found their fortunes caught up in it. Esther Su...

From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

Set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach; and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family ; The Bodysurfers is an Australian classic.

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.