Item category 1: Classics

It could almost have been their own country: these sections with the gums briefly framed like a traditional oil painting by the slowly passing window. The colours were as brown and parched; that chaff-coloured grass, Ah, this dun-coloured realism. Any minute now the cry of the crow or a cockatoo;...

Thirteen Australian package tourists set off around the world on the holiday of a lifetime in this enchanting story by Murray Bail. It could almost have been their own country: these sections with the gums briefly framed like a traditional oil painting by the slowly passing window. The colours we...

Fictionalised account of the last few days of Virginia Woolf's life.

Lily Bart has no fortune, but she possesses everything else she needs to make an excellent marriage: beauty, intelligence, a love of luxury and an elegant skill in negotiating the hidden traps and false friends of New York's high society. But time and again Lily cannot bring herself to make the f...

Fifteen-year-old New Yorker Daisy thinks she knows all about love. ? Her mother died giving birth to her, and now her dad has sent her away for the summer, to live in the English countryside with cousins she's never even met. There she'll discover what real love is: something violent, mysterious ...

Ranges from how children learn to read to what makes words rude or polite, from eyebrow flashes to whistling languages. Unlocking the secrets of communication in an accessible, entertaining way, this book sheds light on the endless mysteries we speak, write and read every day.

Dave Eggers has championed the cause of the short story so magnificently that through his own McSweeney's magazine and through its many imitators the form is once again in the ascendant. Yet while celebrating the work of others, Eggers has also proved himself time and again one of the modern mast...