Item category 1: Classics

"This ebullient, gallivanting novel encapsulates the world vision of the Czech Republic's best-loved author in one tumbling, breathtaking sentence. Saints and sinners, emperors and embezzlers, barmaids and balalaikas all play their part in the bawdy reminiscences of Hrabal's cobbler as he charms ...

Lark Watter, the student daughter of Henry and Mrs Watter, embarks on a journey of self-discovery with a mixture of courage, innocent hopefulness. This work features her ensuing adventures full of profound comedy and peopled by awful characters, and all is related with Adams' trademark zany wit, ...

Depicting decadence and moral corruption in pre-revolutionary France, Dangerous Liaisons is one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. Two aristocrats embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded existences. While ...

Dark Places, a companion novel to Lilian's Story, is the tale of a man with a comically grand exterior who believes he has the right, and the duty, to conquer the mocking flesh of any woman. Even his own daughter

N. S. Rubashov, an old guard Communist, falls victim to an unnamed government; with outstanding psychological insight, Koestler traces his story through arrest, imprisonment and trail in a classic novel which, when first published, famously drew attention to the nature of Stalin's regime.

Imagines a New Russia of the near future that is ruled by a reconstituted nobility and which blends draconian codes with modern technology while locking down Western borders, a region in which a 20-years-older Vladimir Putin has appropriated all free enterprise.

'One of the most productive, imaginative and risk-taking of writers...It is a clever, sexually explicit, fast-moving, full blooded yarn' - Irish Times . A Dead Man in Deptford re-imagines the riotous life and suspicious death of Christopher Marlowe. Poet, lover and spy, Marlowe must negotiate the...