Lucy is the founder of The Hope-Filled Family, a ministry encouraging Christian parents, carers and all those investing in the younger generation. She is the author of several books for adults and children, including Busy Family Devotional and the Mighty Girl, Mighty God series. She is mum to four children ages 11 to 16, who arrived by birth and adoption, and is married to Al, a church leader in York, England.

	 Lucy Rycroft

5ive Guys FC

82ASK

A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

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Willa Cather

When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, he finds a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indigenous in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock–while contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. 
 
Death Comes for the Archbishop shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier.

Death Comes For The Archbishop

Joyce Cary

From her prison cell, the irrepressible, magnetic Sara Monday looks back on the past half-century of her life in Herself Surprised. Born into a poor family, her employment while still a young girl as a cook in a middle-class household set her on a colourful and picaresque path. In To Be a Pilgrim, Tom Wilcher, a wealthy and disgraced lawyer who has been both Sara’s employer and her lover, has retreated to his estate near the end of his life to wrestle with his tormented conscience. And the centre of The Horse's Mouth, a charming, talented, 
impoverished artist named Gulley Jimson–also a lover of Sara Monday–is a restless, rebellious, and self-serving scoundrel whose antics verge on the appalling and farcical. 
 
Read together, these three vigorous and unforgettable narrative voices offer a sweeping vision of the first half of the twentieth century that is lyrical, profane, tragic, and comic all at once. 
 
Published in 1941, 1942, and 1944, the novels in Cary’s trilogy were designed to reveal three complex characters, not only as they see themselves, but as they are seen by one another, resulting in a work of three-dimensional depth and force. 
 
'Family life just goes on. Toughest thing in the world. But of course it is also the microcosm of a world. You get everything there—birth, life, death, love and jealousy, conflict of wills, of authority and freedom, the new and the old. And I always choose the biggest stage possible for my theme...' Joyce Cary

Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, The Horse's Mouth

Edward St Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels hilariously dissect the English upper class, conjuring a world of decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty, but never without the possibility of grace. Taken together, they are one of the most thrilling reading experiences in contemporary fiction. 
 
Edward St. Aubyn chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose across five short novels, painting an acrid portrait of a beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. Never Mind unfolds over a day and an evening at the family&rsquo;s chateau in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his rich and unhappy American wife, Eleanor, and their five-year-old son, Patrick. 
Bad News opens as Patrick, now twenty-two years old, sets off to collect his father&rsquo;s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. 
Back in England, Some Hope offers Patrick the possibility of recovery (and the most debauched and riotous dinner party in contemporary fiction). 
The Booker-shortlisted Mother&rsquo;s Milk returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother&rsquo;s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home. 
At Last, set over the single day of a funeral, is the stunning final volume.

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Ha Jin

The demands of human longing contend with the weight of centuries of custom in 
acclaimed author Ha Jin’s Waiting, a novel of unexpected richness and universal resonance. Every summer Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, returns to his village to end his loveless arranged marriage with the humble and touchingly loyal Shuyu. Each time, Lin must return to the city to tell Manna Wu, the educated, modern nurse he loves, that they will have to postpone their engagement once again. Caught between the conflicting claims of these two very different women and trapped by a culture in which adultery can ruin lives and careers, Lin has been waiting for eighteen years. This year, he promises will be different

Waiting

Jonathan Lethem

Motherless Brooklyn is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Brooklyn's self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three other veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and he must untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. 
 
The Fortress of Solitude is the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighbourhood where the entertainments include muggings and games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unravelling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. 
From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude is a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.

Motherless Brooklyn; Fortress of Solitude

D H Lawrence

In the bleak aftermath of World War I, Constance, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds have left him paralysed. With her husband's encouragement, she enters into a liaison with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on their country estate in Nottinghamshire. As this illicit relationship grows into tenderness, mutual respect and sensual passion, Constance discovers that true fulfilment requires a real connection of both mind and body. Lady Chatterley's Lover shocked its original audience with its vindication of adulterous love across the class divide as well as its explicit descriptions of sex. It retains its power today as a hymn to erotic love and as an impassioned treatise on 'tender-hearted fucking' as a means to salvation from the horrors of war and the sterility of modern life. It is all the more poignant that Lawrence wrote this book - three times over - while he was dying from tuberculosis. 
 The modern world was not interested in its salvation. Lawrence had Lady Chatterley privately printed in Italy in 1928, but strict obscenity laws in the UK rendered it unpublishable there for more than thirty years.

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Mikhail Bulgakov

Kiev - Kyiv - is in chaos. Russia has withdrawn from World War I but the Germans have set up a puppet government in Ukraine. Civil war rages: the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia, but the anti-revolutionary White Guard who have fled to Ukraine, are rallying to resist. In the meantime, Ukrainian nationalists are camped outside the capital, and a Red army is on its way to bring everyone to heel. While all this is going on, the Turbin family try to eke out their existence in Kyiv and discuss what they should do. They are exactly the sort of family - monarchist intelligentsia - for whom the future looks particularly menacing. 
Bulgakov's brilliant and evocative prose brings the city and the moment unforgettably to life and sheds some fascinating light on the complex interwoven histories of Ukraine and Russia.

The White Guard

Virginia Woolf

The beautiful Everyman gift edition in hardback. 
 
The Lord Orlando's country seat has 365 rooms. An exquisitely beautiful youth, he is a favourite of the ageing Queen Elizabeth and enjoys all that Court and tavern have to offer. He falls passionately in love with the intriguing Sasha, an androgynous Russian princess, who jilts him. Stricken, he takes up Literature, penning huge quantities of poems and plays, 'all romantic, and all long'. A few decades later a still youthful Orlando is appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Charles II. Here he wakes up one day and finds he has the body of a woman. "Different sex, same person", she observes, unphased. 
In London, it is the eighteenth century, and she can hobnob with "men of genius" Pope and Swift, Johnson and Boswell. She has affairs with both women and men, but before long it is the nineteenth century, oppressively gloomy and moral and probably time to find a husband. Fortunately, in a Brontësque moment on a moor, the gender- nonconforming Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, newly back from Cape Horn, gallops past and scoops her up into bliss. 
 
Woolf's most unusual and joyous novel was inspired by her affair with the dashing author and aristocrat, Vita Sackville West.

Orlando

Nella Larsen

Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nell Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belong. Passing is a disturbing story about the unravelling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white racist. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of biracial Helga Crane, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexities and imbued with a vibrant sense of place - be it 1920s Harlem, Chicago, or Copenhagen.

The Complete Fiction

Passing. Quicksand. And the Stories

Kazuo Ishiguro

As children, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy attended an exclusive boarding-school in the English countryside. Idyllic in some ways yet vaguely sinister, 'Hailsham' was a place of intense friendships, mysterious rules, and 'guardians' who constantly reminded the students how special they were. Now thirty-one, Kathy looks back on their shared past and tells how she and her friends gradually came to understand the shocking reason for the careful nurturing they had received. An affecting meditation on friendship, love and mortality.

Never Let Me Go

James Weldon Johnson

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards - and double consciousness - experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. 
 
Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to 'pass' for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century - from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of Ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but colour.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Mary Renault

In two remarkable historical novels, Mary Renault fashions from the myth of Theseus a convincingly flawed hero and weaves a thrillingly plausible account of the Labyrinth and the infamous Minotaur. 
The King Must Die follows the young Theseus as he discovers that his true father is the King of Athens, and volunteers to join the annual tribute of Athenian girls and youths sacrificed to a bull-worshipping cult on the island of Crete. Trapped in the labyrinthine palace of King Minos, Theseus enlists the help of high priestess Ariadne in a daring plan to free his people. 
The Bull From the Sea begins after Theseus's triumphal return to Athens. He is now king, but his confidence will be shaken by a life-changing encounter with the queen of the Amazons, the birth of a son who will insist on choosing his own path, and the tragic results of his wife's treachery. 
Renault's deep knowledge of the Greek world, her sure grasp of psychology and genius for inspired speculation bring the distant world of the legendary past enthrallingly to life.

The King Must Die / The Bull from the Sea

Joseph Roth

At the end of the Great War, Andreas Pum has lost a leg but at least he has a medal and a barrel-organ which he plays on the streets of Vienna. At first the simple-minded veteran is satisfied with his lot, and he even finds an ample widow to marry. But then a public quarrel with a respectable citizen on a tram turns Andreas's life onto a rapid downward trajectory. As he loses first his beggar's permit, then his new wife, and even his freedom, he is finally provoked into rejecting his blind faith in the benevolence of both government and God.

Rebellion

Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises is both a tragic love story and a searing group portrait of hapless American expatriates drinking, dancing, and chasing their illusions in post-World War I Europe. The man at its centre, world-weary journalist Jake Barnes, is burdened both by a wound acquired in the war and by his utterly hopeless love for the extravagantly decadent Lady Brett Ashley. When Jake, Brett and their friends leave Paris behind and converge in Pamplona for the annual festival of the running of the bulls, tensions among the various rivals for Brett's wayward affections build to a devastating climax. 
 Hemingway, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, has exerted a lasting influence on fiction in English. His signature prose style, tersely powerful and concealing more than it reveals, arguably reached its apex in this modernist masterpiece.

The Sun Also Rises

Vasily Grossman

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, 'two poles of one magnet', as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal - an unexpected and short-lived moment of freedom. Grossman himself was on the front line as a war correspondent at Stalingrad - hence his gripping battle scenes, though these are more than matched by the drama of the individual conscience struggling against massive pressure to submit to the State. He knew all about this from experience too. His central character, Viktor Shtrum, eventually succumbs, but each delay and act of resistance is a moral victory. Though he writes unsparingly of war, terror and totalitarianism, Grossman also tells of the acts of 'senseless kindness' that redeem humanity, and his message remains one of hope. He dedicates his book, the labour of ten years, and which he did not live to see published, to his mother, who, like Viktor Shtrum's, was killed in the holocaust at Berdichev in Ukraine in September 1941.

Life and Fate

Ben Okri

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story.

The Famished Road

Ivo Andric

The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but its sixteenth-century bridge survived unscathed--until 1914 when tensions in the Balkans triggered the first World War. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, The Bridge on the Drina brilliantly illuminates a succession of lives that swirl around the majestic stone arches. Among them is that of the bridge's builder, a Serb kidnapped as a boy by the Ottomans; years later, as the empire's Grand Vezir, he decides to construct a bridge at the spot where he was parted from his mother. A workman named Radisav tries to hinder the construction, with horrific consequences. Later, the beautiful young Fata climbs the bridge's parapet to escape an arranged marriage, and, later still, an inveterate gambler named Milan risks everything on it in one final game with the devil. With humor and compassion, Ivo Andric chronicles the ordinary Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians whose lives are connected by the bridge, in a land that has itself been a bridge between East and West for centuries.

The Bridge on the Drina

Halldór Laxness

Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Independent People is a masterly realist novel evoking in rich detail a family and a rural community struggling to survive in the starkest of landscapes. At the same time it is infused with an intense awareness of Iceland's saga tradition and folklore. Bjartur of Summerhouses is a hard and sometimes cruel man, but his flinty determination to achieve independence is both genuinely heroic and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude before managing to purchase an isolated piece of land rumoured to be cursed, Bjartur wants nothing more than to tend his flocks unbeholden to any man. But his daughter wants to live unbeholden to him, and what ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. 
An utterly compelling read.

Independent People

Elizabeth Bowen

A brilliant and much admired novelist, Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) surpassed herself as a writer of short fiction: 'the supreme genius of her time', writes John Banville in his introduction; 'There is not a story in this substantial volume ... that is not brought off beautifully.'  A substantial volume indeed, Including 79 stories written over four decades, ranging in setting from the County Cork of the author's Anglo-Irish childhood to bomb-ravaged London where she coolly sat out the War, evoked with vivid and impeccable artistry. She has a disturbing sense of the uncanny, an acute eye for social comedy and her often emotionally secretive characters are depicted with penetrating psychological insight. She is good at houses, ghosts, children, animals ... 900 pages of sheer delight

Collected Stories

V. S. Naipaul

Post-colonial Africa is dissected with pitiless lucidity in this disturbing novel about an outsider, the young Indian trader, Salim, who has moved from the coastal settlement where he grew up to an unnamed country in the African interior (largely based on the Democratic Republic of Congo), settling on that very bend in the river where Conrad had set his Heart of Darkness some seventy years before. Salim enters a ghost town, once a flourishing European outpost, which is fast returning to the bush. A new dictator 'the Big Man' is about to impose his regime with the assistance of Raymond, 'The Big Man's White Man', whose humanitarian concerns have won him international acclaim, but whose plans for the country's future are arrogant and delusional. Salim becomes obsessed by Raymond's wife, Yvette, and begins and affair with her. Personal and political tragedy follow, civil war returns, and Salim, contemplating the disastrous course of his life since leaving home, speaks for the powerlessness of ordinary people everywhere in the face of historical upheaval: 'I couldn't protect anyone [and] no one could protect me... we could only in various ways hide from the truth... One tide of history has brought us here ... Another tide of history was coming to wash us away.'.

A Bend in the River

Peter Carey

OSCAR AND LUCINDA is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century England and Australia where the two potential lovers lead parallel lives until chance brings them together on board ship. 
A narrative tangle of love, religion, gambling, commerce and colonialism culminates in a nightmare expedition – the result of a wager – to transport a glass church across the Australian wilderness. 
 
 In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself in a voice that is direct, colloquial, theatrical, and utterly magical. To his pursuers he is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero, defying British imperial authority in support of the poor Irish settlers who are its victims. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Carey brings the famous bushranger unforgettably to life.

Oscar and Lucinda

True History of the Kelly Gang

Jane Smiley

This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm among his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will, which sets in motion a chain of events that brings dark truths to light. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, A Thousand Acres spins the most fundamental themes of truth, justice, love, and pride into a universally acclaimed masterpiece.

A Thousand Acres

Mavis Gallant

This generous collection of fifty-two stories selected from across her prolific career by the author, is preceded by a preface in which she discusses the sources of her art. 
 
With irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of spare complexity, often pushing the boundaries of the form in boldly unconventional directions. The settings in the COLLECTED STORIES range from Paris to Berlin to Switzerland, from the Riviera to the Côte d'Azur, and her characters are almost all exiles of one sort or another, as she herself was the most of her expatriate life. 
 
The wit and precision of her prose, combined with her expansive view of humanity, provide a rare and deep reading pleasure. With breathtaking control and compression, Gallant delivers a whole life, a whole world, in each story.

Mavis Gallant Collected Stories

Iris Murdoch

First published in 1961, The Severed Head is regarded is one of Iris Murdoch’s most entertaining works. A dark and ferocious comic masterpiece, the novel traces the turbulent emotional journey of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a smug, well-to-do London wine merchant and unfaithful husband, whose life is turned inside out when his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst. 
 
 In The Sea, the Sea the landscape shifts to the seclusion of an isolated house on the edge of England’s North Sea, where Charles Arrowby, a big name in London’s glittering theatrical world, has retired to write his memoirs. Arrowby’s plans begin to unravel when he meets his first love and becomes haunted by the idea of rekindling his adolescent passion. 
 
 The Severed Head and Booker prize-winner The Sea, the Sea are two of Iris Murdoch’s most accomplished novels, displaying all her talent for combining profundity with playful creativity. Both tragic and comic, brooding and hilarious, they brilliantly reveal how much our lives are governed by the lies we tell ourselves as well as our all-consuming desire for love, significance and, ultimately, redemption.

The Sea, The Sea & A Severed Head

James Baldwin

'Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils...' 
 
Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

Giovanni's Room

W. Somerset Maugham

After a lonely boyhood, and the painful ordeal of his schooldays, Philip's yearning for adventure takes him to Germany and later Paris where he tries to make his mark as an artist before returning to London to study medicine. Here, a tortured and one-sided love affair with Mildred, a vulgar yet irresistible waitress, changes the course of his life for ever. 
 
Commenting later on the novel’s autobiographical aspects, Maugham recalled how in writing the book he mingled fact and fiction and 'found myself free from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented me'.However, like Dickens’s David Copperfield to which it is often compared, Of Human Bondage goes far beyond autobiography, and is Maugham’s most ambitious and unsparing novel, revealing the author’s undoubted gift for storytelling as he explores the timeless theme of human freedom - freedom to act, to think and to love.

Of Human Bondage

John Banville

The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1989 and The Sea, which won the Booker prize in 2005, take us into the hauntingly confused worlds of two ageing male protagonists - washed- up scientist Freddie Montgomery, desperate to explain why he is being held in an Irish prison for murder (The Book of Evidence) and recently widowed art historian Max Morden, who has returned to a sleepy seaside boarding house to relive the events of his first adolescent awakenings (The Sea). With spellbinding virtuosity, Banville piles ambiguity upon ambiguity to construct tense tales of sex, betrayal and self-deception, which keep us turning the page, while questioning our own certainties about memory and identity. In both works, the acclaimed Irish novelist is revealed at his masterful best, conjuring dark wit, suspense and drama from the stunning lyrical beauty of his near-perfect prose.

The Book of Evidence & The Sea

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett is the greatest Irish novelist of the later twentieth century, and this trilogy of novels is his masterpiece -which makes it perhaps the outstanding literary work of our time. Because Beckett has a reputation for being difficult, even obscure, readers of the trilogy are bound to be struck not only by the verbal brilliance and inventiveness of the three novels, but also by their extraordinary humour which ranges from wit to broad comedy and even farce in a recognizably Irish way. Each story records an episode of human endurance in the face of metaphysical adversity with compassion and wisdom and each is a compelling narrative in itself in the great tradition of European fiction from Flaubert to Joyce.

Samuel Beckett Trilogy

Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable

Martin Amis

Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. And this is a love story. 
 
But the murderee - Nicola Six - is searching for something and someone else: her murderer. She knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means. She just doesn't know the man. 
 
London Fields is a brilliant, funny and multi-layered novel. It is a book in which the narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life...all Samson has to do is write it as it happens.

London Fields

Ian McEwan

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone. 
 
"From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.”

Atonement

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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