The days between Christmas and New Year's Eve are dead days, when spirits roam and magic shifts restlessly just beneath the surface of our lives. A lot can happen in the dead days.
There is a magician called Valerian who must save his own life,...
The Book of Evidence is a 1989 novel by the Irish author John Banville. The book is narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a 38 year old scientist, who murders a servant girl during an attempt to steal a painting from a neighbor. Freddie is an aimless...
Twelve men – running in direct line line from father to eldest son, who in turn becomes a father – are the heroes of this wonderful family saga which runs over 300 years' panorama of Hungarian life and history. Each man also passes to his son...
An omnibus of novels: The Notebook – The Proof – The Third LieThese three internationally acclaimed novels have confirmed Agota Kristof's reputation as one of the most provocative exponents of new-wave European fiction. With all the stark...
The story you have asked me to tell begins not with the ignominious ugliness of Lloyd's death but on a long-ago day in April when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. I say my...
An anthology of stories edited by Zadie Smith
A stellar host of writers explore the cornerstone of fiction writing: character “The Book of Other” People is about character. Twenty-five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to...
Tariq Ali has been a British national treasure for almost five decades. Revolutionary, writer, broadcaster, filmmaker, polemicist-fighter in the street-and general all-round trouble-maker (in the nicest possible sense), he's been them all, and...
In a snowbound village in the German mountains, a young woman discovers an extraordinary secret. Before she can reveal it, she disappears. All that survives is a picture of a mysterious medieval playing card that has perplexed scholars for...
The book's seven linked novellas offer readers a disturbingly brilliant take on topics like rape, incest, S&M, impotence, and voyeurism, and explore links between sexual and political deviance. In I Love My Mum, a disabled man who is in an...
‘Honestly and intelligently written… offers lessons to those who choose to heed it on the folly of trying to make simple diagnoses or to apply simple remedies in Afghanistan’ Isabel Hilton, Daily Telegraph
‘A colourful portrait of people...