A commonplace book, arranging works of criticism looking at Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with fragments of memoir/fiction. Presented first as random notes on watching Hitchcock, the fragments soon take up multiple narratives and threads and, like a...
When a girl falls into a deep and impenetrable sleep, the borders between her provincial French village and the peculiar, beguiling realm of her dreams begin to disappear: A fat woman sprouts delicate wings and takes flight; a failed photographer...
Eva Ibbotson’s magical novel; set in that most poignant of all times and places, Vienna before the First World War. Susanna’s dress shop stands in the delightful Madensky Square and is the very hub and heart of life. Susanna sympathizes with her...
Set during the fall-out of the Cultural Revolution, these bizarre and delicate stories capture the collision of the old China of vanished dynasties, with communism and today's tiger economy.
The mad woman on the bridge wears a historical gown...
Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s magnificent Magic Seeds continues the story of Willie Chandran, the perennially dissatisfied and self-destructively naive protagonist of his bestselling Half a Life.
Having left a wife and a livelihood in...
A woman embarks on a dazzling new phase in her life after inheriting a sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet is “one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation” (Scott...
A moving and enigmatic novel which deals with the Holocaust and a man's search for his own identity. Magnus pieces together the complex puzzle of his life, which turns out to be closer to a painting by Edward Munch than the romantic tale of family...
ohn Galsworthy (1867-1933) devoted virtually his entire professional career to creating a fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians, the Forsytes. He made their lives and times, loves and losses, fortunes and deaths so...
This sweeping family saga now moves to the lives and loves of the Cherrells in the early 30s, cousins by marriage to the Forsytes. An old English family, their one constant in an age of change and uncertainty is their ancestral home, Condaford...