Fiction: general & literary

A reimagining of the Jeremy Thorpe affair presenting an alternate reality where the people hired to kill Thorpe's ex-lover succeeded. In 1976, twenty-year-old former prostitute Tommy sets out to put to rights a rent boy's murder which was greeted with police disinterest. Debut novel from official...

Anna Sewell's moving story is one of the best-loved animal adventures ever written, this Penguin Threads edition of Black Beauty includes a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley, cover art by Jillian Tamaki and deluxe French flaps.

While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustra...

Rosemary Manning's 1962 gem The Chinese Garden is a delicate and finely crafted novel of the discovery -- and betrayal -- of love. In a girls' boarding school in the late 1920s, a world of iron-willed authority, frigid rooms, and forbidden friendships, sixteen-year-old Rachel struggles to find a ...

Grant Decker is a disgruntled California art teacher turned 40, who has lost his way in life. A random stab on the map means he’s going to Penzance to spend his school holiday, hiking around the coast of Cornwall. Everything about Cornwall is strange to this American–the accents, the food, the ch...

Tells the story of the Emperor Vespasian, who brought peace to Rome after years of strife, and his mistress, the freed slave woman Caenis. This book recreates Ancient Rome's most turbulent period - the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero and Vespasian's rise to power.

Part of the Open Door series of short books for emerging readers. Detective Tom Doyle is one of the best detectives in the city. So when a big-time Dublin drug boss is shot down in the street, Doyle is on the case. It all seems open and shut until he meets the dead man's beautiful wife, Rose. As ...

'The Dead' is universally acknowledged as one of James Joyce's best works, both in its style and emotional intensity. It tells the tale of one evening in the life of Gabriel Conroy at a dinner party, and an ensuing conversation with his wife Gretta that sparks feelings of the utter solitude and, ...

Part of the Open Door series of short books for emerging readers. Pat and Joe Murphy were best friends for as long as anyone could remember. That is, until a big fight tore them apart five years ago. And they haven't spoken until this, the night before Joe's funeral. Joe is dead, you see - but th...

Two venturesome women on a journey through the land of their fathers and mothers. A wrong turn. A bad decision. They had no idea, when they arrived in Morocco, that their usual freedoms as young European women would not be available. So, when the spry Saleh presents himself as their guide and sav...