Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny and daring satire, Vile Bodies reveals the darkness and vulnerability that lurks beneath the glittering surface of the high life. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of inn...

She is the perfect assassin. A Russian orphan, saved from the death penalty for the brutal revenge she took on her gangster father's killers. Ruthlessly trained. Given a new life. New names, new faces - whichever fits. Her paymasters call themselves The Twelve. But she knows nothing of them. Konstantin is the man who saved her and the one she answe...

Sheila Hancock stars in a BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of E. M. Forster's glorious tale of love in Italy and England. Lucy Honeychurch is an innocent abroad. Under the care of her well-meaning but infuriating chaperon, cousin Charlotte, she is completing the final part of a conventional well-bred English upbringing - the Grand Tour. But the...

Recently rediscovered in the archives of the New York Public Library, these short stories provide an unparalleled look at Truman Capote writing in his teens and early twenties, before he penned such classics as Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and In Cold Blood. This collection of more than a dozen pieces showcases the young Capot...

The inspiration for a major film releasing 2008 starring Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon. A study of faith and disillusionment in a glamorous upper-class world, Waugh's most famous novel is partly autobiographical and is a gripping multi-character-study of aristocratic life behind closed doors. Charles Ryder meets Sebastian, a member of the aristo...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of The Master by Colm Toibin, read by Geoffrey Howard.In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they ar...

When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius-his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There's only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involv...

Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground betwee...

Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian ones. He's a Fractional Persian-half, his mom's side-and his first-ever trip to Iran is about to change his life. Darius has never really fit in at home, and he's sure things are going to be the same in Iran. His clinical depression doesn't exac...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli, read by Arielle DeLisle. Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love-she's lived through it twenty-six times. She crushes hard and crushes often, but always in secret. Because no matter how many times her twin sister, Cassie, tells her t...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, read by Niamh Cusack. It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her ho...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) by L.C. Rosen, read by Drew Caidan. My first time getting it in the butt was kind of weird. I think it's going to be weird for everyone's first time, though. Jack Rothman is seventeen. A solid student with a talent for art, he likes partying, makeup and boys. Sometimes all a...

One night, George Duncan is woken by a noise in his garden. Impossibly, a great white crane has tumbled to earth, shot through its wing by an arrow. Unexpectedly moved, George helps the bird, and from the moment he watches it fly off, his life is transformed. The next day, a kind but enigmatic woman walks into George's shop. Suddenly a new world op...

The basis for Killing Eve, now a major BBC TV series, starring Sandra Oh and written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. In a hotel room in Venice, where she's just completed a routine assassination, Villanelle receives a late-night call. Eve Polastri has discovered that a senior MI5 officer is in the pay of the Twelve and is about to debrief him. As Eve inte...

Jane Austen in the hands of queen of crime, Val McDermid. Get ready for a very different Northanger Abbey. Seventeen-year-old Catherine `Cat' Morland has led a sheltered existence in rural Dorset, a life entirely bereft of the romance and excitement for which she yearns. So when Cat's wealthy neighbours, the Allens, invite her to the Edinburgh Fest...

One cold night, in a most unlikely corner of Chicago, teenager Will Grayson crosses paths with . . . Will Grayson! Two teens with the same name who run in two very different circles suddenly find their lives going in new and unexpected directions. Culminating in epic turns-of-heart on both of their parts, they team up to produce the most fabulous m...

DCI Marion Bettany, played by Helen Baxendale, continues her investigation into Colin Arnott's murder, but the residents of Shilwick are curiously reluctant to help. Colin's plans to turn a deconsecrated chapel into a performing arts centre had ruffled feathers throughout the village, and Bettany wants to know if that's a strong enough motive for m...

After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan travels to Jamaica Inn on bleak Bodmin Moor to live with her Aunt Patience. The coachman warns her of the strange happenings there, and Mary suddenly finds her life to be in the hands of strangers: her uncle, Joss Merlyn, whose crude ways repel her; Aunt Patience, who seems mentally unstable and perpetuall...