Brought to you by Penguin. The new novel from Salley Vickers, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Librarian, Grandmothers is the story of three very different women and their relationship with the younger generation: fiercely independent Nan, who leads a secret life as an award-winning poet when she is not teaching her grandson Billy how to lie;...

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, a kind of last testament to his remarkable forebears. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father - an ardent pacifist - and his grandfather who came west to Kansas to fight for abolition and 'preached men into the Civil War'. And he...

In 1949 four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past begin meeting in San Francisco to play Mah Jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and 'say' stories. Nearly forty years later of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother's lifelong wish and the tragic way in which it has come tr...

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years -- from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding -- that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarring...

The famous writer's trials are detailed with interest and compassion. A fascinating blend of fact and fiction, This Oscar Wilde double bill offers significant insight into one of the world's most significant literary figures. Oscar Wilde was ruined by a notorious libel case and two years in reading prison. The 'trials' part of the pack is recorded...

Michael Frayn is the bestselling author of Headlong and Spies. His 1990 novel The Trick Of It is a comical look at an odd couple. Original and witty, Frayn tells a complete story through one-sided letters. Compact, light and entertaining, The Trick Of It is a clever tale. A nameless college professor writes letters to an esteemed friend living in A...

Joe Lampton is 25. He lost his parents during WW2 when their house was bombed and moves to Warley, where he meets the high-society set through the local ameteur dramatics society. He sets off on his quest to join them with a vengeance, hoping to achieve it through his choice of women and affected new persona.

In 1941 Captain Antonio Corelli is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia. It isn't long before he is involved in a heated affair with Pelagia, a local girl, despite her engagement to a young fisherman, Mandras, who has gone off to join Greek partisans. Love is complicated enough in wartime, even when the lovers are on the same side, but as Core...

Frayn's 1967 novel about Fleet Street portrays a newspaper world long since gone. Stuck in a sleepy newspaper department, covering nature notes and crosswords, Dyson dreams of liberation and recognition. When a chance occurs to appear on TV, he eagerly prepares to embrace a celebrity lifestyle.

Nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski reflects back on his wild and wondrous days with a circus. It's the Depression Era and Jacob, finding himself parentless and penniless, joins the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. There he meets the freaks, grifters, and misfits that populate this world. He introduces us to Marlena, beautiful star of the...

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magic...

"A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic." --William Styron From the moment of its publication in 1961, Revolutionary Road was hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs. It's the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and...

Barbara Taylor Bradford introduced the illustrious Harte family in her blockbuster A Woman of Substance. Now she has created an unforgettable new dynasty: the Deravenels. On a bitterly cold day in 1904, the Deravenel family's future changes forever. When Cecily Deravenel tells her eighteen-year-old son Edward of the death of his father, brother, un...

When award-winning film maker Justine Nolan returns to her beautiful childhood home, she is intrigued by an envelope she finds in her absent mother's post. If genuine it will change everything she believes about her family's recent history, her mother and her adored grandmother, Gabriele. Resolving to uncover the truth, she must travel to Istanbul...

A one-time aspiring author has seen his life take a tumble down the ladder of literary aspirations: after prose came verse, then drama, then the ignominious wasteland of sitcom, and then, because failure's always ready to step in with another bottom rung, a badly paid job as a reader of other people's sitcoms. Then suddenly there's new hope. Hollyw...

The nine children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. Tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations, this is a novel about lov...

Hiram Granville, a modern Leonardo, secured more than a thousand patents during his lifetime, often just ahead of others who had already been working the same ideas. His son John, an economics genius, never lost a cent in the stock market-or any other financial deal-and was investigated for insider trading on more than one occasion. Now Cat, a docu...

Lifelong friends, now in their sixties, James, a teacher, and Hugh, a TV personality, both live with attractive women twenty-five years their junior. But the age difference is a time bomb, ticking away at the heart of both relationships. Kate's hunger for a life more in keeping with her own age threatens to bring her eight years with James to an en...

A brilliant debut novel that brings to life an abandoned hospital where a tough-minded doctor decides to harbor a hunted young girl, with powerful consequences. In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she fl...

The Seatons, affluent members of the Protestant gentry, own The Haven, a lush, opulent estate in the Scottish countryside. The Flynns, proud Catholics to the core, spend their working days in the factories and laundry houses of industrial Glasgow. Divided by class, wealth and religion, two families could not live more different lives. However, as t...

"I wonder today how no one else could see the bad thing coming. Not that I knew back then what the bad thing was; and if I had - if I'd known one of us was going to die - would there have been anything I could have done to prevent it? I play it all back in my mind, over and over. The clues were all there." On New Year's Eve, eleven-year-old Ruth an...