In the gentle world of one of England's beautiful old cathedral towns, crisis looms: funds are short, and the cathedral is in need of major repair. One faction of the community argues that the obvious solution is to abolish the expensive, and nowadays rather irrelevant, boys' choir. But of course, there are those who disagree: the choir school's he...

The events of Pietro Russell's life are told in 26 chapters. From A-Z each chapter is set in a different place and reveals a fragment of his story. As his memories flicker back and forth through time in his search for a resolution to the conflicts of his life, his tory gradually unfolds. . .

A beautifully controlled and powerful story of love and conscience, will and desire which begins when a mysterious young girl arrives to take up a post at the seedy H-tel du Lion d'Or in a small French town in the mid-1930s. The Girl at the Lion d'Or is the first book in Sebastian Faulks' French trilogy of novels followed by Birdsong (5373) and Cha...

For twenty years, Anna Bouverie, as a priest's wife, has served God and the parish in a variety of ways. She has baked for the Brownies, delivered parish magazines, washed and ironed her husband's surplices and clothed herself and her children in jumble-sale items. When her husband fails to gain promotion to archdeacon and retreats into isolated bi...

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes "unstuck in time" after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experienc...

Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures ev...

Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's reinvention of the love story. Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which...

Just before the First World War, the Ramsay family go to their holiday home in the Hebrides, bringing several guests with them. While they are there, one of the children wants to visit a lighthouse. After a ten year gap, during which the war wreaks its havoc on Europe, one of the guests returns to the house; and another trip to the lighthouse is pr...

Plagued all her life by her boisterous husband, strait-laced, outspoken, domineering Maudie Tipstafff is now on her own. Invited by her two daughters and her son to spend four months with each of them, she leaves Glasgow for the very first time, uncertain of what awaits her. But what she finds in the very different homes of her children is not what...

A Russian billionaire and his state of the art yacht. His beautiful and sexy supermodel girlfriend. And five dynamic, powerful and famous couples invited on the yacht's maiden voyage. A senator and his lovely but unhappy wife. A very attractive movie star and his needy ex-waitress girlfriend. A famous black footballer and his interior designer wife...

Number one bestseller The One Plus One is the beautiful, poignant and utterly compelling new novel by the internationally bestselling author Jojo Moyes. One eternal optimist... Jess Thomas, with two jobs and two kids and never enough money, wears flip flops in the hope of spring. And when life knocks her down she does her best to bounce right back....

Paulo Coelho's enchanting novel has inspired a devoted following around the world. This story, dazzling in its simplicity and wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls him...

Just round the corner from St Jarlath's Crescent is Chestnut Street. Here, the lives of the residents are revealed in Maeve Binchy's wonderfully compelling tales: Bucket Maguire, the window cleaner, who must do more than he bargained for to protect his son. Nessa Byrne, whose aunt comes to visit from America for six weeks every summer and turns the...

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila, who represent the story of a nation and the nature of friendship. The story begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these toug...

On the outskirts of Casablanca, next to the dump, is the shantytown of Sidi Moumen, where Yachine and his ten brothers grew up, in the aimless chaos of drugs, violence, unemployment, and despair. The barefoot boys started their own football team-the Stars of Sidi Moumen. They played amongst the rocks, detritus, and buried skeletons of the dump but...

A lonely young woman works as an announcer in Paris's Gare du Nord, surrounded by people yet separate from them. Obsessed with a man who loves another, she suffers alone as she waits for him. In her solitude, she wanders the streets of the modern city, playing on the edge of danger, seeking connection. Her interactions with strangers create a confr...

Martel's novel tells the story of Pi--short for Piscine--an unusual boy raised in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to live in Canada and sell the animals to the great zoos of America. The ship taking them across the Pacific sinks and Pi finds himself the sole human survivor on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra wit...

Andy Seed is beginning his fifth year teaching at Cragthwaite Primary in the Yorkshire Dales. There's a beautiful, but not terribly bright, student on placement from the local teacher training college, and a particularly pushy parent with a fine line in complaining. At home in Applesett, things aren't all rosy either. Barbara is forced to take a jo...

Life is full of terrible things. In 1987, Sue Bowl's world changes for ever. Her mother dies, leaving her feeling like she's lost a vital part of herself. And then her father shacks up with an awful man-eater called Ivana. But Sue's mother always told her to make the most of what she's got - and what she's got is a love of writing and some eccentri...

Born to a prominent Chicago judge and his stifled socialite wife, Mia Dennett moves against the grain as a young inner-city art teacher. One night, Mia enters a bar to meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend. But when he doesn't show, she unwisely leaves with an enigmatic stranger. With his smooth moves and modest wit, Colin Thatcher seems at first...

Carson McCullers was all of twenty-three when she published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She became an overnight literary sensation, and soon such authors as Tennessee Williams were calling her "the greatest prose writer that the South [has] produced." Available now for the first time on audio from Caedmon and Harper Audio, The He...