'I'll tell you what happened because it will be a good way to introduce my brother. His name's Simon. I think you're going to like him. I really do. But in a couple of pages he'll be dead. And he was never the same after that.' The Shock of the Fall is an extraordinary portrait of one man's descent into mental illness. It is a brave and groundbreak...

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself,...

Joanna Trollope casts Sense & Sensibility in a fresh new light, re-telling a coming-of-age story about young love and heartbreak, and how when it comes to money especially, some things never change.Two sisters could hardly be more different. Elinor Dashwood, an architecture student, values discretion above all. Her impulsive sister Marianne dis...

After five years of planning and an 18-month campaign costing more than œ15m, England's bid to host the 2018 World Cup ended in humiliation in front of millions of TV viewers around the world. This thrilling drama tells the behind-the-scenes story of what happened in Zurich in the days leading up to the momentous announcement on 2nd December...

Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except each other and a dream - a dream that one day they will have some kind of land of their own. Tackling universal themes, friendship and a shared vision, this is a hugely popular audiobook. A great piece of classic fiction which is studied by many at...

In Sight a woman recounts her progress to motherhood while remembering the death of her own mother and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother. Woven among these personal recollections are significant events in medical history: Wilhelm Rontgen's discovery of the X-ray and his production of an image of his wife's hand; Sig...

Survival is the name of the game as one woman's mind and body are pushed to the limit. TWELVE CONTESTANTS When Zoo agrees to take part in a new reality TV show, In the Dark, she knows that she will be tested to the limits of her endurance. Beating eleven competitors in a series of survival tasks deep in the forest, living on camera at the extremes...

A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House. In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside - and into his past.

As the snow begins to fall, a journalist arrives in the remote city of Kars on the Turkish border. Kars is a troubled place - there's a suicide epidemic among its young women, Islamists are poised to win the local elections, and the head of the intelligence service is viciously effective. When the growing blizzard cuts off the outside world, the st...

As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though there waits someone who cares deeply about how they appear. Then, they meet a man with a disturbing story to tell and become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession. THIS AUDIOBOOK CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE AND/OR ADULT...

This is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie'...

The Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and the Ottoman Empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day - in the European manner. In Istanbul at a time of violent fundamentalism, however, this is a dangerous proposition. Even the illustrious circle of artists are not allowed to know for whom they are working...

'Awfully opinionated for a girl' is what they call Hillary as she grows up in her Chicago suburb. Smart, diligent, and a bit plain, that's the general consensus. Then Hillary goes to college, and her star rises. At Yale Law School, she continues to be a leader- and catches the eye of driven, handsome and charismatic Bill. But when he asks her to ma...

A decade and a half has passed since Grace was locked up, at the age of 16, for the cold-blooded murders of her employer and his lover. Her alleged accomplice was hanged in 1843. Sixteen years on, Grace claims to have no memory of the event. Dr Simon Jordan attempts to uncover the truth.

When Ram Mohammad Thomas, an orphaned, uneducated street kid from Mumbai, wins a billion rupees on a live TV quiz show, he finds himself beaten up and thrown in jail by the programme's producers. During his interrogation he explains, through a series of flashbacks, how he knew the answers to all the show's questions. What he describes about his lif...

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even wit...

Revisiting the terrain of her acclaimed novel NW, The Embassy of Cambodia is another remarkable work of fiction from Zadie Smith. 'The fact is, if we followed the history of every little country in the world - in its dramatic as well as its quiet times - we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or apply ourselves to our necessary...

"Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest; moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child; timid and dull. But Blue was his mother's favourite. And he was a murderer." Blueeyedboy is the brilliant new novel from Joanne Harris: a dark and intricately plotted tale of a poisonously dysf...

Michael Mont is succeeding in his public life in Parliament, but holds grave doubts about his private life and his wife, Fleur. Fleur's original love, Jon Forsyte, her cousin and the son of her father's ex-wife, returns to England where a meeting is inevitable. Fleur's undying love for Jon is disclosed.

Brought to you by Penguin. Welcome to The Close - a beautiful street of mansions, where gorgeous Stella is the indisputable Queen Bee . . . It is here that Laura, seeking peace and privacy after her marriage falls apart, rents a tiny studio. Unfortunately, her arrival upsets suspicious Stella - who fears Laura has designs on her fianc‚, Al. W...

In this 1962 classic, a novelistic exploration of modern crime and punishment, Alex is the 15-year-old leader of his gang of 'droogs' thriving in the ultraviolent future as prophetically imagined by Burgess. Speaking a bizarre Russian-derived slang, Alex and his friends freely pillage and slash their way across a nightmarish urban landscape until A...