The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome.

He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched.

He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrif...

Since the series' inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature. Now THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY brings together the best of the best - fifty-five extraordinary stories that represent a century's worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary g...

Follows the life of the heroine through her many vicissitudes, which include her early seduction, careers in crime and prostitution, conviction for theft and transportation to the plantations of Virginia, and her ultimate redemption and prosperity in the new World.

Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD AND DAVID BRADSHAWFar in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...Huxley's ingenious fantasy of th...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''The best-loved book by our best-loved novelist' IndependentWith its 'light and bright and sparkling' dialogue, its romantic denouement and its lively heroine, Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's most perennially popular novel. The love story of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, who misjudge, then challenge and change each other, is also a novel about the search for happiness and self- knowledge in a world of strict social rules, where...

Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy.

The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down.

As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II. There is a savage killin...

"VONNEGUT IS GEORGE ORWELL, DR. CALIGARI AND FLASH GORDON COMPOUNDED INTO ONE WRITER ... A ZANY BUT MORAL MAD SCIENTIST." - TimeKURT VONNECUT is a master of contemporary American literature. He is the author of eighteen highly acclaimed books and dozens of short stories and essays. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as "a true artist"* with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He is, as Graham Gre...

'A modern classic.' Guardian'A near-perfect work of art.' Joyce Carol OatesSylvia Plath is a major cultural icon who continues to inspire new generations of female readers. The Bell Jar is one of the defining novels of the 20th century. I was supposed to be having the time of my life .

. . Working as an intern for a New York fashion magazine in the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood is on the brink of her future.

Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal...

Sal Paradise, young and innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American Dream.A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel defined the new 'Beat' generation and became the bible of the counter culture.