'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s.

'UTTERLY ENGAGING. FROM THE VERY FIRST PAGE IT IS A HUGELY INVOLVING READ...A HEARTBREAKER: TRAGIC, FUNNY, INTENSELY MOVING' SPECTATORIn a vase in a closet, a couple of years after his father died in 9/11, nine-year-old Oskar discovers a key...The key belonged to his father, he's sure of that. But which of New York's 162 million locks does it open?So begins a quest that takes Oskar - inventor, letter-writer and amateur detective - across New York's five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of ...

At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes.

Includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. Through wordplay, parody and logical and philosophical puzzles, Carroll engenders a variety of sub-texts, teasing, ominous or melancholy. For all the surface playfulness, there is meaning everywhere.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever.

In this nightmare vision of youth in revolt, fifteen-year-old Alex and his friends set out on a diabolical orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jailed for his teenage delinquency and the State tries to reform him - but at what cost? Social prophecy? Black comedy? Study of freewill? A Clockwork Orange is all of these. It is also a dazzling experiment in language, as Burgess creates a new language - 'nadsat', the teenage slang of a not-too-distant future.

Paul Auster's enthralling adventure story from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened when I got there.'So begins the mesmerising narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg - orphan, child of the 1960s, a quester by nature.

Moon Palace is his story - a novel that spans three generations, from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, and moves from the canyons of Manhattan to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American West. Filled with suspense, unlikely coincidences, wrenching tragedies and marvellous flights of lyricism and erudition, the novel carries the reader effortlessly along with Marco's search - for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his origins and his fate. 'Clever: very...

THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION ‘WINNER OF WINNERS’ CHOSEN AS SERVICE95 BOOK CLUB'S BOOK OF THE MONTH FOR AUGUST 2023 ‘A literary masterpiece’ DAILY MAIL ‘An immense achievement’ OBSERVER ‘A gorgeous, pitiless account of love, violence and betrayal’ TIME In 1960s Nigeria, three lives intersect. Ugwu works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic lover, the lecturer.

And Richard, a shy Englishman,...

With an Introduction by Ann Charters'A paean to what Kerouac described as "the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being"' SUNDAY TIMESOn the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero. Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than F.Scott Fitzgerald's, and the narrative goes racing towards the...

The Catcher in Rye is the ultimate novel for disaffected youth, but it's relevant to all ages. The story is told by Holden Caulfield, a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.Lazy in style, full of slang and swear words, it's a novel...