Somerset Maugham appears as one of two narrators in this atmospheric novel of love, truth, secrecy and betrayal in 1920s' colonial Penang. Eng's airy storytelling is a rare gift: he gives hi... read more
This love story tacks between an English boarding school and the Western Front. A moving historical debut; compelling and unexpectedly funny (for the Somme).
Shortlisted for the Booker, this darkly humorous novel draws on Blackwood's dismal Anglo-Irish childhood. First UK edition, first printing, in fine condition with a near-fine dust jacket. So... read more
First edition, first printing. The book is in near fine condition with a near fine dust jacket. Mild shelf wear visible to cover. Very slight spotting to top edges. Previously unpublished sh... read more
The fraught symbiosis of a billionaire and a group of guerrilla gardeners. A skilful and thrilling novel from the author of The Luminaries that interweaves intentions and consequences.
The title is the nickname of St Cuthbert, a C7th hermit. It begins there and ends in 21st century Co. Durham... An incantatory, feverish and experimental novel with prose that skips, slides ... read more
A prelapsarian tale about a haven of racially integrated citizens, based on a real island off the coast of Maine which became - for a while - an exotic utopia in the late C18th.
Two volumes together in a slipcase: a novella and an album of 73 gouache drawings - not illustrations, nor even illustrative, but works in their own right, abstractly informed by the text an... read more
Young Skins and Homesickness, his collections of short stories, were brilliantly successful. Set over a weekend in County Mayo among a group of young, this is his first novel.
Drawing on the author's own experiences of WW2, the novel's protagonist rebels against the pressures of family and politics in Fascist Italy. First published in 1949. By the author of Forbid... read more
The story of the inimitable Maria Callas - conflicted, disappointed, ambitious and supremely gifted - and of her love affair with Aristotle Onassis - by the author of The Fortune Hunter, My ... read more
1990s' Chicago: two students fall in love. Twenty years on, theirs is a suburban life of detoxes and home improvements. A warm and sardonic novel by the author of The Nix.
In the wake of the success of Baron Bagge in 2022, here's another tight novella by the Austrian mid-C20th novelist, this time about the fear of revenge after WW2.
We're in Verona Island here, not Lilliput, and the action is set in a brothel in 1954, where the eponymous Mrs and her 19-year-old business opportunity, Carita, seek to assert their agency i... read more
Measured and sophisticated, this novel has as its central event the shootings outside the Libyan embassy in 1984, which alter forever the lives of three young Libyans. Themes of exile, retic... read more
A green macaw who likes murmuring to itself is one of a trio of characters caught up together in the pandemic; the others are a middle-aged professor and a young drop-out. A novel of unlikel... read more
An excellent Catalan novel from the 1970s, about flight and return, in which the Civil War still looms over the tail-end of Franco's era and modernity blooms. A marvellous evocation of Barce... read more
The latest in Penguin's handsome and imaginative anthologies of national literatures: a hundred years of stories from the colonial period to the present.