"John seemed only to float in a current of pleasure as reflected in his pictures. But hedonism, always a sturdy attribute, acquires a heroic quality with age...": Ian Collins' biography of C... read more
This year's slim winner of the International Booker Prize is stunningly brilliant. Set during the Great War and narrated by a Senegalese soldier fighting for France on the Western Front, it ... read more
Tesson practised living in extreme cold on the shores of Lake Baikal a few years ago, memorably and entrancingly recounted in Consolations of the Forest. Here he has renounced both solitude ... read more
Another themed anthology from Daunt Newest in the Daunt Books series (At the Pond, In the Kitchen), this brings together essays from various Sandoe's luminaries (Penelope Lively, Francesca W... read more
Published in 1954, STW's wonderful last novel depicts an early Victorian merchant family on the Norfolk coast, harried by the good intentions of its flawed paterfamilias. Her coruscating int... read more
A brilliant tale of lexicographers whose lives are influenced in surprising ways by mountweazels. (Mountweazel, noun: a fake entry deliberately inserted into a dictionary or work of referenc... read more
Acute and wide-ranging, these disparate glimpses come together (ha!) to make up a picture not only of the 'Fab Four' but of the new and colourful 1960s' world that they helped to usher in. ... read more
The Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins descends on seventeen-century Essex, where he finds himself oddly fascinated by a 'peculiar' young woman. A historical novel with real bite, which rec... read more
A new translation of this fabulous C16th Chinese work - a wild epic, an outrageous satire, and surely one of the most exuberant works of literature the world has ever known. Based on the mon... read more
Parallel possible worlds spool from a German rocket strike in London in 1944: five children are killed but, in a feat of authorial engineering, are given futures nevertheless. A dazzling cel... read more
In the early 20th century an easily overlooked square in Bloomsbury was the home, at one time or another, of the modernist poet H.D., Dorothy L Sayers, the classicist Jane Harrison, the hist... read more