Alone, stranded in Paris after her Polish husband is jailed, Marya is befriended by an English couple who take her home with them. Slowly they overwhelm her with their passions as Marya drifts into an affair with the husband, an affair the wife seems strangely eager to promote. The husband demands, the wife fosters, and Marya is left - as always - to comfort herself.

    The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture Joy, who blames her problems not on her work or on the accidental drowning of her illicit lover, but on herself. While painful and deeply serious, this is a novel of great warmth and energy: it's the wit and irony found in moments of despair that prove to be Joy's salvation. First published by Polygon in 1989 and Dalkey Archive Press in 1994, now available again.

    You don't need to give Arthur more than one chance to do the Government or trick the foreman.And when the day's work is over, Arthur is off to the pubs, raring for adventure. He is a warrior of the bottle and the bedroom - his slogan is 'If it's going, it's for me' - for his aim is to cheat the world before it can cheat him. And never is the battle more fiercely joined than on Saturday night.But Sunday morning is the time of reckoning, the time for facing up to life - the time, too, you run the risk of getting hooked!Arthur is no exception.

    In this novel, Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, speaks for a generation of Spaniards who were only small children during the Spanish Civil War, grew up under a stifling dictatorship, and, in many cases, emigrated in desperation from their dying country. Upon his return, the narrator confronts the most controversial political, religious, social, and sexual issues of our time with ferocious energy and elegant prose. Torn between the Islamic and European worlds around him, he finds both ultimately unsatisfactory. In the end, only displacement survives.

    He is hardly surprised and not in the least daunted. "The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth," he declares. "The present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by Our own impulse, We command."Hadrian is conceived in the image of his creator, Fr. Rolfe, whose aristocratic pretensions (he called himself Baron Corvo), religious obsession, and anarchic and self-aggrandizing sensibility have made him known as one of the great English eccentrics. Fr. Rolfe endured a lifetime of indignities and disappointments. However, in the hilarious and touching pages of this, his finest novel, he triumphs.

    Lily Bloom is an angry, aging American transplanted to England, now losing her battle with cancer. Attended by nurses and her two daughters -- lumpy Charlotte, a dour, successful businesswoman, and beautiful Natasha, a junkie -- Lily takes us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. From '40s career girl to '50s tippling adulteress to '70s PR flak, Lily has seen America and England through most of a century of riotous and unreal change. And then it's over. Lily catches a cab with her death guide, Aboriginal wizard Phar Lap Jones, and enters the shockingly banal world of the dead: the suburbs. She discovers smoking without consequences and gets another PR job, where none of her coworkers notices that she's not alive. She gets to know her roommates: Rude Boy, her terminally furious son who died in a car accident at age nine; Lithy, a fetus that died before she ever knew it existed; the Fats, huge formless shapes composed of all the weight she's ever gained or lost. How the Dead Live is Will Self's most remarkable and expansively human book, an important, disturbing vision of our time.

    Yeats and T.S. Eliot as one of the masterpieces of modern literature. Fusing poetry and prose, gutter talk and high music, wartime terror and ancient myth, Jones, who served as an infantryman on the Western Front, presents a picture at once panoramic and intimate of a world of interminable waiting and unforeseen death. And yet throughout he remains alert to the flashes of humanity that light up the wasteland of war.

    An assortment of sages sharpen Daniel's wide-eyed outlook until he has the concentration of a card shark Zeta master, via apprenticeships in meditation, safecracking, poker, and the art of walking through walls. Wizards are made, not born, and this unconventional education sets Daniel on the trail of mysteries ancient and modern.A strange, six-pound diamond sphere held by the U.S. government in a New Mexico vault, rumored to be the Philosopher's Stone or the Holy Grail, becomes the AMO's obsession. In time, Daniel perfects his powers and heads off to steal the magic stone, and what happens changes his life forever.Stone Junction is a bravura act of storytelling, both a free-spirited adventure and a parable about the powers within all of us.

    Castle Richmond was written between 4 August 1859 and 31 March 1860, and was published in three volumes on 10 May 1860. It was his tenth novel. Trollope signed the contract for the novel on 2 August 1859. He received �600, �200 more than the payment for his previous novel, The Bertrams, reflecting his growing popular successCastle Richmond is set in southwestern Ireland at beginning of the Irish famine. Castle Richmond is situated on the banks of the Blackwater River in County Cork. Trollope's work in Ireland from 1841 to 1859 had given him an extensive knowledge of the island, and Richard Mullen has written that "All the principal strands of his life were formed in Ireland

    Fanny Burney's unusual love story and deft social satire was much admired on its first publication in 1782 for its subtle interweaving of comedy, humanity, and social analysis. Controversial in its time, this eighteenth-century novel seems entirely fresh in relation to late twentieth-century concerns.

    If you're not careful you'll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native." It is never clear to Elizabeth whether the mission school principal's cruel revelation of her origins is at the bottom of her mental breakdown. She has left South Africa with her son and is living in the village of Motabeng, the place of sand, in Botswana where there are no street lights at night. In the darkness of this country where people turn and look at her with vague curiosity as an outsider she establishes an entirely abnormal relationship with two men. A mind-bending book which takes the reader in and out of sanity.

    In this iridescent gem of a novel, Louis de Bernieres returns to the territory he mapped so well in The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, a South American country of resplendent eccentricity, gargantuan corruption, and terrifying violence, where the ordinary machinery of government has rusted and the only thing that works is magic.

    Lawrence’s The Fox is a captivating work exploring the dual themes of power and supremacy in the aftermath of the First World War. Banford and March live and work together on their meager farm, surviving hardship only by sheer determination and dedicated labor. The farm is their world, a place of safety—that is, until a young soldier walks in and upsets the women’s delicate status quo. None could have predicted the effect his presence would have on their lives.

    Chariton's Callirhoe, subtitled Love Story in Syracuse, is a fast-paced historical romance of the first century CE and the oldest extant novel.

    But a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia's son Jack has spiraled into heroin addiction.In an attempt to save him, Julia marshals help from her looseknit clan: elderly parents; remarried ex-husband; removed sister; and combative eldest son. Ultimately, heroin courses through the characters' lives with an impersonal and devastating energy, sweeping the family into a world in which deceit, crime, and fear are part of daily life.