The opening novel in Anthony Powell's brilliant twelve-novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time.Discover the extraordinary life of Anthony Powell – captured by acclaimed biographer Hilary Spurling in Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time

    Charles Goodwin, the garden committee president, would like the garden to stay just the way it is. Lord Vernon of Barnstable, the appalling life peer, has plans for the garden. Bryony Mullins, the gusset-mouthed harridan, doesn't give a flying knicker elastic what happens to the garden as long as it's not what Vernon wants. Angel Tenby, the sexually organic gardener, wants the garden to run free. Mrs Kotzen, the neighbour, wants the garden to be chic. The vicar wants the garden to be accessible and relevant. Lily Ng, the teenage daily, would probably think the garden silly if she thought about it at all; she wants to offer sex in lieu of ironing. Mona Corinth, the Hollywood legend, is dead and may be about to become part of the garden. Iona Wallace is the obligatory love interest. She would like to be a garden: laid, forked, plucked, seeded, mulched, vigorously pollarded, bedded and admired for her natural beauty. The garden wants absolutely nothing at all.Sap Rising may well be a story about dark dank nature both human and vegetable and our uneasy relationship with the mystic natural forces that move the earth. It may be a parable on the fragile consensus that maintains and tends green England. On the other hand, it might just be a farcical love story set in a garden about nothing of any consequence performed by comic grotesques with a lot of swearing and unnatural sex.

    Archie had snatched Liza from her own engagement party to someone else, wooed her, swept her off to his father in Scotland, and finally married her. Now bedded firmly into country life-three children, Archie the village doctor, Liza a teacher, everything comfortable, funny, affectionate, --they awaited the arrival of Archie's father, the brilliant Sir Andrew Logan, a widower for over thirty years.When his city-clean Rover stopped in the drive, Sir Andrew was not alone. Beside him was a golden lady in caramel suede, a warm, witty, desirable widow whom everyone--except Archie--adored at once. Archie saw his father's mistress as the worm in the bud of his perfect life--a life that was to be wrenched apart before he and Liza could re-create their world.

    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.

    The Parisian episode is fascinating for its expose of the kitchens of posh French restaurants, where the narrator works at the bottom of the culinary echelon as dishwasher, or plongeur. In London, while waiting for a job, he experiences the world of tramps, street people, and free lodging houses. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and of society.

    Perfect for fans of Pedigree Mum and The Mummyfesto.It was just a squashed grape on the kitchen floor. Hardly a reason to get upset, right? But six years of motherhood has left Lisa Stratton feeling like a skivvy. Every morning before she’s opened her eyes, she starts her mental inventory of jobs to do. And just like yesterday, the day before and every day since she became a mum, she’s woken up knackered. So when her husband deliberately steps over the grape because it’s ‘her responsibility’ to run the house, it tips her over the edge. He wasn’t always like this – they used to share everything. Then the kids came along and he saw it as an excuse to sit back. But this time things are going to change. Lisa has made a decision. She’s going on strike…

    What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament in Concrete Island soon turns into horror as Maitland - a wickedly modern Robinson Crusoe - realizes that, despite evidence of other inhabitants, this doomed terrain has become a mirror of his own mind. Seeking the dark outer rim of the everyday, Ballard weaves private catastrophe into an intensely specular allegory.

    Samuel Szajkowski, a recently hired history teacher, walked into a school assembly with a gun and murdered three students and a colleague before turning the weapon on himself. It was a tragedy that could not have been predicted. Szajkowski, it seems clear, was a psychopath beyond help. Yet as Detective Inspector Lucia May- the only woman in her high-testosterone office in the Criminal Investigations Department-begins to piece together the testimonies of the various witnesses, an uglier and more complex picture emerges, calling into question the innocence of others. But no one, including Lucia's boss, is interested. As the pressure to close the case builds and her colleagues' sexism takes a sinister turn, Lucia begins to realize that she has more in common with the killer than she could have imagined, and she becomes deter­mined to expose the truth. Brilliantly interweaving the witnesses' accounts with Lucia's own perspective, A Thousand Cuts is a narrative tour de force from a formidable new voice in fiction.

    Widowed, penniless and desperate, she came to Fairchild Acres looking for work–and to confront stockbroker Patrick Stafford, her son's real father. Sure, she wasn't expecting the red carpet rollout from her ex-lover…but insults and rudeness? Well, she'll show him exactly what she's made of–and what he's missing!Even after all these years, Patrick still hasn't forgiven Bronwyn for marrying another man for money.Now Bronwyn can see what life could have been, with him. Sure, he'll step up and acknowledge his son.But the cost will be far dearer than Bronwyn could ever have imagined….

    'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party . . .' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they at first appear.There but for the was hailed as one of the best books of 2011 by Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, Patrick Ness, Sebastian Barry, Boyd Tonkin, Erica Wagner and Nick Barley. 'Dazzlingly inventive' A.S. Byatt 'Whimsically devastating. Playful, humorous, serious, profoundly clever and profoundly affecting' Guardian 'A real gem' Erica Wagner, The Times 'Eccentric, adventurous, intoxicating, dazzling. This is a novel with serious ambitions that remains huge fun to read' Literary Review 'If you liked Smith's earlier fiction, you will know that she enjoys setting up a situation before chucking in a literary Molotov cocktail then describing what happens' Sunday Express 'Wonderful, word-playful, compelling' Jeanette Winterson 'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' Daily Telegraph 'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard

    Now she's a journalist with a passion for truth, more devoted to her work at the London Journal than she ever was to her ex-husband.When the newspaper is bought by media giant The Goring Group, who value sales figures over fact-checking, Thorn openly questions their methods, and promptly finds herself moved from the news desk to the midweek supplement, reporting heart-warming stories for their new segment, The Bright Side, a job to which she is spectacularly unsuited.On a final warning and with no heart-warming news in sight, a desperate Thorn fabricates a good-news story of her own. The story, centred on an angelic apparition on Hampstead Heath, goes viral. Caught between her principles and her ambitions, Thorn goes in search of the truth behind her creation, only to find the answers locked away in the unconscious mind of a stranger.Marika Cobbold returns with her eighth novel, On Hampstead Heath. Sharp, poignant, and infused with dark humour, On Hampstead Heath is an homage to storytelling and to truth; to the tales we tell ourselves, and the stories that save us.

    In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language.Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys’s early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come to appreciate how Pepys’s singular literary enterprise would in many ways prefigure our modern selves. With exquisite insight and compassion, Samuel Pepys captures the uniquely fascinating figure whose legacy lives on more than three hundred years after his death.

    During his teenage years in Brixton, Johnson witnessed serial episodes of racial abuse and joined the Black Panthers movement in protest. There, he learned his history and culture, but found his own outlet.”—Caroline Frost, BBC FourLinton Kwesi Johnson is the most influential black poet in Britain. The author of five previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known worldwide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae. Much of his work is written in the street Creole of the Caribbean communities in which he grew up in England. Mi Revalueshanary Fren includes all of his best-known poems, which concern racism and politics, personal experience, philosophy, and the art of music, among other things.Contains a full-length CD of Johnson reading.

    Remainder is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.

    In recent times the argument has evolved from one of constructive discussion to one of a refusal to engage - where the bomb speaks louder than the word. This volume collects pieces from Kureishi's work which respond to this change, providing a historical perspective for the times in which we live. 'Kureishi has a particular appreciation for the complexity of modern British Muslim identity that comes from having a mixed-race family . . . Here, Kureishi's experience turns to insight.' Observer