He keeps a list, in fact. But Laura isn't on it - even though she's just become his latest ex. He's got his life back, you see. He can just do what he wants when he wants: like listen to whatever music he likes, look up the girls that are on his list, and generally behaves as if Laura never mattered. But Rob finds he can't move on. He's stuck in a really deep groove - and it's called Laura. Soon, Rob's asking himself some big questions: about love, about life - and about why we choose to share ours with the people we do.

    They find each other—and the castle of their dreams—through a classified ad in a London newspaper one rainy February afternoon. The ladies expect a pleasant holiday, but they don’t anticipate that the month they spend in Portofino will reintroduce them to their true natures and reacquaint them with joy. Now, if the same transformation can be worked on their husbands and lovers, the enchantment will be complete.The Enchanted April was a best-seller in both England and the United States, where it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and set off a craze for tourism to Portofino. More recently, the novel has been the inspiration for a major film and a Broadway play.

    One such couple are Guy and Harriet Pringle, who have escaped the war in Europe only to find the conflict once more on their doorstep, providing a volatile backdrop to their own personal battles. The civilian world meets the military through the figure of Simon Boulderstone, a young army officer who will witness the tragedy and tension of war on the frontier at first hand. An outstanding author of wartime fiction, Olivia Manning brilliantly evokes here the world of the Levant - Egypt, Jerusalem and Syria - with perception and subtlety, humour and humanity.

    The Claverings is filled with contemporary detail and shows, as Trollope often does, the weakness of men and the emotional strength of women.

    Is the child really his? And does he want him?

    This sudden solitude compels Joan to assess her life for the first time ever and face up to many of the truths about herself. Looking back over the years, Joan painfully re-examines her attitudes, relationships and actions and becomes increasingly uneasy about the person who is revealed to her.

    When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny.

    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.

    Party Going describes their four-hour wait in a London railway hotel where they shelter from the grim weather and the throngs of workers on the platform below.

    Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax, and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.

    His struggle to succeed and his conquest of Henrietta, the spirited daughter of a rich manufacturer, drive a richly woven tale that takes the reader from the dusty plains of India to the teeming slums of nineteenth-century London, from the chaos of the great industrial cities to the age of the peaceful certainties of the English countryside. Filled with epic scenes and memorable characters, God is an Englishman triumphs in its portrayal of human strength and weakness, and in its revelations of the power of love.

    A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.” Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.At 61, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels and listening to a bit of light jazz. Then his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting re-married, to the deeply inappropriate Ray. Her family is not pleased – as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has “strangler’s hands.” Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband’s ex-colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind. The way these damaged people fall apart – and come together – as a family is the true subject of Haddon’s disturbing yet amusing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.A SPOT OF BOTHER is Mark Haddon’s unforgettable follow-up to the internationally beloved bestseller THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME. Here the madness – literally – of family life proves rich comic fodder for Haddon’s crackling prose and bittersweet insights into misdirected love.

    This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Ed Glinert, author of The London Compendium.It is 1938 and the prospect of war hangs over every London inhabitant. But the city simply doesn't stop. Everywhere people continue to work, drink, fall in love, fight and struggle to get on in life. At the lodging-house at No.10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, the buttoned-up clerk Mr Josser returns home with the clock he has received as a retirement gift. The other residents include the faded actress Connie; tinned food-loving Mr Puddy; widowed landlady Mrs Vizzard (whose head is turned by her new lodger, a self-styled 'Professor of Spiritualism'); and flashy young mechanic Percy Boon, whose foray into stolen cars descends into something much, much worse...Norman Collins (1907-1982) was a British writer, and later a radio and television executive, who was responsible for creating Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4, and became one of the major figures behind the establishment of the Independent Television (ITV) network in the UK. In all Norman Collins wrote 16 novels and two plays, including London Belongs to Me (1945), The Governor's Lady (1968) and The Husband's Story (1978).If you enjoyed London Belongs to Me, you might like Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'One of the great city novels: a sprawling celebration of the comedy, the savagery, the eccentricity and the quiet heroism at the heart of ordinary London life'Sarah Waters, author of The Night Watch

    Charlton from a undernourished and timid tax clerk to ‘Charlie’, a fully-converted member of the Larkin way of life: an easygoing celebration of nature, food, drink, and family. In the process, the reader is introduced to the Brigadier, Miss Pilchester, and Angela Snow. Setting the style for the series, the book ends with a grand celebration, and the announcement of the wedding of Charlie and Mariette. The novel was filmed with the title ‘The Mating Game’, and between 1991 and 1993, Yorkshire Television produced a highly-successful television series called ‘The Darling Buds of May’. This first book in the Larkin series was very successful, appearing first in the United States and then in Britain, where it sold 40,000 in the first two months. Many critics felt that Bates deserved better than to be remembered mostly for the Larkin novels, but they were very profitable. The immensely popular Larkin series of comic novels consisted of ‘The Darling Buds of May’, ‘A Breath of French Air’ (1959), ‘When the Green Woods Laugh’ (1960), ‘Oh! To Be in England’ (1963), and ‘A Little of What You Fancy’ (1970). Bates, speaking of how he was inspired to create the Larkins, recalled the real junkyard that he often passed near his home in Kent; and he remembered seeing a family -- a father, mother and many children, sucking at ice-creams and eating crisps in a "ramshackle lorry that had been recently painted a violent electric blue". He tried writing a brief tale based on the family, but soon decided that he couldn’t waste such a rich gallery of characters to a short story." Pop is a wonderful character who hates pomp, pretension and humbug; loves his family, but doesn’t hesitate to break a few rules... and his and the Larkins' secret is “that they live as many of us would like to live if only we had the guts and nerve to flout the conventions." See also the Pop Larkin Chronicles, which contains all five Larkin books.

    On the way their ship is set upon by pirates, and the children are accidentally transferred to the pirate vessel. Jonsen, the well-meaning pirate captain, doesn't know how to dispose of his new cargo, while the children adjust with surprising ease to their new life. As this strange company drifts around the Caribbean, events turn more frightening and the pirates find themselves increasingly incriminated by the children's fates. The most shocking betrayal, however, will take place only after the return to civilization.The swift, almost hallucinatory action of Hughes's novel, together with its provocative insight into the psychology of children, made it a best seller when it was first published in 1929 and has since established it as a classic of twentieth-century literature - an unequaled exploration of the nature, and limits, of innocence.