He and his family live an idyllic life of peace and solitude, punctuated by afternoon tea, long strolls in the garden, and summer showers. Or would if they weren't in a Wodehouse story.The apple of Lord Emsworth's eye is the Empress of Blandings, a splendid Berkshire sow who has twice won honors in the Fat Pig class at the local agricultural show. Besides keeping his pig in shape, Emsworth must deal with his sister's snobby demeanor, his brother's crazy memoirs, and a rival pig whose bulk might dash the Empress's hopes of another medal. Throw in a few young lovers and you have yourself a perfect brew of hilarious adventures. Included in this omnibus are Summer Lightning, Heavy Weather, and Blandings Castle. Evelyn Waugh once said, "The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. All those who know them long to return."

    Although he published over 45 books of poetry, hundreds of his poems were kept by him and his publisher for posthumous publication, This is the first collection of these unique poems, which Bukowski considered to be among his best work.

    Elsa, who has not a penny to her name except the scrapings from last week's pay packet, goes with her rich, 48-year-old friend and employer, Victor, to spend her 19th birthday in the household of his millionaire friend, Hamish.

    For three weeks, he had been afraid of going to sleep . . .'Young officer John Hilliard returns to his battalion in France following a period of sick leave in England. Despite having trouble adjusting to all the new faces, the stiff and reserved Hilliard forms a friendship with David Barton, an open and cheerful new recruit who has still to be bloodied in battle. As the pair approach the front line, to the proximity of death and destruction, their strange friendship deepens. But each knows that soon they will be separated . . .'A remarkable feat of imaginative and descriptive writing' The Times'The feeling of men under appalling stress at a particular moment in history is communicated with almost uncanny power' Sunday Times'Truly Astonishing' Daily Telegraph

    He brings this vibrant city's long and noble history alive through the ever-shifting fortunes, fates, and intrigues of half-a-dozen families, from the age of Julius Caesar to the 20th century. Generation after generation, these families embody the passion, struggle, wealth, and verve of the greatest city in the world.

    Sophia is twenty-one years old, carries a newt -- Great Warty -- around in her pocket and marries -- in haste -- a young artist called Charles. Swept into bohemian London of the thirties, Sophia is ill-equipped to cope. Poverty, babies (however much loved) and her husband conspire to torment her. Hoping to add some spice to her life, Sophia takes up with the dismal, ageing art critic, Peregrine, and learns to repent her marriage -- and her affair -- at leisure. But in this case virtue is more than its own reward, for repentance brings an abrupt end to a life of unpaid bills, unsold pictures and unwashed crockery ...

    Joseph - a 22-year-old self-styled nihilist in search of meaning, found releasing a badger from a zoo, seducing his best friend's mother, dancing at a Dionysic revel and spending his days in a mortuary - is the anti-hero at the heart of this novel.

    

    Now, however, he has been seriously rattled by Barry Unsworth's Losing Nelson, a gripping study of the dark side of heroism and hero worship. In the basement of his large, anonymous North London house, Charles Cleasby obsessively reenacts the admiral's every military maneuver: "Usually when we fought these battles I had a feeling of fulfilment, they brought me closer to him..." Cleasby's admiration also extends upstairs--to his life's work, a biography of the great man. His only assistant in his heroic struggle is Miss Lily (real name, Lilian Butler), a hired secretary who carefully transcribes his painstaking pages. Cleasby wants nothing better than to rescue Nelson from the revisionist clutches of unpatriotic academic cynics. Alas, his passion soon reveals a sinister side, as he declares that he is in fact the admiral's twin: I will say what I think angels are. They can be dark or bright, but they all have the gift of spontaneity, of creating themselves anew. This is a pure form of energy, and Horatio was winged with it. All the same, angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes they meet and recognize each other. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time or distance. He became a bright angel on February 14, 1797, during the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. I became his dark twin on September 9, 1997, when I too broke the line. As the book builds to its inexorable climax--and Cleasby's only solace is his amanuensis--Losing Nelson confirms Unsworth as one of England's most elegant, understated novelists. His historical grasp of Nelson is outstanding. But his book really excels, and also profoundly disturbs, in its exploration of the tarnished angels of patriotism. --Jerry Brotton

    Floods. Foot and mouth. The disappearances of Tony Blair and Madeleine MacCann. The arrival of Gordon Brown. Terror attacks in Glasgow. And Gordon Burn, artist, journalist and true-crime author, has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into a novel about the way news is made, and the way the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us.This is a daring and thrilling novel from one of the most astute observers of celebrity and tragedy. It is sure to make the headlines itself for the way it is written and for the controversial subjects he tackles. In Born Yesterday Gordon Burn creates a whole new way of writing a novel, and makes us think again about the stories we are fed by the media around us.

    For Emily, romance is in the air. For the mysterious Mrs Forester, there is scandal brewing. And for the Bishop of Simla, rainclouds are not the only storms on the horizon...The Hill Station is the novel on which J.G. Farrell was working at the time of his tragically early accidental death. It demonstrates powerfully what a great loss to world literature this was.

    His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds and the young run riot, no one is safe, least of all Paul. Taking its title from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Evelyn Waugh's first, funniest novel immediately caught the ear of the public with his account of an ingénu abroad in the decadent confusion of 1920s high society.

    Reminiscent of Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, this lively, wonderfully inventive romp takes readers into the mind of the grand matriarch of Britain’s Royal Family, bringing us an endearing runaway Queen Elizabeth on the town—and leading us behind the Buckingham Palace walls and into the upstairs/downstairs spaces of England’s monarchy.

    His old school friend Roper has defected to the USSR to become one of the evil empire's great scientific minds. Hillier must bring Roper back to England or risk losing his fat retirement bonus. As thoughtful as it is funny, this morality tale of a Secret Service gone mad features sex, gluttony, violence, treachery, and religion. Anthony Burgess's cast of astonishing characters includes Roper's German prostitute wife; Miss Devi and her Tamil love treatise; and the large Mr. Theodorescu, international secret monger and lascivious gourmand. A rare combination of the deadly serious and the absurd, the lofty and the lusty, Tremor of Intent will hold you in its thrall.

     Embedded in this beautifully written novel is Deborah Levy's gift for blending fairytale with biting satire. Through the voice of the irreverent and ironic narrator J.K., Swallowing Geography interrogates the yearning of discontented children, imagined homes and strangers and histories at the turbulent close of the 20th century.'A stunningly original writer' Kirsty Gunn'One of the few British writers comfortable on a world stage' New Statesman'Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression' Jeanette WintersonDeborah Levy writes fiction, plays and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she is the author of highly praised books including The Unloved, Things I Don't Want to Know, Beautiful Mutants and Billy and Girl. Her novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards (UK Author of the Year) and 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize, while the title story of her most recent work of fiction, Black Vodka, was shortlisted for the 2012 BBC International Short Story Award.