The History of Love
Nicole Krauss
Leo Gursky is a man who fell in love at the age of ten and has been in love ever since. These days he is just about surviving...
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
'One of the most haunting books you could ever wish to read...it is stunning - moving, exciting, and wonderful' Lenny Henry Set in the deep American south between...
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
Spanning three decades and crossing continents, Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel is a triumph of humane story-telling. 'When her grandmother learned of Ashima's pregnancy, she was particularly thrilled at...
Brooklyn
Colm Tóibín
It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her...
Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden
A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than 20 years of Japan's most dramatic...
The Mermaid Chair
Sue Monk Kidd
Jessie Sullivan has been married half her life, and has become accustomed to her role. But when she returns to the isolated island she grew up on to...
The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'cemetery of lost books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone...
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John le Carré
The enduring novel by one of our greatest storytellers. George Smiley, who is a troubled man of infinite compassion, is also a single-mindedly ruthless adversary as a spy....
Restless
William Boyd
It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian emigree living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas...
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...' Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until,...
Snowdrops
A. D. Miller
Snowdrops. That's what the Russians call them - the bodies that float up into the light in the thaw. Drunks, most of them, and homeless people who just...
Jamrach's Menagerie
Carol Birch
'I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway,...
The Earth Hums in B Flat
Mari Strachan
Gwenni Morgan is not like any other girl in this small Welsh town. Inquisitive, bookish and full of spirit, she can fly in her sleep and loves playing...
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
At a café table in Lahore, a Pakistani man converses with a stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this...
My Last Duchess
Daisy Goodwin
Cora Cash, possibly the wealthiest heiress in 1890s America, has been raised to believe that money will open every door to her. But when her mother whisks Cora...
The Island
Victoria Hislop
On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother's past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to...
Any Human Heart
William Boyd
Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair...
When God Was a Rabbit
Sarah Winman
When God Was a Rabbit is an incredibly exciting debut from an extraordinary new voice in fiction. Spanning four decades, from 1968 onwards, this is the story of...
Notes from an Exhibition
Patrick Gale
Notes from an Exhibition, from the bestselling Patrick Gale, tells the story of artist Rachel Kelly, whose life has been a sacrifice to both her extraordinary art and...
Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen
When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits - the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular...
The Long Song
Andrea Levy
'You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the...
Tiger Hills
Sarita Mandanna
When a flock of herons wheeled overhead at the moment of Devi's birth, it seemed that her life would be touched by fate... As a child, Devi befriends...
Room
Emma Donoghue
Jack is five. He lives with his Ma. They live in a single, locked room. They don’t have the key. Jack and Ma are prisoners.
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
'Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies ...' A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded...
Children of the Revolution
Dinaw Mengestu
Sepha Stephanos owns a newsagent and general store in a rundown Washington, D.C. neighbourhood that is on the verge of gentrification. Seventeen years ago he fled the Ethiopian...
The Postmistress
Sarah Blake
It is 1940, and bombs fall nightly on London. In the thick of the chaos is young American radio reporter Frankie Bard. She huddles close to terrified strangers...
The Pelican Brief
John Grisham
Two Supreme Court Justices are dead. Their murders remain unsolved. Darby Shaw, a brilliant and beautiful New Orleans legal student, draws up a speculative legal brief which links...
Schindler's Ark
Thomas Keneally
In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a...
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, wrestles...
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
Of all John Fowles's novels, The French Lieutenant's Woman received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature....
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first...
The Graduate
Charles Webb
As far as Benjamin Braddock’s parents are concerned, his future is sewn up. Now he has graduated from college, he will go to Yale or Harvard, get a...
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Truman Capote
With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, Holly Golightly is top notch in style and a sensation wherever she goes. Her...
Brighton Rock
Graham Greene
A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared...
Live and Let Die
Ian Fleming
Beautiful, fortune-telling Solitaire is the prisoner and tool of Mr Big: master of fear, artist in crime and Voodoo Baron of Death. But James Bond has no time...
East Fortune
James Runcie
The boy stepped out into the road. He stretched his arms out and his legs apart, making an X, palms facing the windscreen, the hands with a slight...
Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks
Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen,...
Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones
‘You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The...
Handle with Care
Jodi Picoult
Charlotte O'Keefe's beautiful, much-longed-for, adored daughter Willow is born with osteogenesis imperfecta - a very severe form of brittle bone disease. If she slips on a crisp packet...
Nineteen Minutes
Jodi Picoult
Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens – until a student enters the local high school with an arsenal of guns and starts...
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
''Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks'...
The Winter Ghosts
Kate Mosse
From the bestselling author of Labyrinth and Sepulchre - a compelling story of ghosts and remembrance. The Great War took much more than lives. It robbed a generation...
Banquet for the Damned
Adam L. G. Nevill
Few believed Professor Coldwell was in touch with an unseen world - that he could commune with spirits. But in Scotland’s oldest university town something has passed from...
Interview with the Vampire
Anne Rice
In a darkened room, a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life - the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed...
The Woman in Black
Susan Hill
Proud and solitary, Eel Marsh House surveys the windswept reaches of the salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway. Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summonded to attend the...
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, this is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written literary masterpiece. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in...
The Road Home
Rose Tremain
'On the coach, Lev chose a seat near the back and he sat huddled against the window, staring out at the land he was leaving ...' Lev is...
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as...
Train to Budapest
Dacia Maraini
1956: Amara, a young Italian journalist, is sent to report on the growing political divide between East and West in post-war central Europe. She also has a more...
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our...
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Marina Lewycka
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our...
Chocolat
Joanne Harris
Chocolat begins with Vianne Rocher and her six-year-old daughter Anouk arriving in the small village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes - 'a blip on the fast road between Toulouse and Bordeaux'...
The Constant Gardener
John Le Carré
Tessa Quayle has been horribly murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover, a doctor with one of...
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth's novel is at its core a love story, the tale of Lata - and her mother's attempts to find her a suitable husband, through love or...
Atonement
Ian McEwan
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden...
Diary of a Nobody
George and Weedon Grossmith
'Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see - because I...
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Mitch Albom
An enchanting, beautifully written novel that explores a mystery only heaven can unfold. Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in the toil of his father...
Sophie's Bakery for the Broken Hearted
Lolly Winston
36-year-old Sophie Stanton has lost her young husband to cancer. In an age where women are expected to be high-achievers, Sophie desperately wants to be a good widow...
Sacred Hearts
Sarah Dunant
1570 in the Italian city of Ferrara, and the convent of Santa Caterina is filled with noble women who are married to Christ because many cannot find husbands...
Notes on a Scandal
Zoe Heller
From the first day that the beguiling Sheba Hart joins the staff of St George's, history teacher Barbara Covett is convinced that she has found a kindred spirit....
Summertime
J.M. Coetzee
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his...
The Historian
Elizabeth Kostova
Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to 'My dear and unfortunate successor'....
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s McCarthyite America. Born in the U.S....
Rosemary's Baby
Ira Levin
Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor husband Guy move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and only elderly residents. Neighbours...
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels,...
Life of Pi
Yann Martell
After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy...
Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
A classic of its kind, a dazzling parody of the earthy, melodramatic novels of the period. Flora Poste has been expensively educated to do everything but earn her...
The Kite Runner
Khaled Houssani
Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his father and resolves to win the local kite-fighting tournament, to prove that he has the makings of a...
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of dust bowl Oklahoma and Californian...
The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur and murderer. Balram, the White Tiger, was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of...
The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when...
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind....
The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. The woman in question is Hanna, and before long...
Cutting for stone
Abraham Verghese
Marion and Shiva Stone, born in a mission hospital in Ethiopia in the 1950s, are twin sons of an illicit union between an Indian nun and British doctor....
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, who is thirty years her senior. Nearly two decades later, in...
Comments
I have enjoyed recently East fortune, James Runcie and A spot of Bother, mark haddon
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