"McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize winning look back at his childhood. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while…”
“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
People everywhere brag or whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying shcoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all we were wet…”
So begins Frank McCourt’s stunning memoir of his childhood in Ireland and America, a recollection of unvarnished truth and no self pity, of grinding poverty and indomitable spirit that will live in the memory long after the tape has ended.
Now a major film directed by Alan Parker and starring Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson."
"Frank McCourt’s sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Angela’s Ashes, focussing on the “great country”, America
Angela’s Ashes was a publishing phenomenon. Frank McCourt’s critically acclaimed, lyrical memoir of his Limerick childhood won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Award amongst others, and rapidly became a word-of-mouth bestseller topping all charts worldwide for over two years. It left readers and critics alike eager to hear more about Frank McCourt’s incredible, poignant life.
’Tis is the story of Frank’s American journey from impoverished immigrant with rotten teeth, infected eyes and no formal education to brilliant raconteur and schoolteacher."
"Hardy’s favourite of his own novels; a powerful work with brooding sexual undertones, ahead of its time in addressing themes of divorce, social inequality and land tenure. Now a film starring Rufus Sewell.
Grace Melbury, the only daughter of a timber-merchant, arrives home in Little Hintock after an expensive education and her father looks to find a husband for her. There are two rivals for her hand: Giles Winterbourne, a good-hearted yeoman and her childhood sweetheart, and Edred Fitzpiers, an ambitious young doctor of good family. Fitzpiers wins her, but the mismatch brings unhappiness not just to the young couple, but to a wider circle in the woodland community.
The Woodlanders is one of Hardy’s most powerful works and the one he liked best. With brooding sexual undertones, it addresses themes about which the author held strong views – the laws of divorce, the inequalities of society, and the uncertainty of land tenure."
"A rip-roaring tropical island adventure with a dash of philosophy, now a major film starring Simon Callow, Sam Neill and Rufus Sewell.
‘The girl he had come across … that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.’
Damaged by his father’s nihilistic philosophy, Axel Heyst has withdrawn from the world to live in near-isolation on the island of Samburan. His solitude ends when he rescues an English girl from her preying patron, but their heady existence will face tragic consequences when the outside world intrudes once more.
First published in 1915, ‘Victory’ is arguably the most psychologically complex of Conrad’s novels, in which he creates an extraordinarily compelling love story and one of great erotic power: Axel and Lena are what set this novel apart from the other works of one of English language’s greatest writers.
This Collins Classics edition is published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of this remarkable novel."
"OVER FIVE MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE
‘A phenomenon’ Jessie Burton
‘Dazzling’ Daily Mail
‘Truly magical' Guardian
Those eyes are fixed on someone. But who? What is she thinking as she stares out from one of the world’s best-loved paintings?
Johannes Vermeer can spot exceptional beauty. When servant girl Griet catches his eye, she soon becomes both student and muse. But then he gives her his wife’s pearl earrings to wear for a portrait, and a scandal erupts that could threaten Griet’s future…
Vivid and captivating, this timeless modern classic has become a successful film and an international bestseller, with over 5 million copies sold around the world; now with a new introduction by the author.
‘A veritable work of art… one of those rare novels where all the decisions made by the author appear inevitable and right’ Rose Tremain
‘Timeless, delicate and as exquisitely measured as one of Vermeer's paintings. Tense yet perfectly-paced and filled with the beauty of life's colours, Girl with the Pearl Earring is a masterpiece in its own right. Just a phenomenon. I will hold this novel close for the rest of my life’ Jessie Burton, author of The Minaturist
‘If ever a novel rightly deserves its “five millions copies sold” achievement, it is this dazzling little masterpiece … Absolute magic’ Daily Mail
'A portrait of radiance…Tracy Chevalier brings the real artist Vermeer and a fictional muse to life in a jewel of a novel' Time
‘Chevalier doesn't put a foot wrong in this triumphant work … It is a beautifully written tale that mirrors the elegance of the painting that inspired it’ Wall Street Journal
'A wonderful novel, mysterious, steeped in atmosphere, deeply revealing about the process of painting…truly magical' Guardian
‘It is no wonder that this beautifully-written story has sold more than five million copies and been made into a successful film. An absolute triumph’ Woman’s Weekly"
"‘Vividly imagined’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Sex and death meet again in [a] marvellous evocation of Edwardian England’ Daily Mail
Queen Victoria is dead. In January 1901, the day after her passing, two very different families visit neighbouring graves in a London cemetery. The traditional Waterhouses revere the late Queen where the Colemans have a more modern outlook, but both families are appalled by the friendship that springs up between their respective daughters, Lavinia and Maude.
As the girls grow up, their world changes almost beyond measure: cars are replacing horses, electric lighting is taking over from gas, and emancipation is fast approaching, to the delight of some and the dismay of others…"
"When small-town girl Carrie Meeber sets out for Chicago, she is equipped with nothing but a few dollars, a certain unspoiled beauty and charm, and a pitiful lack of preparation for the complex moral choices she will face. Adrift in an indifferent city, she struggles from the sweatshop to stage success and inspires an obsessive love in a married man twice her age—which threatens to destroy him.
Dreiser transforms the conventional fallen-woman story into a genuinely original work of imaginative fiction. He hurls his impressionable eighteen-year-old heroine into the amoral world of the big city and reveals, with powerful insight, the driving forces of our culture: America's restless idealism, glamorous material seductions, and spiritual innocence. Many consider this the greatest novel on urban life ever written."
"In this sequel to his acclaimed novel Portofino, Frank Schaeffer's memorable young narrator, Calvin Becker, returns in a story that is a coming-of-age gem.
It is 1966, and Calvin is fourteen, torn between his naturally volcanic sexual curiosity and a fundamentalist family so strict that he has never seen a movie, watched television, or danced—and has to hide his five copies of Mad magazine in the attic. Ralph and Elsa Becker, Reformed Presbyterian missionaries from Kansas, are stationed in Switzerland and on a modest ski vacation with their three children: tyrannical eighteen-year-old Janet, angelic Rachael, and the irrepressible Calvin.But at the Hotel Riffelberg, a supposed safe haven from the sinners listening to jazz far below in Zermatt, Calvin nevertheless falls into the hands of Eva, a young waitress who, while bringing him breakfast each morning, begins Calvin's initiation. Even so, it is only after his mother catches him in the act (or so she thinks) that Calvin's real education begins. The resulting family meltdown builds to a climax destined to push Calvin's childhood into the past."
"LaFarge's stunning novel of love, betrayal, and exploitation is based on themes involving the life of the great city planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann.
Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann was the architect of modern Paris. In two decades, from 1853 to 1869, he transformed the cramped, filthy lanes of the medieval city into the airy boulevards and green parks of today. Yet there is a story that, on his deathbed, Haussmann wished to undo everything he'd built. "Would that it had died with me!" he is supposed to have said. What is the secret of the baron's last regret?
To answer this question, author Paul LaFarge tells the story of a three-sided affair that pitted love against ambition and architecture against flesh, in this sweeping drama of a changing social order."
"This timeless collection charted a new stylistic path for modern fiction. Through twenty-two connected short stories, Sherwood Anderson looks into the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in the American heartland. These psychological portraits of the sensitive and imaginative of Winesburg's population are seen through the eyes of a young reporter-narrator, George Willard. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon. With its simple and intense style, Winesburg, Ohio evokes the quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women.
Though its reputation once suffered, Winesburg, Ohio is now considered one of the most influential portraits of pre-industrial small-town life in the United States. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked it twenty-fourth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and it continues to be read widely both in and out of classrooms around the country."
"Ravic is a German doctor and refugee living in Paris in 1939. Despite a law banning him from performing surgery, he has been treating some of the city's most elite citizens for two years on the behalf of two less-than-skillful French physicians.
Forbidden to return to his own country and dodging the everyday dangers of jail and deportation, Ravic manages to hang on, all the while searching for the Nazi who tortured him back in Germany. And though he's given up on the possibility of love, life has a curious way of taking a turn for the romantic, even during the worst of times."
"Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter—sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined “Writers’ Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months,” and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of “real life” that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But “here” turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world—and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the stories they tell—and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made from their plight.
Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television—The Real World meets Alive. It draws from a great literary tradition—The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankenstein—to tell an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest—which means his most extreme and his most provocative."
