It is 1866, and walter moody has come to make his fortune upon the new zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. ...

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Named 'one of the greatest novels of all time' by the ObserverWith a new introduction by Amanda CraigFreda and Brenda are friends spending their days in an Italian-run wine-bottling factory in North London. When a works outing materialises it offers promise for Freda, but terror for Brenda. Unexpected passions run high on the chilly day of liberty and their lives are never the same again.

Beryl Bainbridge dazzles readers in this offbeat, haunting yet hilarious...

From the New York Times number one bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds, comes Kristin Hannah's haunting, heartbreakingly beautiful novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between past and present. Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family apple orchard; the other followed a dream and travelled the world to become a famous photo journalist.

B...

Sarah Waters, the award-winning author of three novels set in Victorian London, returns with a stunning novel that marks a departure from the 19th century.

'A masterpiece... one of the best prose writers in our time' Michael OndaatjeRobert Grainier is a day labourer in the American West, felling the trees that feed the railways. It is the start of the twentieth century, and the world is changing at a rapid pace.

Life is fragile in the wilds of the frontier; disease and forest fires are rife. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainier journeys, struggling to make sense of the bewildering changes transforming the nation. Rich and muscular, sweep...

1946, and Claire Randall goes to the Scottish Highlands with her husband Frank. It's a second honeymoon, a chance to learn how war has changed them and to re-establish their loving marriage. But one afternoon, Claire walks through a circle of standing stones and vanishes into 1743, where the first person she meets is a British army officer - her husband's six-times great-grandfather. Unfortunately, Black Jack Randall is not the man his descendant is, and while trying to escape him, Claire fal...

'I am a sick person. I am a spiteful person. An unattractive person, too .

. .'In the depths of a cellar in St. Petersburg, a retired civil servant spews forth a passionate and furious note on the ills of society.

The underground man's manifesto reveals his erratic, self-contradictory and even sadistic nature. Yet Dostoyevsky's disturbing character causes an uncomfortable flicker of recognition, and we see in him our own human condition.

With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University,Bakersfield. Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence.

Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives a...

The book that inspired Park Chan-wook's astonishing film The Handmaiden. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Booker PrizeLondon 1862. Sue Trinder, orphaned at birth, grows up among petty thieves - fingersmiths - under the rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her 'family'.

But from the moment she draws breath, Sue's fate is linked to that of another orphan growing up in a gloomy mansion not too many miles away.

A beautiful heiress is fatally poisoned in a West End restaurant…