Willkommen in QualityLand, in einer nicht allzu fernen Zukunft: Alles läuft rund - Arbeit, Freizeit und Beziehungen sind von Algorithmen optimiert. Trotzdem beschleicht den Maschinenverschrotter Peter Arbeitsloser immer mehr das Gefühl, dass mit seinem Leben etwas nicht stimmt. Wenn das System wirklich so perfekt ist, warum gibt es dann Drohnen, die an Flugangst leiden, oder Kampfroboter mit posttraumatischer Belastungsstörung? Warum werden die Maschinen immer menschlicher, aber die Mens...

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.