In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written. Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment.

Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-c...

A NEW TRANSLATION BY ADAM THORPE'A great novel that is also an inexhaustible pleasure to read' GuardianEmma Bovary is an avid reader of sentimental novels; brought up on a Normandy farm and convent-educated, she longs for romance. At first, Emma pins her hopes on marriage, but life with her well-meaning husband in the provinces leaves her bored and dissatisfied. She seeks escape through extravagant spending sprees and, eventually, adultery.

As Emma pursues her impossible reverie she seals her...

'Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't matter what'This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts.

At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tende...

Tales of upheaval and confusion, longing and love in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. For the characters in after the quake, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. Satsuki has spent thirty years hating one man: did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away.

Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. Katagiri...

Yuval Noah Harari's bestselling phenomenon now in a beautifully packaged new special edition. Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old.

Willa Cather’s best-loved novel, and the final book in the Great Plains trilogy, is a beautiful portrayal of friendship, longing and growing up in frontier Nebraska. When young orphan Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, he finds himself growing up alongside Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. Their childhoods are full of shared adventures but as they grow their paths diverge, spurred on by the dire poverty of the Shimerda family.

Yet Jim will never forget Ántoni...

**WINNER OF THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2014**A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERSometimes your child - the most familiar person of all - is radically different from you. The saying goes that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But what happens when it does? Drawing on interviews with over three hundred families, covering subjects including deafness, dwarfs, Down's Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, children born of rape, children convicted of crime and transgender people, Andr...

A brilliant new translation of Koestler's long-lost original manuscript. A chilling and unforgettable 20th century classic. From a prison cell in an unnamed country run by a totalitarian government Rubashov reflects.

Once a powerful player in the regime, mercilessly dispensing with anyone who got in the way of his party's aims, Rubashov has had the tables turned on him. He has been arrested and he'll be interrogated, probably tortured and certainly executed. Darkness at Noon is as gripping as...

Bigger Thomas has grown up in Chicago’s slums, reckless, angry and adrift. A respectable job with the affluent Dalton family provides hope but sets him on course for a catastrophic collision between his world and theirs. Hunted by citizen and police alike, and baited by prejudiced officials, Bigger finds himself the cause célèbre in an ever-narrowing endgame.

First published in 1940, Native Son shocked readers with its candid depiction of violence and confrontation of racial stereotypes. ...

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs...