It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say.

Ignatius J Reilly is fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much unhinged, too. But is he bothered by this? No. For this misanthropic crusader against an America fallen into vice and ignorance has a mission: to rescue a naked female philosopher in distress.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is Carver's most famous collection of short stories and remians one of the most influential pieces of modern literature to date.

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal.

This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK.

Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer.

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children.

The circus arrives without warning. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. The black sign, painted in white letters that hangs upon the gates, reads: Opens at Nightfall Closes at Dawn. When the tents are all aglow, the sign appears. Le Cirque des Reves The Circus of Dreams. Now the circus is open. Now you may enter.

She cashes in her savings, packs a suitcase full of books and sets off for Broken Wheel, Iowa, a town where she knows nobody. Sara quickly realises that Broken Wheel is in desperate need of some adventure, a dose of self-help and perhaps a little romance, too.

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