Recommended Authors

(in alphabetical order)

A bit of a guide to the best of the list. You will find
next to the title of a book which is worthwhile reading even though it requires some effort (either for its literary characteristics, the difficulty of the language or for its length).
when the book is "unputdownable" and reasonably easy to read. The more stars, the more addictive it is. The concept of "unputdownable" here is absolutely subjective and based on my own experience or the experience of people I talked t.

Send your reviews and help other students to choose what to read.

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-O-P-Q-R-S-V-W

Margaret Atwood

The Blind Assassin

Synopsis
Even now, at the age of 82, Iris lives in the shadow cast by her younger sister Laura. Now poor and trying to cope with a failing body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death and the novel which earned her such notoriety.

Sexually explicit for its time, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms, the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one; while events in both move closer to war and catastrophe. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama.

Read an excerpt (PDF)

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Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

The classic and much-loved romance between proud Mr Darcy and prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet.

Available in the Library

Read the first chapters

Emma

Synopsis
Emma Wodehouse has led a simple life, but during the course of this she at last reaps her share of the world's vexations. In this comedy of manners, the heroine learns to come to terms with the reality of other people, and with her own erring nature.

Read an extract from the novel

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Paul Auster

The Book of Illusions

One man's obsession with the mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in grief. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann, and remembers how to laugh . . .

Available in the Library

Paul Auster

The Brooklyn Follies

Synopsis
Nathan and Tom are an uncle and nephew double-act - one in remission from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter, the other hiding away from his once-promising academic career. Matters change when Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives...

Reviews

Herald
'A dark, deliciously funny novel, so good you never want it to end.'

New Statesman
'Auster at the top of his game. This superb novel about human folly turns out to be tremendously wise.'

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Ian Banks

Dead Air

Synopsis
Iain Banks' daring new novel opens in a loft apartment in the East End, in a former factory due to be knocked down in a few days. Ken Nott is a devoutly contrarian vaguely left wing radio shock-jock living in London. After a wedding breakfast people start dropping fruits from a balcony on to a deserted carpark ten storeys below, then they start dropping other things; an old TV that doesn't work, a blown loudspeaker, beanbags, other unwanted furniture...Then they get carried away and start dropping things that are still working, while wrecking the rest of the apartment. But mobile phones start ringing and they're told to turn on a TV, because a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Centre. At ease with the volatility of modernity, Iain Banks is also our most accomplished literary writer of narrative-driven adventure stories that never ignore the injustices and moral conundrums of the real world. His new novel, displays his trademark dark wit, buoyancy and momentum.

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John Banville

The Sea

Synopsis
The brilliant new novel by the Booker-shortlisted author of Shroud and The Book of Evidence, John Banville is, quite simply, one of the greatest novelists writing in the English language today. When Max Morden returns to the coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family appear that long ago summer as if from another world. Drawn to the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, Max soon finds himself entangled in their lives, which are as seductive as they are unsettling. What ensues will haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that is to follow. John Banville is one of the most sublime writers working in the English language. Utterly compelling, profoundly moving and illuminating, The Sea is quite possibly the best thing he has ever written.

Maeve Binchy

Quentins

Synopsis
Every table at Quentins Restaurant has a thousand stories to tell: tales of love, betrayal and revenge. Ella Brady wants to make a documentary about the renowned Dublin restaurant that has captured the spirit of a generation and a city in the years it has been open. In Maeve Binchy's magical QUENTINS you will meet new friends and old: the twins from SCARLET FEATHER, the Signora from EVENING CLASS, Ria from TARA ROAD and a host of fresh faces. There is Monica, the ever cheerful Australian waitress, and Blouse Brennan, whose simplicity disguises a sharp mind and a heart of gold. Presiding over Quentins are Patrick and Brenda Brennan, who have made Quentins such a legend. But even they have a story and a sadness which is hidden from the public gaze. As Ella uncovers more of what has gone on, she wonders about the wisdom of bringing it to the screen. Should the restaurant keep its secrets.

Available in the library

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Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre

Synopsis
The story of Jane Eyre, who experiences the miseries of being an orphaned child in early Victorian society, before becoming a governess at Thornfield Hall and meeting Mr Rochester. Jane shares many of Brontes' own beliefs about the position of women, arguing for a form of sexual equality.

Read it on-line

Available in the Library

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights

Synopsis
The saga of two Yorkshire families in the remote Pennine Hills. The book has been interpreted as an historical romance, a ghostly thriller, a psychological love-story, a religious allegory and a nature poem. This is the author's only novel.

Available in the Library

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Louis de Bernières

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

From back cover
It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Green Island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. A first he is ostracised by the locals, but as a conscientious but far from fanatical soldier, whose main aim is to have a peaceful war, he proves in time to be civilised, humorous - and a consummate musician.
When the local doctor's daughter's letters to her fiancé - and members of the underground - go unanswered, the working of the eternal triangle seems inevitable. But can this fragile love survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender?

Available in the library

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Bill Bryson

Mother Tongue

Synopsis
A witty, irreverent but very useful account of the peculiarities of the English language. This book is designed to appeal to all lovers of language and history.

Notes from the Small Island

From the Back Cover
After nearly two decades in Britain, Bill Bryson took the decision to move back to the States for a while, to let his kids experience life in another country, to give his wife the chance to shop until 10 p.m. seven nights a week, and, most of all, because he had read that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, and it was thus clear to him that his people needed him.

But before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire, Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of the nation's public face and private parts (as it were), and to analyse what precisely it was he loved so much about a country that produced Marmite, a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy, place names like Farleigh Wallop, Titsey and Shellow Bowells, people who said 'Mustn't grumble', and Gardeners' Question Time.

Available in the Library

African Diary

Synopsis
Bill Bryson goes to Kenya at the invitation of CARE International, the charity dedicated to working with local communities to eradicate poverty around the world. Kenya, generally regarded as the cradle of mankind, is a land of contrasts, with famous game reserves, stunning landscapes, and a vibrant cultural tradition. It also provides plenty to worry a traveller like Bill Bryson, fixated as he is on the dangers posed by snakes, insects and large predators. But on a more sober note, it is a country that shares many serious human and environmental problems with the rest of Africa: refugees, AIDS, drought and grinding poverty. Travelling around the country, Bryson casts his inimitable eye on a continent new to him, and the resultant diary, though short in length, contains the trademark Bryson stamp of wry observation and curious insight. All the author's royalties from "Bill Bryson's African Diary", as well as all profits, will go to CARE International.

Read an excerpt (PDF)

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Truman Capote

In Cold Blood

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Tracy Chevalier

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Synopsis
A brilliant historical novel on the corruption of innocence, using the famous painting by Vermeer as an inspiration. Griet, the young daughter of a tilemaker in seventeeth century Holland, obtains her first job, as a servant in Vermeer's household. Tracy Chevalier shows us, through Griet's eyes, the complicated family, the society of the small town of Delft, and life with an obsessive genius. Griet loves being drawn into his artistic life, and leaving her former drudgery, but the cost to her own survival may be high.

Available in the Library

Falling Angels

Chevalier herself writes after the story's end that "the Acknowledgements is the only section of a novel that reveals an author's "normal" voice. Every character uses their "normal" voice in this novel, and Chevalier's own voice excels in ensuring that each one is unique (for example, everything is "delicious" for Livy), so that, like Mr Coleman mourning his daughter growing up, you will "miss her when she goes". --Olivia Dickinson

Available in the Library

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The Lady and the Unicorn

The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries are a set of six medieval tapestries. Beautiful, intricate and expertly made, they are also mysterious in their origin and meaning. Tapestries give an appearance of order and continuity, as if designed and made by one person, belying the complicated process required to create them. Weavers, patrons, designers, artists, merchants and apprentices were involved in their making, and behind them were the wives, daughters and servants who exercised influences over their men. Like the many strands of wool and silk woven together into one cloth, so these people came together in a complex dance to create the whole picture. Jean le Viste, a newly wealthy member of the French court, commissions the tapestries to hang in his chateau. Nicolas, his chosen designer, meets le Viste's wife Genevieve and his daughter Claude, both of whom take a keen interest in the tapestries.

Guardian
'The Lady and the Unicorn will perhaps eclipse Pearl Earring.’
Daily Mail
'Her helter-skelter dialogue has a lot of charm and wit'.

Available in the Library

Jonathan Coe

The House of Sleep

Synopsis
A comedy about the powers we acquire and relinquish when we fall asleep, and when we fall in love. It features Sarah who is narcoleptic, Terry, a disillusioned film critic for whom sleep is a memory, and for Dr Dunstan, sleep is nothing less than a global disease.

Read the first chapter (PDF)

The Rotter's Club

Synopsis
Jonathan Coe's new novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension. A group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin on to events in the wider world. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, The Rotters' Club captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of 'Old Labour' - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb.

The Closed Circle

Synopsis
Set against the backdrop of the Millenium celebrations and Britain's increasingly compromised role in America's war against terrorism', The Closed Circle lifts the lid on an era in which politics and presentation, ideology and the media have become virtually indistinguishable. Darkly comic, hugely engaging, and compulsively readable, it is the much-anticipated follow-up to Jonathan Coe's bestselling novel The Rotters' Club, and reintroduces us to the characters first encountered in that book. But whereas The Rotters' Club was a novel of innocence, The Closed Circle is its opposite: a novel of experience.

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J.M. Coetzee

Disgrace

Synopsis
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities he is expected to apologize to save his job, but instead he refuses and resigns, retiring to live with his daughter on her remote farm.

Elizabeth Costello

Synopsis
A profound new work of fiction from one of the greatest writers alive. Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown; she is feted, studied, honoured. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation and from which, it seems, she will never escape, she has reached the stage, late in life, where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. One of a new breed of intellectual nomads, her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer in residence on a cruise liner during which she encounters a fellow guest lecturer, an African poet also employed to divert the passengers; a visit to her sister, a missionary in Africa, who is receiving an honorary degree, an occasion which both recognise as the final opportunity for effecting some form of reconciliation; and a disquieting appearance at a writers' conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly amongst the audience. She has made her life's work the study of other people yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations. Elizabeth Costello is a humane, moral, and uncompromising creation; J.M. Coetzee's latest work of fiction offers us a profound and delicate vision of literary celebrity, artistry and the private life of the mind.

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Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness

Synopsis
Marlow voyages into the wildness and jungle of the Belgian Congo to meet Kurtz, a company agent, and having found him, realizes that Kurtz has won supremacy over the natives through unrestrained violence. The story explores the workings of the subconscious, and addresses political imperialism. Right from the opening paragraph it is obvious that this book is going to be special. Conrad's Russian background gives his use of language a robust economical style, and he often conjures powerful vivid images in two or three words. The world around the character, in particular the jungle, seems to be more than just a backdrop. People enter the jungle and are swallowed up as if it is a living malignant force, but as you progress you realise that it is the Europeans who are the real source of darkness. Conrad's style of writing has real impact on the surface, but it is only when you delve deeper than the surface that you realise what Conrad is really writing about. I would go as far as saying that this is a must read for anyone interested in literature. Few writers ever attain such skill with the English language and it was not even Conrad's first language.

Available in the library

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Michael Cunningham

The Hours

Synopsis
Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughan goes shopping for flowers for a party for her AIDS-suffering poet-friend. This novel meditates on artistic behaviour, love and madness.

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Roald Dahl

Matilda

Available in the Library

Tales of the Unexpected

Available in the Library

Gerald Durrell

My Family and Other Animals

Synopsis
The author relates his memories of a five-year sojourn with his family on the island of Corfu when he was a boy, describing in detail the procession of wild animals he brought back to the family's villa to study.

Available in the Library

George Elliot

Middlemarch

Synopsis
The first World's Classics were introduced by some of the greatest writers of their day, including Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and T.S. Eliot. In these hardback editions, contemporary novelists including A.S. Byatt and Joyce Carol Oates introduce their favourite classics in original pocketbook size. Echoing the original World's Classics series, the books are produced to gift-book standard with stitched binding, head and tail bands, printed on 60msg paper and featuring matt laminated jackets in a "retro-look" design. Writing at the moment when the foundations of Western thought were being challenged, George Eliot fashions in "Middlemarch" (1871-2) the quintessential Victorian novel; a concept of life and society free from the dogma of the past yet able to confront the scepticism that was taking over the age.

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Bret Easton Ellis

American Psycho

Synopsis
Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom - doing impermissible things to women. He is living his own "Americalkkjjjkkrp9n Dream".

Available in the library

Less than Zero

Synopsis
Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, a best-selling novel follows a cast of upper-class, good-looking, oversexed, drug-addled, thrill-seeking, college-age characters on the road to perdition.

Available in the Library

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Ben Elton

Dead Famous

Synopsis
One house. Ten contestants. Thirty cameras. Forty microphones. Yet again the public gorges its voyeuristic appetite as another group of unknown and unremarkable people submit themselves to the brutal exposure of the televised real-life soap opera, House Arrest. Everybody knows the rules: total strangers are forced to live together while the rest of the country watches them do it. Who will crack first? Who will have sex with whom? Who will the public love and who will they hate? All the usual questions. And then, suddenly, there are some new ones. Who is the murderer? How did he or she manage to kill under the constant gaze of the thirty television cameras? Why did they do it? And who will be next?

High society

From the Back Cover
The war on drugs has been lost. The simple fact is that the whole world is rapidly becoming one vast criminal network. From pop stars and royal princes to crack whores and street kids, from the Groucho Club toilets to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, we are all partners in crime.

High Society is a story about Britain today, a criminal nation in which everybody is either breaking the law or knows people who do. It takes the reader on a hilarious, heartbreaking and terrifying journey through the kaleidoscope world that the law has created and from which the law offers no protection.

Available in the library

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William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury

Synopsis
A novel which describes the dissolution of the once aristocratic Compson family in the American South, told through the eyes of three of its members. In different ways they prove unable to deal with either the responsibility of the past or the imperatives of the present.

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Helen Fielding

Bridget Jones' Diary

In the course of the year recorded in Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget confides her hopes, her dreams, and her monstrously fluctuating poundage, not to mention her consumption of 5277 cigarettes and "Fat units 3457 (approx.) (hideous in every way)." In 365 days, she gains 74 pounds. On the other hand, she loses 72! There is also the unspoken New Year's resolution--the quest for the right man. Alas, here Bridget goes severely off course when she has an affair with her charming cad of a boss. But who would be without their e-mail flirtation focused on a short black skirt? The boss even contends that it is so short as to be nonexistent.

The Edge of Reason

More Bridget Jones

(Read the first chapter- PDF)

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

Synopsis
Everybody who is anybody is seen at Gatsby's glittering parties. None of the socialites understand Gatsby. He seems to always be watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. But as the tragic story unfolds, Gatsby's destructive dreams and passions are revealed.

Available in the Library

Read the first chapter (PDF)

Tender is the Night

Book Description
Set in the hedonistic society of the 'Roaring Twenties,' the novel chronicles the tale of a wealthy mental patient, Nicole Warren, and her marriage to her psychiatrist. The resulting saga of the troubled marriage and their circle of friends highlights the perception of problems inherent in great wealth. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Synopsis
The story of Dick and Nicole Divers, rich Americans holding court in their villa on the French Riviera during the 1920s. Into their circle comes Rosemary Hoyt, a film star, who is instantly attracted to them, but understands little of the dark secrets and hidden corruption that bind them.

Available in the library

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E.M. Forster

A Room with a View

Synopsis
In this piece of social comedy, Forster is concerned with one of his favourite themes - "the undeveloped heart" of the English middle classes, who are here represented by a group of tourists and expatriates in Florence.

Available in the Library

Howards End

Synopsis
The classic novel explores the divisions of culture and class in late-Victorian England through the story of a disputed inheritance.

Maurice
Synopsis
This is the story of a man's discovery of his true sexuality. Maurice is born into a privileged way of life, conforming to social conventions, yet he finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. Through Clive, a Cambridge friend, and Alec, the gamekeeper, he experiences a sexual awakening.

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John Fowles

The Collector

Synopsis
This is the story of a lonely young man whose sole interest is collecting butterflies - until he wins the pools - and then he begins collecting girls.

Available in the Library

The Magus

Synopsis
A novel which explores the complexities of the human mind. On a remote Greek island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. Surreal threads weave ever tighter as reality and illusion intertwine in a bizarre psychological game.

Available in the library

Stephen Fry

The Hippopotamus

Synopsis
Fired from his newspaper and disgusted with a world that undervalues him, Ted Wallace seeks a few months repose and free drink at the country mansion of his old friend, Lord Logan. But strange things have been going on at Swafford Hall, phenomena beyond the comprehension of a hippopotamus like Ted.

The Stars' Tennis Balls

Synopsis
For Ned, 1980 seems a blissful year. Handsome, charming, popular and talented, his life is progressing smoothly, effortlessly, happily. And when he meets the lovely Portia Fendeman his personal jigsaw appears complete. But timing is everything in life, and his life is about to change for ever. Things are going to get very bad indeed for innocent young Ned. A promise made to a dying teacher and a spiteful trick played by fellow pupils will rocket Ned from cricket captain to solitary confinement, from head boy to hell. When Ned emerges he is a man bent on just one thing - revenge; and revenge is a dish he plans to savour and serve to those who conspired against him. Part love story, part thriller, a gloriously rich mix that only Stephen Fry can dish up to us, The Stars' Tennis Balls will leave you happy and replete.

Available in the library

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Arthur Golden

Memoirs of a Geisha

Synopsis
Summoning up more than 20 years of Japan's most dramatic history, the geisha's story uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. It moves from a small fishing village in 1929 to the glamorous and decadent Kyoto of the 30s and on to postwar New York.

Read an excerpt (PDF)

Available in the Library

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William Golding

Lord of the Flies

Synopsis
Golding's best-known novel is the story of a group of boys who, after a plane crash, set up a fragile community on a previously uninhabited island. As memories of home recede and the blood from frenzied pig-hunts arouses them, the boys' childish fear turns into something deeper and more primitive.

Available in the Library

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Sue Grafton

Q is for Quarry

Synopsis
Mystery novel featuring wise-cracking female private investigator, Kinsey Millhone.

Read a chapter

Available in the library

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Jane Green

Bookends

Synopsis
Cath and Si are best friends, both unlucky in love. Cath is scatty, messy and emotionally closed, Si is impossibly tidy, bitchy and desperate for a man of his own. When Portia steps back into their lives, her reappearance sets off a chain of events that tests them to the limit.

Jemina J.

Synopsis
Jemima Jones is overweight - about seven stone overweight. Treated like a slave by her thin and bitchy flatmates, lorded over at the "Kilburn Herald" by the beautiful Geraldine, her only consolation is food. That and a passion for her charming, sexy colleague Ben. Her life needs to change and soon.

Mr Maybe

Synopsis
At 27, Libby thinks there's a lot to be said for a rich husband. So when Nick comes along - lovely, funny, and with no money whatsoever - she decides he's only good for a fling. Wealthy banker Ed, on the other hand, could possibly be the answer. But does Libby really know what she needs?

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Graham Greene

The heart of the Matter

Synopsis
Scobie, a police officer serving in a war-time West African state, is distrusted, being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in doing so he is forced to betray everything he believes in, with drastic and tragic consequences.

The Quiet American

Synopsis
Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious "Third Force". As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend, Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch.

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John Grisham

The Runaway Jury

Synopsis
A tale of suspense which goes behind the closed doors of a Mississippi court. In a landmark trial involving hundreds of millions of dollars, the jury starts to behave mysteriously, and at least one juror is convinced that he's being watched. Is the jury being manipulated? If so, by whom, and why?

Read the first chapter (PDF)

The Street Lawyer

Synopsis
Michael was a rising star at "Drake and Sweeney", a giant Washington DC firm with 800 lawyers. But a violent encounter with a homeless man stopped him cold. Michael survived; his assailant did not. Michael did some digging, and found a dirty little secret, which involved "Drake and Sweeney".

Read the first chapter (PDF)

The King of Torts

Read the first chapter (PDF)

The Brethren

Synopsis
Trumble, a minimum security federal prison, is home to an assortment of criminals, including three former judges. One of their scams goes awry, it ensnares the wrong victim, an innocent on the outside, a man with dangerous friends.

Read the first chapter (PDF)

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Mark Haddon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Synopsis
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.

Read the first chapter

Available in the library

Joseph Heller

Catch-22

A classic.

Read the first chapter (PDF)

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Zoë Heller

Notes on a Scandal

Synopsis
When Sheba arrives Barbara senses that she will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. Sure enough Sheba starts an affair with a pupil and is caught. When all the dust settles and Sheba's life falls apart, Barbara is there for her even if she can't condone her sexual behaviour.

Nick Hornby

High Fidelity

Synopsis
Rob is a music junkie who owns record shop in Islington. Unable to make his relationship with Laura work, he seeks refuge in the company of the two hopeless guys, and in a one night stand, only to find that life with Laura has its unexpected attractions.

Available in the Library

About a Boy

Synopsis
Will is 36 and doesn't really want children. But then he comes across 12-year-old Marcus and it's pretty clear that Marcus would like a dad. The trouble is, Marcus is weird - a boy who prefers Joni Mitchell to Nirvana. He also knows something about Will that he can definitely use.

Available in the Library

How to Be Good

Synopsis
According to her own moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's a doctor, and doctors are decent people, and her husband David is the "Angriest Man" in Holloway. When David suddenly becomes good, Katie's sums no longer add up, and she is forced to ask herself some questions.

Available in the Library

A Long Way down

Synopsis
Asks some of the big questions: about life and death, strangers and friendship, love and pain, and whether a group of losers, and pizza, can really see you through a long, dark night of the soul.

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Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is set in a technology-rich future where test-tube babies and subconscious learning dominate people’s lives. At first, the reader is introduced to the method and capabilities of genetic engineering, where scientists are able to design babies, changing their attributes (intelligence, physical strength, etc) in order to tailor a person to a specific job. Later on, we find out about subconscious learning and the effects and uses it has on the populace. Apparently this has all been going on for generations, and so the majority of people have been bio-engineered and brainwashed.
We soon find another side of the population, people who have been left out of the technological world, people who live as themselves and with freedom. When a man decides to take a holiday there (a type of quarantined park for the savage humans), he meets one of them and manages to sneak him back to the city.

Available in the Library

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P.D. JAMES

A Certain Justice

Synopsis
Venetia Aldridge QC is a distinguished barrister. Four weeks after agreeing to defend Gerry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt, Miss Aldridge is found dead. Adam Dalgliesh investigates, only to find that her many enemies include colleagues, criminals, family - and even her lover.

Cover her face

Synopsis
Sally Jupp came from the village home for unmarried mothers and seemed ideal to help Mrs Maxie run a house and look after her invalid husband. But the real Sally was very different from the docile, repentant character she seemed to be. When a murder occurs, Chief Inspector Dalgliesh arrives.

Available in the Library

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Lisa Jewell

Ralph's Party

Synopsis
A novel about a group of young (and not so young) Londoners and their relationships, decribing what it's like to be living in London in the late 1990s.

Available in the Library

Thirty-Nothing

"What did you do with the rabbit?" Not a surefire line to seduce a woman perhaps but when Dig Ryan bumps into his first love after a 12-year gap he just can't help himself. Instead of winning her back with his wit and whispered sweet nothings, Dig finds himself faced with an affliction he didn't know he had--he says completely the wrong thing at completely the wrong time. Often. But his ex, the delicious Delilah, seems as keen as he is and it looks like Dig is about to put the something into his thirty-nothing life.
So where does that leave Nadine--Dig's best friend since school? Instead of being thrilled that Dig is settling down, the reunion unlocks her insecurities and she regresses into the "big ginger gooseberry" she was as a teenager. She realises--just when it's too late--that she's in love with him, that she's always been in love with him. And, to make matters worse, she thinks she just might feel better if she gets back in touch with her ex (who Dig reckons is the Antichrist). The result is irresistible; an immensely enjoyable read that will guzzle up the hours and more than delight.

Vince and Joy

Synopsis
Vince & Joy Remember having sex for the very first time? Remember thinking: this is The One? Remember life getting in the way ? Remember wondering: what happened to the person I once was? And what happened to the person I first fell in love with? For Vince and Joy, finding your destiny is easy. Following it, isn't

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Marian Keyes

Lucy Sullivan is getting married

Synopsis
Lucy Sullivan is getting married, or is she? Mrs Nolan has read her tarot cards and predicted that Lucy will be walking up the aisle within the year. There is the small matter of no boyfriend, but then Lucy meets Gus and starts to wonder. Could he be the future Mr Lucy Sullivan?

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Last Chance Saloon

Synopsis
Tara, Katherine and Fintan have been friends since they were teenagers in Knockaway, County Clare, in the days of legwarmers, pink stretch jeans and Duran Duran. Now in their early 30s, they live in London where they are still bound together. But fate is about to step in and alter their lives.

Rachel's Holiday

Synopsis
Rachel Walsh is 27 and the miserable owner of size 8 feet. Overly fond of recreational drugs, she gets frogmarched into the Cloisters, Dublin's answer to the Betty Ford Clinic. Once there, she seeks redemption in the shape of Chris, a "man with a past".

Watermelon

Book Description
It’s bad enough that Claire’s husband James left her the day he was at the birth of their first child – I mean, if he thought it was going to upset him that much he should have just stayed at home – but to rub salt into the episiotomy, he didn’t even have the decency to leave her for someone skinny!He’s just absconded, leaving Claire with a newborn baby, a broken heart, two extra stone and an …er…birth canal ten times its normal size.In the absence of any better offers, Claire goes home to her family. To her beautiful sister Helen, her soap-watching mother, her bewildered father. And in a story that’s both hilarious and bitter-sweet, Claire just gets better.A lot better.In fact so much better that when James slithers back into her life he’s in for a bit of a surprise.

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Sushi for beginners

Synopsis
A nervous breakdown seems like a great idea: all that lying in bed and watching daytime TV. But who's going to have it? Will it be housewife Clodagh, who spends her days microwaving pasta for her demanding toddlers and waiting for her beautiful husband Dylan to come home? Or Lisa, hard, brittle and shiny as an M&M, reeling from the shock of a demotion from her fabulous job in London to a one-horse magazine in Dublin? Or Ashling, so normal she's weird?

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Angels

Synopsis
Maggie Walsh has always done everything by the book - right up until the day she walks out on her marriage. Follow her on a journey of discovery, from suburbia to a suntan, complete with cocktails and heartache, as she discovers what she really wants from life.

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John Irving

The Hotel New Hampshire

Quirky, bizarre, tragic, fiendishly funny, The Hotel New Hampshire is anything but a conventional family saga, though a family saga it certainly is. The Berry family are different. Love abounds - both healthy and incestuous. It is the overwhelming desire of the Berry father to run a hotel, which he does, with dubious success in both a former girls' school in New Hampshire, and in Vienna.
It is the Berry children who grab the readers' attention, sympathies and love - all five of them: Frank (the eldest), Franny (the weirdest), John (the narrator), Lily (the writer) and Egg (the youngest). When Irving, or rather John, writes 'Frank's queer, Franny's weird, Lily's small and Egg is Egg' the initiated reader can do no other than shout a deafening 'yes, I know what you mean!'

The World According to Garp

'Like all extraordinary books, The World According to Garp defies synopsis...' wrote the Chicago Sun-Times when Garp was first published in 1978. It is a marvellous, important, permanent novel by a serious artist of remarkable powers...
Garp is a book that captivates all who read it. Peopled with the most extraordinary characters you will ever meet, here is a novel that will make you laugh, make you weep, and, above all, make you think.

A widow for one year

Synopsis
Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character - a "difficult" woman. By no means is she conventionally "nice", but she will never be forgotten. Her story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life.

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Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day

Synopsis
An elderly butler is on a five-day motoring trip through the West Country in the 1950s. The climax of his journey is to be a reunion with his former housekeeper. This 1989 Booker Prize-winner attempts to capture a period in British history and draw a portrait of a man in old age.

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The Unconsoled

Synopsis
Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical - and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be - he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life. Ishiguro's extraordinary study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control was met on publication by consternation, vilification - and the highest praise.

Never Let Me Go

Synopsis
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there? It is only years later that Kathy, now aged 31, finally allows herself to yield to the pull of memory. What unfolds is the haunting story of how Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, slowly come to face the truth about their seemingly happy childhoods - and about their futures. Never Let Me Go is a uniquely moving novel, charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our lives.

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Jack Kerouac

On the Road

Synopsis
Love, jazz and excitement - these are all part of Sal Paradise's adventures "on the road" with his wild friend Dean Moriarty and other crazy companions as they travel together across the US.
This counterculture classic records the escapades of members of the beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast.

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D.H. Lawrence

Sons and Lovers

Synopsis
Living on the Nottinghamshire coalfields, the Morel family is beset with conflict. Gertrude, disillusioned with her inarticulate working class husband, pours her energies and aspirations into her son, Paul. Tensions develop when Paul falls in love and seeks to escape from his family ties.

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David Lodge

Changing places

Synopsis
The plate-glass, concrete jungle of Euphoria State University, USA, and the damp red-brick University of Rummidge have an annual exchange scheme. Normally the exchange passes without comment. But when Philip Swallow swaps with Professor Zapp the fates play a hand.

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Small World

The unbridled greed, pettiness, buffoonery and intellectual gobbledegook in the world of higher scholarship are the topics of this thorough and thoroughly funny "roman à English department". It's interesting for a couple of reasons, aside from its humour and lampoonery: it's an insider's view of things--always the best kind--and it takes its old- fashioned time telling a story, complete with reasonable digressions about the state of literary criticism and what may or may not be a realistic view of the academic life.
Synopsis
Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle, the lovely Angelica - the jet-propelled academics are on the move, in the air, on the make, in "Small World".

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Thinks

Synopsis
Ralph Messenger is an international academic star in the highly trendy field of language and thought research. Novelist Helen Reed arrives at the university to teach creative writing and to recover from the unexpected death of her husband. Despite huge differences in belief and temperament, they begin a secret affair - with complicated consequences, comic and tragic, for those around them. Witty, elegant and timely, THINKS is a dazzling exploration of love and deception, the enigmas of consciousness and the intricacies of the human heart.

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Author! Author

Synopsis
Framed by a dramatic and moving account of Henry James's last illness, Author! Author! begins in the early 1880s, describing James's friendship with the genial Punch artist, George Du Maurier, and his intimate but problematic relationship with fellow American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. At the end of the decade Henry, worried by the failure of his books to sell, resolves to achieve fame and fortune as a playwright while Du Maurier diversifies into writing novels. The consequences that ensue mingle comedy, irony, pathos, and suspense. As Du Maurier's novel Trilby becomes the bestseller of the century, Henry anxiously awaits the opening night of his make-or-break play, Guy Domville. This event, on January 5, 1895, and its complex sequel form the climax to Lodge's absorbing novel. Thronged with vividly drawn characters, some of them with famous names, Author! Author! presents a fascinating panorama of literary and theatrical life in late Victorian England. But at its heart is a portrait, rendered with remarkable empathy, of a writer who never achieved popular success in his lifetime or resolved his sexual identity, yet wrote some of the greatest novels about love in the English language.

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Josie Lloyd, Emlyn Rees

Come Together

Synopsis
Follows the fortunes of Jack - struggling painter, lad about town, charmer - and Amy - disorganized, funny and looking for love. Whilst Jack outlines his tactics for a night on the town and the seduction of the gorgeous Amy, Amy plans how to hook the first decent man she's met in ages.

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Daphne Du Maurier

Rebecca

Synopsis
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ...Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers ...Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity.

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Daniel Philippe Mason

The Piano Tuner

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Yann Martel

Life of Pi

Some books defy categorisation: Life of Pi, the second novel from Canadian writer Yann Martel, is a case in point: just about the only thing you can say for certain about it is that it is fiercely and admirably unique. The plot, if that’s the right word, concerns the oceanic wanderings of a lost boy, the young and eager Piscine Patel of the title (Pi). After a colourful and loving upbringing in gorgeously-hued India, the Muslim-Christian-animistic Pi sets off for a fresh start in Canada. His blissful voyage is rudely interrupted when his boat is scuppered halfway across the Pacific, and he is forced to rough it in a lifeboat with a hyena, a monkey, a whingeing zebra and a tiger called Richard. That would be bad enough, but from here on things get weirder: the animals start slaughtering each other in a veritable frenzy of allegorical bloodlust, until Richard the tiger and Pi are left alone to wander the wastes of ocean, with plenty of time to ponder their fate, the cruelty of the gods, the best way to handle storms and the various different recipes for oothappam, scrapple and coconut yam kootu. The denouement is pleasantly neat. According to the blurb, thirtysomething Yann Martel spent long years in Alaska, India, Mexico, France, Costa Rica, Turkey and Iran, before settling in Canada. All those cultures and more have been poured into this spicy, vivacious, kinetic and very entertaining fiction. --Sean Thomas

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Alexander McCall Smith

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Synopsis
Wayward daughters. Missing Husbands. Philandering partners. Curious conmen. If you've got a problem, and no one else can help you, then pay a visit to Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only - and finest - female private detective. Her methods may not be conventional, and her manner not exactly Miss Marple, but she's got warmth, wit and canny intuition on her side, not to mention Mr J.L.B. Maketoni, the charming proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. And Precious is going to need them all as she sets out on the trail of a missing child, a case that tumbles our heroine into a hotbed of strange situations and more than a little danger ... Delightfully different, THE NO.1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY offers a captivating glimpse of an unusual world.

Excerpted from The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith.
Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe - the only lady private detective in Botswana - brewed redbush tea. And three mugs - one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course.

But there was also the view, which again could appear on no inventory. How could any such list describe what one saw when one looked out from Mma Ramotswe's door? To the front, an acacia tree, the thorn tree which dots the wide edges of the Kalahari; the great white thorns, a warning; the olive-grey leaves, by contrast so delicate. In its branches, in the late afternoon, or in the cool of the early morning, one might see a Go-Away Bird, or hear it, rather. And beyond the acacia, over the dusty road, the roofs of the town under a cover of trees and scrub bush; on the horizon, in a blue shimmer of heat, the hills, like improbable, overgrown termite-mounds.

Everybody called her Mma Ramotswe, although if people had wanted to be formal, they would have addresses her as Mma Mma Ramotswe. This is the right thing for a person of stature, but which she had never used of herself. So it was always Mma Ramotswe, rather than Precious Ramotswe, a name which very few people employed.

She was a good detective, and a good woman. A good woman in a good country, one might say. She loved her country, Botswana, which is a place of peace, and she loved Africa, for all its trials. I am not ashamed to be called an African patriot, said Mma Ramotswe. I love all the people whom God made, but I especially know how to love the people who live in this place. They are my people, my brothers and sisters. It is my duty to help them to solve mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do

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Alexander McCall Smith

44 Scotland Street

Synopsis
The story revolves around the comings and goings at No. 44 Scotland Street, a fictitious building in a real street in Edinburgh. Immediately recognisable are the Edinburgh chartered surveyor, stalwart of the Conservative Association, who dreams of membership of Scotland's most exclusive golf club. We have the pushy Stockbridge mother, and her prodigiously talented five-year-old son, who is making good progress with the saxophone and with his Italian. Then there is Domenica Macdonald who is that type of Edinburgh lady who sees herself as a citizen of a broader intellectual world. In McCall Smith's hands such characters retain charm and novelty, simultaneously arousing both mirth and empathy. 44 Scotland Street is vintage McCall Smith, tackling issues of trust and honesty, snobbery and hypocrisy, love and loss, but all with great lightness of touch. Clever, elegant and funny, this is a novel that provides huge entertainment but which is underpinned by the moral dilemmas of everyday life and the characters' struggles to resolve them.

Sunday Express, 27 March 2005
'a hilarious yet sharply insightful tale of middle-class Edinburgh ... a joyous, charming portrait of city life and human foibles'

Times, 20 August 2005
‘Addicts of McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe novels will recognise the gentle humour … of his latest work’

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Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

The Nanny Diaries

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Daphne du Maurier

Rebecca

Synopsis
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ... Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers ... Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity.

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Ian McEwan

The innocent

Book Description
The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present; comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life – and to lose his unwanted innocence. The promise of his new life begins to be fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening – a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.

Amsterdam

Synopsis
A contemporary morality tale that is as profound as it is witty. Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday are former lovers of the recently-deceased Molly Lane. They make a pact following her funeral, which both tests their friendship to the limits and has consequences neither has foreseen.

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Atonement

We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama The Trials of Arabella to welcome home her elder, idolised brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins, the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren't up to the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting preoccupations come onto the scene. The charlady's son Robbie Turner appears to be forcing Briony's sister Cecilia to strip in the Fountain and sends her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen for a war to promote his new "Army Amo" bar; and upstairs Briony's migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon, secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present...
The interwar upper-middle-class setting of the book's long, masterfully sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green, but as we move forward--eventually to the turn of the 21st century--the novel's central concerns emerge, and McEwan's voice becomes clear, even personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains and dangers of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling what readers make of your writing. McEwan shouldn't have any doubts about readers of Atonement: this is a thoughtful, provocative and at times moving book that will have readers applauding.--Alan Stewart

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Saturday

Synopsis
Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and proud father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world - the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city and his happy family life are under threat. Later, Perowne makes his way to his weekly squash game through London streets filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors. A minor car accident brings him into a confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive, young man, on the edge of violence. To Perowne's professional eye, there appears to be something profoundly wrong with him. Towards the end of a day rich in incident and filled with Perowne's celebrations of life's pleasures, his family gathers for a reunion. But with the sudden appearance of Baxter, Perowne's earlier fears seem about to be realised.

Excerpted from Saturday by Ian McEwan.
One
Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet. It’s not clear to him when exactly he became conscious, nor does it seem relevant. He’s never done such a thing before, but he isn’t alarmed or even faintly surprised, for the movement is easy, and pleasurable in his limbs, and his back and legs feel unusually strong. He stands there, naked by the bed – he always sleeps naked – feeling his full height, aware of his wife’s patient breathing and of the wintry bedroom air on his skin. That too is a pleasurable sensation. His bedside clock shows three forty. He has no idea what he’s doing out of bed: he has no need to relieve himself, nor is he disturbed by a dream or some element of the day before, or even by the state of the world. It’s as if, standing there in the darkness, he’s materialised out of nothing, fully formed, unencumbered. He doesn’t feel tired!
, despite the hour or his recent labours, nor is his conscience troubled by any recent case. In fact, he’s alert and empty-headed and inexplicably elated. With no decision made, no motivation at all, he begins to move towards the nearest of the three bedroom windows and experiences such ease and lightness in his tread that he suspects at once he’s dreaming or sleepwalking. If it is the case, he’ll be disappointed. Dreams don’t interest him; that this should be real is a richer possibility. And he’s entirely himself, he is certain of it, and he knows that sleep is behind him: to know the difference between it and waking, to know the boundaries, is the essence of sanity.
The bedroom is large and uncluttered. As he glides across it with almost comic facility, the prospect of the experience ending saddens him briefly, then the thought is gone. He is by the centre window, pulling back the tall folding wooden shutters with care so as not to wake Rosalind. In this he’s selfish as well as solicitous. He doesn’t wish to be asked what he’s about – what answer could he give, and why relinquish this moment in the attempt? He opens the second shutter, letting it concertina into the casement, and quietly raises the sash window. It is many feet taller than him, but it slides easily upwards, hoisted by its concealed lead counterweight. His skin tightens as the February air pours in around him, but he isn’t troubled by the cold. From the second floor he faces the night, the city in its icy white light, the skeletal trees in the square, and thirty feet below, the black arrowhead railings like a row of spears. There’s a degree or two of frost and the air is clear. The streetlamp glare hasn’t quite obliterated all the stars; above the Regency façade on the other side of the square hang remnants of constellations in the southern sky. That particular façade is a reconstruction, a pastiche – wartime Fitzrovia took some hits from the Luftwaffe – and right behind is the Post Office Tower, municipal and seedy by day, but at night, half-concealed and decently illuminated, a valiant memorial to more optimistic days.
And now, what days are these? Baffled and fearful, he mostly thinks when he takes time from his weekly round to consider. But he doesn’t feel that now. He leans forwards, pressing his weight onto his palms against the sill, exulting in the emptiness and clarity of the scene. His vision – always good – seems to have sharpened. He sees the paving stone mica glistening in the pedestrianised square, pigeon excre- ment hardened by distance and cold into something almost beautiful, like a scattering of snow. He likes the symmetry of black cast-iron posts and their even darker shadows, and the lattice of cobbled gutters. The overfull litter baskets suggest abundance rather than squalor; the vacant benches set around the circular gardens look benignly expectant of their daily traffic – cheerful lunchtime office crowds, the solemn, studious boys from the Indian hostel, lovers in quiet raptures or crisis, the crepuscular drug dealers, the ruined old lady with her wild, haunting calls.!
Go away! she’ll shout for hours at a time, and squawk harshly, sounding like some marsh bird or zoo creature.
Standing here, as immune to the cold as a marble statue, gazing towards Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of façades, scaffolding and pitched roofs, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece – millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work. And the Perownes’ own corner a triumph of congruent proportion; the perfect square laid out by Robert Adam enclosing a perfect circle of garden – an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by street light from above, and from below by fibre-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting.
An habitual observer of his own moods, he wonders about this sustained, distorting euphoria. Perhaps down at the molecular level there’s been a chemical accident while he slept – something like a spiled tray of drinks, prompting dopamine-like receptors to initiate a kindly cascade of intracellular events; or it’s the prospect of a Saturday, or the paradoxical consequence of extreme tiredness. It’s true, he finished the week in a state of unusual depletion. He came home to an empty house, and lay in the bath with a book, content to be talking to no one. It was his literate, too literate daughter Daisy who sent the biography of Darwin which in turn has something to do with a Conrad novel she wants him to read and which he has yet to start

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Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman

Synopsis
This play tells the story of Willy Loman, an ageing salesman, who is a failure in both his business and private life. Fired by his firm, ignored by his children, his humiliation ends in suicide.

From the Back Cover
Miller's most famous play, it is the story of the American Dream gone awry when a small man is destroyed by society's false values. Death of a Salesman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 and continues to shine on stages throughout the world even today.

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Maggie O'Farrell

My Lover's Love

Synopsis
A compulsive tale of betrayal and its impact upon a group of flatmates and lovers, Maggie O'Farrell's second novel does not disappoint. With the sensuality, passion and emotional acuteness which characterised her debut, she has written a gripping exploration of the ambivalence at the heart of intimate relationships, a keenly observed portrayal of shifting metropolitan lives and a superbly imagined story of a haunting. When Lily moves into Marcus's flat and plunges headlong into a relationship, she must contend not merely with the disapproval of flatmate Aidan, but with a more intangible, hostile presence. Could it be that Sinead, Marcus's ex, is trying to communicate with her? When Lily begins to 'see' Sinead first about the flat, and then on the streets of London, she must question not merely her sanity, but whether the man she loves is someone she can, or indeed ought to live with at all.

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George Orwell

Ninety Eighty Four

Synopsis
A satire on the horrors of totalitarianism, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is set in a society run by Big Brother where people are made to conform to orthodoxy by the Thought Police. Winston Smith yearns for truth and liberty, but he comes to realize that he cannot outwit the forces at work.

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Animal Farm

Book Description
At once an allegory for both utopia and totalitarianism, Animal Farm is a story that expresses a dismal view of humans and their attempts to create a just society without compassion, history, and nonviolence. Orwell's book is decidedly anti-utopian and yet an unforgettable morality tale that entertains as it teaches.

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Allison Pearson

I Don't Know How She Does It

Synopsis
Meet Kate Reddy, fund manager and mother of two. She can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones and get herself and two children washed and dressed and out of the house in half an hour. A victim of time famine, Kate counts seconds like other women count calories. As she hurtles between appointments, through her head spools the crazy tape-loop of the working mother's life: must remember client reports, bouncy castles, transatlantic phone call, nativity play, check Dow Jones, cancel hygienist, squeeze sagging pelvic floor, make time for sex. Factor in a manipulative nanny, an Australian boss who looks at Kate's breasts as if they're on special offer, a long suffering husband, her quietly aghast in-laws, two needy children and an e-mail lover, and you have a woman juggling so many balls that some day soon something's going to hit the ground. In an uproariously funny and achingly sad novel, Allison Pearson captures the guilty secret lives of working mothers, the self-recriminations, comic deceptions, forgeries, giddy exhaustion and despair as no other writer has ever done. With fierce irony and a sparkling style, she brilliantly dramatises the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the 21st century.

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Allan and Barbara Pease

Why Men don't Listen and Women can't read maps

Synopsis
Bestselling authors Allan and Barbara Pease -- spotlight the differences in the way men and women think. Barbara and Allan Pease travelled the world collating the dramatic findings of new research on the brain, investigating evolutionary biology, analysing psychologists research, studying social change and annoying the locals. The result is Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps the sometimes shocking, always illuminating, frequently hilarious look at where the battle line is drawn between the sexes, why it was drawn and how to cross it. Revealed: Why men really can't do more than one thing at a time Why women make such a mess of parallel parking Why men should never lie to women Why women talk so much and men so little Why men love erotic images and women aren't impressed Why women prefer to simply talk it through Why men offer solutions, but hate advice Why women despair about men's silences Why men want sex, and women need love WHAT MEN AND WOMEN REALLY WANT This is a must read for all men and women who love each other, hate each other, or simply co exist. You will learn as much about yourself and how to improve your relationships, as you will about the opposite sex.

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J.B. Priestley

An Inspector Calls

In this play an inspector interrupts a party to investigate a girl's suicide, and implicates each of the party-makers in her death.

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Kathy Reiths

Grave Secrets

Synopsis
Dr. Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist for the medical examiners in Montreal and North Carolina, departs from home turf to journey to Guatemala, where her skills will be tested to the limit. It was a summer morning in 1982 when soldiers entered the village of Chupan Ya and rounded up the women and children. Families and neighbors refer to their lost members as "the disappeared". The bodies are said to lie in a mass grave. Tempe brings all her skill to uncover the savagery of the past. But something savage is happening today. Four girls are missing from Guatemala City, including the daughter of a high-ranking government official. When a young archaeologist is brutally murdered, Tempe realizes that she may be the next victim in a web of intrigue that connects the historical and contemporary murders.

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Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea

Synopsis
Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress - product of an inbred, decadent, expatriate community - a sensitive girl at once beguiled and repelled by the lush Jamaican landscape. Soon after her marriage to Rochester rumours of madness in the Cosway family poison Rochester's mind against her.

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J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

Synopsis
A 16-year old American boy relates in his own words the experiences he goes through at school and after, and reveals with unusual candour the workings of his own mind. What does a boy in his teens think and feel about his teachers, parents, friends and acquaintances?

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Nine Stories

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Alice Sebold

The Lovely Bones

Synopsis
Susie Salmon, murdered at the age of 14, watches from heaven as her friends and siblings grow up and do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But then she finds that life is not quite finished with her yet.

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Bernard Shaw

Pymalion

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Zadie Smith

White Teeth

"Smith can write. Her novel has energy, pace, humour and fully formed characters; it is blissfully free of the introversion and self-consciousness detail that mar many first novels. Smith has stories to tell and, in the tradition of Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie, she gets on with them; the dialogue is pitch perfect, the comedy neat and underplayed." Daily Telegraph

"This is a strikingly clever and funny book with a passion for ideas, for language and for the rich tragi-comedy of life...It is her ebullient, simple prose and her generous understanding of human nature that make Zadie Smith's novel outstanding. It is not only great fun to read, but full of hope. Written by a member of a generation described by the author herself as "children with first and last names on a great collision course", the reader is encouraged to look forward, like Irie Jones, to 'a time, not far from now, when roots won't matter any more.'" Sunday Telegraph

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Zadie Smith

On Beauty

Synopsis
Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering Professor at Wellington College. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths, and faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Then Jerome, Howard's oldest son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps. Increasingly, the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register...

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Muriel Spark

Far Cry from Kensington

Synopsis
Set in a rooming house near South Kensington underground this novel portrays the horror as well as the romance in bedsitter land. It is written by the author of "Girls of Slender Means" and "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie".

The Pride of Jean Broodie

Synopsis
She was a schoolmistress with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic, her ideas were progressive, even shocking. And when she decided to transform a group of young girls under her tutelage into the "creme de la creme" of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have predicted the outcome.

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John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men

Synopsis
Recounts the travails of the Joad family as they struggle to reach California from Oklahoma during the Depression years.

The Grapes of Wrath

Synopsis
A parable of commitment, loneliness, hope and loss, OF MICE AND MEN is a powerful and moving portrayal of two men striving to understand their own unique place in the world. Drifters in search of work, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie have nothing in the world except each other - and a dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch, but their hopes are doomed as Lennie - struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and feelings of jealousy - becomes a victim of his own strength. Tackling universal themes, friendship and a shared vision, and giving a voice to America's lonely and dispossessed, OF MICE AND MEN remains Steinbeck's most popular work.

East of Eden

Synopsis
Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity; the inexplicability of love; and the murderous consequences of love's absence.

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The pearl

Synopsis
Kino is a Mexican pearl fisher in the Gulf of California. When he and his wife, Juana, have a baby, their joy is complete ... until the infant is bitten by a scorpion. Kino finds a great pearl worth a fortune, but it brings only tragedy and evil to his family.

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Donna Tartt

The Secret History

Synopsis
The narrator of this story is a boy who leaves California to attend a college in New England. He falls in with a group of students of Ancient Greek. Four of their number work themselves into a trance-like condition one night, and murder a local farmer. Bunny then tries to blackmail the others.

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Joanna Trollope

The Best of Friends

From the Back Cover
Gina and Laurence had been the best of friends ever since they were idealistic teenagers. They had never been in love - just friends. Gina had eventually married the exquisitely tasteful Fergus (who had changed his name from Leslie to something more upmarket), and Laurence had married down-to-earth Hilary. Gina and Fergus lived in stylish perfection at High Place. Laurence and Hilary had spent their married lives turning Laurence's legacy, The Bee House, into both home and hotel. Then, with elegant disdain, Fergus Bedford announced he was leaving Gina and their teenage daughter. As Gina's misery ricocheted through the two homes, she turned for emotional support to Laurence, her dearest friend. And as Laurence gave comfort, so his own marriage and the stability of his children edged towards destruction.

The Rector's Wife

From the Back Cover
For twenty years Anna Bouverie, as a priest's wife (£9000 a year and a redbrick rectory that looked like a bus shelter) had served God and the parish in a diversity of ways. She had organised the deanery suppers, made cakes for the Brownies' Easter Cake Bake, delivered parish magazines, washed and ironed her husband's surplices (not altogether perfectly according to Miss Dunstable), grown her own vegetables and clothed herself and her children in left-over jumble-sale items.
When her husband failed to gain promotion to archdeacon and retreated into isolated bitterness, and the bullying of her younger daughter at the local comprehensive reached unendurable proportions, Anna suddenly rebelled. Taking a job in the local supermarket she earned money, a sense of her own worth, the shocked disapproval of the parish, and the icy fury of her husband.

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Anne Tyler

Back When We Were Grownups

Synopsis
After losing her husband in a motor accident, at 53 Rebecca asks herself whether she is an imposter in her own life. Is she really the joyous and outgoing celebrator that her family think she is? What would have happened if she'd married her college sweetheart? And should she try to find him again?

A Patchwork Planet

Synopsis
Barnaby Gaitlin is a loser - just short of 30, he's the black sheep of a philanthropic Baltimore family. He has an almost pathological curiosity about other people's lives, and a hopeless charm which attracts the kind of angelic woman who wants to save him from himself.

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Breathing Lessons

Synopsis
One hot summer day Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore towards Pennsylvania, to the funeral of the husband of Maggie's best friend. During the course of that journey, the author shows all there is to know about a marriage. The author also wrote "Saint Maybe" and "Morgan's Passing".

Ladder of Years

Synopsis
One day, during a family seaside holiday, something which has already begun to fray quietly snaps. Delia simply walks off the beach, away from her husband, Sam, and her three almost grown-up children. In a nearby town, she reinvents herself as a serious and independent-minded woman without ties.

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Alice Walker

The Color Purple

Synopsis
Set in the segregated world of the Deep South between the wars, this text is a challenging read for students aged 14 and above. It is part of a series of contemporary women's writing, in editions designed specifically for schools.

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Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited

Synopsis
The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmain family and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recgonize his spiritual and social distance from them.

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Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest

Read the First Act

Available in the Library

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Read it on line

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Tennesse Williams

Sweet Bird of Youth and other plays

Synopsis
Tennessee Williams's sensuous, atmospheric plays transformed the American stage with their passion, exoticism and vibrant characters who rage against their personal demons and the modern world. This collection includes a number of William's plays, including "A Streetcar Named Desire".

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