Λογοτεχνία

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

When you open up, who will you let in?Alex Morris has lost everything:her relationship, her career and her faith in the future. Moving to Edinburgh to escape her demons, Alex takes a job teaching at a Pupil Referral Unit. It's a place for kids whose behaviour is so extreme that they cannot be taught in a normal classroom. Alex is fragile with grief and way out of her depth. Her fourth-year students are troubled and violent. In desperation to reach them, Alex turns to the stories she knows best. Greek tragedy isn't the most obvious way to win over such damaged children, yet these tales of fate, family and vengeance speak directly to them. Enthralled by the bloodthirsty justice of the ancient world, the teenagers begin to weave the threads of their own tragedy - one that Alex watches, helpless to prevent.

A collection of short fiction stories spanning the last 30 years from award-winning author Russell Banks.

War is raging between the Greeks and the Trojans. Achilles, the great warrior champion of the Greek army, is angrily sulking in his tent and refusing to fight, after a row with his leader Agamemnon. But when the Trojan king Hector kills Achilles' beloved friend, he plunges back into the battle to seek his bloody revenge - even though he knows it will bring about his own doom. Robert Graves's gripping, vigorous retelling of The Iliad portrays quarrelling kings and tarnished heroes, who leave suffering women behind them and are watched over by capricious gods and goddesses. It takes a revered classic back to its roots as popular entertainment.

12 of the popular Father Brown mysteries appear in this copiously annotated edition. Includes "The Blue Cross," "The Hammer of God," "The Eye of Apollo," and more.

A well worked fantasy. -- Kirkus. While stranded in a desert of central Australia, a small fossil-hunting expedition makes an unexpected discovery from prehistory: living colonies of six-foot-tall ants and giant mantises.

A dazzling and intricate tale from Elif Shafak, Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World - chosen for the Duchess of Cornwall's online book club The Reading Room'There were six of us: the master, the apprentices and the white elephant. We built everything together...'Sixteenth century Istanbul: a stowaway arrives in the city bearing an extraordinary gift for the Sultan. The boy is utterly alone in a foreign land, with no worldly possessions to his name except Chota, a rare white elephant destined for the palace menagerie.

So begins an epic adventure that will see young Jahan rise from lowly origins to the highest ranks of the Sultan's court. Along the way he will meet deceitful courtiers and false friends, gypsies, animal tamers, and the beautiful, mischievous Princess Mihrimah. He will journey on Chota's back to the furthest corners of the Sultan's kingdom and back again.

And one day he will catch the eye of the royal architect, Sinan, a chance encounter destined to change Jahan's fortunes forever. Filled with all the colour of the Ottoman Empire, when Istanbul was the teeming centre of civilisation, The Architect's Apprentice is a magical, sweeping tale of one boy and his elephant caught up in a world of wonder and danger. 'A gorgeous picture of a city teeming with secrets, intrigue and romance' The Times'Exuberant, epic and comic, fantastical and realistic .

. . like all good stories it conveys deeper meanings about human experience' Financial Times'Fascinating.

A vigorous evocation of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power' Sunday Times'Intricate, multi-layered, resplendent, vividly evoked, beautifully written' Observer*Elif Shafak's latest novel The Island of Missing Trees is available now*

A wonderful new selection of Henry James's short stories exploring the relationship between art and life, edited by Michael Gorra. This volume gathers seven of the very best of Henry James's short stories, all focussing the relationship between art and life. In 'The Aspern Papers', a critic is determined to get his hands on a great poet's papers hidden in a faded Venetian house - not matter what the human cost.

'The Author of Beltraffio', 'The Lesson of the Master' and 'The Figure in the Carpet' all focus on naive young men's unsettling encounters with their literary heroes. In 'The Middle Years', a dying novelist begins to glimpse his own potential, while 'The Real Thing' and 'Greville Fane' both explore the tension between artistic and commercial success. These fables of the creative life reveal James at his ironic, provocative best.

Henry James was born in 1843 in New York and died in London in 1916. In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, autobiography and travel, he wrote some twenty novels, the first published being Roderick Hudson (1875). They include The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.

Michael Gorra is Professor of English at Smith College and the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (2012), a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in biography.

THE ATHENIAN MURDERS is a brilliant, very entertaining and absolutely original literary mystery, revolving round two intertwined riddles. In classical Athens, one of the pupils of Plato's Academy is found dead. His idealistic teacher suspects that this wasn't an accident and asks Herakles, known as the 'Decipherer of Enigmas', to investigate the death and ultimately a dark, irrational and subversive cult. The second plot unfolds in parallel through the footnotes of the translator of the text. As he proceeds with his work, he becomes increasingly convinced that the original author has hidden a second meaning, which can be brought to light by interpreting certain repeated words and images. As the main plot and also the translation of the manuscript advances, there are certain sinister coincidences, and it seems that the text is addressing him personally and in an increasingly menacing manner... THE ATHENIAN MURDERS constitutes a highly compelling, entertaining and intelligent game about the different ways we can see and read reality, about our refusal to take things 'as they are' and our need to interpret hidden meanings into everyday life.