Λογοτεχνία

This is an intense drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona's love for Othello, the Moor, transcends racial prejudice; but the envious Iago conspires to devastate their lives. In its vivid rendering of racism, sexism, contested identities, and the savagery lurking within civilisation, Othello is arguably the most topical and accessible tragedy from Shakespeare's major phase as a dramatist.

When Joel Knox's mother dies, he is sent into the exotic unknown of the Deep South to live with a father he has never seen. But once he gets there, everyone is curiously evasive when Joel asks to see his father. Truman Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms is a brilliant, searching study of homosexuality set in a shimmering landscape of heat, mystery and decadence.

In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalizingly springs to life.

Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty. Thrumming with secrets and shape-shifting geographies, Dorothy Tse's extraordinary debut novel is a boldly inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions.

'O the deceitfulness of the heart of man! This John, whom I took to be the honestest of men ...this very fellow was all the while a vile hypocrite, and a perfidious wretch, and helping to carry on my ruin'. Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, alone in the world, is pursued by her dead mistress' son. Although she is attracted to Mr B, she holds out against his demands, determined to protect her virginity and abide by her moral standards. Psychlologically acute in its explorations of sex, freedom and power, Richardson's first novel caused a sensation when it was published. Richly comic and lively, Pamela contains a diverse cast of characters ranging from the vulgar and malevolent Mrs Jewkes to the agressive but awkward country squire.

Milton's celebrated epic poem, now in a gorgeous new clothbound edition designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. These delectable and collectable editions are bound in high-quality, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. In Paradise Lost Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time.

And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties - blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration and briefly in danger of execution - Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence towards authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to 'justify the ways of God to men', or exposes the cruelty of Christianity. John Milton (1608-1674) spent his early years in scholarly pursuit.

In 1649 he took up the cause for the new Commonwealth, defending the English revolution both in English and Latin - and sacrificing his eyesight in the process. He risked his life by publishing The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth on the eve of the Restoration (1660). His great poems were published after this political defeat.

John Leonard is a Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

Satan is out for revenge. His rebellion has failed, he has been cast out from heaven and is doomed to spend eternity in hell. Somehow he must find a way to prove his power and wound his enemies. He fixes upon God's beloved new creations, Adam and Eve, as the vehicles of his vengeance. In this dramatic and influential epic, Milton tells the story of the serpent and the apple, the fall of man and the exile from paradise in stunningly vivid and powerful verse.

One of the pillars of nineteenth-century Russian prose fiction alongside towering figures such as Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev started his writing career as a poet, gaining much critical acclaim and renown in that field. The title piece of this collection, Parasha, which brought the young author to the attention of the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky and established his reputation, is a humorous narrative poem in the vein of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin or Lermontov's Sashka, telling the story of a young woman's marriage to her dull, unromantic neighbour and the couple's humdrum and more or less happy life ever after.

Also contained in this volume are four other narrative poems by Turgenev - Andrei, A Conversation, The Landowner and The Village Priest - all showing the author's early interest in ordinary stories of Russian life and all displaying the wit and stylistic versatility that we have come to associate with his more famous prose works.

"One woman dead, another missing-and time is running out politically incorrect detective Andreas Kaldis, promoted out of Athens to serve as police chief for Mykonos, is certain his homicide investigation days are over. Murders don't happen in tourist heaven. At least that's what he's thinking as he stares at the remains of a young woman, ritually bound and buried on a pile of human bones inside a remote mountain church. Teamed with the nearly-retired local homicide chief, Andreas tries to find the killer before the media can destroy the island's fabled reputation with a barrage of world-wide attention on a mystery that's haunted Mykonos undetected for decades . When another young woman disappears, political niceties no longer matter. With the investigation now a rescue operation, Andreas races against a killer intent on claiming a new victim."--