Literature

In this first full collection since Not the End of the World, we meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man whose luck changes when a horse speaks to him. With clockwork intricacy, inventiveness and sharp social observation, Kate Atkinson conjures a feast for the imagination, a constantly changing multiverse in which nothing is quite as it seems.

With the deftest of touches, the characters are once again brought to life’ JOANNE HARRIS‘The halls of Valhalla have been crying out for Gaiman to tell their stories’ OBSERVERThe great Norse myths, which have inspired so much of modern fiction, are dazzlingly retold by Neil Gaiman. Tales of dwarfs and frost giants, of treasure and magic, and of Asgard, home to the gods: Odin the all-father, highest and oldest of the Aesir; his mighty son Thor, whose hammer Mjollnir makes the mountain giants tremble; Loki, wily and handsome, reliably unreliable in his lusts; and Freya, more beautiful than the sun or the moon, who spurns those who seek to control her. From the dawn of the world to the twilight of the gods, this is a thrilling, vivid retelling of the Norse myths from the award-winning, bestselling Neil Gaiman. *This book has been printed with two different cover designs. We are unable to accept requests for a specific cover. The different covers will be assigned to orders at random*

Set in the mid-19th century, and written from the author's first-hand experience, North and South follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the vital but turbulent north. Elizabeth Gaskell's skilful narrative uses an unusual love story to show how personal and public lives were woven together in a newly industrial society. This is a tale of hard-won triumphs - of rational thought over prejudice and of humane care over blind deference to the market. Readers in the twenty-first century will find themselves absorbed as this Victorian novel traces the origins of problems and possibilities which are still challenging a hundred and fifty years later: the complex relationships, public and private, between men and women of different classes.

Read the haunting love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar. When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past. 'Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around' Time Out'Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility' Guardian'This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows' Independent on Sunday

"One day after the races, I sat down and wrote the heading Notes of a Dirty Old Man, opened a beer, and the writing got done by itself... Just sit by the window, lift the beer and let it come. Anything that wanted to arrive, arrived."

This collection of Bukowski's columns for an underground LA newspaper epitomizes his style of gritty realism. Writing as himself, or his alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, Bukowski delves into America's lowlife to eulogise life's losers and antiheroes. Packed with violence, women, gambling and booze, Bukowski's semi-autobiographical stories veer between hilarity and despair, as he extols the inherent beauty and futility of life.
Charles Bukowski was one of America's best-known and most prolific writers. During his lifetime Bukowski published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose including the novels "Post Office" (1971), "Factotum" (1975), "Women" (1978) and "Pulp" (1994), all available from Virgin Books.

Arthur Maxley is a tense and listless young man. One day he receives a letter from his long-estranged father. Arthur's fear and aversion to the man is powerful, yet his compulsion to see his father is irresistible. After their meeting, Arthur is propelled into a night of drinking and spontaneous intimacy with a beautiful young woman. But as the memories of childhood trauma surface and disorientate, Arthur's night out rises towards the pitch of disaster.

'Two days after Notre Dame burned, I flew to Paris to appear on the TV programme La Grande Librairie for a discussion about cathedrals. The following morning I had breakfast at the Hotel Bristol with my French publisher and she asked me to write a short book about Notre Dame and what it means to all of us. She said she would donate the publisher's profits to the rebuilding fund and, if I wished, I could do the same with my royalties. Yes, I said; of course, I'd love to.' Ken FollettIn aid of the crucial restoration work to restore Paris's great cathedral, Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals is a moving, short piece of non-fiction celebrating the stunning history of this beloved building, from Ken Follett, author of the multi-million copy selling Kingsbridge series. This edition contains an exclusive extract from The Evening and the Morning, a prequel to The Pillars of the Earth, publishing Autumn 2020. A minimum of 50p per copy on each sale of this book will go to the charity La Fondation du Patrimoine.

"Nouns" is a collection of 30 prose-poems each of which attempts to define a noun. The collection reads as
a constellation of narratives, a space where the familiar collides with the fantastical to create associations that are as humorous as they are heartbreaking.
Designed to look like a pocket-sized poetry book, "Nouns" brings out a compact yet light feel as it consists of
one kind of paper, inside and out.
Each book is accompanied by a unique postcard from a series of illustrations, eight in total, made by the author Margarita Athanasiou.
The postcards were printed at the
risoprinter of DOLCE in one, two
or three colors and they are all
numbered. Each illustration comes in
an edition of 44.

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas's fatal decision to fight in the war. The book also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke were 'making it new' - vehemently and pugnaciously. These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented by his work and his marriage. But as his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century. Their writing was far more than just war poetry, but it was World War I that put an ocean between them. Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old. It is these roads taken - and those not taken - that are at the heart of this remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas's tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.

This representative selection from the work of one of modern Greece's most fascinating poets was made shortly after his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979. It is drawn from all periods of his distinguished career and traces his development from early surrealism, in which he transforms French influence into a distinct personal voice and mythology, through the dramatic style of "The Axion Esti" with its blend of spirituality and earthiness, up to the later work in which he experiments with new modes for expressing his perennial themes. The poems are chosen, introduced and mainly translated by the leading translators of modern Greek poetry, Edmund Keeley and the late Philip Sherrard, whose collaborations also included translations of Seferis, Cavafy and Sikelianos. Other contributors to the book include George Savidis, Nanos Valaoritis and John Stathatos.