Literature

"Winter Love is startlingly good: an intense, compelling story of illicit desire and heartbreak that’s also a fabulous evocation of worn-out wartime life. A blistering, unsettling, darkly romantic read." - SARAH WATERS “This short and intense shock of a book transports us to the dark streets of wartime London to experience the pleasures and pains of forbidden love” - CATHY RENTZENBRINKFrom the moment Red encounters her charismatic new college classmate, Mara, she is drawn in. Recently-married Mara is stylish and colourful and has a glamorous ease that lights up wintry Blitz-ridden London. Their friendship soon becomes an illicit but exhilarating affair exploring the enticing obsessive power, and long agonising hold, of love. First published in 1962, Winter Love is an explosive unpredictable love story told in exquisite, intimate prose.

Elfrida Phipps loves her new life in her pretty Hampshire village. She has a tiny cottage, her faithful dog Horace and the friendship of the neighbouring Blundells - particularly Oscar - to ensure that her days include companionship as well as independence. But an unforeseen tragedy upsets Elfrida's tranquillity: Oscar's wife and daughter are killed in a terrible car crash and he finds himself homeless when his stepchildren claim their dead mother's inheritance.

Oscar and Elfrida take refuge in a rambling house in Scotland which becomes a magnet for various waifs and strays who converge upon it, including an unhappy teenage girl. It could be a recipe for disaster. But somehow the Christmas season weaves its magical spell and for Elfrida and Oscar, in the evening of their lives, the winter solstice brings love and solace.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize The first book in Hilary Mantel's award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, with a new cover design to celebrate the publication of the much anticipated The Mirror and the Light From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel. 'Every bit as good as they said it was' Observer 'Terrific' Margaret Atwood 'As soon as I opened this book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop' The Times In Wolf Hall, one of our very best writers brings the opulent, brutal world of the Tudors to bloody, glittering life.

We are sad creatures. I am a prostitute running to seed and my last asset is an idiot son. I am a street-sweeper collapsing under the weight of time and my own obesity. I am a foul-mouthed and repellent daughter desperately in need of a man. Sad creatures. Simple needs. Mr. Dimitriou conjures us into existence in the space of a few lines, and we live, poised between hope and its extinction, for a few brief pages in the harsh world of his pared down prose. Sad creatures, dumb creatures: our spokesman ultimately is a dead or dying dog... woof, woof, dear Lord.

Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a wealthy and polished man. He proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries.

Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. He delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions.

Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow’s housing estates where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial battles for the sake of reputation. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the doocot that James has built for his prize racing pigeons. As they begin to fall in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo must work hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold.

But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland, with two strange men behind whose drunken banter lie murky pasts, he needs to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism, Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the meaning of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

The cult classic from one of France's most stylish writers'Don't give a damn,' says Zazie, 'what I wanted was to go in the metro'Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that becomes wilder and more manic by the minute. In 1960 Queneau's cult classic was made into a hugely successful film by Louis Malle. Packed full of word play and phonetic games, Zazie in the Metro remains as stylish and witty as ever.