Literature

The brilliant new novel from the Booker prize-winning author. Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. They aren't sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they've been pushed into each other's arms. But who would have pushed them, and why? Hanging over their lives is a momentous catastrophe - a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial and apology, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened. Set in the future - a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited - J is a love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, and, longlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize.

What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages - oh, here is Jacob's room.'

Who is Jacob Flanders? Virginia Woolf's third novel, published in 1922 alongside James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, follows this elusive title character from a sunlit childhood on the Cornwall coast to adventures in Cambridge, London, and Athens. Women fall in love with Jacob; young men desire his company and conversation. But Woolf keeps her scornful, charming protagonist at a distance, enveloping Jacob in mystery as he enters adulthood and the Great War
thunders across Europe. A daring work that reimagines every element of the traditional novel, Jacob's Room tells a new story for a new century.

In 1922, Lytton Strachey pronounced Jacob's Room 'a most wonderful achievement-more like poetry, it seems to me, than anything else, and as such I prophesy immortal.' One hundred years after its publication, Woolf's first full-length work of experimental fiction pulls us into the inexhaustible mysteries of intimacy and mortality.

The author has called "The Jaguar" an extravagant story." He employs an extravagant style to stress the irony of his heroine's attempt to preserve a false image of her moral superiority in the process of promoting selfish ends. The historical events referred to in Dimitra's of herself and her family belong to the Second World Wi1r period. Dimitra, a mathematics teacher, had been an active member of the leftist resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of Greece and was persecuted as a communist in the civil war that followed. Years later, she likes to think, of herself as an uncompromising individual engaged in a noble struggle to promote the ideals of a socialist revolution. The unexpected return of her sister-in-Iaw Philio from America to claim an inheritance forces her to take a good look at the past. Her breathless interior monologue throughout the night of her confrontation with Philio reveals Dimitra's obstinate refusal to accept the "bourgeois" compromises she has meanwhile made and has been comfortably living with for the past ten years. The extravagant melodrama of Dimitra's rhetoric often becomes a caricature of dialectic reasoning, a comic version of double-think paring reality to make it fit within the confines' of wishful thinking and self-righteousness. When the verbal torrent is finally spent., the comedy fades leaving a bitter after-taste of the pathos of self-deception. In native South American religion the jaguar was regarded as a fierce deity representing forces of war, destruction and human sacrifice.

James Merrill once called his poetic works 'chronicles of love and loss', and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his life - comic and haunting, exotic and domestic - to shape a compelling, sometimes intensely moving, personal portrait. Sophisticated, witty and ironic, his poetry also engages passionately with topical issues - war, terrorism, political corruption, AIDS, climate change and the destruction of nature. An admirer of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and W.

H. Auden, Merrill, like them, has left a legacy that will speak to readers for years to come.

"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!"Throughout the hardships of her childhood - spent with a severe aunt and abusive cousin, and later at the austere Lowood charity school - Jane Eyre clings to a sense of self-worth, despite of her treatment from those close to her. At the age of eighteen, sick of her narrow existence, she seeks work as a governess. The monotony of Jane's new life at Thornfield Hall is broken up by the arrival of her peculiar and changeful employer, Mr Rochester. Routine at the mansion is further disrupted bymysterious incidents that draw the pair closer together but which, once explained, threaten Jane's happiness and integrity. A flagship of Victorian fiction, Jane Eyre draws the reader in by the vigour of Jane's voice and the novel's forceful depiction of childhood injustice, of the restraints placed upon women, and the complexities of both faith and passion. The emotional charge of Jane's story is as strong today as it was more than 150 years ago, as she seeks dignity and freedom on her own terms. In this new edition, Juliette Atkinson explores the power of narrative voice and looks at the striking physicality of the novel, which is both shocking and romantic.

As close to an autobiography as London ever wrote, this brutally frank memoir of a lifelong struggle with alcohol also offers insights into the author's life as an adventurer and popular writer.

Joseph Andrews refuses Lady Booby's advances, she discharges him, and Joseph — in the company of his old tutor, Parson Adams (one of the great comic figures of literature) — sets out from London to visit his sweetheart, Fanny. Along the way, the two travelers meet with a series of adventures — some hilarious, some heartstopping — in which through their own innocence and honesty they expose the hypocrisy and affectation of others. Joseph Andrews started out as a parody of Richardson's Pamela, but soon left that purpose behind and now is regarded as the first English realistic novel.

"Come now my right hand,
depict what demoniacally torments you,
but over it place

The Virgin's silver sheen
that at night masks the waters of the
marshy waste".

[...] The Journal of an Unseen April contains 49 poems in the form of journal entries, beginning on 1 April and ending on 7 May, and covers the whole period'of an unspecified Greek Easter (though some critics specify the year as being 1981 when Easter fell, as in the Journal, on 26 April). The prevailing atmosphere throughout the work is that of death, but death expressed as a transcendent, unseen life. The setting is the border area between the earthly and transcendent life; between the "now" and the "forever" of The Axion Esti. Its themes of departing and experience of what Elytis elsewhere has called the "after-death" acquired a new relevance in the month of April 1996, which came in the wake of his own departing and during which the translation was made. It was the first April without Elytis or, perhaps more correctly, the first April with an unseen Elytis. I dedicate the trans-lation to his unseen presence.

First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. Told in the first person by Celine's fictional alter ego Bardamu, the novel is loosely based on the author's own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in the USA and, later, as a young doctor in a working-class suburb in Paris. Celine's disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the chaotic state in which man has left society lies behind the bitterness that distinguishes his idiosyncratic, colloquial and visionary writing and gives it its force.