Roman

'Wilson's memoir is essential reading for anyone who wants to experience and understand the unique comfort that Austen's works universally provide.' NATALIE JENNER (author of The Jane Austen Society)At 70, Ruth Wilson began to have recurring dreams about losing her voice. As she grappled with feelings of unfathomable sadness, she made the radical decision to retreat from her conventional life with her husband to a small sunshine-yellow cottage in the countryside where she lived alone for the following ten years. From the moment she first encountered Pride and Prejudice in the 1940s she had looked to Jane Austen's heroines as her models for the sort of woman she wanted to become. She resolved to re-read Austen's six novels; to reflect on her life in relation to what she discovered in each of them. And as Ruth read between the lines of both the novels and her own life, she began to reclaim her voice. A life-affirming memoir of love, self-acceptance and the curative power of reading, The Jane Austen Remedy is an inspirational account of the lessons learned from Jane Austen over nine decades, as well as a timely reminder that it's never too late to seize a second chance.

From internationally bestselling author Isabel Allende comes an exquisitely crafted, multigenerational love story. In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis and the world goes to war, young Alma Belasco's parents send her overseas to live with an aunt and uncle in their opulent San Francisco mansion. There she meets Ichimei Fukuda, the son of the family's Japanese gardener, and between them a tender love blossoms, but following Pearl Harbor the two are cruelly pulled apart. Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichimei reunite again and again, but theirs is a love they are forever forced to hide from the world. Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to reconcile her own troubled past, meets the older woman and her grandson, Seth, at Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, and learn about Ichimei and this extraordinary secret passion that has endured for nearly seventy years.

Someone has seized the fabled Jewel of Seven Stars from the mummy's grip, and the ancient Egyptian queen Tera has risen from her tomb to take it back—at any cost! This thrilling tale of adventure and ritual magic recounts a supernatural struggle in which archeologists, grave robbers, and anyone else who attempts to possess the Jewel meet a mysterious, violent fate. Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, wrote this enthralling novel of possession, reincarnation, and an ancient curse at the peak of the Victorian fascination with Egyptology. His spellbinding blend of Eastern lore and classic horror fiction formed the template for the plots of dozens of mummy movies. This edition features the original ending as it appeared in the 1903 publication, a gripping conclusion that was censored in subsequent printings and long unavailable.

A Jewish girl suffers from anti-Semitic sentiments in the Iraq of the past century. A Kurdish girl finds her diary over sixty years later. What connects them? Rahila grows up under the growing anti-Semitic threats of the 1940’s and loses her family and most people around her to the pull of Zionism and the state of Israel. She herself marries a Muslim, converts to Islam and stays in Iraq. Zara is part of the Arab Spring movement in Kurdistan and struggles to come to terms with her new-found, Jewish roots. She finds she is not the only one whose long forgotten past is looming heavily over her present and future. Two women, living in two different eras, play the main parts in Judit Neurink’s novel situated in Iraq. Neurink, who lived in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq for over ten years, brings to life the past Iraq has chosen to forget, of the Jews who for centuries made up the fabric of the society. Using the stories of two strong women, she draws the pictures of Iraqi, Kurdish and Jewish families struggling to survive in a changing and often hostile world. The Jewish Bride covers a chapter in Iraq’s history that is absent in what is taught in Iraqi schools and universities. While Jewish buildings and quarters have crumbled and all but disappeared, the knowledge about how Jews, Muslims and Christians used to live together in Iraq seems doomed to perish with the older generation. By telling these stories and mixing them with fiction, Neurink has made this lost past come alive again. The Jewish Bride is a powerful story that will touch and move readers from all over the world.

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction by A. D. P. Briggs. As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosha? The search reveals the divisions which rack the brothers, yet paradoxically unite them. Around the writhings of this one dysfunctional family Dostoevsky weaves a dense network of social, psychological and philosophical relationships. At the same time he shows - from the opening 'scandal' scene in the monastery to a personal appearance by an eccentric Devil - that his dramatic skills have lost nothing of their edge. The Karamazov Brothers, completed a few months before Dostoevsky's death in 1881, remains for many the high point of his genius as novelist and chronicler of the modern malaise. It cast a long shadow over D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and other giants of twentieth-century European literature.

In two remarkable historical novels, Mary Renault fashions from the myth of Theseus a convincingly flawed hero and weaves a thrillingly plausible account of the Labyrinth and the infamous Minotaur. The King Must Die follows the young Theseus as he discovers that his true father is the King of Athens, and volunteers to join the annual tribute of Athenian girls and youths sacrificed to a bull-worshipping cult on the island of Crete. Trapped in the labyrinthine palace of King Minos, Theseus enlists the help of high priestess Ariadne in a daring plan to free his people. The Bull From the Sea begins after Theseus's triumphal return to Athens. He is now king, but his confidence will be shaken by a life-changing encounter with the queen of the Amazons, the birth of a son who will insist on choosing his own path, and the tragic results of his wife's treachery. Renault's deep knowledge of the Greek world, her sure grasp of psychology and genius for inspired speculation bring the distant world of the legendary past enthrallingly to life.

The great French feminist writer we need to remember' Guardian

'Violette Leduc's novels are works of genius and also a bit peculiar' Deborah Levy, from the introduction

An old woman lives alone in a tiny attic flat in Paris, counting out coffee beans every morning beneath the roar of the overhead metro. Starving, she spends her days walking around the city, each step a bid for recognition of her own existence. She rides crowded metro carriages to feel the warmth of other bodies, and watches the hot batter of pancakes drip from the hands of street-sellers.

One morning she awakes with an urgent need to taste an orange; but when she rummages in the bins she finds instead a discarded fox fur scarf. The little fox fur becomes the key to her salvation, the friend who changes her lonely existence into a playful world of her own invention.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is a stunning portrait of Paris, of the invisibility we all feel in a big city, and ultimately of the hope and triumph of a woman who reclaims her place in the world.

Set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, the delectable decadence of Versailles, and the French Revolution, "The Last Banquet" is an intimate epic that tells the story of one man's quest to know the world through its many and marvelous flavors. Jean-Marie d'Aumout will try anything once, with consequences that are at times mouthwatering and at others fascinatingly macabre (Three Snake Bouillabaisse anyone? Or perhaps some pickled Wolf's Heart?). When he is not obsessively searching for a new taste d'Aumout is a fast friend, a loving husband, a doting father, and an imaginative lover. He befriends Ben Franklin, corresponds with the Marquis de Sade and Voltaire, becomes a favorite at Versailles, thwarts a peasant uprising, improves upon traditional French methods of contraception, plays an instrumental role in the Corsican War of Independence, and constructs France's finest menagerie. But d'Aumout's every adventurous turn is decided by his at times dark obsession to know all the world's flavors before that world changes irreversibly. As gripping as Patrick Suskind's "Perfume," as gloriously ambitious as Daniel Kehlman's "Measuring the World," and as prize-worthy as Andrew Miller's Pure, The Last Banquet is a hugely appealing novel about food and flavor, about the Age of Reason and the ages of man, and our obsessions and about how, if we manage to survive them, they can bequeath us wisdom and consolation in old age.

The remarkable new novel from the author of the multimillion-selling international sensation The Midnight Library'A beautiful novel full of life-affirming wonder and imagination' BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH'What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don't understand yet . . .'When retired Maths teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the Balearics Grace searches for answers about her friend's life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past. Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.