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The Impressionist

In India, at the birth of the last century, an infant is brought howling into the world, his remarkable paleness marking him out from his brown-skinned fellows. Revered at first, he is later cast out form his wealthy home when his true parentage is revealed. So begins Pran Nath's odyssey of self-discovery - a journey that will take him from the streets of Agra, via the red light district of Bombay, to the green lawns of England and beyond - as he struggles to understand who he really is.

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Blindness

A city is hit by an epidemic of sudden blindness. The authorities segregate the newly-blind and all who have come into contact with them. It is not long before the criminal element take over, the compound is set on fire and the blind escape - only to find a deserted, looted city.

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The Great Gatsby (Penguin Modern Classics)

Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach ... Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Penguin Modern Classics)

When an unbridled schoolmistress with advanced ideas is in her prime the classroom can take on a new identity and no one can predict what will happen. Jean Brodie is a teacher whose unconventional ideas put her at odds with the other members of staff at the Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh, as she endeavours to shape the lives of the select group of girls who form her.

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A Romance with Cocaine (Modern Voices)

Struggling with the confusion and insecurities that adolescence brings, Vadim seeks an outlet for his frustration. Yet following unfulfilling attempts at classroom rebellion, filial disobedience and teenage sex, he is drawn closer and closer into the world of illicit drugs. But as his desire to experiment with narcotics grows stronger, so too do his feelings of worthlessness and isolation, and his ultimate physical surrender to cocaine mirrors his nation's psychological capitulation to a world where morals no longer apply. "Novel with Cocaine" is an extraordinary work, and astonishingly prescient for its time.

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Darkness at Noon

N. S. Rubashov, an old guard Communist, falls victim to an unnamed government; with outstanding psychological insight, Koestler traces his story through arrest, imprisonment and trail in a classic novel which, when first published, famously drew attention to the nature of Stalin's regime.

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Under the Volcano (Penguin Modern Classics)

It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate...and the ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and Mescal, while his ex-wife and half brother look on powerless to help him. As the day wears on, it becomes apparent that Geoffrey must die. It is his only escape from a world he cannot understand. UNDER THE VOLCANO is one of the century's great undisputed masterpieces.

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Story of the Eye: By Lord Auch (Penguin Modern Classics)

Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym Lord Auch, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

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The Magus (Vintage Classics)

On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games. John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of human complexities. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, "The Magus" is a feast for the mind and the senses.

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The Wapshot Chronicle (Vintage Classics)

Meet the Wapshots of St Botolphs. There is Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea-dog and would-be suicide; his licentious older son, Moses; and, Moses' adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, and partly based on Cheever's adolescence in New England, "The Wapshot Chronicle" is a family narrative in the finest traditions of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James.

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The Blue Flower

A beautiful new cover reissue of Penelope Fitzgerald's final masterpiece Set in Germany at the very end of the eighteenth century, The Blue Flower is the story of the brilliant Fritz von Hardenberg, a graduate of the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg, learned in Dialectics and Mathematics, who later became the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis. The passionate and idealistic Fritz needs his father's permission to announce his engagement to his 'heart's heart', his 'true Philosophy', twelve-year-old Sophie von Kuhn. It is a betrothal which amuses, astounds and disturbs his family and friends. How can it be so? One of the most admired of all Penelope Fitzgerald's books, The Blue Flower was chosen as Book of the Year more than any other in 1995. Her final book, it confirmed her reputation as one of the finest novelists of the century.

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The Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy

The Fortunes of War is a teeming, complex, and rich novel, alive with the uncertainty and adventure of civilian life during wartime. Olivia Manning has filled the pages of this epic work with vivid characters who, over the course of nearly a thousand pages, tell the larger story of Europe during the trauma of the Second World War. Harriet and Guy Pringle are young newlyweds when they arrive in Bucharest from England, eager to experience life in that cosmopolitan city. It is the autumn of 1939, only a few weeks after Germany's invasion of Poland, and nobody thinks the war will go on for very long—though troop movements and treaties are the only topic of conversation. By the time the Pringles realize that they are in the middle of a worldwide conflict, it is too late to return home. The only thing to do is to join the great mass of displaced people—White Russians, journalists, attaches, and con artists—and move east to Athens. Manning's mastery of the long form allows her to expand both outward and inward, tackling complexities of world politics and interpersonal relationships with equal panache.

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Revolutionary Road

Hailed as a masterpiece from the moment of its first publication, "Revolutionary Road" is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple whose empty suburban life is held together by the dream that greatness is only just round the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their hopes and ideals, betraying in the end not only each other, but their own best selves.

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Delta of Venus (Penguin Modern Classics)

In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning.

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Atlas Shrugged (Penguin Modern Classics)

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world--and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder--and rebirth--of man's spirit.

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Don't Look Now: Stories (New York Review Books Classics)

Daphne du Maurier wrote some of the most compelling and creepy novels of the twentieth century. In books like Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn she transformed the small dramas of everyday life—love, grief, jealousy—into the stuff of nightmares. Less known, though no less powerful, are her short stories, in which she gave free rein to her imagination in narratives of unflagging suspense. Patrick McGrath's revelatory new selection of du Maurier's stories shows her at her most chilling and most psychologically astute: a dead child reappears in the alleyways of Venice; routine eye surgery reveals the beast within to a meek housewife; nature revolts against man's abuse by turning a benign species into an annihilating force; a dalliance with a beautiful stranger offers something more dangerous than a broken heart. McGrath draws on the whole of du Maurier's long career and includes surprising discoveries together with famous stories like "The Birds." Don't Look Now is a perfect introduction to a peerless storyteller.

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Call Me by Your Name (Paperback)

This amazing novel about first love, published to a roar of acclaim, is now in paperback: 'A superb novel about the sensuous light of the Mediterranean summer, the languorous days and nights filled with desire...wonderful' - Colm Toibin."Call Me By Your Name" is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blooms between seventeen-year-old Elio and his father's house guest Oliver during a restless summer on the Italian Riviera. Unrelenting currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire threaten to overwhelm the lovers who at first feign indifference to the charge between them. What grows from the depths of their souls is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration, and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing they both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

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What I Loved

This is the story of two men who first become friends in 1970s New York, of the women in their lives, and of their sons, born the same year. Both Leo Hertzberg, an art historian, and Bill Weschler, a painter, are cultured, decent men, but neither is equipped to deal with what happens to their children – Leo’s son drowns when he’s 12, while Bill’s son Mark grows up to be a delinquent, and the acolyte of a sinister, guru-like artist who spawns murder in his wake. Spanning the hedonism of the eighties and the chill-out nineties, this multi-layered novel combines a plot of mounting menace with a deeply moving account of familial relationships and a superbly observed portrait of an artist, set against the backdrop of a society reaching new depths of depravity in its frenetic quest for the next fashion, drug and thrill.

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2666: A Novel

Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border, is an urban sprawl that draws in lost souls. Among them are three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; and a police detective in love with an elusive older woman. But there is darker side still to the town. It is an emblem of corruption, violence and decadence, and one from which, over the course of a decade, hundreds of women have mysteriously, often brutally, disappeared.Told in five parts, "2666" is the epic novel that defines one of Latin America's greatest writers and his unique vision of the modern world. Conceived on an astonishing scale, and - in the last years of Roberto Bolano's life - with burning, visionary commitment, it has been greeted across Europe and Latin America as his masterpiece, surpassing even his previous work in inventiveness, imagination, beauty and scope.