Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami

After spending several years in a sanatorium recovering from an illness that caused him to lose his memory and ability to reason, Prince Myshkin arrives in St Petersburg and is at once confronted with the stark realities of life in the Russian capital – from greed, murder and nihilism to passion, vanity and love.

So the Pharaoh agrees to the construction of a pyramid colossal beyond imagining, an edifice that crushes dozens of people as each block is added and which inexorably drains the lifeblood from the country. As Egypt builds its monument to death, its neighbours plot and gloat…

In the town they tell the story of the great pearl - how it was found and how it was lost again. They tell of Kino, the fisherman, and of his wife, Juana, and of the baby, Coyotito. 

Acute and immediate, I Remain in Darkness is an unforgettable exploration of love, memory and the journey to loss.

A perennial bestseller in the wizarding world and one of the most popular books in the Hogwarts School library, Quidditch Through the Ages contains all you will ever need to know about the history, the rules - and the breaking of the rules - of the noble sport of Quidditch.

 Yet despite her youthful nature, she is not without her own enigmas. Most of all, she fears that her intellectual, radical son will exchange her for a superior mother when he becomes a famous writer.

From iconic tortured artist/everyman Charles Bukowski, Hollywood is the fictionalization of his experience adapting his novel Barfly into a movie by the same name.

But the local Governor believes its an elaborate spying mission and arranges for his own spy to follow them.The two dedicated scholars realise only too late that they have stumbled over an ants' nest.

But as paranoia consumed a country at war, Mata Hari's lifestyle brought her under suspicion. In 1917 she was arrested in her hotel room on the Champs Elysees and accused of espionage.

Finally, in ‘The Woman Destroyed’, Simone de Beauvoir tells the story of Monique, trying desperately to resurrect her life after her husband confesses to an affair with a younger woman.

Five students go to detention. Only four leave alive.Yale hopeful Bronwyn has never publicly broken a rule.

Gauguin abandons his wife and children, and job as a stock-broker in Paris, to pursue his passion for painting. In the process he does his best to distances himself from European civilization, fleeing to Tahiti and French Polynesia for inspiration.

With remarkable care and empathy, Alexievich gives voice to those whose stories are lost in the official narratives, uncovering a powerful, hidden history of one of the most important events of the twentieth century.Published to great acclaim in the USSR in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, this masterpiece offers a kaleidoscopic...

This story features D'Arrast, who can be seen as a positive hero as opposed to Meursault in The Stranger.[4] He actively shapes his life and sacrifices himself in order to help a friend, instead of remaining passive.

Old terrors are dredged up from the shipwreck of history. And ultra-explosive state secrets are threatening to flood the entire nation. Mark, an artist, finds the peaceful rhythms of his life turned upside down by ancient love and modern barbarism and by the particular brutality of a country surprised and divided by its new freedom.

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of Ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness.