Books

Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, searches the scorching desert for beetles. As night falls he is forced to seek shelter in an eerie village, h...

The Mahabharata is some 3,500 years old and is the longest poem in any language. It is one of the founding epics of Indian culture and, with its mi...

'It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life' Jay Gatsby is th...

Playful and experimental, James Joyce's autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a vivid portrayal of emotional and intellectual...

Even the men in black armor, the ones Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade Sizing up the heart'...

Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wif...

In To Explain the World, pre-eminent theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg offers a rich and irreverent history of science from a unique perspectiv...

A mole, implanted by Moscow Centre, has infiltrated the highest ranks of the British Intelligence Service, almost destroying it in the process. And...

Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon - it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this e...

Leo Percepied, aspiring writer and self-styled freewheeling bum, gravitates to the subterraneans, impoverished intellectuals who haunt the bars of ...

This ground-breaking book of popular science explores how the way we use our bodies is all wrong. From an evolutionary perspective, if normal is de...

What is the secret of good prose? Does writing well even matter in an age of instant communication? Should we care? In this funny, thoughtful book ...

We live in a Big Me culture: universities and businesses alike reward goal-oriented superstars and those who self-promote are most likely to thrive...

The Greasers and the rich-kid Socs are at war on the Tulsa streets. Ponyboy, a fourteen-year-old brawler, chainsmoker and dreamer, is a fiercely lo...

We all like to think we have a hidden inner life. Most of us assume that our beliefs and desires arise from the murky depths of our minds, and, if ...

Why is the incidence of mental illness in the UK twice that in Germany? Why are Americans three times more likely than the Dutch to develop gamblin...

Her first major literary success, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is an exalted view of her Objectivist philosophy, portraying a visionary artist strug...

Why don't Meyers-Briggs personality tests really work? Why are HR tests for new employees often meaningless? Is there another way of ranking studen...

In a short period - from the early 1640s to the eve of the French Revolution - Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume all made their ...

Arthur Miller's classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 - 'one of the strangest and most aw...

What will the world of tomorrow be like? How does progress happen? And why don't we have a lunar colony already? In this witty and entertaining boo...

Siddhartha is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory our troubled century has produced. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual...

In A Rough Ride to the Future, James Lovelock - the great scientific visionary of our age - presents a radical vision of humanity's future as the t...

Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature...

The past is forgotten, and the future is without hope. Dystopia has become a reality. This is the new normal in our apocalyptic politics - but if w...

In Britain, we have always had an awkward relationship with food. We've been told for so long that we are terrible cooks and yet when someone with ...

Julian Green was born to American parents in Paris in 1900, and spent most of his life in the French capital. Paris is an extraordinary, lyrical lo...

In 1971 Henry Kissinger took the historic step of reopening relations between China and the West, and since then has been more intimately connected...

The story of the negro in America is the story of America... it is not a very pretty story' James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him ...

One of Hermann Hesse's greatest novels, Narcissus and Goldmund is an extraordinary recreation of the Middle Ages, contrasting the careers of two fr...

In the old days, most people would find a decent person who lived in their village or neighbourhood, and after deciding they weren't a murderer, ge...

Translated by Edith Grossman Florentino Ariza is a hopeless romantic who falls passionately for the beautiful Fermina Daza, but finds his love trag...

It is accepted wisdom today that human beings have irrevocably damaged the natural world. Yet what if this narrative obscures a more hopeful truth?...

For all of India's myths, its sea of stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. Sunil Khilnani's Incarnations fil...

If you can persuade a cat... you can persuade anyone. This is the essential guide to getting your way. Jay Heinrichs, award-winning author of Thank...

Why do we laugh? What makes memories fade? Why do people believe in ghosts? How the Mind Works explores every aspect of mental life, showing that o...

Nothing inflames the language purists like an illogical irregardless or a hideous otherization. But is it enough simply to dismiss these words as v...

David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian...

Translated by Geoff Wilkes Gilgi knows where she's going in life: she's ambitious, focused and determined, even when her boss tries it on with her,...

Written when Mishima was only twenty-six, Forbidden Colors is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the lov...

Straightened. Stigmatised. 'Tamed'. Celebrated. Erased. Managed. Appropriated. Forever misunderstood. Black hair is never 'just hair'. This book is...

Desolation Angels is the wild and soulful story of the legendary road trip that Jack Kerouac took before the publication of On the Road, told throu...

Cooked takes us back to basics and first principles: cooking with fire, with water, with air and with earth. Meeting cooks from all over the world,...

George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture ch...

When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At th...

How do we preserve what makes us human in an age of uncertainty? Are we now just consumers shaped by market forces? A sequence of DNA? A collection...

Based on his experiences as a policeman in Burma, George Orwell's first novel presents a devastating picture of British colonial rule. It describes...

Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is a tragic masterpiece of the inexorable unravelling of a man, set in a close-knit Italian-American co...