'Listen, Švejk, are you really God's prize oaf?' 'Humbly report, sir,' Švejk answered solemnly. 'I am!' The chaotic, hilarious adventures of an ordinary soldier, who is either genuinely a total idiot
'I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended over my head' Alfred Russel Wallace left to explore the islands of southeast Asia an obscure naturalist; he returned eigh
The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed it To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their
'He scampered over rooftops, swam in deep water, leapt from balconies.' Set in the vanished world of the shtetl of nineteenth-century eastern Europe, this spellbinding fable tells the story of Yasha:
'Manuscripts don't burn' In Soviet Moscow, God is dead, but the devil - to say nothing of his retinue of demons, from a loudmouthed, gun-toting tomcat, to the fanged fallen angel Koroviev - is very mu
'Then he saw the barrel of a gun aimed dead on target - not at him, as he might have expected, but at the clergyman's back.' Set in a crumbling Spanish mansion, The House of Ulloa follows innocent and
'I pity this house; the curse of God is hanging over it' Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented
'He too began to chase the great pierrot through the corridors of the château...' A novel of desperate yearning and vanished adolescence, the story of Meaulnes and his restless search for a lost, ench
'He said that Shamil had ordered Hadji Murat to be taken dead or alive....' In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four year
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I h
'Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips.' On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is sufferi
'The train ran on without a driver, on and on, like some mindless, unseeing beast...' One of Zola's darkest and most violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration
'The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.' In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven ar
'She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun...' A rapturous work of savage beauty, W
'When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music.' From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to A
'I could hear the frost crackling outside. Greenish moonbeams shone through windows covered with patterns of ice...' One of the most moving accounts of being a boy ever written, My Childhood is a bot
'There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.' While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with l
'Nowhere could she discover the dens of iniquity about which she had dreamed...' Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normand
'What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise...' Mad, macabre tales of demonic spirits, hideous rites, ancient curses and alien entities lurking beneath the surface of rural New England, from
'So Ursula became the child of her father's heart.' The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family and their struggles with each other and themselves. Beautiful, strange and
