'This book seems to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC... The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum...'Paul Ableman's third novel, first published in 1968, is - through the voice of its narrator Billy Soodernim, libidinous and regretful by turns - a meditation on love and carnality, monogamy and promiscuity, childbirth, separation and indeed the whole of the fraught relations between the sexes:...

First published in 1962 As Near as I Can Get was Paul Ableman's follow up to his critically acclaimed debut I Hear Voices.Following Alan Peebles, a young man struggling to become a poet, As Near as I Can depicts a mid-twentieth century London of offices, pubs and lodgings. Fuelled by drink through these desperate years, the narrator charts his encounters with women and fellow artists, as he seeks to glimpse a wonder in life barely discernible beneath the ...

Paul Ableman's modern masterpiece was first published by the Olympia Press of Paris in 1958, to instant acclaim. The narrator of I Hear Voices is a young schizophrenic who transports himself, and the reader, through a wondrously transfigured city where the real and the fantastic blend together in a seamless enchantment. The continual stream and buzz of events is often comical, occasionally wrenching, and always unpredictable. Encounters with Miss Carpet, The Commissioner, Merkitt ...

Tornado Pratt is the last of the old-style American tycoons, one who has lived his life with ferocious vigour through the vacillating fortunes of the twentieth-century USA. Paul Ableman's novel finds him in a hotel room at the end of his days, as he recounts via a dying monologue the events of his turbulent life. What is revealed, in a testimony full of jokes and surprises, is a brash, lustful, comic, profane, naïve and sentimental man who, driven on by remorse, displays a wry and percepti...

The hero of Paul Ableman's Vilp (1962) is Clive Witt, a novelist in search of a hero for his new novel. He advertises for suitable applicants, and from seventy-three replies he selects three: Professor Guthrie Pidge, a zoologist; Pad Dee Murphy, an Irish-Burmese peasant; and Harry Glebe, the inventor of the renowned earth-borer.Clive's novel, though, progresses slowly. His three heroes refuse to mix their very disparate elements into a harmonious whole. Eventually, Clive s...

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wiz...

THE classic thriller of the 20th century - 'Simply the best escape and pursuit story yet written' [THE TIMES] - with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane'[A] masterpiece: a bestseller that redefined its genre' GUARDIAN' Rogue Male is probably the most famous chase thriller ever, influencing an entire generation from Frederick Forsyth to Lee Child' CATHOLIC HERALD

Attractively designed and illustrated by well-known cartoonist Seth (creator of several New Yorker covers, graphic novels, etc.)Small trim size and inexpensive price = perfect for register displayAttractive Seth-designed display for books ideal for register placementSimilar series of Xmas Ghost Stories by Galley Beggar Press have sold 30,000+ in UKCanadian "trial run" of books showed approx. 1,000 copies sold of each book, even as a drop-in title so...

Middle age took Jane Shilling by surprise. She hadn't seen it coming, and she certainly wasn't ready for it. Living a flawed, bittersweet version of the idyll she dreamed of in her twenties, in a tumbledown urban cottage by the Thames, with a son, a cat and a horse in a livery fifty miles away, she wondered whether middle age was the beginning of the end. Or was there one last great adventure to be had?The Stranger in the Mirror is one woman's attempt to understand what mi...

Sixteen unforgettable stories from a "beguiling writer" and the Edgar Award–winning author of the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael ( The Daily Telegraph ).CWA Diamond Dagger Award–Winning AuthorExpanding her horizons far beyond the boundaries of crime fiction, Ellis Peters offers a broad range of short stories in this collection. Two friends, cruelly torn apart when their country is violently sundered...

Barney Fugleman has two major preoccupations in life: sex and literature. He is obsessed by the life and work of a man hailed by many as a genius of the nineteenth century - and by Barney as a 'prurient little Victorian ratbag'.This curious propulsion drives him out of Finchley, and out of the life he shares with Sharon and her 'rampant marvellings', to Cornwall. There he offends serious ramblers with his slip-on snakeskin shoes, fur coat and antagonism to all things green and grow...

'Adolf' is a charming story of a wild rabbit introduced by the father into a miner's home to the delight of the children and the despair of the mother. Larger questions of life and death and nature and civilisation are touched on with a light hand.