When factory worker Pinquean Smallcreep, who has slotted a certain type of slot into a certain type of pulley for many years, packs his sandwiches and sets out on a journey to investigate what it is he is producing, his discoveries become increasingly more bizarre and disturbing. Peter Currell Brown's brilliantly surreal satire of automation and alienation is as exhilarating and unforgettable today as when it was first published.'A most lucidly written nightmare, and a pleasure to read for...

Voted the UK’s Favourite Nature BookThe memoir that inspired Chris Packham's BBC documentary, Asperger’s and MeEvery minute was magical, every single thing it did was fascinating and everything it didn't do was equally wondrous, and to be sat there, with a Kestrel, a real live Kestrel, my own real live Kestrel on my wrist! I felt like I'd climbed through a hole in heaven's fence.An introverted, unu...

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...

**“So flawlessly written that every one of its events seems chillingly, ominously possible.”—Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book ReviewA startling, imaginative novel from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**A violent war for equality has come to the white suburbs, driving out the ruling minorityFor years, it had been what is called a “deteriorating situation.” Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of t...

A mystery that offers "a gripping and richly atmospheric glimpse into the literal underworld of Victorian England—the labyrinthine London sewer system" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).Clare Clark's critically acclaimed The Great Stink "reeks of talent" as it vividly brings to life the dark and mysterious underworld of Victorian London ( The Washington Post Book World). Set in 1855, it tells the story of William May, an engineer who h...

A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the moment of its foundation, with early settlers staking out their small patch of land and terrified by the harsh and alien continent. Focussing on the hostility between the early British inhabitants and the native Aborigines. Remembering Bablyon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy who finds himself caught between the two worlds. Shot through with humour, and written with the poetic intensity that characterised Malouf's...

Selected by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 YearsThe New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied....

This overwhelmingly hot summer everything seems to be slowing down in the tiny Devon village where Alison lives, as if the sun is pouring hot glue over it. 'This idn't nothin',' says Alison's grandmother, recalling a drought when the earth swallowed lambs, and the summer after the war when people got electric shocks off each other. But Alison knows her grandmother's memory is lying: this is far worse. She feels that time has stopped just as she wants to enter the real world of adulthood. I...

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year: Peter Dickinson targets England's upper classes in this murderous and strikingly original theme-park mysteryTourists are waiting in line for entry into the world of Old England, a graceful, elegant country house run as a theme park, complete with wrought-iron gates, pet lions, and maids in white caps greeting visitors with a bob and a curtsy.But this fantasy world turns very real when one of the ...

Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two little girls, extracted from their homes in wartime London, encounter something terrifying in a forest. Later when they meet as grown women, they realise the experience has coloured their lives. A dark tale about the nature of stories themselves.Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.

Explore the extraordinary imagination of Booker Prize-winner and visionary author Ben Okri – one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature.'I wanted to find the right balance between the unforced beauty of art and the rough truth of life' BEN OKRISet in 1970s Nigeria, in a country trying to come to terms with the atrocity of its recent civil war, Dangerous Love introduces us to Omovo, a young artist. Omovo is living in a compound wi...

When Fred Dibnah debuted on television in 1979, British audiences immediately embraced a new cultural icon: a steeplejack from Bolton who fell in love with England's decaying industrial landscape and an exhaustive storyteller whose charm and wit was matched only by his down-to-earth manner. The Producer of that first film, Don Haworth, would go on to make nineteen films about this unlikely celebrity and true British eccentric.Did You Like That? collects the best stories fr...