The Greek myths, refined by the great poets and playwrights of Ancient Greece, distil the essence of human life: its brief span, its pride, courage and insecurity, its anxious relationship with the natural world – earth, sea and sky, represented by powerful gods and monsters.Taking inspiration from the incomparably beautiful and intense poetry of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Spurling – a lifelong classicist and an award-winning playwright and historical novelist – spi...

Ancient as they are, the Greek myths still resonate at the core of our literature and culture, and may well reveal more about human nature and the world we have created than we like to believe.From the garden of his house in the Peloponnese overlooking the gulf of Argos, award-winning playwright and novelist John Spurling draws on a lifetime’s engagement with the classics and with Greek culture to reanimate the characters of Apollo, Herakles, Theseus, Perseus and Agamemnon, along w...

Beneath the floorboards of a ruined house, an 18th-century memoir is discovered. It reveals the life story of William Congreve, the acclaimed English playwright. The lost manuscript is penned by his faithful servant, Jeremy, who tells how they lived together through fierce political division and triumphal nationalism in that era of war with France, the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution.Upon his death a monument in Stowe is erected to honour Mr Congreve. Atop a slender pyramid si...

A riveting historical novel set in fourteenth-century China.In the turbulent final years of the Yuan Dynasty, Wang Meng is a minor bureaucrat in the government of the Mongol conquerors. He is also an extraordinarily gifted artist whose paintings capture the infinite expanse of China's natural beauty. But an empire in turmoil is not a place or time for sitting still. On his journeys across the realm, Wang encounters fellow master painters, a fierce female warrior kn...

Graham Greene is an immensely popular as well as powerful and idiosyncratic writer. His leading characters are murderers, spies, fugitives and outsiders and his most typical plot is that of the hunter and the hunted. In this book, originally published in 1983, John Spurling sets about tracking down the author behind the protagonists. Beginning with an analysis of the patterns of Greene’s mind as revealed in the 40 or so works of fiction, drama, criticism, travel and autobiography he has pu...

First published in 1978, Beckett examines the plays of Beckett in the order in which they were written. The book affords a lively and fresh introduction to Beckett’s theatre. Both authors stress that ‘Beckett was waiting for the theatre as the theatre was waiting for Beckett.’ The differing backgrounds of the two authors of this study have enabled them to approach Beckett’s drama in a particularly fruitful way. This book will be of interest to students of literature and drama.

This book, first published in 1985, stresses Beckett’s success as an innovator in the theatre through a close reading and analysis of his plays. The differing backgrounds of the two authors enables them to approach Beckett’s drama in a particularly fruitful way: ‘Their analysis is clever yet level-headed, readable but does not shirk complexities.’ (Times Educational Supplement). ‘Brilliant collection of essays on Beckett and his works.’ (Irish Times)

The vibrant retelling of the central Greek myths by acclaimed novelist John Spurling, author of The Ten Thousand Things, winner of the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for Historical FictionThe classical Greek intellectual tradition pervades nearly every aspect of our modern Western civilization. Our logic and science, our philosophy, politics, literature, architecture, and art are all indebted to the ancient inhabitants of the small mountainous Mediterranean country. And the power...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of No god but God comes “a lucid, intelligent page-turner” (Los Angeles Times) that challenges long-held assumptions about Jesus.“Riveting . . . [Reza] Aslan synthesizes Scripture and scholarship to create an original account.”—The New YorkerTwo thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establ...

Now a Major Motion Picture starring Claire Foy and Brendan GleesonOne of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st CenturyOne of Kirkus Reviews’s Best Books of the 21st CenturyOne of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the YearOne of Slate's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 YearsON MORE THAN 25 BEST B...

**NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYPeople ∙ O: The Oprah Magazine ∙ Financial Times ∙ Kansas City Star ∙ BookPage ∙ Kirkus Reviews ∙ Publishers Weekly ∙ BooklistNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**“A stunner.”—Justin Cronin“It’s never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass—it’s the ones you don’t expect at all,” says Julia, in this spellbinding novel of catastrophe and survival by a superb new writer. Luminou...

**#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century**At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, sh...