Once 'the Paris of the East', Bucharest in 1989 is a world of danger, repression and corruption, but also of intensity and ravaged beauty. As Ceausescu's demolition squads race to destroy the old city and replace it with a sinister Stalinist Legoland, its inhabitants live out communism's dying days not knowing how or where things will end. In 'The Last Hundred Days' a young English student arrives in Bucharest to take up a job he never applied for and whose duties are never made clear. He ...

**WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD 2020**'This is literary fiction as it should be: in stylish, surprising, lyrical sentences we are forced to confront the hidden power structures, public and private, that control our everyday lives' The TimesA young woman has been murdered, and a neighbour, a retired teacher from Chapleton College, is arrested. An eccentric loner - intellectual, shy, a fastidious dresser with expensive tastes - he is th...

'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with one of the most arresting opening sentences in literature' Patrick McGuinness, from his Preface.A Portrait first appeared in instalments in the modernist magazine The Egoist in 1914, before it came out as a book in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. An autobiographical 'coming of age' story, A Portrait is Joyce's first novel. Many elements of J...

C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of the 1950s and 1960s to the Virgilian Somerset poems to the reflective late poems in which Sisson, looking out on the landscape he cherished, sees himself standing at the last promontory of life'. The essays demonstrate the wit, precision and sheer...

Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper PrizeWinner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year AwardShortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial PrizeShortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prizeLonglisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright PrizeLet me take you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. Let me take you down the alleys that lead into its past. To a town peopled with eccen...

The poems in Jilted City inhabit in-between-places, when a border is being crossed, a word is slipping into another language, when memory is translating loss. 'From Stations where the train doesn't stop' in 'Blue Guide', following a train journey through Belgium, to 'City of Lost Walks', English versions of a dissident Romanian poet whose poetry fails to register except in the form of an omission, McGuinness explores transition and translation, the afterlife of absences. Wit and paradox ar...

The hero of this curious novel is des Esseintes, a neurasthenic aristocrat who has turned his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreated to an isolated country villa. Here, accompanied only by a couple of silent servants, he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems, and complex perfumes and embarks on a series of increasingly strange aesthetic experiments, starting with the decision to give his giant pet tortoise a jewel-encrusted shell...

'Like an artist working an empty sky into a busy cityscape, or an empty chair into a crowded family portrait, Joyce creates spaces where the reader is left to themselves' Patrick McGuinness, from his Preface to Dubliners.Set in the late 19th and early 20th-century, Dubliners is made up of fifteen stories, which all sit within the realm of realism, with easily identifiable streets and a cartographic identity of the city. Alike Joyce's other works, ...

**In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves'This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd'**SUNDAY TIMESIn Blood Feather, a book of doubling and displacement, we see time in a new way: the past, personal and collective, lingering as an ever-present ghost - while lost beyond recall.The first sectio...

'Between now and then, I will offer youA fist full of rock cress fresh from the bankThe valley tips of garlic red with dewCooler than shallots, a breath you can swankIn the village when you come. At noon-dayI will offer you a choice bowl of cawlServed with a 'lover's' spoon and a chopped sprayOf leeks or savori fach, not used now,In the old way you'll understand. The dinOf children singing through the eyelet shedsRingi...

'It is not that Ulysses excludes us; it is, rather, that it includes us in ways that no other work prepares us for. The question is not 'what is a novel?', but what can a novel be? Ulysses is the answer'Patrick McGuinness from his preface to Ulysses: The Restored TextInitially rejected by several printers in Dublin and London for containing 'obscene' content, Ulysses was first published in book form in a limited-edition printing of...

'Beautiful and deep ... **a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent'Food for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times***A major celebration of the French short story and Spectator Book of the Year*The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. The second ...