Few writers have had as many distinct lives as Bruce Chatwin and few have been as compelling in person as in print. Chatwin was a traveller, an aesthete and an anthropologist. In his twenties he was a star at Sotheby's; in his thirties he was a star at The Sunday Times. A solitary man and a socialite; he was always exotic. He became famous as the person who reinvented travel-writing and when he died in 1989, aged 48, he had published six strikingly varied books.Susannah Cl...

Angela Carter was one of the most vivid voices of the twentieth century. When she died in 1992 at the age of fifty-one, she had published fifteen books of fiction and essays; outrage at her omission from any Booker Prize shortlists led to the foundation of the Orange Prize.Angela Carter sent her friend Susannah Clapp postcards from all over the world, missives which form a paper trail through her life. The pictures she chose were sometimes domestic, sometimes flights of fantasy and...

Angela Carter was one of the most important writers of the 20th Century. A pioneer of British magical realism, her work was described by Salman Rushdie as 'without rival and without equal'. Her radical, inventive novels influenced countless writers, while her dark, sensual short fiction turned traditional fables inside out, giving women the power over their desires and fates.Susannah Clapp, Angela Carter's literary executor and friend, introduces the productions and offers fascinat...

A collection of full-cast dramas and readings from the giant of travel writing – plus a bonus documentaryAuthor and adventurer Bruce Chatwin was one of the 20th Century’s most charismatic writers. His first book, In Patagonia, changed the face of travel writing and made him a literary sensation. Collected here are dramatisations and readings of some of his best-known work, as well as a bonus programme shedding light on his relationships an...

The village of Campodimele in the Aurunci Mountains has been called'the village of eternity' by World Health Organisation scientists,after a study revealed the astonishing longevity of its inhabitants.The average life expectancy of Campodimelani men is 90, compared to theEuropean average of 74, while women live to an average age of 86compared to their European counterparts' 80.Notonly do the villagers live to an extraordinary age, they also...

By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Fiction Book of the Year AwardBach, sculpture, plastic surgery, public speaking and a New York love story like no other - this is Lucy Ellmann's most extraordinary work of art to date**'**Bolshy, life-affirming, feminist and energetic. It makes you long to chuck your job, gulp oysters and run naked throu...

Alice Bliss is fifteen. She's smart, funny, and clever. Not afraid to stand up for the things she believes in. She also idolises her father and, when he leaves home to fight a war she doesn't believe in, Alice is distraught.She and her mother negotiate his absence as best they can - waiting impatiently for his letters, throwing themselves into school and work respectively, bickering intermittently and, in Alice's case, falling for the boy next door - but then they're told that he's...

Jerome is a calm man - at least, that's what he'd always believed. But when his daughter's boyfriend dies in an accident, he is overwhelmed by unexpected grief. As he struggles to make sense of the loss and his own reaction to it, he finds himself assailed by emotions and memories he has allowed to lie dormant: the residual feelings for his ex-wife; a baffling new attraction to a stranger; a precarious friendship with a retired policeman; and, above all, unsettling questions about his own ...

'As they used to say in Ireland, the devil only comes into good things .'Narrated by Lilly Bere, On Canaan's Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Sligo, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope and danger.At once epic and intimate, Lilly's narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense ...

Real, compulsive and intense: Cat Clarke is the queen of emotional suspense.'A new Cat Clarke novel is always something to celebrate' JUNO DAWSONThey didn't mean to kill her . . . now the truth will tear them apart.Alice isn't expecting the holiday of her dreams when she sets off on a trip to the wilderness with her friends. But when her best friend Cass decides to teach mean girl Tara a lesson, Alice finds herself ...

When Simon Johnson is attacked in his LA apartment, he knows he must defend himself or die. Turning on the lights after the scuffle, Simon realises he has killed his attacker and the resemblance of the man to himself is uncanny. He embarks on a gripping existential investigation, into his own murky past, and that of Jeremy Shackleford, the (apparently) happily married math teacher whose body is now lying in Simon's bathtub under forty gallons of ice.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2012For half a century Audrey Death has been in a state of semi-consciousness. Severed from the world of the living after falling victim to Encephalitis lethargica, she has languished in Friern Barnet Mental Hospital. Then, in 1971, maverick psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner arrives.Audrey's experiences of a bygone Edwardian London: her socialist lover, her involvement with the Suffragists, and her work in a munitions factory ...