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...

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....

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 ...

This international-bestselling memoir of childhood in post–World War I rural England is one of the most "remarkable" portraits of youth in all literature ( The New York Times).Three years old and wrapped in a Union Jack to protect him from the sun, Laurie Lee arrived in the village of Slad in the final summer of the First World War. The cottage his mother had rented for three and sixpence a week had neither running water nor electricity, but it was surround...

Fifteen thematically and geographically wide-ranging stories from the Nobel Prize Winner, with settings ranging from suburban London to Mozambique.

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...

Three mysteries in the CWA Gold Dagger–winning series by a "master of the bizarre" ( Louis Untermeyer).Scotland Yard detective James Pibble is known for accepting any case, no matter how strange. Taking him to every corner of England, his job throws him into the most curious circumstances.The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest: Detective Pibble is on the case when the revered elder of a New Guinea tribe is bludgeoned to death. All the suspects...

Crash-landed in the Australian outback, two child survivors encounter an Aboriginal boy on ‘walkabout’ in this “haunting” story of culture clash and survival “in the same vein as A High Wind in Jamaica” (Time).A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia, and the only survivors are two children from Charleston, South Carolina, on their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide. Mary and her younger brother, Peter, set out on foot, lost i...