"One of the most extraordinary, original—and funniest—books I have ever read. Subversive, satirical, like a farcical, erotic, animal-human animated film" (Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, author of Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things).Shining moments of tender beauty punctuate this story of a youth on the run after escaping from an elite English boarding school. At London's Euston Station, the narrator meets a talking dachshund named Mary and together they're of...

A gripping tale of a daring heroine testing her wits against a backdrop of secrets, spies and smugglers in perilous Far North Queensland in the late nineteenth century and based on a true story ...A daring heroine tests her wits against secrets, spies and smugglers on a remote Australian island 'It's peculiar, the assumptions we all make. For instance, how, in a diary, the truth bone's connected to the hand bone ... You shouldn't believe everything you read.' 1879, Queensland. Fleei...

It was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen and I didn't have the words to describe it. I felt it though. I let out an incredible whoop of joy and skipped into the air, laughing and laughing; there was so much joy inside me. For the first time in all my memory, I could not contain myself. As a boy in the early 1940s, young Boden Black finds his life changed for ever the day his neighbour Dudley drives him over the hills into the vast snow-covered plains of the Mack...

Love—common and uncommon, vengeful and transformational—is the theme of this superb collection from the bestselling author of Notes from an Exhibition.From subtle tales of domestic unease to a story featuring a caravan that transports three generations of a family away from their small-town lives, author Patrick Gale proves in his second story collection that he is a master at mining the loneliness, yearning, and eternal optimism of the human spirit.

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 ...

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

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...

In June 1964, a twelve-year old child was summonsed to appear at Dublins Children's Court. The offence for which he was charged related to an amateurish break-in when coerced and accompanied by older children. In terms of gravity the misbehaviour was hardly more than a prank. In the severe surroundings of that oak panelled court, deep in the bowels of Dublin Castle, Mickey was sentenced to serve Three years hard labour in what was then known as an industrial school. Letterfrack Industrial ...

A fascinating prize-winning novel about a house with a fanciful little turret, built by a river. Unfolding within its rooms are lives of event and emotional upheaval. A lot happens. And the tumultuous events of the twentieth century also leave their mark, from war to economic collapse, the deaths of presidents and princesses to new waves of music, art, architecture and political ideas. Meanwhile, a few metres away in the river, another creature follows a d...

November, 1935. Harry Kvist walks out the gates of Langholmen jail into another biting Stockholm winter. He has nothing to his name but a fiercely burning hope: that he can begin a new life with the lover he met in his cell. That he can leave behind his old existence of gutter brawls, bruised fists and broken bones. That he can finally go straight.But the city has other ideas. Nazis are spreading their poison on the freezing streets, and one of Kvist’s oldest friends has been murde...

A classic Bolger novel, following the lives of three women.Set in the grimy backstreets and suburbs of Dublin. Bolger has often used a woman’s voice to tell his story, and this novel is no exception; we follow the lives of three women – a Victorian maid, a young woman brought up in the 1960s (the product of a violent family) and that young woman’s daughter, the child of an incestuous relationship, hidden away from sight.

Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.