Everyman

A beautiful anniversary edition to mark twenty years of Kazuo Ishiguro's modern classic, in which he imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of 1990s England. Narrated by Kathy H, as she tries to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, it is a story of love, friendship and memory, charged throughout with a sense of life's fragility.

Award-winning writer Ben Okri, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road, curates this one-volume overview of classic stories of Africa, past and present. This collection includes a pantheon of greats from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Chinua Achebe, DorisLessing, Nadine Gordimer, J. M.Coetzee, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie and many more.

A must-have for every child's library: two enchanting tales by the best-selling author of Northern Lights, in a special hardcover omnibus edition with newly colourised illustrations. With a delightful and unique introduction from the author- especially for this beautiful Everyman's Library volume. In The Firework-Maker's Daughter, young Lila has learned from her father almost all there is to know about his profession-but he insists upon holding back the final secret. With the help of her friend Chulak, Lila discovers that anyone who wants to be a true firework-maker must face down the Fire-Fiend of Mount Merapi. It is only after Lila has set off on her quest that Chulak discovers the other half of the secret-and without it, Lila will perish. In the company of Hamlet, a talking white elephant, Chulak sets off to find Lila before it's too late. Clockwork features an apprentice clockmaker who is tempted to sell his soul. As the townspeople of Glockenheim gather on the eve of the annual unveiling of a new figure for the town clock, Karl, the apprentice, confides to Fritz, a storyteller, that he has failed his task to create one. Fritz, in his turn, has no idea how to finish the new story he has begun concocting, which he calls "Clockwork." He begins to tell it anyway, only to see its dangerous antagonist materialize in front of the two boys and offer Karl a Faustian pact. Real life and storytelling merge, and destruction must be narrowly averted, in this unusual and suspenseful tale of the power of creativity.

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a world in which women are free to use their gifts. In this influential extended essay and using powerful images and memorable thought experiments -such as a fictional sister of William Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother but limited in ways he was not -Woolf analyses the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time.

The Patrick Melrose Novels hilariously dissect the English upper class, conjuring a world of decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty, but never without the possibility of grace. Taken together, they are one of the most thrilling reading experiences in contemporary fiction. Edward St. Aubyn chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose across five short novels, painting an acrid portrait of a beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. Never Mind unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateau in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his rich and unhappy American wife, Eleanor, and their five-year-old son, Patrick. Bad News opens as Patrick, now twenty-two years old, sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. Back in England, Some Hope offers Patrick the possibility of recovery (and the most debauched and riotous dinner party in contemporary fiction). The Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home. At Last, set over the single day of a funeral, is the stunning final volume.

The demands of human longing contend with the weight of centuries of custom in acclaimed author Ha Jin's Waiting, a novel of unexpected richness and universal resonance. Every summer Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, returns to his village to end his loveless arranged marriage with the humble and touchingly loyal Shuyu. Each time, Lin must return to the city to tell Manna Wu, the educated, modern nurse he loves, that they will have to postpone their engagement once again. Caught between the conflicting claims of these two very different women and trapped by a culture in which adultery can ruin lives and careers, Lin has been waiting for eighteen years. This year, he promises will be different