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Experience Skulduggery Pleasant as never before - in this fully original graphic novel brought vibrantly to life in full colour. A small town in the middle of Ireland, a string of unexplained deaths and a monster on the loose. Better call in the experts. When Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain drive into Termoncara, they discover a town with a dark past and a people haunted by their own secrets. There is a creature stalking the streets - a creature who delights in cruelty, who feeds off the little hatreds, who grows stronger with every drop of blood spilled. Horror and mystery collide in an original graphic novel by Derek Landy, P. J. Holden, Matt Soffe, Rob Jones and Pye Parr. -
A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the acclaimed novel The Mere Wife. Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf - and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment students around the world - there is a radical new verse interpretation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements never before translated into English. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist's eye towards gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment - of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child - but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation. A NEW STATESMAN AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR ISBN 9781911617822 -
Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf-and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world-there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist's eye toward gender, genre, and history-Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation. ISBN 9780374110031 -
An attractive and approachable selection of the work of George Bernard Shaw. One of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century, Shaw contributed in a range of ways to both political and social writings as well as creating great works of literature. Shaw is one of only two people to have won both an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize for Literature. Shaw started from the most unpropitious of beginnings. But he possessed a steely self-determination, and turned the unshakeable conviction that he would become a great writer into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This book features selections and extracts from his fiction, plays, essays and personal letters. ISBN 9781788490535 -
"I didn't think it was my kind of a book. A good bit of family drama, an annoying and spoiled teenager with too much time on her hands. I thought it was going to be a struggle. It wasn't. I was pleasantly surprised by the engaging tone of the novel and its universality. You'll be too." Marta ISBN 9780241951569 -
Brave New World predicts - with eerie clarity - a terrifying vision of the future. Read the dystopian classic that inspired the Sky TV series. EVERYONE BELONGS TO EVERYONE ELSE Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills. Discover the brave new world of Aldous Huxley's classic novel, written in 1932, which prophesied a society which expects maximum pleasure and accepts complete surveillance - no matter what the cost. 'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale 'A grave warning... Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling' Observer **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** ISBN 9780099518471 -
Immortalised by Audrey Hepburn's sparkling performance in the 1961 film of the same name, Breakfast at Tiffany's is Truman Capote's timeless portrait of tragicomic cultural icon Holly Golightly, published in Penguin Modern Classics. It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while - down. Pursued by to Salvatore 'Sally' Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing and 'Rusty' Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock deparment', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction. This edition also contains three stories: 'House of Flowers', 'A Diamond Guitar' and 'A Christmas Memory'. ISBN 9780141182797 -
"I've just finished this for classics bookclub and adored it! Forget the film and soak up Capote's wonderful writing and a blonde Holly Golightly! "Never love a wild thing, Mr Bell..." is one of the most moving passages I ever read" Bob ISBN 9780241951453 -
Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War. The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognise his spiritual and social distance from them. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) was born in Hampstead, second son of Arthur Waugh, publisher and literary critic, and brother of Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. In 1928 he published his first work, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). In 1939 he was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, serving in the Middle East and in Yugoslavia. In 1942 he published Put Out More Flags and then in 1945 Brideshead Revisited. Men at Arms (1952) was the first volume of 'The Sword of Honour' trilogy, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; the other volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, followed in 1955 and 1961. If you enjoyed Brideshead Revisited, you might like Waugh's Vile Bodies, also available in Penguin Classics. 'Lush and evocative ... Expresses at once the profundity of change and the indomitable endurance of the human spirit'The Times ISBN 9780141182483 -
In Candide, Voltaire threw down an audacious challenge to the philosophical views of the Enlightenment to create one of the most glorious satires of the eighteenth century. His eponymous hero is an innocent young man whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own fortune. As he and his various companions roam over the world, an outrageous series of disasters - earthquakes, syphilis, the Inquisition - sorely test the young hero's optimism, holding a mirror up to all fanatics, zealots and moral reformers of humankind. Translated and Edited by Theo Cuffe with an Introduction by Michael Wood 'The prince of philosophical novels' John Updike ISBN 9780140455106 -
"For some reason I thought Steinbeck would be grim and gritty and so I avoided his work, until a friend put a copy of Cannery Row into my hand. Yes there is grit, but there is life and laughter and great spirit too. A short gem!" Ann ISBN 9780141185088 -
Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is an irreverent and highly entertaining fantasy about the playful irresponsibility of nuclear scientists. 'All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.' Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of Ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Will Felix Hoenikker's death wish come true? Will his last, fatal gift to humankind bring about the end that, for all of us, is nigh? Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global apocalypse preys on our deepest fears of witnessing the end and, worse still, surviving it... ISBN 9780241951606 -
"At first impression, Flora Poste should be gagged and bound and tied to a chair!! She's a menace, and life at Cold Comfort Farm will never be the same. She always knows best!!" Ann ISBN 9780241418895 -
'I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own...'Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James was an eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge. His classic supernatural tales draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and night-time settings where imagination runs riot. Lonely country houses, remote inns, ancient churches or the manuscript collections of great libraries providesettings for unbearable menace, from creatures seeking retribution and harm. These stories have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb. This edition presents all of James's published ghost stories, including the unforgettable 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad' and 'Casting the Runes', and an appendix of James's writings on the ghost story. Darryl Jones's introduction and notes provide a fascinating insight into James's background and his mastery of the genre he made his own. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. ISBN 9780199674893 -
Throughout these seventy-nine stories - love stories, ghost stories, stories of childhood, of English middle-class life in the twenties and thirties, of London during the Blitz - Elizabeth Bowen combines social comedy and reportage, perception and vision in an oeuvre which reveals, as Angus Wilson affirms in his introduction, that 'the instinctive artist is there at the very heart of her work'. ISBN 9780099287735 -
The Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde is the only truly complete and authoritative single-volume edition of Oscar Wilde's works. Continuously in print since 1948, the Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde has long been recognised as the most comprehensive and authoritative single-volume collection of Wilde's texts available, containing his only novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, as well as his plays, stories, poems, essays and letters, all in their most authoritative texts. Illustrated with many fascinating photographs, the book includes introductions to each section by Merlin Holland (Oscar's grandson), Owen Dudley Edwards, Declan Kiberd and Terence Brown. Also included is a comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Oscar Wilde, and a chronological table of his life and work ISBN 9780007144365 -
"Wow!! No, seriously, this is a veritable powerhouse of raw emotions of the most visceral kind. I had read 'the Brothers Karamazov' and thought, ok, this guy tells a good tale, but this is something else." Ann ISBN 9780099981909 -
'Dostoyevsky's finest masterpiece' John BayleyDostoyevsky's great novel of damnation and redemption evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur. It tells the story of Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, who wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be beyond conventional moral laws. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Translated with an Introduction and notes by DAVID McDUFF ISBN 9780140449136
