Jim Nordon (31 and divorced) has problems. Disliking suburbia, he aims to recuperate as much as possible from the 21st century by renting an apartment on the top floor of Victoria Mansions, an Edwardian building in Southampton Row due for demolition in the coming year. A supposedly successful career in local government means he has denied himself his ambition to become a portrait painter. These problems, if not insuperable, are worsened by the fact that he has to write a report, if possible anonymously, on reducing costs in his own work place. Finally there is the problem of sex. He gains periodic sexual satisfaction from a convenient relationship, but he hires a young girl as PA to help with his report and falls in love with her. This relationship becomes the centre of his life. Although it is a happy love affair, it breaks down when the earlier relationship intervenes. On a Sunday morning after returning to his Manchester home he climbs a hill called The Steep. There he discovers his past. The episode determines him in his decision to change his life. A novel of perceptive characterisation and rich descriptions, written sensitively and poetically with touches of humour, explicit in its treatment of sex, it focuses on love and death and the universal need to confront the steeps that occur in life when choosing between creativity and expediency.

Devoured 50 Shades? Now you're ready to enter the Haven of Obedience.
Twenty-something Londoner Natalie Bowen is envied by many, but her personal life is a disaster.
Then she hears about an exclusive weekend retreat called The Haven, a place that specializes in introducing people to pleasures they could never have imagined. Shocked at the idea, but unable to resist finding out more, Natalie decides it's time to put her hears behind her.
Once at The Haven, Natalie meets the enigmatic and disciplined Simon, a man who is used to getting what he wants. And he's decided he wants Natalie...

A haunting tale of possession and exorcism, now reissued on the seventieth anniversary of the year of its writing, the definitive text of William S. Burroughs's early, long-unpublished novel, now a cult classic and a highly regarded part of his oeuvre Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma. Both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, it is both Burroughs's only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Set in Mexico City during the early fifties, Queer follows William Lee, the protagonist of Burroughs's debut novel Junky, a man afflicted with acute heroin withdrawal and romantic yearnings for Eugene Allerton. As Lee breaks down over the course of his hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges, a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humor and the ugly American at his ugliest. Now reissued on the seventieth anniversary of the year of its writing, this edition of Queer features a contextualizing introduction by the eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris.