Pride and Prejudice, which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim - that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters. In this she is mocked by her cynical and indolent husband. With its wit, its social precision and, above all, its irresistible heroine, Pride and Prejudice has proved one of the most enduringly popular novels in the English language.

Published during the heyday of fascism in Europe, It Can't Happen Here is a chilling cautionary tale by one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, which is still startlingly relevant almost a century later. Charting the rise to power of Berzelius 'Buzz' Windrip, who whips his supporters into a frenzy while promising drastic reform under a banner of patriotism and traditional values, It Can't Happen Here decries the tactics used by politicians to mobilise voters, and exposes the danger of authoritarianism arising from populist platforms, and the chaos such regimes can leave in their wake.

From the author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world – a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

Also published as The Beautiful Widow, Mary Shelley's penultimate novel explores the web of relationships between three women, bound together by the exacting Lord Lodore: his estranged wife Cornelia, a woman ruled by her mother and the norms of aristocratic society; his daughter Ethel, raised in the wilderness of Illinois and utterly dependent on her father; and finally, the independent and highly educated Fanny Derham, the daughter of Lodore's childhood friend. At first glance, Lodore appears to be a "silver fork" novel--a popular romance genre from the Regency era about life in fashionable society--yet Shelley's take imbues the story with subversive critiques of domesticity and masculinity. Long considered the most Jane Austen-like of Mary Shelley's novels, Lodore is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand this brilliant feminist writer.

A heartwarming bestselling Korean novel about the power of books to heal, as a woman leaves her busy life in Seoul to open a bookshop café in the countryside where guests can stay overnight

Welcome to Soyangri Book Kitchen

In a peaceful village in the countryside, far from the bustling heart of Seoul, lies a book lovers’ paradise. With its wafts of delicious food and book-filled shelves, Soyangri Book Kitchen is dotingly managed by its plucky proprietor Yoojin. Her aim? To create a sanctuary for weary souls like herself.

But the book kitchen is more than just a place to eat or read – it’s a place which offers its guests a true escape, not just inside the pages of its many books, but in the warm embrace of an overnight bookstay.

Over the course of a year, seven individuals, all at a crossroads in their lives, find their way to Yoojin’s book kitchen. Among them are Da-in, a singer grappling with an identity crisis, Sohee, a promising lawyer confronted with a daunting medical diagnosis, and Soohyuk, a young musical director whose dreams have been stifled by failure.

As they arrive in Soyangri, each of them will find their life subtly transformed by the magic of its books and the kindness of its people.

A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran.

1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.

1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behsad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.

1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.

2009. Laleh’s brother Mo is more concerned with a friend’s heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down …

A topical, moving novel about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom.

The story is violent, pacy and full of black humour. Imagine the Soprano family arriving in France, or perhaps better, Ray Liotta, the snitch from 'Goodfellas' settling down with his family in a small town in Normandy. Under cover of darkness, an American family moves into a villa in Cholong-sur-Avre in Normandy. Fred Blake tells everyone he is writing a history of the landings. In fact Blake is Giovanni Manzoni, an ex-Mafia boss who grassed and is now in the FBI Witness Protection Program. Having blown his cover a number of times in the US, the FBI finally sends him to France. Things happen to this thuggish family: a plumber who angers Fred with delays and exorbitant estimates 'falls down the stairs' and breaks both arms, the manager of the local supermarket insults Maggie behind her back so that afternoon his supermarket burns down, Warren, the son, starts a gang in his lycee, to intimidate and extort other pupils. A coincidence beyond belief blows Fred's cover yet again and, with the arrival of the shooters from Newark, he is able to dive back into the violent life of crime he misses so much.

"The Young Pretenders" (1895) is a children's book whose sophistication, humour and ironies are nowadays appreciated by both children and adults. Babs lives most contentedly in a large house in the country with her grandmother, her nanny and her brother (their parents are in 'Inja'). Then their grandmother dies and they are sent to live in Kensington with their uncle and his wife. Having run wild in the country, spent hours with the gardener (very like the gardener in "The Secret Garden") and had a great deal to do and to think about, suddenly they are abandoned in a world of artifice and convention and are expected to behave artificially and conventionally. 'It all came of so much pretending. But then it was simply impossible for the children not to pretend. It would have been so dull to have lived their child lives only as the little Conways, when they might be pretending that they were such exciting things as soldiers or savages, cab-horses or mice.'Babs cannot, of course, stop playing, and the central theme of the book is that she has not learned how to dissemble (as opposed to playing 'let's pretend') but must learn how to do so. However, as Charlotte Mitchell, the Preface writer, says, this is not a solemn book, on the contrary, 'its great characteristic is a gay malicious irony' as Babs misunderstands the adult world and fails to conform to adult norms. 'As anyone who has tried to bring up children knows, you spend a good deal of time teaching them to be insincere, to simulate gratitude or contrition, and not to repeat other people's comments at the wrong moments. Many of the jokes depend on the fact that Babs has yet to learn these lessons.'The focus, and the star, of "The Young Pretenders" is Babs. She is intelligent, fun, kind, lively and honest and it is hard to think of a heroine in children's fiction (that is, fiction written for children but enjoyed equally as much by adults) who is like her. Her most touching characteristic is her openness and her complete lack of fear. "'What was we naughty about?'" she asks her brother after their uncle scolds them: 'The children could not know that some very persistent tradesmen had insisted on immediate payment of their bills.' When the news comes from India that they have a new sister Babs thinks of a name for her - Mrs Brown. Her aunt slaps her down, saying that it's not a name but Babs persists, "'It is, I know it is, 'cause nurse has a sister-in-law what's called it.'" Then she 'began to think so hard that she refused a second helping of pudding' eventually announcing, to renewed scorn, that "'I'd like her to be called Strawberry Jam.'"

A sharply funny and moving debut in which a young woman accepts a job that takes her though the Italian Dolomites and into an international mystery far greater—and more personal—than she could have ever expected.

For someone who hates secrets, Las Vegas hairdresser Lucy Rey is about to be faced with a whole bunch of them. After discovering that her fiancé has left her without so much as a goodbye, Lucy finds herself short on funds and desperate for a change of scenery. Enter a most unusual job opportunity: a Bearer of Bad News.

Sure, it’s a little strange—the job description has few details, and the bad news is more like a vaguely worded threat—but Lucy can’t say no to the perks: an all-expenses-paid trip to the Italian Dolomites, plus a generous bonus if she proves she’s delivered the message. Then she learns that her task is just the tip of the iceberg.

Launched into a world of betrayal and greed involving eighty-year-old secrets, stolen jewels, and a World War II-era mystery, Lucy is in way over her head—and she’s connected to this story in ways she never could have imagined.

For fans of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Nita Prose’s The Maid, Elisabeth Dini’s Bearer of Bad News is an exhilarating romp that deftly explores the weight of secrets, the power of friendship, and how, by healing the wounds of the past, we can build a brighter tomorrow.

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of 'Poetry Review'. Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each. Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education: in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his 'mighty theme' - not only the whale but all things sublime - Melville breathes in the world's great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.