Great Expectations was first published as a weekly serial in All the Year Round, December 1860 - August 1861. Its first appearance in volume form was as three-volume novel, without illustrations, in July 1861. A one-volume edition, the next year, preceded its inclusion in the collected editions of Dickens's lifetime. The three-volume 1861 edition is the basis of the present text: variant readings, including those in manuscript and extant proofs, are recorded in the textual apparatus, providing an unusually rich source of information on Dickens's methods of composition. The Introduction traces this process of composition and draws attention to the two unperformed dramatic adaptations: the reading version and the 1861 play version, made as a safeguard of copyright. Appendices include the original ending, the author's notes, and two textual examinations, one of the five so-called `editions' of 1861, the other a comparison of the one-volume 1862 edition with the 1864 Library edition.

Natasja bevind haar vroegoggend op die snelweg, tien ure noord van Kaapstad. Al haar besittings is agter in die kar en sy sweer sy sit haar voete nooit weer naby Johnny nie. Eers nadat sy op die N18 afgedraai het, onthou Natasja: George, haar pa se boesemvriend, woon nog op Lelievlei. Miskien moet sy gaan aanklop?

In dié aangrypende roman herinner die skrywer ons hoe die liefde ons almal raak. En soms skenk die heelal vir jou ’n beskermengel wanneer jy dit die nodigste het.

Sarah het geen begeerte om met grasie oud te word nie. Sy dra onpaar oorbelle, ’n groot sonbril en haar hare is bloedrooi gekleur. Wat sy wel nie op haar ouderdom verwag het nie, is om na haar 55ste martriekreünie genooi te word. En boonop vereis die uitnodiging dat sy ’n metgesel saambring  – wat sy, ’n weduwee, wáár moet kry? Sy is nuuskierig oor die affêre, maar om na haar grootworddorp terug te keer gaan ou wonde oopkrap. En sy gaan vir Franco, die hartevertrapper, weer in die oë moet kyk!

Cara is ná twee wêreldoorloë eindelik op pad terug na haar geboorteland. Sy is destyds wettig deur die Du Toits aangeneem en sy en Clarabelle het  saam grootgeword. Na haar weggaan het die twee gereeld gekorrespondeer, maar later het die oorlog tussenbeide gekom. Sy word goed ontvang en almal is begaan oor haar welstand, maar sy bly verward en eensaam. Vir haar voel dit soms of sy vir die res van haar lewe op reis sal wees. Het sy eindelik haar bestemming bereik? Tyd sal wel leer.

Sally Holt has always been mystified by the things her older sister, Kathy, seems to have been born knowing. Kathy has answers for all of Sally's questions about life, about love and about Billy Barnes, the high school basketball star who runs the refreshment stand at the local pool. Billy's unfathomable, otherworldly cool puts him on a different planet - until a tragedy leaves Sally's life forever intertwined with his.

Opening in the early nineties and charting almost two decades of shared history and missed connections, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is a dazzlingly unconventional love story that brims with unexpected moments of joy.

Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine, and anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland. In the orphanage at St. Cloud’s, it’s clear to Dr Larch, the physician and director of the orphanage, that the abandoned child not only knows she’s Jewish, but she’s familiar with the biblical Queen Esther she was named for. Dr Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther; he doubts he’ll find any family to adopt her.

When Esther is fourteen, soon to become a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic family with a history of providing for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and similar prejudice. Esther’s gratitude to the Winslows is unending. As she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther keeps loving and protecting the Winslows – even in Vienna.

The final chapter of this historical novel is set in Jerusalem in 1981, when Esther is seventy-six.

Oona Kelly Webster is an editor at a prestigious New York publishing house. Married with two children, her twenty-five-year relationship falls apart when she books a silver wedding anniversary getaway at a luxurious château in France and her husband Charles suddenly drops a bombshell which will shatter her carefully built world.

Although devastated, Oona decides to travel to France without Charles, but soon after her arrival in the charming village of Milly-la-Forêt, the world comes to a standstill due to a terrifying pandemic and all travel is forbidden. Isolated and fearful, Oona then receives another shock when she discovers her job has been made redundant. The only thing which helps her to face the tragedy taking place across the world is that she can remain in France, where the beautiful surroundings and slower pace of life will slowly begin to heal her.

And when a chance encounter with her new neighbour, a well-known Hollywood actor who is also stranded far from home, blossoms into something deeper than friendship, Oona wrestles with the risks of opening her heart again— especially to a younger, very famous man who has two young children grieving for their mother.

With a second chance at happiness before her, Oona must be brave enough to stay open to even greater life changes at a time when the world is experiencing great fear and turmoil . . .

From USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Sierra Simone comes her steamy, TikTok-famous Priest series, in which sinners and saints alike test the bonds of religion, love, and lust. He's a priest, and here is his confession. There are many rules a priest can't break. A priest cannot marry. A priest cannot abandon his flock. A priest cannot forsake his God. Tyler Bell has had no problem playing by the rules for the last three years after a family tragedy set him on the path to priesthood. That all changes when the delicious, sultry voice of Poppy Danforth sinks its claws in him through the screen of his confessional booth, and he can't get her sins out of his head. It should be easy to put his impure thoughts of her to rest, considering the vows Tyler has taken. It should be nothing to overcome what the sight and sound of her does to him, when his life with the Church means everything. But once he has his first forbidden taste of those red lips, Tyler can't help but break all his rules for Poppy-no matter what it might cost them both.

A contemporary version of the story of David and Bathsheba. When David Samuel, chairman of Globe Oil, a multinational oil company, becomes a widower, his world is turned upside down. His old friend, Nathan - also a work colleague - and his wife have provided support and care for him, as has his friend and colleague, Rich Hampton. Rich has recently married the beautiful Beth. Then David notices a beautiful girl on a train and is very attracted to her. Later it becomes devastatingly clear that this is the new Mrs Hampton. David plans to get Rich out of the way by sending him on an assignment abroad, and begins an affair with his wife; but Beth becomes pregnant. When conscientious Rich won't return home, there's only one solution in David's mind. he has Rich murdered. Played against a strong backdrop of good supporting characters (including Beth's sister, Cerys, whose husband has an affair and leaves her), Beth ultimately loses the baby. But David has an epiphany; fasting for the child and the woman he loves, he meets with God. He is a chastened and changed man. Beth too has her own experience with God, and throws herself into charitable work. At the end, they come together again, different, but still in love.

Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

In this region of old farms and prehistoric caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who believes that the path to emancipation is not revolt but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner’s rendition of “noir” is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner’s finest achievement yet—a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.

Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian classic Brave New World predicts - with eerie clarity - a terrifying vision of the future, which feels ever closer to our own reality.

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...

Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece.

The intimate, sweeping tale of one Palestinian man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope.

All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.

Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona.

Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived.

Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION.

The year is 1944 and Veit Kolbe, a young German soldier, injured fighting in Russia, is recovering at Mondsee, a village and a lake below Drachenwand mountain, close to Salzburg in Austria. Here he meets Margot and Margarete, two young women who share his hope that sometime, sooner or later, life will begin again. The war is lost but how long will it take before it finally comes to its end? In Hinterland, Arno Geiger tells of Veit's nightmares and the strangely normal life of the small village, of the Brazilian who dreams of returning to Rio de Janeiro, of the landlady and her rallying calls, of Margarete the teacher with whom Veit falls in love, but who doesn't return his affection. But when Veit's wounds are healed his next call-up orders arrive. The military outlook for Germany and Austria looks increasingly grim and Veit's luck has run out . . .

An immensely powerful epic of colonialism, set in 18th-century Greenland, about the great forces of nature, the meeting of cultures and fathers and sons. 1728: The doomed Danish King Fredrik IV sends a governor to Greenland to establish a colony, in the hopes of exploiting the country's allegedly vast natural resources. A few merchants, a barber-surgeon, two trainee priests, a blacksmith, some carpenters and soldiers and a dozen hastily married couples go with him. The missionary priest Hans Egede has already been in Greenland for several years when the new colonists arrive. He has established a mission there, but the converts are few. Among those most hostile Egede is the shaman Aappaluttoq, whose own son was taken by the priest and raised in the Christian faith as his own. Thus the great rift between two men, and two ways of life, is born. The newly arrived couples - composed of men and women plucked from prison - quickly sink into a life of almost complete dissolution, and soon unsanitary conditions, illness and death bring the colony to its knees. Through the starvation and the epidemics that beset the colony, Egede remains steadfast in his determination - willing to sacrifice even those he loves for the sake of his mission. Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, Kim Leine's The Colony of Good Hope explores what happens when two cultures confront one another. In a distant colony, under the harshest conditions, the overwhelming forces of nature meet the vices of man.

When art-thief and gambler Jim Markham falls foul of Satan, he must undergo the ordeal of the seven footprints in order to avoid slavery or death. If he fails he will be forced to carry out Satan's demonic bidding for the next year of his life.

In the far reaches of the night, the alarm was sounding. Some force was holding him down. Where was Tejal? He felt with his arm. Her space was empty. Around him the atmosphere was thick. Somebody was rising from the bed, coughing out his lungs, shocked by the layers of tropical heat and darkness. The room was hot and full and invisible.

Mac fell on the floor and burned his hands on the carpet and he was suddenly awake. He pulled himself up, feeling the skin on his palms burning, made his way to the door. It opened in a flood of sparks.

In a year of arson and bankruptcy, Mackenjee, a tax collector, is following the tracks of stolen billions. His wife Tejal, a lawyer, is defending a young revolutionary accused of burning buses and toppling statues. The two cases begin to intersect.

Caught in a web of politicians and investigators, tax cheats, activists, philosophers, and even a baker, the couple reckon with their standing in the country, the promise of seaside life in changing Muizenberg, and the challenge of finding the right school for their children.

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.

A Bookseller in Madrid is ultimately a story about dreams--dreaming with courage when nothing seems to make sense and dreaming with hope when words printed on a page are all you can hold on to.

For as long as she can remember, Barbara Spiel has always found solace in books. Born in Germany and having come of age in a tumultuous era, she flees her home country as the Nazis rise to power in the early 1930s. Her destination? Madrid. There she's determined to realize her long-held dream of opening a bookshop and creating a safe haven for young idealists and independent thinkers to come together to transform the world.

Yet Spain isn't immune from its own troubles. The winds of change are blowing through both city and countryside, and it's impossible to predict what will happen. When the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War puts Barbara and everyone around her in peril--including the Spanish Socialist parliamentarian she's fallen deeply in love with--the terror and hatred seem all too familiar. It's like Germany all over again, only with its own cast of extremist characters.

Hounded simultaneously by Stalinist checas, Francoist Facists, and the German Gestapo, Barbara fights to keep her bookstore the safe haven that she's always imagined it would be. But with war brewing both inside Spain and outside its borders throughout the entirety of Europe--and beyond--Barbara isn't sure who exactly she can trust, or if people really are who they claim to be.

Acclaimed Italian author Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s best-selling novel to date, The Brittle Age is a powerful mother and daughter story and a profound exploration of human fragility and the haunting shadows of the past

In the 1990s, deep in the Maiella mountains of Central Italy, a brutal crime shatters the peace of the local community. Two young women are murdered, a third left for dead. Lucia is twenty years old back, and the only survivor is her best friend.   

Now, Lucia is a physiotherapist, separating from her husband, her daughter Amanda studying in Milan.  When the pandemic forces Amanda to return to the family’s home near Pescara, Lucia’s memories are reawakened, and with them the impact of past trauma. 

Set against the backdrop of the rugged Apennine mountains, this gripping psychological family drama weaves Lucia and Amanda’s personal struggles with the mystery of the tragedy that marked their familial land decades earlier.  

Inspired by true events, The Brittle Age is a tale of individual resilience, and a commentary on the indelible impact of historical events on personal lives and the broader community.