Sometimes we must look to the past to survive the future. An entertaining novel about what really matters in life from the bestselling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Q wants a simpler and safer life. His work as a quantum cryptographer for the government has led him to believe a crisis is imminent for civilisation and he's looking for somewhere to ride out what's ahead. He buys a ruined farmhouse in Cornwall and begins to build his own self-sufficient haven.

Over the course of this quest he meets the eccentric characters who already live on the moors nearby - including the park ranger in charge of the reintroduced lynxes and aurochs that roam the area; a holy man waiting for the second coming on top of a nearby hill; an Arthurian knight on horseback and the amorous ghost of an Edwardian woman who haunts the farmhouse.

As life in the cities gets more complicated, and our systems of electronic control begin to fall apart, Q flourishes in the wild Cornish countryside. His new way of life brings him back in tune with his teenage children, his ex-wife, and his own sense of who he is. He also grows close to Eva, energetic and enchanting, who is committed to her own quest for love and meaning.

In this entertaining and heart-warming novel Louis de Bernières pokes fun at modern mores, and makes us reconsider what is really precious in our short and precarious lives.

Sometimes we must look to the past to survive the future. A novel about what really matters in life from the bestselling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin Q wants a simpler and safer life. His work as a quantum cryptographer for the government has led him to believe a crisis is imminent for civilisation and he's looking for somewhere to ride out what's ahead. He buys a ruined farmhouse in Cornwall and begins to build his own self-sufficient haven. Over the course of this quest he meets the eccentric characters who already live on the moors nearby - including the park ranger in charge of the reintroduced lynxes and aurochs that roam the area; a holy man waiting for the second coming on top of a nearby hill; an Arthurian knight on horseback and the amorous ghost of an Edwardian woman who haunts the farmhouse. As life in the cities gets more complicated, and our systems of electronic control begin to fall apart, Q flourishes in the wild Cornish countryside. His new way of life brings him back in tune with his teenage children, his ex-wife, and his own sense of who he is. He also grows close to Eva, energetic and enchanting, who is committed to her own quest for love and meaning. In this entertaining and heart-warming novel Louis de Bernières pokes fun at modern mores, and makes us reconsider what is really precious in our short and precarious lives.

Classics, modern fiction, non-fiction and more. Written for secondary and adult students the Oxford Bookworms Library has seven reading levels from A1-C1 of the CEFR. Listen along with downloadable MP3 audio.

'The kind of book that changes readers for the better' Guardian When a family tragedy means Mick is sent to the outback to live with his Granpa, it looks as if he has a lonely life ahead of him. The cattle station is a tough place for a child, where nature is brutal and the men must work hard in the heat and dust. However, after a cyclone hits, things change for Mick. Exploring the floodwaters, he finds a lost puppy covered in mud and half-drowned. Mick and his dog immediately become inseparable as they take on the adventures offered by their unusual home, and the business of growing up, together. In this charming prequel to the much-loved Red Dog, Louis de Bernieres tells the moving story of a young boy and his Granpa, and the charismatic and entertaining dog who so many readers hold close to their hearts.

Kefalonia, 1941. Captain Corelli, an enigmatic young Italian officer, is posted to the idyllic Greek island as part of the Axis occupying forces. Shunned by the locals at first, he proves to be civilised, humorous - and a consummate musician. The captain is soon thrown together with Dr Iannis's strong-willed and beautiful daughter, Pelagia, who discovers all of the complexities of love, and how it can blossom in the most unexpected and profound way. Rona Munro's adaptation of Louis de Bernieres' much-loved epic novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, premiered on tour of the UK in 2019, before transferring to London's West End.

A heartwarming tale about a very special dog. Beautifully illustrated, it is the perfect Christmas gift. One day, in the days when all the trains were driven by steam, a railway guard found something abandoned on a train... Mr Ginger Leghorn is used to collecting up umbrellas and other lost property but he's never found a puppy on his train before. He has no intention of keeping it but his five children - Alfie, Arthur, Beryl, Sissy and Albert - have other ideas and Jim is soon a much-loved, but often disruptive, member of the family. Whether it's his feud with the cat, getting stuck in rabbit-holes, accidentally going to sea, accompanying the children to school or carol singing at Christmas, Jim has a knack of making himself the centre of attention. This little black and tan puppy with his small bright eyes and very waggy rump becomes something of a hero in his town, and even catches the eye of the King himself. Station Jim is full of Christmas cheer for children and adults alike, and especially dog-lovers. It includes delightful pictures by celebrated illustrator Emma Chichester Clark, the creator of Plumdog.

Extravagant, inventive, emotionally sweeping, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is the story of a timeless place that one day wakes up to find itself in the jaws of history. The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army.
Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island. Rich with loyalties and betrayals, and set against a landscape where the factual blends seamlessly with the fantastic, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a passionate novel as rich in ideas as it is genuinely moving.

Set against the backdrop of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, Birds Without Wings traces the fortunes of one small community in south-west Anatolia - a town in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully for centuries. When war is declared and the outside world intrudes, the twin scourges of religion and nationalism lead to forced marches and massacres, and the peaceful fabric of life is destroyed. Birds Without Wings is a novel about the personal and political costs of war, and about love: between men and women; between friends; between those who are driven to be enemies; and between Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty, and Ibrahim the Goatherd, who has courted her since infancy. Epic in sweep, intoxicating in its sensual detail, it is an enchanting masterpiece. 'A mesmerising patchwork of horror, humour and humanity' Independent

INTRODUCED BY LOUIS DE BERNIERES 'I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym' RICHARD OSMAN 'I'd sooner read a new Barbara Pym than a new Jane Austen' PHILIP LARKIN Formidable Miss Doggett fills her life by giving tea parties for young academics and acting as watchdog for the morals of North Oxford. Anthea, her great-niece, is in love with a dashing undergraduate with political ambitions. Of this, Miss Doggett thoroughly approves. However, Anthea's father, an Oxford don, is carrying on in the most unseemly fashion with a student - they have been spotted together at the British museum! But the only liaison Miss Doggett isn't aware of is taking place under her very own roof: the lodger has proposed to her paid companion Miss Morrow. She wouldn't approve of that at all. 'Brilliant, hilarious and so very, very English' DAILY MAIL 'My favourite writer . . . I pick up her books with joy' JILLY COOPER

A heartbreaking story of love, loss and survival from the multi-million copy bestselling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Returning from life as a fighter pilot in the First World War, Daniel is struggling to put the trauma of the Western Front behind him. As the 1920s dawn, he and his wife Rosie move to a tea plantation in Ceylon with their small daughter to make a fresh start. Yet navigating their new world could test their marriage to its limits. Back in England, Rosie's sisters are dealing with impossible challenges in their searches for family, purpose and happiness. These are precarious times, and taking unconventional means may be the only way to get what they want.

Around them the world changes, and events in Germany take a dark and forbidding turn. And soon there is no going back...

A return to the epic romance, heroism, history and warm and eccentric cast of characters that made CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN such an extraordinary hit (2.5 million copies sold). In the brief golden years before the outbreak of World War I, Rosie McCosh and her three very different sisters are growing up in an eccentric household in Kent, with their neighbours the Pitt boys on one side and the Pendennis boys on the other. But their days of childhood adventure are shadowed by the approach of the conflict that will engulf them on the cusp of adulthood. When the boys end up scattered along the Western Front, Rosie is left confused by her love for two young men - one an infantry soldier and one a flying ace. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?

"The most consistent of all series in terms of language control, length, and quality of story." David R. Hill, Director of the Edinburgh Project on Extensive Reading.

Extravagant, inventive, emotionally sweeping, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is the story of a timeless place that one day wakes up to find itself in the jaws of history. The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army.
Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island. Rich with loyalties and betrayals, and set against a landscape where the factual blends seamlessly with the fantastic, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a passionate novel as rich in ideas as it is genuinely moving.

Of Love and Desire is a rich collection of love poems from Louis de Bernieres, written over a lifetime, and capturing its many forms - from rapture, infatuation, urgency, to sorrow, heartache and disillusion. Poetry was de Bernieres' first and greatest literary love, a passion evident in the musicality and emotion of his poems, which are full of stories and the truth of lived experience. This, his second collection, bears the mark of many influences, from the classical Persian poets, to Neruda, to Quintus Smyrnaeus, to Brian Patten. Beautifully illustrated by Donald Sammut, this is an indispensable companion on the lover's journey.

'In early 1998 I went to Perth in Western Australia in order to attend the literature festival, and part of the arrangement was that I should go to Karratha to do their first ever literary dinner. Karratha is a mining town a long way further north. The landscape is extraordinary, being composed of vast heaps of dark red earth and rock poking out of the never-ending bush. I imagine that Mars must have a similar feel to it. I went exploring and discovered the bronze statue to Red Dog outside the town of Dampier. I felt straight away that I had to find out more about this splendid dog. A few months later I returned to Western Australia and spent two glorious weeks driving around collecting Red Dog stories and visiting the places that he knew, writing up the text as I went along. I hope my cat never finds out that I have written a story to celebrate the life of a dog.'

A present contains a monstrous secret. An uninvited guest haunts a Christmas party. A shadow slips across the floor by firelight. A festive entertainment ends in darkness and screams. Who knows what haunts the night at the dark point of the year? This collection of seasonal chillers looks beneath Christmas cheer to a world of ghosts and horrors, mixing terrifying modern fiction with classic stories by masters of the macabre. From Neil Gaiman and M. R. James to Muriel Spark and E. Nesbit, there are stories here to make the hardiest soul quail - so find a comfy chair, lock the door, ignore the cold breath on your neck and get ready to welcome in the real spirits of Christmas.

Accompanying an exhibition at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, this publication presents the glass swallow works Perched, created by the artist Feleksan Onar. While drawing on sources from her personal history as well as collective memory, Feleksan Onar's works in glass deal with notions of identity, constructed narratives, historical relations and impacts of politics on society. In her recent project Perched, her story-telling in glass reflects on the Syrian refugee situation. Triggered by witnessing the helpless refugees strolling around the streets of Istanbul, after being forced to leave their homelands, Perched has been exhibited in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, the New Jersey Visual Arts Center and the Victoria& Albert Museum, London. The work was interpreted as "a visceral expression of the fact that in spite of differences of religion, culture, and individual histories, what we all want most is to be in the place we call home," by the art critic Lisa Morrow. A reading of Louis de Bernieres' novel Birds Without Wings was an inspiration for Onar to create the series. Glass works, inspired by a book, create its own history over time and turn into a book again. This book marks the most comprehensive publication on Perched to date. The result here is a complementary structure addressing the aesthetic and political concepts inherent in Feleksan Onar's art. Contiguity and fragility are the core of this project and provides the form for this book. Newly commissioned essays initiate sections that engage particular aspects of Onar's work. Renowned author Louis de Bernieres contributes a short story; Prof. Dr. Stefan Weber, Mariam Rosser-Owen and Stefanie Bach propose a reading of Perched through the exhibitions in the Pergamon Museum, the Victoria& Albert Museum and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; and Nadania Idriss questions how is art supposed to foster a culture of peace and muses on being perched. Producing glass art, to use Onar's own words, "not only expresses my past and present, but also my anxieties and expectations for future. Through glass, I speak, breathe and live." This is the story of birds standing together in different places with their various colors and holding a vital crisis in their silence, breath and life.

Stirringly told from the view of everyday soldiers, Covenant with Death is acclaimed as one of the greatest novels about war ever written. With a new foreword by Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin. They joined for their country. They fought for each other. When war breaks out in 1914, Mark Fenner and his Sheffield friends immediately flock to Kitchener's call. Amid waving flags and boozy celebration, the three men - Fen, his best friend Locky and self-assured Frank, rival for the woman Fen loves - enlist as volunteers to take on the Germans and win glory. Through ramshackle training in sodden England and a stint in arid Egypt, rebellious but brave Fen proves himself to be a natural leader, only undermined by on-going friction with Frank. Headed by terse, tough Sergeant Major Bold, this group of young men form steel-strong bonds, and yearn to face the great adventure of the Western Front. Then, on one summer's day in 1916, Fen and his band of brothers are sent to the Somme, and this very ordinary hero discovers what it means to fight for your life. 'Laden with knowledge yet sparely written, Covenant with Death is the work of an author immersed in the lives of those who fought' The Times 'The last line ought to be carved in stone somewhere . . . Find it. Read it. You'll be a better person for having done so' Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail An anti-war book right up there with Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front Shortlist (The Greatest War Novels of all Time) 'Covenant With Death . . . showed with unbearable actuality what happened to a newly formed Sheffield regiment on the first day of the battle of the Somme' Christopher Hitchens, Guardian 'The blood and guts, the nightmare stink of cordite . . . appalling realism' The Times 'Only one novel about the war since 1945 has the power and feeling of veracity to compare with the works of the 1920s and 30s . . . Covenant with Death by John Harris' The Western Front Organisation 'A superb novel' Daily Mirror 'John Harris's neglected masterpiece of a novel, Covenant With Death, is the success that it is because it follows a group of Sheffield workers from their flag-waving sign-up to the hecatomb on the Somme' The Atlantic 'True and terrible' Observer 'An outstanding achievement' Sunday Express

A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Bernieres that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Casting his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties and seventies, but plagued by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth, Louis de Bernieres brings us in Notwithstanding stories of a vanished England which will delight readers of his much-loved novels.
The English village was a place where a lady might dress as a man in plus fours and spend her time shooting squirrels with a twelve bore, or keep a vast menagerie in her house. A retired general might give up wearing clothes, a spiritualist might live in a cottage with her sister and the ghost of her husband, and people might think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed.
De Bernieres' characters roam through the book, appearing in each other's stories and painting a picture of an entire community. Here we find the atmosphere of those times as it was in the countryside. Notwithstanding is not about an imagined idyll; it is about people who are worth remembering, whose lives are worth celebrating, and who would otherwise have been forgotten.

"From the Hardcover edition."

With the same ebullient storytelling, luxuriant prose, and irrepressible eroticism he brought to The War of Don Emmanuel s Nether Parts and Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, Louis de Bernières continues his chronicle of Cochadebajo, the Andean village where macho philosophers, defrocked priests, and reformed (though hardly inactive) prostitutes cohabit in cheerful anarchy. But this unruly utopia is imperiled when the demon-harried Cardinal Guzman decides to inaugurate a new Inquisition, with Cochadebajo as its ultimate target.  
     On his side, the Cardinal has an army of fanatics who are all too willing to destroy bodies in order to save souls. The Cochadebajeros have precious little ammunition, unless you count chef Dolores's incendiary Chicken of a True Man, and a civil defense that deems nothing more crucial than the act of love. Part epic, part farce, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman confirms de Bernières's reputation as England's answer to Gabriel García Márquez.

The setting for this iridescent gem of storytelling by the bestselling author of Corelli's Mandolin and The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts is an unnamed South American country where the rule of law has given way to the rule of the lawless and the laws of magic.

The young philosophy professor Dionisio Vivo is the only citizen who dares denounce his country's cocaine mafia. This makes him the object of several assassination attempts, as well as a national hero when the attempts on his life backfire with a regularity that is either farcical or supernatural. But Senor Vivo's immunity does not extend to the people he loves. Only Louis de Bernieres could so deftly manage the ensuing escalation from a macabre comedy to a wrenching tragedy of revenge. Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord is a work that engages on every level, delighting with its outsized characters and enchanting with its luminous prose.

This rambunctious first novel by the author of the bestselling Corelli's Mandolin is set in an impoverished, violent, yet ravishingly beautiful country somewhere in South America. When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny. "Walks a precarious edge between slapstick and pathos, never once losing its balance."--Washington Post Book World.

The epic finale of the Latin American trilogy following The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord While the economy of his small South American country collapses, President Veracruz joins his improbable populace of ex-soldiers, former guerrillas, unfrocked priests and reformed - though by no means inactive - whores, in a bizarre search for sexual fulfilment. But for Cardinal Guzman, a man tormented by his own private daemons, their stupendous, hedonistic fiestas represent the epicentre of all heresies.Heresies that must be challenged with a horrifying new inquisition destined to climax in a spectacular confrontation... 'An extraordinary feat of imagination... a sensuous, often farcical and ultimately optimistic argument for spiritual sanity' Time Out