General

In this collection of short stories: a ten-year-old boy uses Edinburgh buses to escape from his dysfunctional mother and her boyfriend; a retarded youth tries to join a female gang; a dead lesbian lover can't let go; and a British soldier loses the plot.

The subject of racism between blacks and whites in the United States is the central theme of this novel by the author of "One of the Children is Crying", "Island People" and "Mrs October Was Here". A series of encounters between blacks and whites expose the hypocrisy of racism.

A novel about what happens after a tragedy in a family - not the tragedy itself but its aftermath. A daughter has died, suddenly, shockingly, and the different ways in which her mother and father respond to the tragedy, how this plays out within the family and affects the other siblings, is at the heart of things.

Spanning generations, River of the Brokenhearted explores the life of this formidable woman, a pioneer before the age of feminism, and her legacy as it unfolds tragically in the lives of her son and grandchildren.

A horse in nineteenth-century England recounts his experiences with both good and bad masters.

A Spanish family torn apart by the Civil War. This is the drama of Benjamin Prado's Not Only Fire.

Prado introduces us to four generations of an everyday - and yet extraordinary - Spanish family. Each member of the family is close to the edge - and anything could happen, from forgiveness to murder .

Involuntary self-murder is a symptom of what Matthew Maddox, emeritus professor of the Drayburgh School of Fine Art, considers to be a cultural as well as a social malaise - his millennial summing-up of the century he has lived through.

Pocket-sized edition of one of Anthony Powell's early novels, this book features a whole gallery of comic subordinate characters: the egregious valet, Pope, called by his comrades in the army "The Duke"; the two Russian counts, Scherbatcheff and Bobel; the ingenious American, Cortney; and the conscientious ...

Zelmont Raines has slid a long way since those winning touchdowns brought him lucrative endorsement deals. Crack, barrels of booze, a paternity suit, a hip injury, groupies and some shady investments in gangsta rap; can things get any worse? Enter Wilma Wells, the leggy and brainly lawyer for the Los ...

A chilling tale of murder and passion deep in the bayou from the Orange Prize-winning author of Property.

In England his novels are always bestsellers, yet for the last decade this American literary master has not been published in his own country. No longer! Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue displays the same plainspoken power that has dazzled Purdy's devoted audience for decades. The story of a woman's struggle ...

In 1974, a tiny band of self-styled urban guerrillas, calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, abducts a newspaper heiress, who then takes the guerrilla name 'Tania' and shocks the world by choosing to remain with her former captors. Has she been brainwashed? Why else would such a nice girl disavow ...

This collection of short stories explores the lives of young men in their twenties and thirties: their confusions, their obsessions, their emotional complexities. The stories have a wide range, but they are nevertheless all at some level explorations of modern masculinity.

Albert Lippincott is a thirty-year veteran of the Nestor, New York, Post Office - a letter carrier extraordinaire, aggressively cheerful, obsessively efficient. But Albert has a few things to hide. His unfortunate habit, for instance, of reading other people's mail.

The stories in The Coast of Good Intentions evoke the landscape of the Pacific North-west with impressive ease - crab factories, cranberry bogs, the fog-shrouded shore, the Seattle skyline. Here are ordinary lives in all their messy, unresolved glory.

In a brasserie just off the Boulevard St-Germain, a distinguished author is entranced as he watches the motions of a young woman folding a restaurant bill into a paper boat. On an impulse he proposes to her. She answers without hesitation: yes, she will marry him, but on her terms.

This title provides a fictional snapshot of a mongrel nation, by a high-profile group of young writers.