Adrian Mole is now thirty and three-quarters. An accidental celebrity, with a spreading bald patch, despairing of family values, Mole is still worrying: Is Viagra cheating? Why won't the BBC produce his serial killer comedy 'White Van'? Mole chronicles the closing years of the 20th century with slanderous abandon.

Set in London during and just after the Second World War, the love affair between novelist Maurice Bendix and his married lover, Sarah Miles, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. Two years later a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy. Maurice hires a private detective to follow Sarah and slowly his love for her tu...

'Five Quarters of the Orange' revolves around a recipe book, continuing the theme of culinary intrigue begun in 'Chocolat' and 'Blackberry Wine'. Framboise returns to the village where she grew up during wartime and, with the help of the recipes scribbled in her mother's album, opens up a small restaurant. Whilst immersing herself once again in the...

A new generation has arrived to divide the Forsyte clan with society scandals and conflicting passions. Set in the years following the First World War, the story moves to Soames Forsyte's daughter Fleur. She is now married to Michael Mont, but when her old love Jon returns after seven years, desire is rekindled and loyalties begin to divide.

After the death of his estranged wife, Quoyle's fortunes begin to change when his long lost Aunt Agnes convinces him to head north to his ancestral home on the coast of Newfoundland with his daughter Bunny. In the small coastal village of Killick-Claw Quoyle lands a job as a reporter for the local newspaper. He reports on the shipping news as he si...

A nervous breakdown seems like a great idea: all that lying in bed and watching daytime TV. But who's going to have it? Will it be housewife Clodagh, who spends her days microwaving pasta for her demanding toddlers and waiting for her beautiful husband Dylan to come home? Or Lisa, reeling from the shock of a demotion from her fabulous job in London...

Five disparate voices inhabit Ali Smith's dreamlike 'Hotel World', set in the luxurious anonymity of the Global Hotel, in an unnamed northern English city. The disembodied yet interconnected characters include Sara, a 19-year-old chambermaid who has recently died at the hotel; her bereaved sister, Clare, who visits the scene of Sara's death; Penny,...

Ria Lynch and Marilyn Vine have never met. Ria lives in a big ramshackle house in Tara Road, Dublin, which is filled with family and friends, while Marilyn lives in New England, absorbed in her career. A chance phone call brings them together and they decide to exchange homes. So a magical summer begins, full of discovery, unexpected friendships an...

Captain Gault has decided that his family must leave their home in Lahardane. They are after all Protestants living in the big house in rural Cork in 1921, and Ireland is in turmoil. But 8-year-old Lucy can't bear to leave the seashore, the old house, the woods - so she hatches a plan. It is then that the calamity happens - an accident almost, but...

'The Silver Spoon' continues the tale of Soames' daughter Fleur. Married to Michael Mont, in line for a Barony, the story focuses on Michael's start in Parliament and Fleur's dissatisfaction with her marriage. The American, Frances Wilmont, enters the scene bringing news that Fleur's real love, Jon, forbidden to her as the son of her father's ex-wi...

Michael Mont is succeeding in his public life in Parliament, but holds grave doubts about his private life and his wife, Fleur. Fleur's original love, Jon Forsyte, her cousin and the son of her father's ex-wife, returns to England where a meeting is inevitable. Fleur's undying love for Jon is disclosed.

A richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and the Chances, Angela Carter's witty and bawdy novel is populated with as many sets of twins and mistaken identities as any Shakespeare comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of showbusiness.

Every table at Quentins Restaurant has a story to tell: tales of love, betrayal and revenge. The staff who come and go have stories of their own, and the restaurant itself has had times when it looked fair for success and others when it seemed doomed to failure. Ella Brady wants to make a documentary about the renowned Dublin restaurant that has ca...

Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets o...

Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick su...

The sequel to 'The Clan of the Cave Bear'. Life on the glacial continent of the last Ice Age, when two kinds of human beings, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, shared the earth, is an exotic, primeval world where the beautiful Ayla leaves the safety of the clan who raised her and sets out alone on a journey of discovery. CONTAINS ADULT THEMES.

After an impulsive affair with his student sours, David Lurie retreats disgraced to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power is shifting in South Africa. He and Lucy become victims of a disturbing attack whic...

Henry Chester, a Victorian artist, is in search of the perfect model. In nine-year-old Effie he finds her. Ten years later, lovely, childlike and sedated, Effie seems the ideal wife. But something inside her is about to awaken.

This audiobook is the story of Clare and Henry, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pul...

Donald Cameron, a young Scotsman, is commissioned to write a book on the outsider's view of the English. During his investigation into the foibles of English social life he encounters civil servants, newspaper editors, minor poets and a glamorous film star in such classically English situations as the country house weekend and one of the most famou...

Eventually becoming the 1960s film that made Michael Caine a star, 'Alfie' is the tale of a free-wheeling young man, who, thanks to his hedonistic lifestyle and numerous sexual escapades, cannot find true happiness and peace of mind.