The new novel from David Baddiel, comedian, columnist and author of the critically-praised The Secret Purposes. In New York's Mt. Sinai hospital, the world's greatest living writer, Eli Gold, is dying. Witnessing his death are his precocious 8-year-old daughter by his present (fifth) wife, his anxiety-ridden 44-year-old son from his third marriage,...

Jack Henderson, estranged from his ex-wife and grown-up daughters, is involved in a horrific accident. His younger brother Douglas begins an affair with a woman he barely knows, risking everything. And Angus, the eldest of the Henderson boys, finds himself suddenly in freefall having unexpectedly been laid off from his job. As the three brothers he...

Emily is a traumatised burns victim, Arta a Kosovan refugee recovering from a rape. David Temple is a longterm depressive, while the Rt Hon Ralph Hall MP lives in terror of his drink problem being exposed. Very different Londoners, but they share one thing: every week they spend an hour at the Prince Regent hospital, revealing the secrets of their...

It's two fifteen a.m., you're in bed alone and you're woken by the phone. Your eyes are wide and your body tense before it has completed so much as a single ring. And as you wake, in the tiny moment between sleep and consciousness, you know already that something is wrong. Only someone bad would call at such an hour. Or someone good, but with bad n...

Peter is 44, prosperous, childless, a player in the NY contemporary art dealing scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close on 20 years. Their marriage is sound. But when Mizzy, Rebecca's brother, comes to stay, his world is turned upside down. Returning to their flat, Peter sees Rebecca's outline in the shower. But when he opens the shower doo...

Julia Greenfield has a problem: she's twenty-six years old and she's still a virgin. Sex ought to be easy. People have it all the time! But, without meaning to, she made it through college and into adulthood with her virginity intact. Something's got to change. To re-route herself from her stalled life, Julia travels to spend the summer with her my...

For Ned, 1980 seems a blissful year. Handsome, charming, popular and talented, his life is progressing smoothly, effortlessly, happily. And when he meets the lovely Portia Fendeman his personal jigsaw appears complete. But timing is everything in life, and his life is about to change for ever. Things are going to get very bad indeed for innocent yo...

Iris Murdoch's first novel is set in a part of London where struggling writers rub shoulders with successful bookies, and film starlets with frantic philosophers. Its hero, Jake Donaghue, is a drifting, clever, likeable young man who makes a living out of translation work and sponging on his friends. A meeting with Anna, an old flame, leads him int...

What if Princess Diana hadn't died? What if the tragedy in the Alma Tunnel never happened, and she were still alive today? Where would she be, and what would she be doing? Diana's life and marriage were fairy tale and nightmare rolled into one. Adored by millions, in her personal life she suffered heartbreak and betrayal. Within a life of privilege...

Toru Okada is going through a difficult time. He is without a job, his cat has disappeared and his wife is behaving strangely. Into this unbalanced world come a variety of curious characters, a young girl sunbathing in a nearby garden, sisters who are very peculiar indeed, an old war veteran with a violent, disturbing story. Okada retreats to a dee...

Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.

Lou Clark has lots of questions. Like how it is she's ended up working in an airport bar, spending every shift watching other people jet off to new places. Or why the flat she's owned for a year still doesn't feel like home. Whether her close-knit family can forgive her for what she did eighteen months ago. And will she ever get over the love of he...

Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that, against all odds, seduces beautiful Connie into a second date . . . and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades after their relationship first blossomed in London, they live more or less happily in the suburbs with their moody seventeen year-old so...

What would you do if you found out that your husband, your father, your son - was not who you thought? Could you ever love him again? Luke Livingstone is a lucky man. He's a respected solicitor, a father and grandfather, a pillar of the community. He has a loving wife and an idyllic home in the Oxfordshire countryside. Yet Luke is struggling with a...

It seems a perfect afternoon in the Highlands. Standing at the door of the lochside castle that has been his family's home for generations, Charlie Stuart welcomes his guests to the annual summer drinks party. Conversation, laughter and the clinking of glasses soon fill the air as friends and neighbours come together to toast the laird's happiness...

When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links users' personal emails, social media, and finances with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of transpa...

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life, a...

Twenty years after his bestselling debut Essays in Love, internationally acclaimed author Alain de Botton returns to fiction with a brilliant new novel about modern relationships What does it mean to live happily ever after? At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answe...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, read by Jeff Woodman and Scott Shina. A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aid...

Nick Hornby's first novel, an international bestseller and instantly recognized by critics and readers alike as a classic, helps to explain men to women, and men to men. Rob is good on music: he owns a small record shop and has strong views on what's decent and what isn't. But he's much less good on relationships. In fact, he's not at all sure that...

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016 Two strangers arrive in a small Spanish fishing village. The older woman is suffering from mysterious paralysis, driven to seek a cure beyond the bounds of conventional medicine. Her daughter Sofia has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother's illness....