Honey Santana - self-proclaimed queen of lost causes - has a plan. She may be a single mother living in a trailer-park with her teenage son; she may have just been sacked from her day job for whacking an over-friendly co-worker in the balls with a crab mallet; she may be an obsessive compulsive with an anger management problem. But, she's determine...

Melville's 'Bartleby' is a classic American short story, a strange tale of an assiduous copyist whose catch-phrase is 'I would prefer not to'. It is joined here by two other stories from 'The Piazza Tales', Melville's idiosyncratic collection: 'The Lightning-Rod Man' and 'The Bell Tower'.

New York, 1929. Joe Quinn has been given a shot at the NYPD's main headquarters squad and his first case is one that could put his name up in lights: a banker takes a dive from a tall building on to Wall Street. All the signs point to murder. Soon the dead man has company; a group of old buddies is being taken out, in a particularly gruesome manner...

The young and innocent Isabel Archer has a choice to make when she comes to England from America: dignity and duty or her happiness? A familiar theme in James' writing is the meeting of Europe and America. Isabel Archer is determined to make the most of her new-found freedom when she arrives in England, but other expatriate Americans manipulate he...

Bill Bryson drove 14,000 miles in search of the mythical small town of his youth. Instead he found a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger joints; a continent lost to itself through greed, pollution and television, and lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country. A funny and analytical view of smalltown America.

After nearly two decades in Britain, Bill Bryson took the decision to move back to the USA. Before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire, he took one last trip around the UK, and turns an affectionate but laconic eye on his adopted country.

Buck is born to a life of luxury in California, but he's betrayed by an estate gardener and sold to be a sledge dog in the frozen north. It is the time of the famous Klondike Gold Rush and dogs like Buck are in great demand. But Buck escapes to lead a wolf pack, and becomes a legend of the north.

Bill Bryson's quest to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilisation. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemistry, astronomy and particle physics and to render them comprehensible to people who thought they could never be interested in science. In the company of some extraordinary scientists,...

After nearly two decades in England, Bill Bryson returned to live in the country he had left as a youth. Of course there were things that Bryson missed about Blighty, but any sense of loss was countered by the joy of rediscovering some of the forgotten treasures of his childhood. Gathered here are 18 months' worth of musings about the strangest of...

A sea classic from the author of 'Moby Dick'. Billy Budd, a sailor on a merchantman, is 'pressed' into service on HMS Indomitable during the Napoleonic Wars. Although popular amongst the crew, he is victimised by a brutal master-at-arms and tragedy becomes inevitable.

It is fire season, and the hills of Los Angeles are burning. Fire Department personnel rush to evacuate the inhabitants, and find the days-old corpse of a middle-aged recluse who apparently committed suicide. Clutched in his lap is a photo album containing photographs of seven young women who have been murdered. One murder per year for seven years,...