Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics – serie

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these? Humbert Humbert's seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures.

FICTIONS is perhaps the single most mysterious and extraordinary collection of short stories written this century. Influenced by writers as disparate as Lewis Carroll, Stevenson and Cervantes, Borges is nethertheless a complete original who can turn dry logical puzzles in to enchanting fables. The Pieces in this volume represent his most accomplished work.

It is the story of the Galactic Empire, crumbling after twelve thousand years of rule. And it is the particular story of psycho-historian Hari Seldon, the only man who can see the horrors the future has in store: a dark age of ignorance, barbarism and violence that will last for thirty thousand years. Gathering together a band of courageous men and women, Seldon leads them to a hidden location at the edge of the galaxy where he hopes they can preserve human knowledge and wisdom against all who would destroy them. Asimov went on to add numerous sequels and prequels to the trilogy, building up what has become known as the Foundation series, but it is the original three books, first published in the Forties and Fifties, which remain the most powerful, imaginative and breathtaking.

Generally regarded both in Japan and in the West as his most successful novel, THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION brings together all Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religious life and the history of his own nation. Based on actual incident, the burning of a celebrated temple, the novel is both a vivid narrative and a meditation on the state of Japan in the post-war period.

Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, the novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart, this is a novel about lovelessness

A biting satire on dictatorship written during the Second World War and published in 1945, ANIMAL FARM is perhaps the most celebrated twentieth-century English satire after the same writer's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. One of the very few writers to be compared in power, artistry and moral authority with Jonathan Swift, the purity of Orwell's spare prose and the logic of his dark comedy emphasize the stark message of man's inhumanity to man and beast's to beast

Samuel Beckett is the greatest Irish novelist of the later twentieth century, and this trilogy of novels is his masterpiece -which makes it perhaps the outstanding literary work of our time. Because Beckett has a reputation for being difficult, even obscure, readers of the trilogy are bound to be struck not only by the verbal brilliance and inventiveness of the three novels, but also by their extraordinary humour which ranges from wit to broad comedy and even farce in a recognizably Irish way. Each story records an episode of human endurance in the face of metaphysical adversity with compassion and wisdom and each is a compelling narrative in itself in the great tradition of European fiction from Flaubert to Joyce.

Fantasy, mystery, war and love - it's all here in the magical trilogy His Dark MaterialsThis BEAUTIFUL GIFT collection features ALL THREE titles in the award-winning trilogy: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and THE AMBER SPYGLASSThe Amber SpyglassWill and Lyra, whose fates are bound together by powers beyond their own worlds, have been violently separated. But they must find each other, for ahead of them lies the greatest war that has ever been - and a journey to a dark place from which no one has ever returned . . .Northern LightsLyra Belacqua lives half-wild and carefree among the scholars of Jordan College, with her daemon familiar always by her side. But the arrival of her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, draws her to the heart of a terrible struggle - a struggle born of Gobblers and stolen children, witch clans and armoured bears.The Subtle KnifeLyra finds herself in a shimmering, haunted otherworld - Cittàgazze, where soul-eating Spectres stalk the streets and wingbeats of distant angels sound against the sky. But she is not without allies: twelve-year-old Will Parry, fleeing for his life after taking another's, has also stumbled into this strange new realm.On a perilous journey from world to world, Lyra and Will uncover a deadly secret: an object of extraordinary and devastating power. And with every step, they move closer to an even greater threat - and the shattering truth of their own destiny.

Nancy Mitford modelled the characters in her best-known novels on her own unconventional (and at the time of writing, notorious) family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin, Fanny ('the Bolter's girl'), on one of her frequent visits to their country estate: Uncle Matthew the blustering patriarch, owner of that bloodied entrenching tool above the fireplace, who hunts his children with bloodhounds; vague Aunt Sadie, and six children recklessly eager to grow up.The Pursuit of Love is the story of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward of the Radlett daughters, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent Communist (whom she follows to the Spanish Civil War), and finally a very wicked and irresistibly charming French duke.Love in a Cold Climate, again related by Fanny, focuses on Polly Hampton, long groomed for the perfect marriage by her fearsome mother, Lady Montdore, but secretly determined to pursue her own course.

This novel renews the Victorian family saga in a modern setting, tracing the history of the Brangwens through several generations. The book was banned when it first appeared in 1915 for its sensuous immediacy and the frankness with which it explores emotional and sexual life.

Post-colonial Africa is dissected with pitiless lucidity in this disturbing novel about an outsider, the young Indian trader, Salim, who has moved from the coastal settlement where he grew up to an unnamed country in the African interior (largely based on the Democratic Republic of Congo), settling on that very bend in the river where Conrad had set his Heart of Darkness some seventy years before. Salim enters a ghost town, once a flourishing European outpost, which is fast returning to the bush. A new dictator 'the Big Man' is about to impose his regime with the assistance of Raymond, 'The Big Man's White Man', whose humanitarian concerns have won him international acclaim, but whose plans for the country's future are arrogant and delusional. Salim becomes obsessed by Raymond's wife, Yvette, and begins and affair with her. Personal and political tragedy follow, civil war returns, and Salim, contemplating the disastrous course of his life since leaving home, speaks for the powerlessness of ordinary people everywhere in the face of historical upheaval: 'I couldn't protect anyone [and] no one could protect me... we could only in various ways hide from the truth... One tide of history has brought us here ... Another tide of history was coming to wash us away.'.

The Sun Also Rises is both a tragic love story and a searing group portrait of hapless American expatriates drinking, dancing, and chasing their illusions in post-World War I Europe. The man at its centre, world-weary journalist Jake Barnes, is burdened both by a wound acquired in the war and by his utterly hopeless love for the extravagantly decadent Lady Brett Ashley. When Jake, Brett and their friends leave Paris behind and converge in Pamplona for the annual festival of the running of the bulls, tensions among the various rivals for Brett's wayward affections build to a devastating climax.Hemingway, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, has exerted a lasting influence on fiction in English. His signature prose style, tersely powerful and concealing more than it reveals, arguably reached its apex in this modernist masterpiece.

Calvino's dazzling post-modernist masterpiece combines a love story, a detective story and a sardonic dissection of the publishing industry in a scintillating allegory of reading. Based on a witty anaolgy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of same book - IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT by Italo Calvino - are constantly and comically frustrated. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS of our day

This story of a man’s lifelong entanglement with his sister is not only a love story; it manages also to be a fairy tale, an epic, a philosophical treatise on the nature of time, a parody of the history of the novel, and an erotic catalogue. It concludes with an ingenious appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom. Ada, published just after Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, is the supreme work of a virtuosic imagination at white heat.Nabokov is the most allusive and linguistically playful writer in English since Joyce, and like Pale Fire and Lolita, this novel abounds in delightful minor parodies and pastiches, countless multilingual puns and literary jokes.Ada is at its core a love story, the stuff that’s sold reams of pop music, and piles of books. Van, fourteen, falls in love with twelve-year-old Ada during a summer holiday. This premise is possibly the only aspect of Ada common to numerous other novels. Van, an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, tells the story, while the narrative shuttles seamlessly from a first person to a third person - trust Nabokov the Enchanter to achieve that trick.

Robert Graves, aged nineteen, left school within a week of the outbreak of World War I, and immediately volunteered with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His experiences as a junior officer form the heart of this compelling autobiography. Beginning with an ironic overview of his Edwardian childhood, he proceeds to a tongue-in-cheek account of a young poet's life at public school (not helpful to be half-German, but handy to take up boxing), progressing to caricatures of military stereotypes he encounters in training, and the devastating farce of the War itself, the blundering and mismanagement, and the appalling human consequences. Graves's handling of the horrors of war is always deadpan, honest and unadorned. It is wholly in line with his sense of the absurd that his commanding officer should write to inform his parents that he had died of wounds during the battle of the Somme. He soon found that patriotism was meaningless to the men in the trenches; loyalty to comrades alive and dead drove him back to active service though still suffering from shell-shock.Goodbye to All That takes Graves through his convalescence in England, his efforts to protect the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a friend and fellow officer, from the consequences of his public denunciation of the war; marriage to artist and feminist Nancy Nicholson, postwar undergraduate years at Oxford and a decade as a struggling writer with four young children, beset with money problems and neurasthenia. It is written in a spirit of defiance as he prepared to put 'all that' behind him and begin a new life in Majorca with the American poet Laura Riding.

Many of these stores are now so famous from film and television adaptations that they need no introduction. Roald Dahl is well known as a master of the macabre and the unexpected in the tradition of Saki, and this volume does not disappoint. He began his literary career by writing about his own experiences in the RAF during World War II but soon developed this talent in a series of short-story collections. He is perhaps even more celebrated as an author of children's books, but the best of his short stories represent a claim for him to be numbered among the most remarkable story writers of the 20th century.The present volume includes for the first time all the stories in chronological order as established by Dahl's biographer, Jeremy Treglown, in consultation with the Dahl estate.

In the five novels by Ireland's greatest comic writer we can explore the full range of his invention, from the multi-layered madness of At Swim-Two-Birds to the piercing realism of The Hard Life and the surreal logic of The Third Policeman. This is a world where bicycles listen to conversations, inventors search formethods of 'diluting' water, and characters play truant while novelists sleep; a world where spiteful fairies wreak havoc and heroes from legend blunder into suburban sitting-rooms. This is recognizably the Ireland of Joyce and Beckett - rowdy, high-spirited, by turns sensual and and cerebral -transformed by O'Brien's unique vision.

In the book which put South America on the literary map, Marquez tells the haunting story of a community lost in the depths of that almighty continent where time passes slowly. A poetic masterpiece whose rich and powerful language easily survives the translation from Spanish, this is the most celebrated text of magic realism.The mysterious history of the Buendía family of the village of Macondo, which does nothing less than recapitulate the entire history of the human race, has had an influence on world literature unsurpassed by that of any other book of our era. In its lush understanding of the ways in which the political, the personal and the spiritual realms twine and untwine, in its couplings and parturitions, its battles and truces, One Hundred Years of Solitude contains a world we could never have imagined on our own. Yet, once encountered, it seems as familiar as the world of our own childhoods.

Though W. Somerset Maugham was also famous for his novels and plays, it has been argued that in the short story he reached the pinnacle of his art and it was his true métier. These expertly told tales, with their addictive plot twists and vividly drawn characters, are both galvanizing as literature and wonderfully entertaining. In the adventures of his alter ego Ashenden, a writer who (like Maugham himself) turned secret agent in World War I, as well as in stories set in such far-flung locales as South Pacific islands and colonial outposts in Southeast Asia, Maugham brings his characters vividly to life, and their humanity is more convincing for the author's merciless exposure of their flaws and failures. Whether the chasms of misunderstanding he plumbs are those between colonizers and natives, between a missionary and a prostitute, or between a poetry-writing woman and her uncomprehending husband, Maugham brilliantly displays his irony, his wit, and his genius in the art of storytelling.

Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. The three novels in this volume all display her characteristic wit, intellectual breadth and narrative brilliance, applied to the different traditional forms into which she breathed new life. The Bookshop is a contemporary comedy of manners, set in a provincial town. InThe Gate of Angels romance is combined with the novel of ideas; while The Blue Flower revitalizes historical drama in a study of the eighteenth-century German writer Novalis. Fitzgerald being the genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched conceptual context, each book conjures up a different world in a few vivid pages which remain etched on the memory.

Hailed as the greatest Japanese novel of the Twentieth century, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS is a subtle tale of domestic oppression worthy of Balzac or Chekhov, In this saga of the once prosperous but now declining Makioka family struggling to marry off one of their daughters, Tanizaki presents the picture of a family and a society striving to preserve their self-respect as they come to terms with disturbing new ways in a classic confrontation of innovasion and tradition. A wonderful portrait of Japanese life in the first half of the twentieth century.

One of Hemingway's finest novels, A FAREWELL TO ARMS was published in 1929 when the author was at the height of his power, It draws on his own experiences serving with the Italins in World War One when he was severely wounded in action and awarded the Croce de Guerra. This is a vivid portrait of men at war which also explores their deeper responses to the cruetly and heroism of Battle

In "Nineteen eighty-four", one of the 20th century's great myth-makers takes a cold look at the future. Orwell's study of individual struggling - or not struggling - against totalitarianism remains a salutary lesson in any society.

p-Included here are famous tales like 'Sound of Thunder', in which the carelessness of a group of time-travellers leads to disastrous consequences, and 'The Veldt', in which two seemingly innocent young children transform their nursery into a lethal trap. Here are the Martian stories, tales that vividly animate the red planet with its brittle cities and double-mooned sky. Here are stories which speak of a special nostalgia for Green Town, Illinois, the perfect setting for a seemingly cloudless childhood - except for the unknown terror lurking in the ravine. Here are the Irish stories and the Mexican stories, linked across their separate geographies by Bradbury's astonishing inventiveness. Here, too, are thrilling, terrifying stories such as 'The Fog Horn' - perfect for reading under the covers.Read for the first time, these stories are a feast for the imagination; read again - and again - they reveal new, dazzling facets of a master storyteller's extraordinary art.

Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Independent People is a masterly realist novel evoking in rich detail a family and a rural community struggling to survive in the starkest of landscapes. At the same time it is infused with an intense awareness of Iceland's saga tradition and folklore. Bjartur of Summerhouses is a hard and sometimes cruel man, but his flinty determination to achieve independence is both genuinely heroic and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude before managing to purchase an isolated piece of land rumoured to be cursed, Bjartur wants nothing more than to tend his flocks unbeholden to any man. But his daughter wants to live unbeholden to him, and what ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. An utterly compelling read.

A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin - and every bit their equal - Chester Himes was the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories and essays, as well as the classic crime fiction series for which he is best known, featuring detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones.Himes wrote nine novels in the Harlem Detectives series, and in these four popular, accomplished instalments, his cold, wise-cracking sleuths are thrown into a brutal, murderous world peopled with conniving con men, gut-toting gangsters and opium-smoking preachers. Himes's vision of Harlem's criminal underground, enriched by deft plotting and scintillating dialogue, is both riotous entertainment and penetrating enquiry into the fraught tensions of race in postwar America.

Who is killing monks in a great medieval abbey famed for its library - and why? Brother William of Baskerville is sent to find out, taking with him the assistant who later tells the tale of his investigations. Eco's celebrated story combines elements of detective fiction, metaphysical thriller, post-modernist puzzle and historical novel in one of the few twentieth-century books which can be described as genuinely unique.The Name of the Rose was made into a film in 1986, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.

These humorous and poignant tales of lovers, loneliness, and never-quite-belonging, delivered in her characteristically knowing, wry voice, confirm Lorrie Moore as a master of the short story form. Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America and Bark, her four acclaimed collections, are all here, and for good measure so too are a handful of stories excerpted from the novels Anagrams, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and The Gate at the Stairs. But at the author's request, the order of play is gloriously random: 'I didn't want this Everyman's volume to be one that simply glued all the books together in the obvious sequential order,' she writes. 'I wanted instead to let the magical alphabet set individual stories side by side in an otherwise unexpected and unchronological way so that friction or frost might occur: they could jostle and rap and spark or repel .... It might all be like a playlist set to shuffle ...' So, a joyous new discovery for first-time readers and for Moore fans, a multitude of new angles from which to view her incomparable ouevre.