Minerva – serie

From the Booker Prize winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Commitments: the story of an ordinary woman whose extraordinary character will stay with you long after reading.‘He loved me and he beat me. I loved him and I took it. It’s as simple as that’Paula Spencer is thirty-nine, the mother of four and learning to live without Charlo, her violent, abusive husband.Paula’s started drinking more and dreaming more, taking herself back to her contented childhood and audacious teenage years. Everything was better then, not least the music, the soundtrack to her romance with Charlo. As the past floats by and mingles with the present Paula Spencer finds herself coming alive, in all her vulnerability and her strength.‘Roddy Doyle's unsparing examination of a brutal marriage transcends the boundaries of class and nationhood’ The Times

Meet the Rabbitte family, motley bunch of loveable ne'er-do-wells whose everyday purgatory is rich with hangovers, dogshit and dirty dishes. When the older sister announces her pregnancy, the family are forced to rally together and discover the strangeness of intimacy.But the question remains: which friend of the family is the father of Sharon's child?By the bestselling author of The Commitments, now a long-running West End stage show. 'Unstoppable fun. A big-hearted, big-night out' The Times

Eureka Street is a story of Belfast in the 1990s, six months before and after another ceasefire. It is the story of Chuckie Lurgan, fat, Protestant and poor, who suddenly becomes wealthy by various legal but immoral means; and of Jake Jackson, Catholic reformed tough guy, who has been abandoned by his English girlfriend and is looking for love. Meanwhile the strange letters 'OTG' start appearing on walls and paving stones throughout the city.

A missionary, a murderer, an artist and an exile: Maugham turns human weakness into unforgettable short fiction. Somerset Maugham is the acknowledged master of the short story, and his full range is represented in this collection. In acclaimed stories such as ‘Rain’, ‘The Letter’, ‘The Vessel of Wrath’ and ‘The Alien Corn’, Maugham illustrates his wry perception of human weakness and his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time and place. Set chiefly in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and among British expatriate and colonial communities, these classic short stories explore moral strain, social hypocrisy, exile, failed idealism and desire. Again and again, Maugham strips away the public version of events to reveal motives that are weaker, crueller and more human than society admits. What gives these stories their force is Maugham’s restraint. He rarely presses for judgement, but lets gossip, memory and circumstance do their work, leaving his characters exposed in ways that feel sharp, ironic and deeply human.