The year is 1998. Nick Karolides is a marine biologist working on coral reef protection off Zanzibar - the island of slaves, sultans and spices that for centuries has signified both the exotic and the
Harold Pinter's response to world events is always pure and simple: he writes with an economy that throws the stark light of truth onto any given subject: There is no fudge, no dallying, no compromise
I May Be Some Time is a richly engrossing cultural history of our obsession with ice, Eskimos and polar exploration. When Captain Scott died in 1912 on his way back from the South Pole, his story be
Children's books - from Narnia to The Hobbit - are celebrated in this enlightened examination of the joys of childhood reading. Fairy tales and Where the Wild Things Are, The Lord of the Rings and t
It tells the remarkable story of men who wanted to play God - of the inventors and magicians who laboured for centuries to simulate life mechanically.'A meticulous account of the search for mechanical
From Scorsese and Lynch to Wenders and Godard, interviews with twenty of the world's greatest directors on how they make films--and whyEach great filmmaker has a secret method to his moviemaking--but
The outline of the story is well known - has become, in fact, the stuff of legend: the archetypal life of the tortured genius, critically spurned and dying young. What Andrew Motion brings to bear o
Mata Hari's fame soon spreads throughout the cabarets and theatres of Europe and, as the major powers lurch towards inevitable conflict, she begins to attract the attention of numerous admirers - many
Without telling her husband, a young woman drives off to the coast. But a detective is already looking for them, and he knows it will only be a matter of time before she makes a mistake . . 'There are
The protagonist of this novel is a 15-year-old North London schoolboy called Gabriel. He is forced to come to terms with a new life, and use his gift for painting in order to make sense of his world,
This anthology results from decades of random reading plus a recent deliberate trawl to discover more examples of what Robert Graves calls 'heart-rending sense', poems I would want to copy out in long
It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film. When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious lite
Class and national barriers lose their distinction and a heady whirl of parties, drinking and promiscuity distracts from the more serious business at hand. Told in intimate, alternate chapters from th
Sam Pig lives in a thatched cottage with Tom, Bill and Ann Pig - and also Brock the Badger. Here are twenty of the best Sam Pig stories from Alison Uttley, whose magical imagination has brought Sam's
Set in northern England during the 1984 miner's strike, Billy Elliot tells the story of a young working class boy who chooses not to follow his widowed father's instructions to train to be a boxer. In
In this collection of stories, Kureishi chronicles the loveless, the lost and the dispossessed. They represent the frustrated and intoxicating, the melancholic and sensitive, capable of great cruelty
This is the first novel by the author of "Immortality", which won "The Independent" Award for Foreign Fiction in 1991. Milan Kundera is also the author of "The Book of Laughter and Fogetting".
He knows everything about her before they meet: more about her nine novels then she does herself. He has devoted his life to studying and teaching them and yet he is four times as clever as she is. No
Ida, Oscar and Ping are staying at the ancient, river-encircled house of Green Knowe. They set out to chart the river and discover it has some surprising and mysterious secrets.
Tolly's great-grandmother's house is full of a very special kind of magic. There are other children living there - children who had been happy there centuries before.
The first publication of the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's romantic thrillerMade in 1959, North by Northwest is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most beloved thrillers, an enticing cocktail of suspense,
Continuing the story begun in "The Bean Trees", this novel features the characters Taylor and Turtle as they witness an event whose repercussions will change their lives forever. By the author of "Ani
In the 1000-line poem Killing Time, the manic countdown to a thousand years of history reaches its climax, with the past twelve months spooling past like newsreel. In the Age of Communication, we find
This collection of poems includes the themes of domestic tension, law and order, submerged and exploding violence, and the anarchic strain in the human psyche. Simon Armitage is the author of "Zoom!".
