Explores how gospel singer Arthur Montana discovers his love for Jimmy and portrays how profoundly racial politics can shape the private business of love.

Schreber was a judge and doctor of law who lived according to a strict set of principles. His nervous illness first manifested itself as hypochondria and insomnia - which he put down to his excessive workload - but gradually deteriorated into pathological delusion. This book analyses his illness.

From the moment she walks from court having been charged with attempting to poison her husband, to her banishment, escape to Paris, and final years of solitude and waiting, the life of Therese Desqueyroux is passionate and tortured. The victim of a hostile fate, Therese, as Mauriac said of her belongs to that class of human beings for whom night can end only when life itself ends. All that is asked of them is that they should not resign themselves to night s darkness. Therese s moving and powerful story affirms the vitality of the human spirit, making her an unforgettable heroine."

Celebrates seven decades of Czeslaw Milosz's exceptional career.

In the humid air of 16th-century Peru, Atahuallpa, the Sun-God King, meets Pizarro the Conquistador, representative of the Spanish Empire at its insatiable. While the Inca King is convinced of his own immortality, the Spaniard is cynical and greedy, leadin

In Poland, in 1939, the secure world of assimilated Jews is blown away by the invasion of the Third Reich. Maciek's father disappears into the war's vortex, leaving the orphaned child with his Aunt Tania. It is her cool inventiveness, in their dramatic fli

A play written during Brecht's exile to the United States and set in pre-Communist China. It is a parable of a young woman torn between obligation and reality, between love and practicality, and between her own needs and those of her friends and neighbours

Francois Besson listens to a tape recording of a girl contemplating suicide. Drifting through the days in a provincial city, he thoughtlessly starts a fire in his apartment, attends confession, and examines, with great intentness but without affection, a naked woman he wakes beside.

The author's talent for creating the unexpected, and for rewriting the rules of the English language, has made him one of the most innovative and respected writers of the 20th century. This is another dazzling display of his unrivaled ability to surprise, to stimulate, and to explore.

Edward Venn-Thomas lives in the twentieth century but has been mysteriously transported to the future, and the apparently idyllic society of New Create, where there is no hunger, no war and no dissatisfaction. However Venn-Thomas is starting to find life among the New Cretans rather dull. He comes to realize that their perfect existence, inspired by the poets and magicians of their strange occultic religion, lacks one fundamental thing - evil. So Venn-Thomas sees it as nothing less than his duty to introduce them to the darker side of life. First published in 1949 and also known as Watch the...