Nanda Brookenham is 'coming out' in London society. Thrust suddenly into the vicious, immoral circle that has gathered round her mother, she even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of the man she admires. Light and ironic in its touch, The Awkward Age nevertheless analyzes the English character with great subtlety.

The Awkward Age, which has been much praised for its natural dialogue and the delicacy of feeling it conveys, exemplifies Conrad's remark that James 'is never in deep gloom or in violent sunshine. But he feels deeply and vividly every...

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?
This short novel was the artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the...

Ronald Blythe invites us into the company of his neighbours and friends to hear his reflections on the natural and local history, the liturgy, stories, village events and gossip that shape and unite their lives. Though intimately local, his voice is that of a poet, transcending boundaries of place and time with a universal appeal. 'Man of letters, man of faith, Suffolk man: Ronald Blythe is all of these.' Tiimes Literary Supplement

s suspicious as one often is of the other, literature and spirituality enjoy a rich and deep relationship. They have been inextricably linked since narrative and symbol first met in the earliest biblical writings.
Story, poetry and drama have always been used to express the human search for religious meaning and to modulate the divine voice. Equally, 'Take Christianity out of English literature, ' asks Ronald Blythe in this book, 'and what is left?'
In this fascinating and spirited collection of essays the novelist Penelope Lively explores fiction writing as an act of creation with its...

'Here, where Time brings pasture to the sea' - the eminent Victorian A.C. Swinburne, from whose long work about the lost city of Dunwich this collection takes its title, was not the first or last poet to be struck by the landscape, and history, of Suffolk. Until almost within living memory Suffolk was a farming-fishing place, not all that far from London, yet strangely remote. Perhaps for this reason its coast was already something of a haven for writers and artists before Benjamin Britten made Aldeburgh the base for his annual music festival. The county's climate appeared to make artists and...