What Columbus started in 1492 was finished in 1898, when the red and gold flag was lowered at Havana to mark the end of four centuries of Spanish dominance in the Caribbean.

For two and a half centuries after the Pope divided the world between Spain and Portugal, the navies of Britain, France, Spain and occasionally the Netherlands fought in the Caribbean. Most of the islands changed hands at least once. Europe discovered the delights of coffee, tea and cocoa; sugar boomed; fortunes were made and lost; the slave trade flourished. But after the Napoleonic Wars prosperity receded, the...

First published in 1975, this story tells of how a chance meeting in a cafe, a piece of grit delicately removed by a gentleman from a lady's eye give birth to an affair... a brief yet unrelenting emotional tug-of-war between two people whose spontaneous desire clashes head-on with the 'facts' of their existence.

There is Anna, married to Graham and happily content with her home life and two children. There is Alec, trapped in a loveless marriage to cool, uninvolved Melanie, looking to his work as a doctor for fulfillment.

Between them a flame is kindled that splendidly ignites...

To the casual visitor Santa Marta is a sub-tropical paradise, a small sister of Jamaica, Bermuda and Nassau, unmentioned in the colour-splashed brochures of travel agents: an island where the sun shines throughout the year on the sandy beaches of innumerable coves, on the cane-fields and coconut plantations, on the shingled hits of the peasant villages and the fine houses of the white planters handed down through generation after generation, from the Sugar Barons of a past century. But this was not how the newspaper columnist, Bradshaw, saw it when he arrived on his first trip to the...

This book tells the story of the Balliol family as they exist through the suffrage movement and the end of the Edwardian era to the Great War.

The Balliol children are subject to the effects of the war - the harsh discipline and the subsequent laxness, the breakup of family loyalties, the post-war cynicism and, in the youngest child, the ultimate trend back to a sounder pattern of life.

The action of this book, which is swift, continuous and dramatic, develops side by side with the plot of its theme that "to build a sanctuary, you must destroy a sanctuary"; that the...

If you enjoyed the powerful atmosphere of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby you may just have an inkling of the smoothly professional efficacy of Alec Waugh's The Fatal Gift. His novel breathes the values and attitudes of the early decades of the 20th century.

Raymond Peronne has wealth, is bright, is devastatingly attractive to women: his fatal gift. Second son of a baronet, Perronne goes to Oxford (from which he is rusticated), then to New York (in the'20s and '30s) and is in Egypt during the war (moving in circles then, as in this novel, inhabited by such as Evelyn...

Austria. February 1925. It was always to remain a special date for Guy Renton. There his chance meeting with the young and beautiful, but married, Mrs Renee Burton, precipitated the first crisis in his life. Hitherto he had been sure of himself temperamentally and emotionally: the 1914-18 war over, he had concentrated on his love of rugby, eventually being 'capped' for England, and he knew that one day, when too old to play, he would enter the family wine business.

Until that far off day, life should have been carefree. But Renee was to change his plans radically. This story of their...

First published in 1930, this discursive and absorbing travel-book offers, as the author says in his new Foreword, "a picture of a way of living that exists no longer."

Hot Countries tells of a series of journeys in the Far East, the West Indies and the South Sea Islands when he was a young and light-hearted novelist seeking colour, romance and adventure.

The bright summer sun faded into the shimmering Mediterranean as the young American painter began what was to be the five most perfect hours of his lifetime. It would be more than just an affair, a passionate encounter, and yet it would come to nothing. It would be a period of total enchantment that would remain to haunt him for the rest of his life, affecting his career, his code of behaviour, his entire existence. He sensed all this and yet he went to her, this woman he loved, this woman who could never be his...

Events that take place in an obscure oil-surveyor's camp in the French West Indies act as the link and the catalyst for three desperate groups of people thousands of miles apart - in London, New York and the picturesque old quarter of New Orleans.

Upon often trivial acts depends matters of life and love and death, and as always Alec Waugh has distilled the drama and the truth from a wide spectrum of characters and situations. The fascination of this novel is that it is, in effect, a game of global consequences.

This semi-autobiographical work tells the story of Gordon Caruthers' schooldays at the English public school, Fenhurst. From his confusion and isolation, through rebellious school escapades and relationships with fellow students, Alec Waugh reveals his own deep criticism of a system forcing pupils to conform to flawed ideals, and the inevitable consequences of thrusting thirteen year old children and eighteen year old adolescents together. The book caused a storm of controversy at the time and was banned in many schools. Today it can be rightly seen as a controversial comment on public...