Series: Canons

RAW ∼ REBELLIOUS ∼ VULGAR Bukowski's take on the bildungsroman, an anti-coming-of-age story and his finest novel. Lifelong misfit Henry Chinaski grows up downtrodden, stumbling through a world he has only ever known as hostile. Fights, failed romances and humiliations abound; Chinaski toughens up as he grows up, finding solace in books and in the bottle. Savagely funny and profoundly...

FEVERISH ~ PROVOCATIVE ~ INTIMATE A neon-lit portrait of danger and desire, unravelling and reinvention. Jesse is a twenty-nine-year-old adrift in San Francisco's demi-monde of sexually ambiguous, drug-taking outsiders, desperately trying to sustain a connection with her bisexual boyfriend. She becomes caretaker and confidante to Madame Pig, a grotesque, besotted recluse, and meets Madison - Pig's daughter or lover or...

UNSETTLING ~ WRY ~ TENDER An unusual and unforgettable take on what it means to be an outsider, an outcast, a misfit. Five thousand years after having escaped Crete, the Minotaur finds himself deep in the American South, living in a trailer park and working as a line cook at Grub's Ribs. He leads a lonely life observing the haphazard...

'One of the literary greats of the twentieth century' MARGARET ATWOOD 'A crafter of fierce, focused, fertile dreams' DAVID MITCHELL 'A literary icon' STEPHEN KING Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of...

In May 1924, the BBC broadcast a miracle to the world: a wild nightingale singing a duet with a remarkable young cellist called Beatrice Harrison. Over a million people tuned in to hear this live performance, which Beatrice repeated with a nightingale for the BBC every spring until 1942. These broadcasts transformed the public interest in nightingales—a species already in...

Against an unflinching backdrop of 90s reservation life in the western Dakotas, Neither Wolf Nor Dog tells the story of two men, one white and one Native American, connected by their own understandings of life yet struggling to find a common voice. As they journey together through small Indian towns and down forgotten roads where the whisperings of the wind...

Sophie, a twenty-something Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A., and Lola, a German immigrant who has settled in Hollywood, know that while Los Angeles is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal. The two women dazzle—one with the promises of youth, the other with the fulfilment of nostalgia—as they wend their way through the pink sunsets and...

It is the 1970s in LA, and Jacaranda Leven - child of sun and surf - is swept into the dazzling cultural milieu of the beautiful people. Floating on a cloud of drink, drugs and men, she finds herself adrift, before her talent for writing, and a determined literary agent, set her on a course for New York and a...

The notorious corner of West Fayette and Monroe Streets in Baltimore is a 24-hour open-air drug market that provides the economic fuel for a dying neighbourhood. Through the eyes of one broken family—two drug-addicted adults and their smart, vulnerable fifteen-year-old son, DeAndre McCollough—Simon and Burns examine the sinister realities of inner cities across the USA. The Corner unflinchingly assesses why...

Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them . . . So begins this irresistible voyage into the dark side of Victorian London. Amongst an unforgettable cast of low-lifes, physicians, businessmen, and prostitutes, meet our heroine Sugar, a young woman trying to drag herself up from the gutter any way she can. Be prepared for a...

In Dubliners, James Joyce takes us on an extraordinary journey with the ordinary men and women from the city of his birth. In 'Araby', a young boy struggles with everyday tasks in the face of a growing infatuation with his neighbour's sister; in 'The Boarding House', a single mother orchestrates a marriage proposal for her daughter; in 'The Dead', the...

Under the Sea-Wind marks the beginnings of one of the most significant careers in nature writing. In it, Rachel Carson celebrates the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, conjuring the atmosphere of the shore and the open sea. Carson illustrates the delicately balanced, fragile struggle for life along the shoreline. Through her vivid descriptions,...

Trickster disrupted the world around him, and in doing so he reshaped it. Playful, mischievous, subversive, amoral, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but they are also indispensable heroes of culture. Trickster Makes This World revisits the stories of Coyote, Eshu, and Hermes and holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Pablo Picasso,...

From the fiery intellectual provocateur - and one of our most fearless advocates of gender equality - a brilliant, urgent essay collection that both celebrates modern feminism and challenges us to build an alliance of strong women and strong men. Ever since the release of her seminal first book, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia has remained one of feminism's most outspoken,...

Now is the time for the new, the beautiful and the humane. In Together, award-winning political thinker, author and poet Ece Temelkuran provides an inspiring manifesto for change by revealing fresh possibilities for the better world we might want to live in and gives us a new vocabulary for the political action that the twenty-first century demands. Above all, this...

The One State is the perfect society, ruled over by the enlightened Benefactor. It is a city made almost entirely of glass, where surveillance is universal and life runs according to algorithmic rules to ensure perfect happiness. And D-503, the Builder, is the ideal citizen, at least until he meets I-330, who opens his eyes to new ideas of love,...

Five thousand years after leaving the Cretan labyrinth, the Minotaur — or M as he is known to his colleagues — is working as a line chef at Grub's Rib in Carolina, keeping his horns down, trying in vain to put his past behind him. He leads an ordered lifestyle in a shabby trailer park where he tinkers with cars,...

Despite their status as intellectual giants of the twentieth century, John Berger and Susan Sontag's artistic collaboration—and intense friendship—remains virtually unknown. Published for the first time, To Tell a Story offers a glimpse into their shared history that spanned nearly a quarter-century. From sources such as their eponymous film broadcast, rare personal letters and archival recordings, the composite fragments build...

Powerful - Barack Obama Searing - New York Times How do you comfort a man who has just lost his best friend? How does it feel to see fear in your wife's eyes? What does it mean to come home? In one of the most acclaimed and celebrated collections of stories for years, Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of...

In The Writing Life, Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard offers up her own trials in the pursuit of inspiration: the absurdity, the fierce determination, and the sacrifices (warm feet; gainful employment; peace of mind). Her perennial guide, which wrestles with the hubris and insanity of the creative process, has been an inspiration and a comfort to writers for nearly...

Dreamer is a multi-layered masterpiece, capturing Civil Rights-era America in a snapshot of racism and brutality, revolution and hope. Martin Luther King Jr is a political visionary, human rights activist, preacher, scholar, and martyr. Chaym Smith is his dark mirror, a violent, cynical criminal with the mind and talent to mimic King's. When Smith begins to act as King's double...

When Gunnar Huttunen turns up in a small village to restore its run-down mill, its inhabitants are wary. Gunnar is big. He's a bit odd. And, strangest of all, he howls wildly at night. If Gunnar is different, then he must be mad, the villagers decide. Hounded from his home, he must find a way to survive the wilds of...

The Underground Sea is a succinct, urgent collection of writings from John Berger's archive. It brings together for the first time his work on mineworkers and the miners' strikes and has been edited as a set of actions for today: a time when people are rediscovering the necessity, power, and possibilities of collective action. Including essays, transcripts, interviews, and images,...

From the grimly gothic Do Not Disturb to the razor-sharp dissection of manners in The Takeover and the mordantly brilliant The Only Problem, in a panoramic sweep taking in the shores of the Italian lakes to the castles of Geneva, Muriel Spark casts her unflinching gaze over the continent and onto some of the odder specimens of human nature abounding...

When you hire C. Card, you have scraped the bottom of the private eye barrel. He is a detective of sorts. When he's hired to steal a body from the morgue, he needs to stop dreaming, find bullets for his gun and get there before someone else does. Not since Trout Fishing in America has Brautigan so successfully combined his...

Twice Voted Scotland's Favourite Book Faced with a choice between a harsh farming life and the world of books and learning, Chris Guthrie chooses to remain in her rural community, bound by her intense love of the land. But everything changes with the arrival of the First World War, and Chris finds her land altered beyond recognition. In lyrical prose,...

A heartbroken American writer starts a story about an ice-cold sombrero that falls inexplicably from the sky and lands in the centre of a small Southwest town. Devastated by the departure of his gorgeous Japanese girlfriend, he cannot concentrate on his writing and, in frustration, he throws away his beginning. But as the man searches through his apartment for strands...

Getting it in the Head, McCormack's celebrated debut collection, is richly imaginative, bitterly funny, powerful, and original. Here we enter a world where the infatuation with death, ruin, and destruction is total. Set in locations ranging from New York to the west of Ireland, and to the nameless realms of the imagination, it is a world where beautiful but deranged...

The Bachelors displays the best of Sparkian satire, placing her at the heart of a great literary tradition alongside Waugh and Trollope, Wilde and Wodehouse. It demands rediscovery. "It's easy to see why Waugh admired The Bachelors. On one level, it is a blithely carnivorous satire in the Waugh mould. The bachelors of the title – almost the only men...

In this investigation into loss, losing, and being lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty. A Field Guide to Getting Lost takes in subjects as eclectic as memory and mapmaking, Hitchcock movies, and Renaissance painting. Beautifully written, this book combines memoir, history, and philosophy, shedding glittering new light on the way we live now.

Jock McLeish, failed husband, lover and businessman, is alone in a hotel room, drinking whisky, fantasising about sex and contemplating suicide. As he tries to distance himself from reality, his lonely, alcohol-fuelled fantasies are interrupted by a flood of memories, reminding him of his own shortcomings. An unforgettably imaginative book, deeply experimental in its form and charged with a dark...

WINNER OF THE WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZE 2025 WINNER OF THE PRIX ÉMILE GUIMET DE LITTÉRATURE ASIATIQUE 2017 WINNER OF THE RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI AWARD 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER 2016 In Capital, Rana Dasgupta reveals the new version of Delhi which...

There is no such thing as history, you see. It's a dream, perhaps even a dream of a dream... Walter Benjamin is dead. One of the most radiant minds of the twentieth century has been snatched away by death in a small town on the border between Spain and France. His thousand-page manuscript, carried the length of France during his...