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The 1993 Booker Prize-winner. Paddy Clarke, a ten-year-old Dubliner, describes his world, a place full of warmth, cruelty, love, sardines and slaps across the face. He's confused; he sees everything but he understands less and less.

Children can now enjoy their favourite Poppy story, time and time again with this brilliant picture book and DVD set. The DVD features a soundtrack read by Tamzin Outhwaite, animated stills from the book and brilliant music and sound effects. It's Poppy's birthday and she's really excited. She simply can't wait to be a birthday princess! But everyone seems so busy — it's as if no one cares about her enough to remember her special day. They can't all have forgotten... can they?

Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, «Ulysses» follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, «Ulysses» is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century. «Ulysses» was Paris in 1922. It was first published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head in 1960. In 1974 a team of scholars, led by Professor Hans Walter Gabler, began to study manuscript evidence, typescripts and proofs in an attempt to reconstruct as closely as possible the creative process by which Joyce wrote «Ulysses». This text is the revised 1993 edition of Gabler's version.

At twenty-nine, fun-loving, good-natured Claire has everything she ever wanted: a husband she adores, a great apartment, a good job. Then, on the day she gives birth to her first baby, James visits her in the recovery room to inform her that he's leaving her. Claire is left with a beautiful newborn daughter, a broken heart, and a body that she can hardly bear to look at in the mirror. So, in the absence of any better offers, Claire decides to go home to her family in Dublin. To her gorgeous man-eating sister Helen, her soap-watching mother, her bewildered father. And there, sheltered by the love of an (albeit quirky) family, she gets better. A lot better. In fact, so much better that when James slithers back into her life, he's in for a bit of a surprise.

This narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son becomes a text which speaks directly to the confusions and agonies of existence, detailing a personal, philosophical odyssey.

Bob Lee Swagger has seen enough of war and fighting for any man: his past as a Marine Corps sniper and later as a self-appointed avenger has been a bloody one. But the hope that he is finished with combat are dashed with a visit from Colonel Philip Yano. Yano has come to America to find a samurai sword that Bob's father took from Yano's dying father in the desperate battle for Iwo Jima in 1945. Yano believes the sword to be a national treasure, of huge political significance to whoever can get hold of it. Bob agrees to help and delivers the sword to Yano in Tokyo, but soon afterwards the Yano family are murdered, their house burned to the ground and the sword stolen. Dark forces are at work. With the aid of Yano's old comrades, Bob enters not only Tokyo's criminal underbelly, but also the violent, obsessive world of the Samurai. Once more he is on a mission of vengeance.

Tessa has just a few months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It's her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is sex. Released from the constraints of 'normal' life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up. Tessa's feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her estranged mother, her best friend, her new boyfriend, all are painfully crystallized in the precious weeks before Tessa's time finally runs out. Before I Die is a brilliantly-crafted novel, heartbreaking yet astonishingly life-affirming. It will take you to the very edge.

Barrytown, Dublin, has something to sing about. The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabitte, brilliantly coached by Joel 'The Lips' Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from paris hall to immortality on vinyl. But can The Commitments live up to their name?

Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other 'midnight's children' all of whom are endowed with unusual gifts. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's story is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.

Centres around Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown with a deep love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and an even deeper gambling debt. Wanted for tax evasion and on the verge of extradition, Krone is drafted into the service of a mysterious order of nuns who promise him reprieve from the international authorities.

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens — as he later put it, it was clear my people needed me). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss hotlines, and the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item. Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, I'm a Stranger Here Myself recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man's attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.

Offers a guide to this extraordinary river and the towns and villages which line it. Exploring its history since prehistoric times, this book shows the fishes that swam in the river and the boats that plied its surface; about floods and tides; hauntings and suicides; miasmas and malaria; locks, weirs and embankments; bridges, docks and palaces.

Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain.

'Bed time, Baby Bat. Time to brush your teeth and your face. Have you washed behind your wings? Thought not'. Baby Bat is full of beans and he does not want to go to bed. At least not until Snail, Caterpillar, Spider and the Moon are tucked in and he thinks the whole world is sleeping. Will Mummy Bat ever manage to get Baby Bat off to sleep?

On a brisk autumn day, a thirteen-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America-and into another realm. One of the most influential and heralded works of fantasy ever written, The Talisman is an extraordinary novel of loyalty, awakening, terror, and mystery. Jack Sawyer, on a desperate quest to save his mother's life, must search for a prize across an epic landscape of innocents and monsters, of incredible dangers and even more incredible truths. The prize is essential, but the journey means even more.

The ultimate dictionary for lovers of Provence: Peter Mayle's personal selection of the foods, customs and words he finds most fascinating, curious, delicious, or just plain fun. Though organized from A to Z, this is hardly a conventional work of reference. In more than 170 entries, Peter Mayle--bestselling author of A Year in Provence — writes about subjects as wide-ranging as architecture and zingue-zingue-zoun (in the local patois, a word meant to describe the sound of a violin). And, of course, he writes about food and drink: vin rose, truffles, olives, melons, bouillabaisse, the cheese that killed a Roman emperor, even a cure for indigestion. Provence A-Z is a delight for Peter Mayle's ever-growing audience and the perfect complement to any guidebook on Provence, or, for that matter, France.

In this stunning novel Andre Dubus III set in present-day California a story of human conflict that has the power and resonance of a classical tragedy. Working on a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Shah's Air Force yearns to restore his family's dignity. When an attractive bungalow comes up at a country auction for a fraction of its value, he sees an opportunity to dream his own American Dream, for himself, his wife and children. But for the house's former owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, the loss of her father's house is the latest in a series of insults life has dealt her. When he becomes involved with a married policeman who takes up her cause, the stage is set for a gut-wrenching tragedy, which keeps the reader gripped and moved to the last page. Dubus has an extraordinary ability to get us inside each of his characters, to see the world as it is for each of them. These are ordinary people, people just looking for a small piece of ground to stand on, driven by the same ordinary needs into inevitable conflict — a conflict in which even the reader, rooting for all of them, has no safe haven. Unfolding relentlessly from its opening pages, House of Sand and Fog is a narrative triumph. It turns both the traditional immigrant success story and a modern love story upside down with a heartrending outcome, combining American realism with a Shak.

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: «A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do.» Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.

In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the recluse genius John Shade: an adoring foreward and commentary by Shade's self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote: a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 — 30 years after its original publication — Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.

The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. It is first and foremost a compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime.

In his highly acclaimed debut, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch took us on an adrenaline-fueled adventure with a band of daring thieves led by con artist extraordinaire Locke Lamora. Now Lynch brings back his outrageous hero for a caper so death-defying, nothing short of a miracle will pull it off. After a brutal battle with the underworld that nearly destroyed him, Locke and his trusted sidekick, Jean, fled the island city of their birth and landed on the exotic shores of Tal Verrar to nurse their wounds. But even at this westernmost edge of civilization, they can't rest for long — and are soon back to what they do best: stealing from the undeserving rich and pocketing the proceeds for themselves. This time, however, they have targeted the grandest prize of all: the Sinspire, the most exclusive and heavily guarded gambling house in the world. Its nine floors attract the wealthiest clientele — and to rise to the top, one must impress with good credit, amusing behavior... and excruciatingly impeccable play. For there is one cardinal rule, enforced by Requin, the house's cold-blooded master: it is death to cheat at any game at the Sinspire. Brazenly undeterred, Locke and Jean have orchestrated an elaborate plan to lie, trick, and swindle their way up the nine floors... straight to Requin's teeming vault. Under the cloak of false identities, they meticulously make their climb — until they are closer to the spoils than ever. But someone in Tal Verrar has uncovered the duo's secret. Someone from their past who has every intention of making the impudent criminals pay for their sins. Now it will take every ounce of cunning to save their mercenary souls. And even that maynot be enough...

From the author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles comes a huge mesmerizing novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries. Two people with special powers are drwan together and set out in a passionate alliance to unlock the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift. As the strane saga is played out, a world of witches is created that will fascinate readers for years to come.