Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

'Psychologically, the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did.'

George Orwell

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes.

A summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella.

The sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor.

These form a series of events that change the orphaned Pip's life forever, and he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman.

Dickens's haunting late novel depicts Pip's education and development through adversity as he discovers thetrue nature of his 'great expectations'!

About the Author

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812. He enjoyed his first commercial success with The Pickwick Papers in 1836, swiftly followed by the serialization of Oliver Twist a year later. By the publication of The Old Curiosity Shop in 1841, Dickens was internationally famous. Great Expectations was first published in serial form in All the Year Round magazine between 1860 and 1861. His novels, many now adapted for TV and film, continue to entertain readers all over the world.

In December the BBC will show a major new adaptation, forming part of their celebration of Dickens and the bicentenary of his birth in 2012.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

'Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious and brilliant...He can write as thrillingly about large-scale events as he can about the tiny details of the private world.' The Times

'Unquestionably a marvel - entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation.' Observer

David Mitchell's novels have captivated critics and readers alike, as his Man Booker shortlistings and Richard & Judy Book of the Year award attest. Now he has written a masterpiece.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the kind of book that comes along once in a decade - enthralling in its storytelling, imagination and scope.

Set at a turning point in history on a tiny island attached to mainland Japan, David Mitchell's tale of power, passion and integrity transports us to a world that is at once exotic and familiar: an extraordinary place and an era when news from abroad took months to arrive, yet when people behaved as they always do - loving, lusting and yearning, cheating, fighting and killing.

Bringing to vivid life a tectonic shift between East and West, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is dramatic, funny, heartbreaking, enlightening and thought-provoking. Reading it is an unforgettable experience.

The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there.

To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.

But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”

A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author.

Read The Guardian review here...

Find out more about the book and the author at his website here...

Here the author is interviewed about the novel on American radio:

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

`Few historical novels come close to acquiring the literary gravitas of Umberto Eco's superior thriller, perhaps because it is as much concerned with semiotics and the science of deductive reasoning as it is in conjuring up the fearful atmosphere of a 14th-century Italian monastery' - Metro

The year is 1327.

Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate.

When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the over of night.

A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.

He began to write it in 1978 because he "felt like poisoning a monk."

The novel works on many levels. It is a compelling murder mystery, as young narrator Adso of Elk accompanies the wise William of Baskerville as he uses logic and semiotics to not only solve a murder mystery, but to decipher labrynths and hidden secrets of the vast monastery library.

Interwoven with the murder mystery is a virtual course on philosophy and late Middle Ages religion, as Eco provides detailed accounts of the histories of various sects, includes scholarly debate on topics such as the poverty of Christ, and a history of the Catholic Church leading to the establishment of a papacy in Avignon, France.

One is reminded of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as William and Adso use logic and determination to piece together numerous bizarre deaths and occurences at the Abbey, while encountering obstacles and outright hostility by the Abbot and his librarian, to name a couple. The setting of the novel, and the glimpse into a culture that few of us can even imagine, is reason enough to read The Name of the Rose.

About the Author

Umberto Eco, an Italian philosopher and best-selling novelist, is a great polymathic fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce, and Borges. The Name of the Rose, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, is an experimental medieval whodunit set in a monastic library. Within the mystery is a tale of books, librarians, patrons, censorship, and the search for truth in a period of tension between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the Italian region of Piedmont,  right in the middle of the Genova, Milan, Turin triangle. Young Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside during the Second World War. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews. His father came from a family of thirteen children, and was very keen fo Umberto to read Law, but instead he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature. Umberto's thesis was on the topic of Thomas Aquinas and this earned him a BA in philosophy in 1954. In that period, Eco abandoned the Roman Catholic Church after a crisis of faith.

Following this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for RAI, Radiotelevisione Italiana, the state broadcasting station, he also became a lecturer at the University of Turin (1956–64). A group of avant-garde artists—painters, musicians, writers—whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63) became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico di San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater. He divides his time writing and lecturing between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Rimini. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.

"I myself like easy books that put me to sleep immediately. But the normal reader who does not spend his day fighting with Kant or Hegel feels respected if there is a jujitsu with a novel, a resistance, a seduction. If the book says yes immediately, it is a whore."

Umberto Eco

To find out more about the Author click here...

The Name of the Rose translated surprisingly well to screen in 1986, with a masterclass in laconic understatement from Sean Connery, an early appearance from US bad boy Christian Slater and a convincingly medieval setting.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

'Told with a compelling intensity which will keep the reader hooked until the last Undead tomb door swings shut' Sunday Telegraph


'It's the impeccably researched and subtly chilling story of a young woman's search for the truth about her historian father, and his quest to find Vlad himself. It's so refreshing to read genuinely sinister and suspenseful literary horror which does not need to rely on shock tactics' Bookseller

Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian combines a search for the historical Dracula with a profound sense that Stoker got some things right- that the late Mediaeval tyrant kills among us yet, undead and dangerous.

From Stoker, she also takes a sense that the supernatural seems more real when embedded in documentary evidence.

Three generations search for Dracula's resting place, and their stories are nested within each other, so that we know that at least two quests ended badly.

Kostova rations her thrills very carefully. She also has a profound and well-communicated sense of place and period, so that the book is equally at home in 1930s Rumania, Cold War Budapest and 1970s Oxford.
To read more about The Historian and to see what other books Elizabeth Kostova has written, click on the link below:

http://www.theswanthieves.com/

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary is one of the most important French novels of the 19th century.


Written in 1856, it is Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece.

Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Bovary, an unhappily married woman who seeks escape through forbidden relationships with other men. 

The book could be viewed as an expose of the situation of women in the 19th century; women who had not yet been emancipated and were expected to obey their husbands, to stay in their homes while the men went to work, or left for months on end to fight in wars.

Emma Bovary also serves as a voice for Flaubert, who patterned the character's personality after his own. Emma Bovary's "rebellious" attitude against the accepted ideas of the day, reflects Flaubert's views of the bourgeoisie.

Ultimately, Madame Bovary's indiscretions and her obsession with Romance lead to her downfall, which not only appeases the guardians of morality, but shows us Flaubert's view of the world wasn't one of naive optimism.

The novel was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between October 1 and December 15, 1856, resulting in a trial in January 1857 that made the story notorious. Flaubert was acquitted in 1857 and the book became a bestseller and remains one of the most influential books ever written.

To read A.S. Byatt's review of Madame Bovary, click on the link below:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jul/27/classics.asbyatthttp://

To find out more about Gustave Flaubert's life, click on the link below:

http://www.madamebovary.com/default.htm

Here's the opening scene of the 2000 BBC version that I think is rather good...

A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly

'A GATHERING LIGHT is a remarkable debut, a book that sweeps across the genre boundaries of murder, mystery, romance, and historical fiction - resulting in an original novel that is both gripping and touching.' Scott Turow 

'If ever a book deserved to cross over, this is it this is a wonderfully rich, involving and beautifully written book.' Adele Geras, The Guardian 

'Part history, part compelling murder mystery, Jennifer Donnelly's A GATHERING LIGHT brings the past to powerful and vivid life.' Celia Rees

When Mattie Gokey is given a bundle of letters to burn she fully intends to execute the wishes of the giver, Grace Brown. 


When Grace Brown is found drowned the next day in Big Moose Lake, Mattie finds that it is not as easy to burn those letters as she had thought.


And, as she reads, a riveting story emerges - not only Grace Brown's story but also Mattie's hopes and ambitions for the future and her relationships with her friends and family. 


Published to widespread acclaim this wonderful novel, part murder mystery and part coming-of-age story, is an astounding and accomplished piece of literature.


Read the opening of Chapter 1 here...

When summer comes to the North Woods, time slows down. And some days it stops altogether. The sky, gray and lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant you can’t help but stop what you’re doing—pinning wet sheets to the line maybe, or shucking a bushel of corn on the back steps—to stare up at it. Locusts whir in the birches, coaxing you out of the sun and under the boughs, and the heat stills the air, heavy and sweet with the scent of balsam. 


As I stand here on the porch of the Glenmore, the finest hotel on all of Big Moose Lake, I tell myself that today — Thursday, July 12, 1906 — is such a day. Time has stopped, and the beauty and calm of this perfect afternoon will never end. The guests up from New York, all in their summer whites, will play croquet on the lawn forever. Old Mrs. Ellis will stay on the porch until the end of time, rapping her cane on the railing for more lemonade. The children of doctors and lawyers from Utica, Rome, and Syracuse will always run through the woods, laughing and shrieking, giddy from too much ice cream.


I believe these things. With all my heart. For I am good at telling myself lies.

Find out more about the book and the author by clicking here...

Young Samurai the Way of the Warrior by Chris Bradford

A fantastic adventure that floors the reader on page one and keeps them there until the end. The pace is furious and the martial arts detail authentic -Eoin Colfer

August 1611. Jack Fletcher is shipwrecked off the coast of Japan. His beloved father and the crew lie slaughtered by ninja pirates. Rescued by the legendary sword master Masamoto Takeshi, Jack's only hope is to become a samurai warrior. And so his training begins. But life at the samurai school is a constant fight for survival. Even with his friend Akiko by his side, Jack is singled out by bullies and treated as an outcast. With courage in his heart and his sword held high, can Jack prove himself and face his deadliest rival yet?


To read reviews and to find out more about Japanese martial arts click the link below
http://http//www.youngsamurai.com/site/YOUN/Templates/General.aspx?pageid=45&cc=GB

To see Chris Bradford's website click here
http://http//www.chrisbradford.co.uk/Chris_Bradford/Home.html

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo

'A poignant, elegiac novel.' Daily Mail

'Full of warmth as well as grief, conveying vividly how precious it is to be alive' Sunday Times

'Michael Morpurgo is expert at getting through to his readers. He writes here about events that should never be forgotten nor forgiven...' The Independent

Longer novels from Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo are always a particular treat, and Private Peaceful is no exception. Tragic, surprising and engaging in equal measures, Morpurgo's novel charts both the childhood of young Thomas Peaceful in the early years of the 20th century, and his eventual underage enlistment in the British army to help fight the First World War.

It is, above all, a poignant story of war and about all of its many life-changing effects on those involved - also the brutality of the commanding regimes and the relentless squalor of trench warfare. It's not for the squeamish - Morpurgo tells it like it was and his honest insight is on every page for all to appreciate.
 
"Tommo" Peaceful is recalling his childhood from those terrible battlefields. He remembers his big brother Charlie taking him to his first day of school, the death of his father, his mum working hard to keep a roof over their heads and food on their table. He remembers his brother Joe, who some called simple, but who to Tommo was very special. He also recalls the only girl in his life, Molly, and how Charlie somehow took her away from him. But as the World turned to War, he had to grow up fast.
 
Together Charlie and Tommo enlist and are sent to France, almost immediately, to what could only be described as pure hell on Earth. Bullets, bombs, death. Shells, noise, dirt. Disease, rats, stench. Charlie and Tommo fight for their lives and to stay together - facing certain death in the face every time they try to advance the British lines.
 
Morpurgo rattles through his narrative at some speed, gracefully capturing both the horror of war and the ecstasy of life. The ending is shocking and memorable. This is difficult, emotionally draining but highly recommended reading. John McLay

The lost generation - Michael Morpurgo's Private Peaceful enables Diane Samuels to explore distant memories of the first world war in her review for The Guardian...

About the Author

Multi-award winning author, Michael Morpurgo, is one of Britain's best-loved writers for children and has won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, The Writers Guild Award and the Blue Peter Book Award for his recent novel, Private Peaceful, which has also had two successful runs as a play devised by Bristol Old Vic.

From 2003 to 2005 he was the Children's Laureate, a role which took him all over the UK to promote literacy and reading, and in 2005 he was named the Booksellers Association Author of the Year.

Find out more about the author by clicking here to visit his website...

Want to know Michael Morpurgo's favourite book? Watch him answer his 5 most common questions here...

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale

'If you love Sherlock Holmes then you'll love this...'

'Very simply, this is a fantastic book, fantastically written and it's a book of deep moral purpose.'

Ekow Eshun, Newsnight Review

'What the book does brilliantly...is look at notions of class, criminality, human nature and religion in an age of change... terrific.'  Ian Rankin, The Guardian

It is a summer's night in 1860.

In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet.

Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home.

The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them.

Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Road Hill House a fortnight later. He faces an unenviable task: to solve a case in which the grieving family are the suspects.

The murder provokes national hysteria. The thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes - scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing - arouses fear and a kind of excitement. But when Whicher reaches his shocking conclusion there is uproar and bewilderment.

A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, this has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery - a body; a detective; a country house steeped in secrets. In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Kate Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life.

Watch the Author discussing the book



About the Author

Kate Summerscale was born 1965 and is an award-winning English writer and journalist. She is the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction in 2008, and the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay. about Joe Carstairs the 'fastest woman on water', which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography. She formerly worked for The Independent and from 1995 to 1996 she wrote and edited obituaries for The Daily Telegraph. She is also the former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph. Her articles have appeared in various national newspapers. She has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize in 2001.

The birth of the detective - Ian Rankin is intrigued by this real-life whodunit in his review for The Guardian

The Silver Blade by Sally Gardner

"There is magic, romance, a hint of gothic coupled with vivid vignettes of Parisian life in all its post revolutionary squalor. The writing is beautiful, never forced and everything is cleverly woven together like an intricate tapestry...read The Silver Blade and succumb to the seduction of this master storyteller."

The French Revolution lives on in children's imaginations, if at all, largely thanks to The Scarlet Pimpernel. The tale of how a seemingly foppish aristocrat leads a double life, rescuing other aristocrats from the guillotine, has been a perennial favourite. Yet what about all the other innocents, who, in the days of the Terror, could be executed simply for showing pity for the condemned?

This, Sally Gardner's sequel to The Red Necklace, plunges us into that very question. At the end of the first book, Yann saved his beloved Sido and discovered that she loved him, but returned to Paris to rescue his friends while she sailed to England.

Now known as the Silver Blade, he performs in the theatre by night and by day rescues others from the guillotine, at enormous risk. A Romany, Yann can read people's thoughts, make them forget things and cause objects to move by force of concentration. The trouble is that his old enemy and Sidonie's, Count Kalliovski, has returned from the dead after making a pact with the Devil. The only man who can walk the streets during the Terror wearing the “decadent symbols of aristocracy”, he is living in a palace of bones in Paris's catacombs, with a monstrous black dog with human eyes.

Why does Kalliovski keep waxwork heads, how does he make them talk and what does he want of the master key-maker Quint? All will be revealed.

Set against a vivid historical background, prize winning author Sally Gardner brings to life the horrors of the French Revolution in this breath-taking adventure, complete with intrepid heroism and a touching love story.

Perfect for readers and fans of The Red Necklace and I, Coriander.

About the Author

Sally Gardner trained at art college and went on to work in the theatre, winning awards for her costume designs for some notable productions. After her twin daughters and her son were born she started to illustrate children's books, and then turned to writing. She lives in north London.  

Watch the author discuss growing up in Dickensian London, dyslexia and her new novel, THE SILVER BLADE.

The Falconer's Knot by Mary Hoffman

'Mary Hoffman's medieval murder mystery has all the ingredients needed to weave a satisfying web of intrigue ... This is a pacy and highly enjoyable read ... there is a freshness of perspective and intricacy of plot that lifts the story above the obvious or crass. The female characters and their struggles to find some autonomy beyond the confines of the roles allotted to them provide a particularly vivid thread beneath the mystery narrative ... I defy anyone to read this book and not want to visit Assisi.' The Guardian

Silvano and Chiara are two teenagers with a difference. Silvano has been accused of a murder he did not commit. Chiara has been ousted from her family as a young woman with no marriage prospects.

For these two very different reasons they are forced to seek refuge in a neighbouring convent and friary. And when they meet they are instantly aware that they are both outsiders, ill at ease with monastic life. Then a grisly murder - followed by another, and then another - strikes fear into the close-knit community. Chiara and Silvano cling together within the terrifying spiral of murder as they, and the friends they have made, attempt to solve the deadly mystery.

This remarkably rich mystery thriller, with all the pace and action of a 'whodunnit', is set in the incredibly atmospheric environs of a friary in 14th-century Italy.

Amidst all the action of the murder mystery, the author depicts in fascinating and intricate detail the lives and tasks of the friars and nuns, whether it be crushing pigments to create paints for the fresco artists in nearby Assisi, or the daily and nightly ritual of the religious services. All the historical detail is carefully researched. A huge cast of characters with romantic teen heroes, combined with the thriller-murder element, ensure a pacy, richly enjoyable read.

About the Author

Mary Hoffman is an acclaimed children's author and critic. She is the author of the internationally bestselling picture book Amazing Grace. Her Stravaganza sequence for Bloomsbury has its own fan forum and the latest, Stravaganza - City of Secrets, was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and The Falconer's Knot was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award. She currently runs her own blog (you can read it here) and is working on her next historical novel. Mary has three grown-up daughters and lives with her husband in West Oxfordshire.

She also runs a website that you can access here...

Read The Guardian review of The Falconer's Knot by clicking on this link...

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

From master storyteller, Michael Morpurgo comes an incredibly moving story about one horse's experience in the deadly chaos of the first world war.

In 1914, Joey, a young farm horse, is sold to the army and thrust into the midst of the war on the Western Front. With his officer, he charges towards the enemy, witnessing the horror of the frontline.

But even in the desolation of the trenches, Joey's courage touches the soldiers around him.

About the Author

Multi-award winning author, Michael Morpurgo, is one of Britain's best-loved writers for children and has won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, The Writers Guild Award and the Blue Peter Book Award for his recent novel, Private Peaceful, which has also had two successful runs as a play devised by Bristol Old Vic. From 2003 to 2005 he was the Children's Laureate, a role which took him all over the UK to promote literacy and reading, and in 2005 he was named the Booksellers Association Author of the Year.

About the National Theatre Production

The award-winning smash hit War Horse is still playing at the New London Theatre.

War Horse is a thrilling and spectacular production based on the celebrated novel by Michael Morpurgo.
The First World War is the backdrop for this tale of bravery, loyalty, and the extraordinary bond between a young recruit and his horse.

Actors, working with astonishing life-sized puppets by the internationally renowned Handspring Puppet Company, take audiences on an unforgettable journey through history.

Winner of Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards.

Find out more here at the official website.

Here's the trailer to the theatrical production...

Atonement by Ian McEwan

'Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence.' The Independent

Atonement is Ian McEwan's ninth novel and his first since the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam in 1998. But whereas Amsterdam was a slim, sleek piece, Atonement is a more sturdy, ambitious work, allowing McEwan more room to play, think and experiment.

We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama The Trials of Arabella to welcome home her elder, idolised brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins, the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren't up to the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting preoccupations come onto the scene.
 
The charlady's son Robbie Turner appears to be forcing Briony's sister Cecilia to strip in the Fountain and sends her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen for a war to promote his new "Army Amo" bar; and upstairs Briony's migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon, secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present...
 
The interwar upper-middle-class setting of the book's long, masterfully sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green, but as we move forward--eventually to the turn of the 21st century--the novel's central concerns emerge, and McEwan's voice becomes clear, even personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains and dangers of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling what readers make of your writing. McEwan shouldn't have any doubts about readers of Atonement: this is a thoughtful, provocative and at times moving book that will have readers applauding.
Alan Stewart

About the Author

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, The Cement Garden, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize, Atonement, Saturday and On Chesil Beach.

Here's the trailer for the 2007 film version starring Keira Knightley and James MacAvoy...

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

'One of the finest British writers of this century'
 A. Alvarez

WIDE SARGASSO SEA is set in 1830s Jamaica.

Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality.

After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness.

This classic study of betrayal is Jean Rhys' brief, beautiful masterpiece.

The novel works as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's famous 1847 novel. It is the story of the first Mrs. Rochester, Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in the Caribbean to her unhappy marriage and relocation to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans, Rhys's novel re-imagines Brontë's devilish madwoman in the attic.

As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals largely with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation.

About the Author

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother. She came to England when she was sixteen and then drifted into a series of jobs - chorus girl, mannequin, artist's model - after her father died.

She began to write when the first of her three marriages broke up. She was in her thirties by then, and living in Paris, where she was encouraged by Ford Madox Ford, who also discovered D. H. Lawrence. Ford wrote an enthusiastic introduction to her first book in 1927, a collection of stories called The Left Bank. This was followed by Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939).

None of these books was particularly successful, perhaps because they were decades ahead of their time in theme and tone, dealing as they did with women as underdogs, exploited and exploiting their sexuality. With the outbreak of war and subsequent failure of Good Morning, Midnight, the books went out of print and Jean Rhys literally dropped completely from sight. It was generally thought that she was dead. Nearly twenty years later she was rediscovered, largely due to the enthusiasm of the writer Francis Wyndham. She was living reclusively in Cornwall, and during those years had accumulated the stories collected in Tigers are Better-Looking.

In 1966 she made a sensational reappearance with Wide Sargasso Sea, which won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the W. H. Smith Award in 1966, her only comment on the latter being that 'It has come too late'. Her final collection of stories, Sleep It Off Lady, appeared in 1976 and Smile Please, her unfinished autobiography, was published posthumously in 1979. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1966 and a CBE in 1978. Jean Rhys died in 1979.

This is the trailer to the recent BBC4 production of the novel

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

"Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, sleep-disturbing, Birdsong is not a perfect novel - just a great one."

Simon Schama. New Yorker

"One of the finest novels of the last 40 years."

Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday

Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself.

Readers who are entranced by sweeping historical sagas will devour Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks' drama set during the first world war.

The book's hero, a 20-year-old Englishman named Stephen Wraysford, finds his true love on a trip to Amiens in 1910. Unfortunately, she's already married, the wife of a wealthy textile baron. Wrayford convinces her to leave a life of passionless comfort to be at his side, but things do not turn out according to plan. Wraysford is haunted by this doomed affair and carries it with him into the trenches of the war.

Birdsong derives most of its power from its descriptions of mud and blood, and Wraysford's attempt to retain a scrap of humanity while surrounded by it. There is a simultaneous description of his present-day granddaughter's quest to read his diaries, which is designed to give some sense of perspective; this device is only somewhat successful. Nevertheless, Birdsong is a rewarding read, an unflinching war story and a touching romance.

The novel came 13th in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read which aimed to find Britain's favourite book.

About the Author

Sebastian Faulks was born on 20 April 1953 and educated at Wellington College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was the first literary editor of The Independent and became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday before leaving in 1991 to concentrate on writing. He has been a columnist for The Guardian (1992-8) and the Evening Standard (1997-9). He continues to contribute articles and reviews to a number of newspapers and magazines. He wrote and presented the Channel 4 Television series, Churchill's Secret Army, which was broadcast in 1999.

Though his best known work is the bestselling Birdsong (1993), The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives is a multiple biography of the lives of the artist Christopher Wood, airman Richard Hillary and spy Jeremy Wolfenden. His fifth novel, Charlotte Gray (1998), completes the loose trilogy of books about France with an account of the adventures of a young Scottish woman who becomes involved with the French resistance during the Second World War. A film adaptation of the novel, starring Cate Blanchett, was first screened in 2002. His next novel, On Green Dolphin Street (2001), is a love story set against the backdrop of the Cold War. Human Traces, a book set in the 19th century and telling the tale of two friends who set up a pioneering asylum, was published in 2005. Engleby was published in 2007.

Faulks on Fiction is a compelling and personal look at the British novel through its greatest characters - the heroes, lovers, snobs and villains - and is also a major BBC series. Click on the video link to see Faulks interviewing contemporary writers on characters in fiction.



Sebastian Faulks lives with his wife and three children in London. He was awarded the CBE in 2002.

Find out more by clicking on the link below.

Find out more about Sebastian Faulks here...

Click on the link to hear Faulks discussing Birdsong on the BBC World Service's World Book Club.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/133_wbc_archive_new/page3.shtml

The BBC produced a TV version of the novel in early 2012. Here's the trailer...

The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner

'Exquisitely constructed...sophisticated, unpatronising...this book is a challenging read but also extremely rewarding. With vivid descriptions and fluid prose, this tale of magic, murder and madness brings 18th-century Europe to life on the page' WATERSTONE'S BOOKS QUARTERLY

'Gardner has woven a tense and believable fantasy into a setting of great danger and social termoil. Suspenseful throughout, The Red Necklace builds a thrilling climax. Highly recommended' HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW


The story of a remarkable boy called Yann Margoza; Tetu the dwarf, his friend and mentor; Sido, unloved daughter of a foolish Marquis; and Count Kalliovski, Grand Master of a secret society, who has half the aristocracy in thrall to him, and wants Yann dead.

Yann is spirited away to London but three years later, when Paris is gripped by the bloody horrors of the Revolution, he returns, charged with two missions: to find out Kalliovski's darkest deeds and to save Sido from the guillotine.

With a tangle of secrets, a thread of magic and a touch of humour, the follies of the aristocracy and the sufferings of ordinary people are unfolded as their lives move relentlessly towards the tragic and horrific days of the Terror.

THE RED NECKLACE is not only a tremendous adventure story but a vibrant and passionate picture of Paris in turmoil and of a large cast of memorable characters.

About the Author

Sally Gardner trained at art college and went on to work in the theatre, winning awards for her costume designs for some notable productions. After her twin daughters and her son were born she started to illustrate children's books, and then turned to writing. She lives in North London.

Click here to find out more about the Author...

Love in the time of the Terror - Adèle Geras applauds a sprightly tale set during the French revolution

My Swordhand is Singing by Marcus Sedgwick

Winner of the Booktrust Teenage Prize

'A bloodthirsty tale which grips readers from the off.' WATERSTONE'S BOOKS QUARTERLY

'Marcus Sedgwick paints a chilling and irresistibly Gothic picture of the fight between good against evil. This book is tense, unnerving and well-structured - it scared me right to the end and I could not put it down.'  Anna Hickling, The Times

'He came to the gate of the graveyard. There could be no doubt. The wool ran over the fence next to the gate, as if his quarry had sailed clean over it. Dumbly, he gripped it, as if it were a lifeline, when in reality it was leading him towards death itself...' 

In the bitter cold of an unrelenting winter Tomas and his son, Peter, arrive in Chust and despite the inhospitability of the villagers settle there as woodcutters.

Tomas digs a channel of fast-flowing waters around their hut so they have their own little island kingdom. Peter doesn't understand why his father has done this, nor why his father carries a long battered box everywhere they go, and why he is forbidden to know its contents. But when a band of gypsies comes to the village Peter's drab existence is turned upside down.

He is infatuated by the beautiful gypsy princess, Sofia, intoxicated by their love of life and drawn into their deadly quest. For these travellers are Vampire Slayers and Chust is a dying community - where the dead come back to wreak revenge on the living.

Amidst the terrifying events that follow, Peter is stunned to see his father change from a disillusioned man to the warrior hero he once was.

Set in the remote and forbidding landscapes of the seventeenth century this is a heart-rending story of loss and redemption, and inspired by the original vampire folklore of Eastern Europe it represents a unique regeneration of a timeless myth.

Marcus Sedgwick is a successful children's author. When he was young he was told he wouldn't be able to make a living as an author, and that left an impression on him, so much so that he did maths and politics at university. But then he got a job in a children's bookshop, "fell in love with contemporary children's writing" and remembered his childhood aspirations to become a writer. He decided to give it a try.



About the Author

Since Floodland won the Brandford-Boase Award for the best first children's novel of 2000, Marcus Sedgwick's books have been shortlisted for many awards, including The Guardian Children's Fiction Award, The Blue Peter Book Award, the Carnegie Medal and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. About My Swordhand is Singing he says: "It was fascinating to discover the original folklore that gave birth to the vampire legend. No snowy graveyard is left unvisited, no corpse undisturbed, no spell unspoken, no date with destiny unmet. But it's not all gloom; there's misery and horror, too."

By day he works in children's publishing and by night is the drummer in a rock band in Brighton. He lives in Sussex with his wife Pippa, and has a daughter, Alice.

Click here to visit Marcus Sedgewick's own website...

This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

'Perhaps the best historical novel I have read…A stunning achievement of imagination and story-telling. A masterpiece.' Bernard Cornwell

'It's an excellent read, in the traditions of Patrick O'Brian, and fully deserves its position on the Booker list.'

The Daily Telegraph

In 1831 Charles Darwin set off in HMS Beagle under the command of Captain Robert Fitzroy on a voyage that would change the world. 

In novels by Kurt Vonnegut, we find the concept of a "karass": a small group of people whom fate brings together to accomplish great things.

The suicide of a British captain in 1828 and the need to replace him in charting the icy complexities of Tierra Del Fuego led to the appointment of Fitzroy as commander of the Beagle. His manic-depressive state led him to advertise for a ship's naturalist, a companion to jolly him from dark moods - and to appoint Charles Darwin. Of such contingencies are revolutions made, whether or not they might have happened otherwise.

This is an epic novel of sea-faring adventure set in the 19th century charting the life of Fitzroy, the captain of 'The Beagle' and his passenger Charles Darwin.

It combines adventure, emotion, ideas, humour and tragedy as well as illuminating the history of the 19th century. Fitzroy, the Christian Tory aristocrat believed in the sanctity of the individual, but his beliefs destroyed his career and he committed suicide. Darwin, the liberal minor cleric doubts the truth of the Bible and develops his theory of evolution which is brutal and unforgiving in human terms. The two friends became bitter enemies as Darwin destroyed everything Fitzroy stood for.

This Thing of Darkness is two sorts of book: a superior adventure story and a polemic. One can enjoy the former considerably while noting that the manners of the latter are wanting. The Independent

About the Author

Harry Thompson was a highly successful television producer 'Have I Got News for You, They Think It's All Over, Never Mind the Buzzcocks' and the author of a number of non-fiction bestsellers 'Peter Cook, The Biography'. He wrote for most of the national newspapers, especially on travel, and was nominated for Travel Journalist of the Year. He died in November 2005.

Click here to read an interview with the author from The Guardian conducted a few months before he died...

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

'The situation at the centre of this richly accomplished new novel isn’t fantasy but fact. Taking a real-life Edwardian whodunit Barnes transforms it into a dazzling exercise in detective fiction of more kinds than one.' The Times

Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village.

Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham.

Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George remains in hardworking obscurity.

But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

With a mixture of detailed research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men.

This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race.

Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful difference between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

The Guardian reviews Julian Barnes's wonderfully executed Arthur & George which recounts Conan Doyle's own detective adventure

Read more about the book at the Author's own website...

About the Author

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964 and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he graduated in modern languages (with honors) in 1968. After graduation, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement for three years. In 1977, Barnes began working as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the New Review. From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesmen and then for the Observer.

Barnes has received several awards and honors for his writing including the Somerset Maugham Award (Metroland 1981), three Booker Prize nominations (incl. Flaubert's Parrot 1984, England, England 1998); Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (FP 1985); Prix Médicis (FP 1986); E. M. Forster Award (American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1986); Gutenberg Prize (1987); Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italy, 1988); and the Prix Femina (Talking It Over 1992). Barnes was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004. In 1993 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation and in 2004 won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

Julian Barnes has written numerous novels, short stories, and essays. He has also translated a book by French author Alphonse Daudet and a collection of German cartoons by Volker Kriegel. His writing has earned him considerable respect as an author who deals with the themes of history, reality, truth and love.

Read an interview with the author explaining why he came to write about the creator of Sherlock Holmes...

Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick

'One of the finest and best-constructed page turners of the year Tense, succinct, evocative and ingenious, and one to haunt you long after the novel is over.'

Nicolette Jones, THE SUNDAY TIMES

'An outstanding psychological thriller about the Arctic gold rush.' THE BOOKSELLER

1910. A cabin north of the Arctic Circle.

Fifteen-year-old Sig Andersson is alone.

Alone, except for the corpse of his father, who died earlier that day after falling through a weak spot on the ice-covered lake.

His sister, Anna, and step-mother, Nadya, have gone to the local town for help.

Then comes a knock at the door. It's a man, the flash of a revolver's butt at his hip, and a mean glare in his eyes.

Sig has never seen him before but Wolff claims to have unfinished business with his father.

As Sig gradually learns the awful truth about Wolff's connection to his father, his thoughts are drawn to a certain box hidden on a shelf in the storeroom, in which lies his father's prized possession - a revolver.

When Anna returns alone, and Wolff begins to close in, Sig's choice is pulled into sharp focus.

Should he use the gun, or not?

Read The Guardian's review of Marcus Sedgwick's 'thought-provoking revenge tale' here...

About the Author

Marcus Sedgwick was born in 1968 in Kent, and has worked as a bookseller and inside children's publishing, becoming a writer for children in 1994, and well-known for the dark themes in his young adult fantasy books. He has illustrated some of his own books, and also produces woodcuts and stone carvings.

His first novel, Floodland (2000), winner of the 2000 Branford Boase Book Award, tells the tale of Zoe, who lives on her own on an island once part of England, and his second book, Witch Hill (2001), is about Jamie, a boy whose house is destroyed by fire. The Dark Horse (2002), borrows its tone from Norse myth, and Cowards (2003) is about two men who refuse to fight in the first World War. The Book of Dead Days (2003) and its sequel, Dark Flight Down (2004), tell of the search of Boy, Willow and Valerian, and their capture by Emperor Frederick.

My Swordhand is Singing (2006), was shortlisted for several book awards and was winner of the 2007 Booktrust Teenage Prize. Blood Red, Snow White (2007), was shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Children's Book Award.

His latest book is White Crow (2010), shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. He has also recently published several books in The Raven Mysteries series, featuring Edgar the Raven and the Otherhand family.

Click here to visit Marcus Sedgwick's own website...

Interview with Marcus Sedgwick: 'There is almost nothing you can't tackle in a teenage novel'