"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" tells the moving tale of an Italian family living in Scotland during the rise of Mussolini and his rule in Italy. The story is told from the point of view of Lucia, the family's daughter, who, at 83, reflects on her childho...

After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka family find themselves embroiled in the struggle for Polish independence. This is a history of Eastern Europe told in miniature throug...

Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His writing contributed greatly to existentialism, and the term "Kafkaesque" is now synonymous with the literature of the surreal, the complex and the illogical. His works...

The centrepiece of "Silent Highway" is the title-poem which celebrates the role of the river Thames in the life of London. It is written as a sequence that looks at history and the present: from Pocahontas's voyage to the arrival of the "Windrush" br...

Annabel Patterson here turns her well-known concern with political history in early modern England into an engine for investigating our own era and a much wider terrain. The focus of this book is, broadly, nationalism and internationalism today, appr...

A work unprecedented in world literature, this unique volume contains a new translation of Leo Tolstoy's controversial novella, "The Kreutzer Sonata", which was initially banned by Russian censors. In addition, available to English readers for the fi...

C. H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of th...

Catullus is a companion of lovers and of those whom love has disappointed. He is also a satirical and epigrammatic writer who savagely consoles with laughter. "Carmina" captures in English both the mordant, scathing wit and also the concise tendernes...

Although originally published separately, Patrick Modiano's three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of ot...

"The Bay Psalm Book" was the first book to be printed in North America, twenty years after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts. Now extremely rare – only eleven copies survive – it is also the most expensive book in the world, fetchin...