A platoon of inexperienced British soldiers crosses to France, in excited and nervous anticipation of what is to come; they find themselves at Ypres where the battle-weary Allied troops are dug in, and slaughter surrounds them. With their young, upri...

Set deep in the mountains of southern France, this charming short novel tells the story of a man from the Cevennes Mountains called Roux, who refuses to join the army at the outbreak of war in 1914. Instead, he flees and hides in the hills, only retu...

I never saw the man again, alive or dead. One will say that I saw him only for a moment, that it was misty at the time, and that even I did not recognise the features, covered as they were with grime and stubble. Yet I am sure that the taller of the...

A profound and very human account of the early years of the war, told from the perspective of a father rather than combatants, but no less revealing. Mr Britling lives in the quintessentially English town of Matching's Easy in Essex. He is a great...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! The National Gallery in Prague has in its collection a unique Japanese illustrated manuscript of ogi no soshi, a genre of waka poems illustrated in fan-shaped pictures, which blossomed fro...

On its publication in German, "Against the World" was hailed as an immediate classic. "One of the most spectacular debuts of recent decades", said Kulturspiegel, while Der Spiegel went even farther: "Against the World is the book of books". Now Engli...

Originally published in Italian in 1965, "A Test of Powers" was immediately seen as one of the central texts of Italian intellectual life. By the time of the 1968 student revolts, it was clear that Franco Fortini had anticipated many of the themes an...

This novel tells the classic tale of the mischievous "Master of Sherwood Forest", who lives the outlaw life with Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet and his band of Merry Men, bedevilling the implacable Sheriff of Nottingham during the reign of Ric...

When the young Arthur pulls the embedded sword from the stone, his future as the King of England is foretold. This imaginative retelling of the classic legends recounts the story of Arthur's formation of the Knights of the Round Table, his securing o...

Shipwrecked on an unchartered island, the Swiss Family Robinson – mother, father and four young boys – make the most of their predicament, adapting to the island and turning the absence of civilization to their advantage. Through perseverance, hard w...