"Over", Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta..." In these and other pieces Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflectio...

Thanks to its colourful cast of characters and gritty portrayal of street life in Victorian London, Dickens Oliver Twist has captured readers hearts for over 150 years. Todays children will love it too. Oliver, a poor orphan, escapes the miserable wo...

In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, wrote the first draft of "Frankenstein" after she and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley took part in a ghost writing competition at Lord Byron's villa by Lake Geneva. Returning to England in the autumn...

Chris McCully brings Old English poetry to life with exhilarating immediacy. Here is the earliest surviving English poem, "Caedmon's Hymn", as well as one of the last poems to be written in the classical Old English alliterative style; some of the gr...

Horace (65-8 BC) is the most beguiling of the great Latin poets. He has left an ineradicable mark on Western literature: Dante placed him alongside Homer and Virgil, and his works have been translated and re-imagined since the Renaissance. Len Krisak...

This anthology brings together for the first time a substantial selection of poems by Augusta Webster (1837-1894), Mathilde Blind (1841-1896) and Amy Levy (1861-1889), three poets whose writing both reflected and helped to shape a time when women wer...

In the great Bengali poet's autobiographical writings we discover what his translators describe as "a heart of love, a mind at its service that can cut like a knife, and in some sense the spirit of a child". The six prose pieces, centering on the poe...

"I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully...

Julian Turner's "Crossing the Outskirts" was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize best first collection. In his second book he explores his familiar themes of identity and loss, and new, more personal ones –...

For sale in CIS only! The collection includes pilgrimage accounts, which describe a 'national' circuit (as in Lady Nijo's, c. 1280, or Sei Shonagon's, c. 990, accounts) or move across vast regions to places of learning and pilgrimage or to a particu...