Series: Picador Collection

Celebrating 50 years of Picador Books Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2015 Shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction 2016 Winner of Fiction of the Year at the British Book Awards 2016 Finalist for the National Book Awards 2015 The million-copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and...

The post-apocalyptic modern classic with an introduction by novelist John Banville. In a burned-out America, a father and his young son walk under a darkened sky, heading slowly for the coast. They have no idea what, if anything, awaits them there. The landscape is destroyed, nothing moves save the ash on the wind and cruel, lawless men stalk the roadside,...

Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is the true story of a 24-hour period on Everest, when members of three separate expeditions were caught in a storm and faced a battle against hurricane-force winds, exposure, and the effects of altitude, which ended in the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history. In March 1996, Outside magazine sent veteran journalist and...

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis Celebrating 50 years of Picador Books. I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane? Patrick Bateman has it all: good looks, youth, charm, a job on Wall Street, and reservations at every new restaurant in town. He is also a psychopath. A man addicted to his superficial, perfect life, he pulls...

Adapted by the Coen Brothers into an Academy Award-winning film, No Country for Old Men is a dark and suspenseful novel from Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road. Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles upon a transaction gone horribly wrong. Finding bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice -...

John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where...

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full. Set in the anarchic world opened up by America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic and potent account of the barbarous violence that...

CELEBRATING FIFTY YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS Now an HBO Max original TV series The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. One snowy night in...

CELEBRATING FIFTY YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of...

In Cities of the Plain, the concluding volume of Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed Border Trilogy, two men grapple with a vanishing way of life amidst a rapidly changing world. John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, whose stories began in All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, now find themselves facing the tumultuous currents of the 1950s American Southwest. Bound by their...

A dark, nihilistic tale, Cormac McCarthy's second novel Outer Dark sees brother and sister wander separately through a countryside scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers. In an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, a woman named Rinthy bears her brother's child. The brother, Culla, abandons the baby in the woods, and tells Rinthy...

Funny and compulsively readable - Louis Theroux What if a tiny, shadowy elite rule the world from a secret room? In Them: Adventures with Extremists Jon Ronson sets out to find this room, with the help of the extremists - Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen - that believe in it. Along the way, he is chased by men in...

The second book in the Lonesome Dove quartet, Comanche Moon, which follows on from Dead Man's Walk, follows Rangers Gus and Call in their bitter struggle to protect the advancing West frontier against the defiant Comanches, courageously determined to defend their territory and their way of life. It showcases Larry McMurtry's strong affinity for the landscape and its inhabitants with...

Taking you deep into the heart of the American West, Dead Man's Walk is the first book in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet. These are the wild days when Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call – heroes of Lonesome Dove – first encounter the untamed frontier that will form their characters. Not yet twenty, Gus and Call enlist as Texas Rangers...

In January 1895, Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. In The Master, Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in...

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS Winner of the Man Booker Prize, The Line of Beauty is a classic novel about class, politics, and sexuality in Margaret Thatcher's 1980s Britain. There was the soft glare of the flash—twice—three times—a gleaming sense of occasion, the gleam floating in the eye as a blot of shadow, his heart running fast with no...

'One of the finest American writers of his mighty generation' - Esquire 'A tour de force of erotic realism, a romantic cliffhanger' - The New York Times The 1960s. Philip Dean, a footloose Yale dropout, is touring provincial France and sometimes Paris in a borrowed, once elegant car. He begins a mismatched affair with a young shop girl named Anne-Marie....

Set in rural Tennessee between the world wars, The Orchard Keeper is the unique, darkly biblical debut novel from the legendary author of Blood Meridian and The Road, Cormac McCarthy. 'McCarthy has the best kind of Southern style' - New York Times John Wesley Rattner is a young boy when his father is murdered. Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger,...

A wonderful novel. I was deeply moved. Outstanding - John Boyne Mark Casey did not expect to fall in love. But from the minute he saw Joanne Lynch across the garden of a Dublin pub, it seemed that nothing else was possible. But Mark is also drawn back - guiltily - to his family and the land they have farmed...

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is a powerful, triumphant, Pulitzer-winning tribute to the American West. Immerse yourself in the gritty realism of the American frontier in this masterful epic from the screenwriter of Brokeback Mountain. This is the story of a group of audacious cowboys on a perilous cattle drive across the sprawling wilderness, from Texas to Montana, bound by...

Bucky Wunderlick is a rock and roll icon at the height of his career, but fame and fortune have left him feeling hollow and disillusioned. Seeking refuge from the relentless pressures of celebrity culture, he abruptly abandons his band mid-tour and retreats to a sparse, unfurnished apartment on Great Jones Street in New York City. This cryptic disappearance ignites a...

'As unexpectedly beguiling as it is affecting' Daily Mail Since his award-winning debut collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson's work has been as melancholy, witty, strange, and lovely as any in America. Inspired by the true story of his own great-aunt, he explores the life of Miss Jane Chisolm, born in rural, early-twentieth-century Mississippi with a...

"Our purest living prose stylist." - The Guardian "Tantalizing . . . A memorable tour de force." - The New York Times Book Review Some Hope is the third in Edward St Aubyn's semi-autobiographical series, The Patrick Melrose novels. Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd...

Compelling, insightful, often sombrely beautiful — The Sunday Telegraph Moving beyond travelogue, V.S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa considers the effects of belief—in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders, and mythical history—upon the progress of African civilisation. Beginning in Uganda, at the continent's centre, Naipaul's journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory...

With his trademark compassion and erudition, Dr Oliver Sacks examines the power of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people. Among them: a surgeon who is struck by lightning and suddenly becomes obsessed with Chopin; people with 'amusia', to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans; and a man whose memory spans...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2018 Winner of The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 Winner of the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Bold, brilliant . . . this is as poignant and visual as classic film noir - Ian Rankin An incredible achievement - Irvine Welsh This book will shift something in...

'Funny, deep, shocking, wry, heartwarming and spine-chilling' - The Guardian Mr Fox, by award-winning author Helen Oyeyemi, is a beautiful and immersive exploration of the labyrinthine world of imagination, storytelling, and love. It's a bright afternoon in 1938, and Mary Foxe is in a confrontational mood. St John Fox, celebrated novelist, hasn't seen her in six years. He's unprepared for...

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyse us? Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the...

"A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul's stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts" - The Times In 1964, V. S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later, prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to...

Inspired by the true story of Anthony Blunt and the Cambridge Five spy ring, The Untouchable is a beautifully crafted novel by John Banville, author of the Booker Prize-winning The Sea. Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After an announcement in the House of Commons and the hasty revelation of his double life of wartime espionage, his disgrace is public, his...

Slaka! Land of lake and forest, of beetroot and tractor. Slaka! Land whose borders are sometimes here, often further north, and sometimes not at all! Dr Petworth is on a cultural exchange to the small (and fictional) Eastern European country of Slaka. Pallid and middle-aged, Dr Petworth might appear stuffy, but during his short stay he manages to embroil himself...

The Mystic Masseur, V. S. Naipaul’s first published novel, chronicles the rise and rise of Ganesh, transitioning from a failed primary school teacher and struggling masseur to an author, revered mystic, and MBE. This journey is memorable for both its hilarity and bewildering success. An unforgettable cast of characters witnesses this meteoric ascent: Ganesh’s father-in-law, Ramlogan, whose shop gave the...

The multi-million-copy number one bestseller. One of The Sunday Times's top 100 bestselling books of the past 50 years. Welcome to Bridget's first diary: mercilessly funny, endlessly touching, and utterly addictive. A dazzlingly urban satire on modern relationships? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something? As Bridget documents...

Francis Jay is a man of the '90s. Street-wise but eco-friendly, smart yet charmingly naive, when his journalism career falls on the rocks, he sets out to salvage it by embarking on a quest to write about one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age for a TV documentary. The myth of Doctor Criminale proves almost impossible to penetrate,...

In An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks uses case studies to illustrate the myriad ways in which neurological conditions can affect our sense of self, our experience of the world, and how we relate to those around us. Writing with his trademark blend of scientific rigour and human compassion, he describes patients such as the colour-blind painter or the surgeon...

A lauded contemporary classic of the memoir form: devastatingly powerful, moving and uplifting. Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award ‘Strong and admirable’ – Hilary Mantel ‘Full of energy’ – Blake Morrison When our stepfather staggered home reeking of whisky, ceramic hit the wall. We got used to the smash and the next-day stain, but eventually the wallpaper began to fade...

An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in...

American literature's philosopher king - and its sharpest satirist - The New Yorker Craig Suder, third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is in a slump. His batting average is shocking, his marriage somehow worse, and he secretly fears he's inherited his mother's insanity. Ordered to take a midseason rest, Suder instead takes his LP of Charlie Parker's "Ornithology" and flees....

Now a major motion picture starring Pierce Brosnan and Helena Bonham Carter. In love, everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need... Four Letters Of Love tells the story of Nicholas...

Tigers in Red Weather is a Sunday Times bestseller and a Richard and Judy Book Club Pick. "Immensely gripping" - The Guardian Liza Klaussmann's Tigers in Red Weather tells the story of Nick and her cousin Helena, who have grown up together, sharing long hot summers at Tiger House. With husbands and children of their own, they keep returning. But...

Follow Colm Tóibín's lone religious pilgrimage along the Irish border during the tumultuous summer of 1987. In the summer after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, when tension was high in Northern Ireland, Colm Tóibín walked along the border from Derry to Newry. Bad Blood is a stark and evocative account of this journey through fear and hatred, and a report on ordinary...

In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Tóibín examines the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Linked by the common thread of their sexualities, his subjects range from figures such as Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s, to Pedro Almodóvar, born nearly a hundred years later. Tóibín explores...

In Feminine Gospels, Carol Ann Duffy draws on the historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various visions—and revisions—of female identity. Simultaneously stripping women bare and revealing them in all their guises and disguises, these poems tell tall stories as though they were true confessions, and spin modern myths from real women seen in every aspect—as bodies...

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction A man visits his ageing father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of...

Homage to Barcelona by Colm Tóibín celebrates one of Europe's greatest cities—a cosmopolitan hub of vibrant architecture, art, culture, and nightlife. It moves from the story of the city's founding and its huge expansion in the nineteenth century to the lives of Gaudí, Miró, Picasso, Casals, and Dalí. It also explores the history of Catalan nationalism, the tragedy of the...

‘You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, especially if you’re in the book like I am’ – Steve Martin ‘An exceptionally vivid and penetrating insight into Hollywood film-making’ Observer The star-studded, hilarious memoir from Richard E. Grant revealing life behind the camera. When, in the summer of 1986, Richard E. Grant was cast as the lead in Withnail and I, his whole world...

Mother's Milk was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the South Bank Literature Award. "So good - so fantastically well-written, profound and humane... it is heart-stopping" - Observer The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril. Caught up in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing, adultery, and assisted suicide, Patrick finds his wife Mary consumed by motherhood,...

Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild examines the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who walked deep into the Alaskan wilderness and whose SOS note and emaciated corpse were found four months later. In April 1992, Chris McCandless set off alone into the Alaskan wild. He had given his savings to charity, abandoned his car and his possessions, and...

Part travelogue, part reportage, part autobiography, The Sign of the Cross is the story of Colm Tóibín's religious pilgrimage across Europe. Between 1990 and 1994, Colm Tóibín made a series of trips through Catholic Europe. His journey led him into close contact with people from all walks of life, from priests to politicians, from the intellectually open to the spiritually...

Ghosts opens with a shipwreck, leaving a party of sightseers temporarily marooned on an island. The stranded castaways make their way towards the refuge of the isle's reclusive savant; but the big isolated house which is home to Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic assistant, Licht, is also home to another, unnamed presence . . . Onto this seemingly haunted...

The first volume of John Banville's Revolutions Trilogy and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Doctor Copernicus is a rich historical novel that explores the life of one of history's greatest scientists. The work of Nicholas Koppernigk, better known as Copernicus, shattered the medieval view of the universe and led to the formulation of the image of the...

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, a novel inspired by the shocking true story of the Scottsboro boys. Even after all these years, the injustice still stuns. Innocent boys sentenced to die, not for a crime they did not commit, but for a crime that never occurred. Lives splintered as casually as wood being hacked for kindling. Alabama, 1931....

Dark secrets and reality unravel in Shroud, the second novel in John Banville's Cleave Trilogy, alongside Eclipse and Ancient Light. Axel Vander, distinguished intellectual and elderly academic, is not the man he seems. When a letter arrives out of the blue, threatening to unveil his secrets—and carefully concealed identity—Vander travels to Turin to meet its author. There, muddled by age...

The first of John Banville's Cleave Trilogy, concerning father and daughter Alexander and Cass Cleave, Eclipse is a lyrical exploration of memory, family and identity. Alexander Cleave, actor, has left his career and his family behind and banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life, but finds this impossible in a house brimming with presences, some...

'A science fiction genius . . . Ted Chiang is a superstar.' - The Guardian With Stories of Your Life and Others, his masterful debut collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably varied stories. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth to the firmament above, to a world where...

The second volume of John Banville's Revolutions Trilogy and winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Kepler is a gorgeous historical novel exploring the life of Johannes Kepler, one of the world's greatest mathematicians. Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in south Germany, was one of the world's greatest mathematicians and astronomers. The novel Kepler, by John Banville, brilliantly recreates his life...

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon...

'This story starts roughly in the 1970s, a few years after I was born, about the time when I began to have memories and my father's codename was already long established as "Andronic", a name we learned about only last summer . . .' Burying the Typewriter is the haunting true story of life behind the Iron Curtain, and one...

Stuart Treece, a forty-year-old professor and head of English, now rather set in his ways (Hannibal Lecter is not on his syllabus), is made to feel somewhat alien by his encounters with a younger generation whose values are decidedly at odds with his own. In this witty tragi-comedy, the hero's attempts to come to terms with his new situation are...

McMurtry is one of our best, and Terms of Endearment is one of his finest - Los Angeles Times In this acclaimed novel that inspired the Academy Award-winning film, Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry created two characters who won the hearts of readers and film-goers everywhere: Aurora Greenway and her daughter, Emma. Aurora is the kind of woman who makes the...

The inspiration behind the Major Motion Picture starring Caleb Landry Jones. Extraordinary - The Guardian Inimitably excellent - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders - two men and a dangerously magnetic woman - arrive on the woodland borders, triggering a...

To the Hermitage tells two tales: a contemporary story of our narrator, a novelist, who has been invited to Stockholm and then to Russia to take part in what is enigmatically referred to as the Diderot Project, and one set two hundred years earlier in which Bradbury brilliantly recreates Diderot's journey to Russia to entertain and enlighten the mind of...

This is Larry McMurtry's ballad in prose: his heartfelt tribute to a bygone era of the American West. In his final novel, he returns to the vivid and unsparing portrait of the nineteenth-century and cowboy lifestyle made so memorable in his classic Lonesome Dove. Long Grass, Texas. Once hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and...

Our greatest living expert on Sparta - Tom Holland, author of Rubicon The definitive account of the extraordinary people of Sparta. The Spartan legend has inspired and captivated subsequent generations, with evidence of its legacy found in both the Roman and British Empires. The Spartans are our ancestors, every bit as much as the Athenians. But while Athens promoted democracy,...

Salim has spent most of his life on the east coast of Africa, living and working with his family. When he sets out to build a new life for himself, moving to an unnamed country in the heart of the continent, he believes he is doing so to fulfil his duty as a man. He buys a small shop in...

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books In this acclaimed travel memoir, Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a spectacular and exotic three-week trek through the Himalayan land of Nepal, where she and her companions are gathering seeds for planting at home. The natural world and, in particular, plants and gardening are central to Kincaid's work. Among Flowers intertwines meditations on nature and stunning...

In this semi-autobiographical work, a man abandons his life of privilege to live among eccentrics, criminals and the impoverished of Knoxville. Suttree is a humorous, compelling tapestry of life on the edge from Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and Blood Meridian. 'Suttree contains a humour that is Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair' - Times...

‘This book investigates the Islamic revolution and tries to understand the fundamentalist zeal that has gripped the young in Iran and other Muslim countries . . . He is a modern master.’ – Sunday Times Reissued in the Picador Collection, Among the Believers is V. S. Naipaul’s classic account of his journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. ‘The believers’...

'His narrative skill is spectacular. One returns with pleasure to the slow hand-in-hand revelations of both India and himself' - The Times An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul's semi-autobiographical account—at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered—of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. He was twenty-nine years old; he stayed for a...

Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier...

Jonathan Raban's enthralling journey into the history of the Great Plains of Montana - the least populated, most uncharted region of the United States - uncovers the heart and soul of the country. Bringing to life the extraordinary landscape of the prairie and the homesteaders whose dreams foundered there, and reaching through history to the present day, Bad Land uncovers...

One of The Sunday Times's top 100 bestselling books of the past 50 years Bridget Jones, the original singleton, is back and her life is as chaotic as ever in The Edge of Reason, the number one bestseller from Helen Fielding. The Wilderness Years are over! But for how long? Bridget's second diary takes us through a year that begins...

‘Gripping and important’ Jon Ronson M. E. Thomas is a high-functioning non-criminal sociopath. She is charismatic, ambitious and successful. You would be charmed by her if you met her, might even be seduced by her. You would not realise that she is studying you to find your flaws, that she is ruthlessly manipulative, has no empathy and does not feel...

In Half a Life we are introduced to the compelling figure of Willie Chandran. Springing from the unhappy union of a low-caste mother and a father constantly at odds with life, Willie is naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. Drawn to England, and to the immigrant and bohemian communities of...

The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier's mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny resemblance to an Oscar-winning actor, and a serious amount of shares in the Turner Corporation. Percival Everett's novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin colour with his fabulous...

Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul follows the character of Willy Chandra, whom we first met in Half a Life. Willy is a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. Now, in his early 40s, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the demanding encouragement of his sister and his own listlessness and joins an...

Winner of the Whitbread Novel Award Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 'Dazzling, gritty brilliance' - Sunday Times 'Completely captivating' - Literary Review Jim Crace's provocative retelling of Jesus' forty day fast in the desert is a classic that tampers with tradition. Moving and fascinating in equal measure, Quarantine is a stunningly realized novel from one of the great writers of...

Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time, and Rapture is essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages - Rose Tremain The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama, and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is a book-length love-poem and a moving...

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS You think adoption is a story which has an end. But the point about it is that it has no end. It keeps changing its ending. From the moment when, as a little girl, she realises that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing...

Absorbing in its simplicity about bourgeois banality and the quest for expression - NEW YORK TIMES Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won't allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet and three inches, covered entirely in...