Series: Picador Collection

Taking its title from the strangely frozen picture by the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of Arrival tells the story of a young Indian from the Caribbean arriving in post-imperial England and consciously, over many years, finding himself as a writer. It is the story of a journey, from one place to another, from the British colony of...

A ruthless satire of academic life, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury is a witty campus novel and one of the most influential books of the 1970s. Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That's your problem-solving system... But haven't we tried all that? Howard Kirk, product of...

Inspired by the crimes of Malcolm Macarthur in Ireland, 1982, The Book of Evidence by John Banville is a gripping portrait of a cold, deceptive and utterly unprecedented killer, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. “Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift of seeing people's souls” — Don DeLillo, author of White Noise and Libra Freddie...

Hold Your Own, Kae Tempest's first full-length collection for Picador, is an ambitious, multi-voiced work based around the mythical figure of Tiresias. This four-part work follows him through his transformations from child, man and woman to blind prophet. Through this structure, Tempest holds up a mirror to contemporary life in a direct and provocative way rarely associated with poetry. A...

Cormac McCarthy plumbs the depths of human degradation in Child of God, his most brutally violent, shocking work. From the author of Blood Meridian and The Road. 1960s, Tennessee. Lester Ballard is a violent, solitary and introverted young backwoodsman, dispossessed on his ancestral land. Homeless, indulging in voyeurism, he is accused of rape. When he is released from jail, he...

Underworld opens—famously—at the Dodgers-Giants 1951 National League final, where Bobby Thomson hits The Shot Heard Round the World and wins the pennant race for the Giants. But on the other side of the planet, another highly significant shot was fired: the USSR's first atomic detonation. And so begins a masterpiece of gloriously symphonic storytelling. Don DeLillo loosely follows the fate...

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is the true and haunting account of Leopold's brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast...

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...

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating mix of memoir and science, telling the story of how one woman's cells have saved countless lives. Now an HBO film starring Oprah Winfrey & Rose Byrne. 'No dead woman has done more for the living . . . A fascinating, harrowing, necessary book.' - Hilary Mantel, Guardian Her name was...