Series: Picador Collection

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...

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing. It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he...

If revenge is a dish best served cold, See Now Then is a baked alaska in reverse, chilling on the outside, screaming hot at the center - New York Times A piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness. Kincaid inhabits each of her characters - a mother, a father, and...

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...

Fresh, risky, improvisational and hard-to-categorize writing - Chicago Tribune Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for the New Yorker's 'Talk of the Town' column from 1978 to 1983. New York is a town that fast adopts those who embrace it, and in these early pieces Kincaid discovers its many hidden secrets and urban mannerisms as she...

Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area – the geological history of a cave forty-four metres above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon – he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and...

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books Xuela Claudette Richardson is recalling the last seventy years of her life, and so she must begin with her birth, and the accompanying death of her mother. Xuela's vivid, visceral recollections of the lonely, unsettled life that follows the trauma of her arrival include that of her distant father, who sends her away to...

Set in Ireland in the 1990s, Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship tells the story of the Devereux family. Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily, and her granddaughter Helen have come together after years of strife and reached an uneasy truce. Helen's adored brother, Declan, is dying. Two friends join him and the women in a crumbling old house by the sea,...

'An extraordinary journey of discovery' - Daily Telegraph 'Pedals along with never a dull paragraph . . . dazzling' - The Sunday Times Ten years ago, I began to explore the country on which I was supposed to be an authority . . . France is a country famous for its intellectuals, its philosophers and writers, its fashion, food and...

The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín details the life of Eamon Redmond, a judge in Ireland's high court. He is a man remote from his wife, his son and daughter, and, at least outwardly, from his own childhood. The life he has built for himself, between his work in Dublin and his family's retreat by the sea at Cush, is...

A classic work of Irish literature, this award-winning novel is an exploration of love, art and identity. This was the night train to Barcelona, some hours before the dawn. This was 1950, late September. I had left my husband. I had left my home. Katherine Proctor has dared to leave her family in Ireland and reach out for a new...

Call Me By Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst - Esquire From the winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly novel that spans seven transformative decades as it plumbs the complex relationships of a remarkable family. In October 1940, the handsome young David Sparsholt arrives in Oxford. A...

Richard Garay lives alone with his mother, hiding his sexuality from her and from those around him. Stifled by a job he despises, he finds himself willing to take considerable risks. Set in Argentina in a time of great change, The Story of the Night is a powerful and moving novel about a man who, as the Falklands War is...

Sunday Times Novel of the Year Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize A magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations. In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. The weekend will be one of excitements...

Now a major Netflix film from the makers of Normal People and Room, starring Florence Pugh. 'An old-school page turner with crackling intensity' - Stephen King 'Powerful, compulsively readable' - The Irish Times Eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse, sent to investigate whether she is a fraud, meets a journalist hungry for a...

The Year of the Runaways was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Sweeping between India and England, from childhood to the present day, Sunjeev Sahota's unforgettable novel about illegal immigrants is a story of dignity in the face of adversity. It is an ideal read for fans of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. 'The Grapes of Wrath for the 21st...

Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy - The New York Times David Larson can never go home. His parents are dead. His sister and her hippie husband, staunchly anti-war, won't even have the newly returned Vietnam veteran in the house. So Larson takes his chances on the road, travelling west from Georgia until he...

Have you ever seen something that wasn't really there? Heard someone call your name in an empty house? Sensed someone following you and turned around to find nothing? Hallucinations don't belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. In some conditions, hallucinations can lead to religious epiphanies or even the...

How does the brain perceive and interpret information from the eye? And what happens when the process is disrupted? In The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the capacity to recognise faces, the sense of...

Two weeks before his death, Oliver Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness, the last book he would oversee. The bestselling author of On the Move, Musicophilia, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks is known for his illuminating case histories about people living with neurological conditions at the far borderlands of human experience....

Never Mind, the winner of the Betty Trask Award, is the first in Edward St Aubyn's highly acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels, adapted for TV for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch. This audiobook is read aloud by stage and screen actor Alex Jennings. At his mother's family house in the south of France, Patrick Melrose has the run of a...

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...

The Crossing forms the second part of Cormac McCarthy's critically acclaimed Border Trilogy, a story that began with All the Pretty Horses and concludes with Cities of the Plain. Set on the south-western ranches in the years before the Second World War, Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing follows the fortunes of sixteen-year-old Billy Parham and his younger brother Boyd. Fascinated by...

Winner of the 2017 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Winner of the Longman History Today Trustees' Award Longlisted for the Orwell Prize Unflinching and revealing, Black and British is a vital history that reveals how black British lives have been woven into the fabric of the nation for centuries — from Roman Britain to the Black Lives Matter protests. 'Groundbreaking' - The...

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...

At Last is a miraculously wrought piece of art’ Suzi Feay, Financial Times ‘A terrifying, spectacularly entertaining saga’ James Lasdun, The Guardian At Last is the fifth instalment in Edward St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical series, The Patrick Melrose novels. As friends, relatives and foes trickle in to pay their final respects to his mother Eleanor, Patrick Melrose finds himself questioning whether...

Who? Him. The Husband. Hero. Hunk. The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t'adore. Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of...

Enthralling - John Banville Effortlessly beautiful, funny, sexy and wise - Julie Myerson, Books of the Year, Observer All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. The life is that of Philip Bowman, and we see his formative experiences as a young naval officer in battles off Okinawa, his post-war career as a...

Unputdownable - The Sunday Times Nobody has written a better account - The Observer Such pace, drama and immediacy that one could almost believe he had been an eye-witness - The Spectator In this compelling reconstruction, Joachim Fest, Germany's greatest historian of Nazism, describes in vivid detail the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Führer's bunker during the bitter last days of...

Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Tree of Smoke - the name given to a 'psyop' that may or may not be hypothetical and may or may not be officially sanctioned - is Denis Johnson's most gripping, visionary and ambitious work. Set across South-East Asia and the United States, and spanning two decades, Tree of Smoke tells the story...

It was the night of February 25, 1964. A cloud of cigar smoke drifted through the ring lights. Cassius Clay threw punches into the grey floating haze and waited for the bell. When Cassius Clay burst onto the sports scene in the 1950s, he broke the mould. He changed the world of sports and went on to change the world...

A strikingly original first novel, from the author of A Little Life. 'The world Yanagihara conjures up, full of dark pockets of mystery, is magical.' - The Times In 1950 Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumoured lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers...

Since Gomorrah was first published in Italy in 2006, Roberto Saviano has received death threats and he has been assigned police protection. A ground-breaking study and a searing expose, Gomorrah is the astonishing true story of the renowned crime organization, the Camorra, known by insiders as 'the System'. With a global reach, large stakes in construction, high fashion, illegal drugs...

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...

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...

A magical book. Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch. Graham Swift It is the 1920s, and Patrick Lewis has arrived in the bustling city of Toronto, leaving behind his Canadian wilderness home. He immerses himself in the lives of the people who surround him, learning, from their...

"One of the most exciting - and one of the most fun - novels of the decade" - Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a lesbian best friend, makes zines, and is...

Winner of the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the Year. 2074. America's future is Civil War. Sarat's reality is survival. They took her father, they took her home, they told her lies... She didn't start this war, but...

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...

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...

"You'll want to forget it and won't be able to" - Zadie Smith "The essential American story" - The Washington Post My father comes into focus for me on a Liars' Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can't but write it...

Mrs. Hemingway is so beautifully written, and evocative, that I could not put it down until the last page' - Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You. One world-famous writer. Four extraordinary women. The South of France, 1926. Hadley and Ernest Hemingway are enjoying all the glamorous pleasures life has to offer. Between cool drinks and boiling sunshine, they make...

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...

"De Botton is a national treasure." - Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black A unique love story and a classic work of philosophy, rooted in the mysterious workings of the human heart and mind. Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing. We cannot properly speak until...

The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester is the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 1996. To like something is to want to ingest it and, in that sense, is to submit to the world; to like something is to succumb, in a small but contentful way, to death. Tarquin Winot—hedonist, food obsessive, ironist and snob—travels a circuitous route...

A Boy's Own Story traces an unnamed narrator's coming-of-age during the 1950s. It was his power that stupefied me and made me regard my knowledge as nothing more than hired cleverness he might choose to show off at a dinner party. Beset by aloof parents, a cruel sister, and relentless mocking from his peers, the unnamed narrator struggles with his...

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...