Series: W&N Essentials

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM MAGGIE O'FARRELL Vera was painting the pony's hooves gold in the dining room; Janet said this was bad for him; poison would seep into his bloodstream. At the bottom of a great stone staircase, dressed in her mother's black lace evening dress, twisted in murderous death, lies Janet. So end the sixteen years of Janet's...

‘One of the greatest books I've ever read. Its heart is strange, but it is huge; let yours beat in response’ MARY GAITSKILL Pale Fire, a 999-line poem, is the final work of the celebrated—and recently murdered—American author, John Francis Shade. Here that poem is transcribed, introduced, and annotated (at length) by Shade's fellow scholar, neighbour, and apparent friend, Charles...

'If you've ever been in a relationship with another person, if you've ever had a family, you need to read this book' – Ann Patchett Polly Solo-Miller Demarest is the perfect flower of the Solo-Miller family. The Solo-Millers have everything: looks, brains, money, a strong, fortified sense of clan, and branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as...

NOW A MAJOR GOLDEN GLOBE-WINNING NETFLIX SERIES Time Out calls it "Superb". Newsweek describes it as "Mesmerizing". The Financial Times praises it as "Gripping". Michael Ondaatje says, "Sheer entertainment. It is a book I reread every few years - for the pure pleasure and skill of it." The Scotsman warns, "Don't pick this up if you want a night's sleep."...

'For a while he watched the butterflies which still swooped and fluttered in this little glade, impervious to the bombs that had fallen round about.' 1939: Walter Blackett, ruthless rubber merchant, is head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. And his family's prosperous world of tennis parties, cocktails, and deferential servants seems unchanging. No one suspects it -...

First published in 1960, Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels, is an account of the enclosed and eccentric childhood through which Nancy, Diana, Pam, Unity, Decca, and Debo lived. In writing of their upbringing between the wars, she also writes of her own commitment to communism and of her elopement to the Spanish Civil War with Esmond Romilly. Jessica Mitford...

When she is sent to an orphanage at the age of eight, Beth Harmon soon discovers two ways to escape her surroundings, albeit fleetingly: playing chess and taking the little green pills given to her and the other children to keep them subdued. Before long, it becomes apparent that hers is a prodigious talent, and as she progresses to the...

WINNER OF THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mother? Told...

Meridian by Alice Walker is a profound and evocative novel that immerses readers in the life of Meridian Hill, a brilliant and inquisitive young woman hailing from a working-class Black family in the American South. Set against the vivid and turbulent backdrop of the 1960s civil rights movement, the story unfolds with Meridian facing numerous struggles from an early age....

A Big Storm Knocked it Over 'A love story for anyone who tends to overthink things' - Maile Meloy In her late thirties, book designer Jane Louise Parker has started to worry she will never find someone to marry. Until she meets Teddy, whose native decency leaves her almost breathless at her good fortune. After their wedding, Jane Louise returns...

'Colwin wrings magic from ordinary lives' Entertainment WeeklyCarl thinks that his wife Lucy tells him everything, until he discovers her secret daily habit. She has arranged a part of her life away from him and gone swimming in it. Patricia plays the same honky-tonk album over and over, while worrying that she'll never become any less young and heedless, any...

"My favourite book. I can't think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic" Tennessee Williams "The book I give as a gift . . . It feels like giving someone an exotic fruit" Sheila Heti "A modern legend . . . A very funny writer" Truman Capote "Profoundly witty, genuinely unusual in its apprehensions, and...

Jen Fain is a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of 1970s New York. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as she finds it. Simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession and critique - Speedboat is funny, disturbing, cutting, brilliant unlike anything that had come before. Since it burst onto the...

'Colwin is a bard of burgeoning adulthood' New YorkerPolly has been the house pet to several families: friendly, cheerful, good with children, happy to bask in the domesticity of other people's lives - until she meets Gilbert. Cordy, raised with the spartan, pleasure-rejecting habits of the very rich, cannot stomach the pleasures of his beloved Jane's cooking, her lavender soap,...

Jen Fain is a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of 1970s New York. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as she finds it. Simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique - Speedboat is funny, disturbing, cutting, brilliant, and unlike anything that had come before. Since it burst onto...

Breathtaking, moving and very funny - Brandon Taylor Olly is twenty-one when she first meets Sam Bax. Fearless, goofy and risk-taking, he arrives in her life on the back of a huge motorcycle. By the end of the day, the pair are kissing in an apple orchard. A year later, they are married. Five years after that, Sam has sailed...

Inspiring. Emotionally charged. Ground-breaking - BERNARDINE EVARISTO A revelation. I am so thankful to Ntozake Shange for seeing us, reflecting us and showing us how beautiful we can be - JESMYN WARD Encompassing, it seems, every feeling and experience a woman has ever had - NEW YORKER The Lady in Red has adored her lover for eight months, two weeks,...

'Brilliant. Searching and profound' E.H. Carr, Times Literary Supplement'When reading Isaiah Berlin we breathe an altogether different air' New York Review of Books'Beautifully written' W. H. Auden, New Yorker'Ingenious. Exactly what good critical writing should be' Max Beloff, GuardianThe fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.For Isaiah Berlin, there is a fundamental distinction in mankind: those...

Singapore just before the Japanese invasion in the Second World War: the Blackett family's prosperous world of tennis parties, cocktails and deferential servants seems unchanging. But it is poised on the edge of the abyss... This is the eve of the Fall of Singapore and, as we know, of much else besides. Not only the Blacketts, their friends and enemies,...

Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland. Composed...

WINNER OF THE 1973 BOOKER PRIZE 'We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us... but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?' The Siege of Krishnapur is set in Krishnapur, 1857: India is on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny. In this remote town on the vast North Indian plain, life...

'No one alive can write sentences like he can. He's the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf' – Olivia Laing 'Among the most brilliant novelists writing today' – Robert Macfarlane 'Truly gets to the heart of that strange, indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape' – Benjamin Myers Retreating from the ruins of his marriage, Mike leaves...

Warm, wise, witty, and just plain fun - Maggie Shipstead At a perfectly ordinary cocktail party, Francis is introduced to Billy and—although it slips right by him at the time—he falls in love with her at once. Billy is a serious, often glum person. An economic historian, she is indifferent to a great many things (clothes, food, home decor), frowns...

'This book is heaven. Elspeth Barker writes like no one else' OLIVIA LAING 'Deserves to be permanently on the bedside table - to cheer, reassure and inspire' OBSERVER 'Gothic, poetic and exuberantly funny. What a pleasure it was to read' ESTHER FREUD 'Joyous, startling, funny, lush, dark and complex' THE TIMES In Notes from the Henhouse, you will find: A...

A masterpiece — Anita Brookner A very beautiful novel — Nick Hornby Includes some of the most perfect sentences in English – Guardian At the turn of the twentieth century, two children play on an English beach. Eustace, a gentle, dreamy boy with a weak heart, relies on his older sister Hilda. As young adults, Eustace and Hilda are unexpectedly...

WINNER OF THE 1970 BOOKER PRIZE 'And so at the Majestic everything returned to the way it had been before. The gleaming tiles became dulled. Sofas as sleek as prize cattle lost their glow.' 1919, the Majestic Hotel in Kinalough, Ireland. Haunted war veteran Major Brendan Archer arrives to marry Angela Spencer, daughter of the house. But his fiancée is...

A classic novel by a Booker Prize-winning author. Soon to be an ITV television series starring David Morrisey, Luke Treadaway, Charles Dance and Jane Horrocks. The Singapore Grip is set in Singapore just before the Japanese invasion in the Second World War, where the Blackett family's prosperous world of tennis parties, cocktails and deferential servants seems unchanging. However, it is...

In the Nazi-occupied Warsaw of 1943, Irma Seidenman, a young Jewish widow, possesses two attributes that can spell the difference between life and death: she has blue eyes and blond hair. With these, and a set of false papers, she has slipped out of the ghetto, passing as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an informer spots...