'Point Omega is a treat: the most satisfying and least cryptic of DeLillo's late novels' — Sunday Telegraph. Richard Elster, a retired secret war adviser, has retreated to a forlorn house in a desert, 'somewhere south of nowhere'. But his planned isolation is interrupted when he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience in a one-take film. The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits. When a devastating event follows, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. Written in hypnotic prose, this substantial novel is both a metaphysical meditation and a deeply unsettling mystery, from which one thing emerges: loss, fierce and incomprehensible. 'Another formidable construction by a very distinctive writer' — Evening Standard. 'A pared, intense anti-parable... so rigorous and so precise' — Observer. 'Impossible to forget' — Sunday Times.

'Most smart people tend to feel queasy when the conversation turns to things like 'certain death' and 'total failure' and the idea of 'a doomed generation'. But not me. I am comfortable with these themes'. Hunter S. Thompson, celebrated author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has been writing a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner for the last two years. Those columns are collected here to offer a chronicle of the adventures of a Generation of Swine. The incomparable 'Dr Gonzo' has journeyed no small distance in search of intelligent life and reports back, instead, on the demented state of current events. He keeps tabs on the 1998 presidential race, quotes from the Bible (reference books in hotel rooms are supplied exclusively by the Gideons) and asks why the President appears to be a hundred and twenty-eight years old. 'He is working from a dementia that no one in his right mind would want to share. It is the dementia, however, that makes Thompson great' — Playboy. 'His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest' — Nelson Algren.

One midsummer's day in Arden, the Godley family gather at their dying father's bedside, a collection of troubled individuals and fraying relationships. The gods, those mischievous spirits, look on silently; unable to resist intervening, they spy, tease and seduce their mortal playthings. Old Adam Godley's time on earth seems to be running out, and his mind runs to disquieting memories. Little does he realize, as he lies mute but alert in the Sky Room, what mischief the gods are capable of. Overflowing with a bawdy humour, and a deep and refreshing clarity of insight, The Infinities is at once a gloriously earthy romp and a delicately poised, infinitely wise look at the terrible and wonderful plight of being human. In electrifying prose, Banville captures the aching intensity, the magic and enchantment, of a single midsummer's day in Arden.

In the sweet shop Willy Chapman was free, absolved from all responsibility, and he ran his sweet shop like his life — quietly, steadfastly, devotedly. It was a bargain struck between Chapman and his beautiful, emotionally injured wife — a bargain based on unexpressed, inexpressible love and on a courageous acceptance of life's deprivation... threatened only by Dorry, their clever, angry, unforgiving daughter.

Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, this novel traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

'Perfectly controlled, superbly written. Waterland is original, compelling and narration of the highest order' Guardian In the years since its first publication, in 1983, Waterland has established itself as one of the classics of twentieth-century British literature: a visionary tale of England's Fen country; a sinuous meditation on the workings of history; and a family story startling in its detail and universal in its reach. This edition includes an introduction, by the author, written to celebrate the book's 25th anniversary. 'Graham Swift has mapped his Waterland like a new Wessex. He appropriates the Fens as Moby Dick did whaling or Wuthering Heights the moors. This is a beautiful, serious and intelligent novel, admirably ambitious and original' Observer 'A 300-page tour de force... A burst of exuberant fictive energy' Evening Standard 'Waterland is a formidably intelligent book, animated by an impressive, angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need. The most powerful novel I have read for some time' New York Review of Books.

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet.

«New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, poets and leaders of a movement they call visceral realism, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their mission: to track down the poet Cesarea Tinajero, who disappeared into the Sonora desert — and obscurity — decades before. But the detectives are themselves hunted men, and their search for the past will end in violence, flight, and permanent exile. In this dazzling novel, Roberto Bolano tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes on a twenty-year, multi-continent, tragicomic quest through a darkening universe. 'A unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature...Bolano writes with such elegance, verve and style and is so immensely readable. He makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' — «Guardian». 'Part road movie, part joyful, nostalgic confession. A masterpiece' — «Daily Telegraph». 'Extraordinary ...A portrait of people for whom literature is bread and water, sex and death. The abiding message to be taken from Bolano's novel, and maybe from his fraught life, too: books matter' — «GQ».»

There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and traces the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people. First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes. These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history. Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is beautiful, heartbreaking, cathartic.

Who was Shakespeare? Why has his writing endured? What makes it so endlessly adaptable to different times and cultures? And how has Shakespeare come to be such a powerful symbol of genius? The Genius of Shakespeare is a fascinating biography of the life – and afterlife – of the greatest English poet. Jonathan Bate, one of the world’s leading Shakespearean scholars, deftly shows how the legend of Shakespeare’s genius was created and sustained, and how it has become a truly global phenomenon.

Helen Knightly has spent a lifetime trying to win the love of a mother who had none to spare. And as this electrifying novel opens, she steps over a boundary she never dreamt she would even approach. But while her act is almost unconscious, it also seems like the fulfilment of a lifetime's buried desire. Over the next twenty-four hours, her life rushes in at her as she confronts the choices that have brought her to this crossroads.

A lost child: On the eve of the First World War, a little girl is found abandoned on a ship to Australia. A mysterious woman called the Authoress had promised to look after her — but has disappeared without a trace. A terrible secret: On the night of her twenty-first birthday, Nell Andrews learns a secret that will change her life forever. Decades later, she embarks upon a search for the truth that leads her to the windswept Cornish coast and the strange and beautiful Blackhurst Manor, once owned by the aristocratic Mountrachet family. A mysterious inheritance: On Nell's death, her granddaughter, Cassandra, comes into an unexpected inheritance. Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden are notorious amongst the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold — secrets about the doomed Mountrachet family and their ward Eliza Makepeace, a writer of dark Victorian fairytales. It is here that Cassandra will finally uncover the truth about the family, and solve the century-old mystery of a little girl lost.

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 — leave the scene as he found it, or cut the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows, will change everything. And so begins a terrifying chain of events, in which each participant seems determined to answer the question that one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? 'No Country for Old Men is a severed head and shoulders over anything else written in America this year' Independent on Sunday 'A Western thriller with a racy plot and punchy dialogue, perfect for a lazy Sunday' The Times '[An] utterly absorbing, chilling tale ...One of the most sinister characters in modern American fiction' Herald 'A fast, powerful read, steeped with a deep sorrow about the moral degradation of the legendary American West' Financial Times 'It's hard to think of a contemporary writer more worth reading' Independent.

It is autumn, 1541. Following the uncovering of a plot against his throne in Yorkshire, King Henry VIII has set out on a spectacular Progress to the North to overawe his rebellious subjects there. Accompanied by a thousand soldiers, and his fifth wife Catherine Howard, the King is to attend an extravagant submission of the local gentry at York.

John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, two cowboys of the old school, are poised on the edge of a world about to change forever. Their journeys across the border into Mexico, each an adventure fraught with fear and pain, mark a passage into adulthood and eventual salvation.

Summer 1924: On the eve of a glittering Society party, by the lake of a grand English country house, a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again. Winter 1999: Grace Bradley, 98, one-time housemaid of Riverton Manor, is visited by a young director making a film about the poet's suicide. Ghosts awaken and memories, long-consigned to the dark reaches of Grace's mind, begin to sneak back through the cracks. A shocking secret threatens to emerge; something history has forgotten but Grace never could. A thrilling mystery and a compelling love story, The House at Riverton will appeal to readers of Ian McEwan's Atonement, L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, and lovers of the film Gosford Park.

In this hilarious romp through England, one of America's pre-eminent humourists seeks the answer to an eternal question: what makes the Brits tick? One semi-tropical Fourth of July, Joe Queenan’s English wife suggested that the family might like a chicken tikka masala in lieu of the customary barbecue. It was this pitiless act of gastronomic cultural oppression, coupled with the dread of the fearsome Christmas pudding that awaited him for dessert, that inspired the author to make a solitary pilgrimage to Great Britain. Freed from the obligation to visit an unending procession of Auntie Margarets and Cousin Robins, as he had done for the first twenty-five years of his marriage, Queenan decided that he would not come back from Albion until he had finally penetrated the Limey heart of darkness. His trip was not in vain. Crisscrossing Old Blighty like Cromwell hunting Papists, Queenan finally came to terms with the choochiness, squiffiness, ponciness and sticky-wicketness that lie at the heart of the British character. Here he is trying to find out whose idea it was to impale King Edward II on a red-hot poker – and what this says about English sexual politics. Here he is enjoying a tour of Liverpool given by Big Jim, a cab driver whose best man was John Lennon. And here he is in Stroud, impressed by Talon, an all-Brit Eagles tribute band fresh from the Cheese and Grain in Frome. At the end of his epic adventure, the author returns chastened, none the wiser, but encouraged that his wife is actually as sane as she is, in light of her fellow countrymen.

Dissects what Proust had to say about friendship. This title looks at paying attention, taking your time, being alive and includes the author's commentary.

Taking in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, history, religion, and Groucho Marx, the author charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak. He attempts to define the age-old dilemmas of the heart.