Cult Fiction

Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight [Paris time]. It is a saga,...

Passionate, erotic and haunting, this is a brilliant novel by one of Britain's most important novelists. Simon Rakes - a conservation expert - is restoring the Stone Virgin, a statue...

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour? What is John Updike's deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News' Female Performer of the...

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology...

'Brilliant ... a panorama of a remarkable talent ... McCullers's finest stories' The New York TimesFew writers have expressed loneliness, the need for human understanding and the search for love...

A National Book Award Finalist: This 'wonderfully descriptive' novel from an author with a 'tremendous imagination' tells the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias...

The classic, heartrending story of a British boy's four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Newly reissued with an introduction by John Lanchester. Based...

Still Life with Woodpecker is sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between...

The PowerBook is twenty-first century fiction that uses past, present and future as shifting dimensions of a multiple reality. The story is simple. An e-writer called Ali or Alix will...

Cherry Vanilla, twelve years old with a penchant for short leather skirts and make-up, has one ambition: to become the most famous 'lot lizard', or truck stop whore, in the...

First published on the anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new writings - a fitting tribute to the author, and an essential contribution...

Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It...

Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who...

The bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar (R)-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York. 'Riotously funny' New York...

A hilariously filthy tale of sex, crime, and family dysfunction from the brilliantly twisted mind of John Waters, the legendary filmmaker and bestselling author of Mr. Know-It-All.Marsha Sprinkle: Suitcase thief....

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,...

Scare yourself silly this Halloween with fourteen terrifying ghost stories chosen by the master of the macabre, Roald Dahl'Spookiness is the real purpose of the ghost story. It should give...

'One of the most disturbing novels I've read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality' - Michiko Kakutani, "New York Times". In 1985, Bret Easton...

The sixth installment in Jasper Fforde's New York Times bestselling series follows literary detective Thursday Next on another adventure in her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England-from the author of Early...

Ten years on from Trainspotting Sick Boy is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London. Having failed spectacularly as a hustler, pimp, husband, father and businessman, Sick Boy...

'Sedaris is the premier observer of our world and its weirdnesses' Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt'He's like an American Alan Bennett' Guardian'Unquestionably the king of comic...

A beautiful hardback edition of the greatest rediscovered classic of recent yearsWilliam Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his...

A hilariously filthy tale of sex, crime, and family dysfunction from the brilliantly twisted mind of John Waters, the legendary filmmaker and bestselling author of Mr. Know-It-All.Marsha Sprinkle: Suitcase thief....

He became a bestselling novelist while still in college, immediately famous and wealthy. He watched his insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box. He was...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD JACOBSONExplosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of...

Mary Gaitskill's tales of desire and dislocation in 1980s New York caused a sensation with their frank, caustic portrayals of men and women's inner lives. As her characters have sex,...

A towering philosophical novel that is the summation of her Objectivist philosophy, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is the saga of the enigmatic John Galt, and his ambitious plan to 'stop...

'This book is a total pleasure to read, a bright burst of colour in a grey winter season' Sunday TimesShe will whisper an empire into existence - but all stories...

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.Sylvia Plath's groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel offers...

ONE OF THE BBC'S '100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD'The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction.Under the despotic rule of...