Nicholas Boulton
Author
Series
Spires novels volume 1
Description
From the acclaimed author of BOYFRIEND MATERIAL comes a deeply emotional romance about heartbreak, hope, and learning to love against all the odds.
Once the golden boy of the English literary scene, now a clinically depressed writer of pulp crime fiction, Ash Winters has given up on hope, happiness, and—most of all—himself. He lives his life between the cycles of his illness, haunted by the ghosts of other people's expectations.
Then
...2) The Magus
Author
Formats
Description
Widely considered John Fowles's masterpiece, The Magus is "a dynamo of suspense and horror...a dizzying, electrifying chase through the labyrinth of the soul....Read it in one sitting if possible-but read it" (New York Times).
A young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching post on a remote Greek island in order to escape an unsatisfactory love affair. There, his friendship with a reclusive millionaire evolves into a...
A young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching post on a remote Greek island in order to escape an unsatisfactory love affair. There, his friendship with a reclusive millionaire evolves into a...
Author
Description
Daphnis and Chloe is one of the most engaging and gently erotic stories to emerge from the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome. It is a pastoral tale, telling of a boy and a girl, both abandoned (but separately) as babies on nearby hillsides; one becomes a goatherd, the other a shepherdess, and a mutual attraction arises as they move from childhood to adolescence and to the slow discovery of desire. Will aggressive forces and rival suitors prevent a...
Author
Description
Completed six years after Dostoyevsky's own term as a convict, The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical account of life in a Siberian prison camp, and the physical and mental effects it has on those who are sentenced to inhabit it. Alexandr Petrovitch Goryanchikov, a gentleman of the noble class, has been condemned to ten years of hard labour for murdering his wife. He is little prepared for the cruel conditions and punishing temperatures,...
5) Man and Wife
Author
Description
Published 10 years after Collins's most popular novel The Woman in White, Man and Wife centres on the confused and inequitable marriage laws of 19th-century Britain, reflecting the author's own antipathy towards the institution. The plot follows the fortunes of a woman who, committed to marriage with one man, comes to believe that she may have inadvertently married his friend, according to the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. Collins shows himself...
6) Naples '44
Author
Description
Naples '44 is an unflinching autobiographical account of a year in Naples after the armistice and Allied landings in Sorrento in 1943. Working as a British counterintelligence officer under the Allied occupation, Lewis documents the rich pageant of life in the city and its surrounding areas. There is suffering and squalor: criminal gangs are on the rise, along with typhus and black market commerce, and the female population is forced into part-time...
Author
Description
Is there any music more instantly recognisable and beautifully scored than Tchaikovsky's wildly popular ballet Swan Lake? These and other works have become enduring classics, yet they were not uncontroversial in Tchaikovsky's day, and there are those that still wonder if his style is fundamentally European or ardently Russian. Find out more about Tchaikovsky's childhood obsession with music, his turbulent relationships with friends and colleagues,...
Author
Description
Considered one of the first existentialist novels, Notes from Underground contains one of the most unsettling characters in 19th-century fiction. Resentful, cruel, entitled and pitiful, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man is a disturbing human being bent on humiliating others for his own amusement. He despises modern society and stews in a self-imposed misery, articulated through his bitter, contradictory monologues about torment and alienation. The Gambler...
Author
Description
Set in the financial centres of 1820s Frankfurt and London, Jezebel's Daughter (1880) tells the story of two widows: Madame Fontaine, who will go to any lengths to secure her daughter's marriage, and Mrs Wagner, who devotes herself to her late husband's social reforms. In pursuit of her endeavours, Mrs Wagner befriends Jack Straw, a former inmate of Bedlam, who plays a pivotal role as the action, full of plotting and counterplotting, unfolds, culminating...
10) Basil
Author
Description
Appearing in 1852, Basil was Wilkie Collins's second published novel. The eponymous narrator is emotionally torn between two women: Margaret Sherwin and his sister Clara. His marriage to Margaret, a draper's sexually precocious daughter, is to remain secret and unconsummated for the first year, as agreed with her father. Anticipating Collins's later sensation novels, the plot involves betrayal, insanity and death, with a thrilling conclusion set among...
11) The Nether World
Author
Description
Dramatic, fast-moving and brutal, Gissing's highly regarded early novel lays bare the reality of urban poverty in 1870s London. Old Michael Snowdon returns to the city with an inheritance that he determines should go towards helping the poor - but goodness and charity are not to play a part here. Everyone has an agenda, and scheming spreads through the story like a disease. Gissing's own experience of London as an outsider in a vast city that both...
Author
Description
In Moscow an unknown author approaches a publisher (the narrator), asking him to read and publish his manuscript. The narrator agrees to read it before the author returns three months later. At the heart of the story in the manuscript is a love triangle and themes of corruption, concealed love and fatal jealousy. When one of the central characters is discovered dead, the narrative becomes a murder-mystery as the search for the culprit begins.
Written...
Author
Description
Praised by Chekhov as his favourite writer, Nikolai Leskov occupies a unique place in
Russian literature. His original stories often seem like folk-tales, their larger-than-life
characters including soldiers, Tsars, priests and gypsies. Leskov's storytelling, simple
in its style, combines a deep religious spirit with comic absurdity.
The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Leskov's best-known work, is a realist
account of a young woman who...
14) My Childhood
Author
Series
Description
Published in 1913, My Childhood is the first in an autobiographical trilogy by the Russian writer and five-time Nobel Prize-nominee Maxim Gorky. Painfully moving in places, the book tells of the experiences of a young boy who goes to live with his grandparents following the death of his father. Gorky's depiction of 19th-century Russia through the eyes of his younger self is remarkable. As he recalls memories of his youth, contrasting themes and emotions...
Author
Description
The Great Gate of Kiev resounds to the tumultuous bell rings that end Pictures an an Exhibition, one of the most magnificent and virtuosic of all piano pieces. However, to some of his contemporaries, Modest Mussorgsky was 'insane' and 'a perfect idiot'. Born into a wealthy land-owning family, what drove this tormented man and why did he suffer psychological breakdowns and alcoholism? How did he achieve his command of the realist idiom in his stage...
16) The Betrothed
Author
Description
After the jealous tyrant Don Rodrigo foils their wedding, young Lombardian peasants Lucia and Lorenzo must separate and flee for their safety. Their difficult path to matrimony takes place against the turbulent backdrop of the Thirty Years War, where lawlessness and exploitation are at their height. Lucia takes refuge in a convent, where she is later abducted and taken on a nightmarish journey to a sinister castle, while Lorenzo goes to Milan, where...
17) The White Guard
Author
Description
In the Ukrainian capital Kiev ('the City'), life has become frightening and fragile. Bulgakov's first full-length novel is set in the harsh and chaotic winter of 1918–19, as power struggles start to play out with brutal consequences. Echoing Tolstoy's approach in War and Peace, Bulgakov contrasts the concerns of domestic life with the wide-ranging and destructive historical events; but where Tolstoy's structure is clear, Bulgakov interweaves narrative,...
Author
Description
The music of Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák is suffused with natural nobility, fluency and freshness, and embodies the spirit of his native land. This revealing biography portrays Dvořák as a complex and wide-ranging composer, and explores the creation and performance of his music as well as its reception on both sides of the Atlantic, tracing his art in all its richness and variety. Musical excerpts include the Cello Concerto, the 'New World'...
Author
Series
Description
Ollie and Caro Harcourt are moving house with their twelve-year-old daughter Jade. Ollie is desperate to leave the city. Caro is less sure. Then they view Cold Hill House, a dilapidated rural mansion, and fall instantly in love. It's expensive, but with its space, seclusion, and huge grounds, it seems like a brilliant idea.
That is, until they arrive.
It soon becomes apparent that they are not alone. A spectral woman appears on screens and walks...
Author
Description
Published in 1896, A Child of the Jago is a gritty and realistic portrayal of life in the slums of London's East End during the late 19th century. The novel is set in an area known as the Old Jago (based on a real-life slum called the Old Nichol) and vividly describes the poverty, crime and squalor that characterised the impoverished neighbourhood.
The story revolves around Dicky Perrott, a young boy growing up in the Jago, and his struggle for survival...