Showing results for "Warner" in Literary Fiction

Brought to you by Penguin. In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it. Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in...

Adamine Bustamante is born in Jamaica, inside one of the island’s last leper colonies. When she goes to a Revivalist Church, she discovers her gift of warning. But no one has bothered to warn Adamine that when she migrates to England her prophecies of hurricanes and earthquakes will no longer be respected. People will think she is crazy and lock her away in a mental hospital.

A luminous memoir of post-war childhood, adventure and loss on the banks of the Nile. ‘Wonderful – a brave, inventive, touching distillation of memory and imagination’ JENNY UGLOW Inventory of a Life Mislaid follows Marina Warner’s beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves...

Brought to you by Penguin. What is lost when knowledge is withheld? Oxford, 1914. When the the young men are drawn away to fight, it is the women who must keep going. Twin sisters Peggy and Maude work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and...

Brought to you by Penguin. Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling...

A remarkable man makes the journey from England to Berlin. He has six days left to live and must relate his life story before he dies. He has witnessed firsthand the rise of the Nazis, experienced family tragedy, fought in the German army, been interred in a POW camp and faced persecution in peacetime Britain. He has survived at the limits of human endurance. His secret is someone else's salvation.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of White Teeth by Zadie Smith, read by Lenny Henry, Sagar Arya, Pippa Bennett-Warner and Ray Panthaki. From the MAN BOOKER PRIZE- and WOMEN'S PRIZE-SHORTLISTED author of Swing Time, On Beauty and Grand Union 'BELIEVE THE HYPE' The Times 'The almost...

The funny man is a middling comic in an unnamed city. By day he takes care of his infant son, by night he performs in small clubs, sandwiched between other aspiring comics. His wife waits tables to support the family. It doesn't sound like much, but they're happy, more or less. Until the day he comes up with it. His thing. His gimmick. And everything changes. He's a headliner, and the venues get bigger fast. Pretty soon it's Hollywood and a starring role in a blockbuster, all thanks to the gimmick.

Brought to you by Penguin. The nuns who enter a medieval Norfolk convent are told to renounce the world, but the world still finds ways to trouble them, whether it is through fire, floods, pestilence, a collapsing spire, jealous rivalries, a priest with a secret or a plague of caterpillars. As...

In the heat of the French summer, young Englishman Stephen Wraysford travels to France and falls in love with his host's wife, Isabelle Azaire. When the world stops, their affair falters, and Stephen signs up. In a maze of tunnels under the trenches, Stephen finds the courage this war demands from the men in his command. And it is here that he will fight for everything he has ever known and loved.

On a searing summer Friday, Eddie Chapman has been stuck for hours in a traffic jam. There are accidents along the highway, but ambulances and police are conspicuously absent. When he decides to abandon his car and run home, he sees that the trees along the edge of a stream have been burnt, and the water in the streambed is gone. Something is very wrong. When he arrives home, the power is out, and there is no running water. The pipes everywhere, it seems, have gone dry.

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break away from her controlling family - a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of 20th-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Pippa Bennett- Warner. Pippa has recently starred in the BBC Drama MotherFatherSon alongside Richard Gere and has featured in Harlots and Sick Note. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Kathryn Sutherland. Taken...

It's 2116, and Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson are token rebels in an irretrievably corrupted society where promiscuity is the norm, eugenics a respectable science, and morality turned upside down. There is no poverty, crime or sickness - but no creativity, art or culture either. Human beings are merely docile citizens: divided into castes, brainwashed and controlled by the state and dependent on the drug soma for superficial gratification.

Brought to you by Penguin. Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Step out into a world of Go Home vans. Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy a flat. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep...

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer...

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2017 'Smith's finest. Extraordinary, truly marvellous' Observer A dazzlingly exuberant novel moving from north west London to West Africa, from the critically acclaimed author of White Teeth, On...

Three BBC Radio performances of works by the great G. K. Chesterton. Best known as the creator of clerical detective Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton was a prolific and talented writer in virtually every area of literature: from novels, poetry and short stories to plays, biographies and essays. A noted thinker, controversialist, raconteur and wit, he has influenced authors from Neil Gaiman to Jorge Luis Borges. This collection comprises his two most famous novels as well as half a dozen tales from his short story collection

Brought to you by Penguin. WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE On Brazzaville Beach, on the edge of Africa, Hope Clearwater ponders the strange circumstances that led her to leave her husband John, and his mathematical obsessions, in England and venture to Africa to help world-renowned...

'Master of the jaw-dropping twist' S MAGAZINE 'An edge-of-your-seat thriller that'll keep you guessing right until the end, get this to the top of your reading pile' HEAT ** The new heart-stopping emotional thriller from the Queen of the Big Reveal ** Robyn 'Avril' Managa was twelve when she...