Item category 2: Classic Fiction

From a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war, Caliban Shrieks' narrator takes readers on a lyrical tour of life as a young man born into the first days of the 20th century. Lost to time, only to be rediscove...

A moving portrayal of the struggle between desire and duty in nineteenth-century New York high society. Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May's cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their c...

Admired by writers from Nabokov to Bulgakov to George Saunders, Gogol is considered one of the more enigmatic of the Russian greats. He only wrote one novel, 'Dead Souls', and destroyed much of his later work, so his stories constitute his major output. In this collection Gogol's three greatest S...

Nopporn, a Thai student studying in Japan, is tasked with hosting a distinguished old family friend and his new wife, the beautiful, aristocratic Kirati. Despite their difference in age and status, and the social constraints of the day, Nopporn and Kirati are inexorably drawn to each other. A sti...

Italo Calvino Gonzalo is a highly educated man living alone with his ageing, widowed mother in a town scarred by war. He rages against the world. The doctor tells him to get out more. But his frustration starts to erupt in increasingly ferocious and unexpected ways, with disastrous consequences. ...

Eszter Encsy is an acclaimed actress, funny and outrageous, quick-witted but callous. Yet even flushed with the success of adulthood, Eszter craves acceptance of herself as she really is and of the person she has been. The only child of an impoverished aristocrat and a harried music teacher faili...

Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she can go raving with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club in the industrial town on the outskirts of London. A young woman unsure of her future, the sound is her guide - a chance to discover who she really is in the rhythms of those smoke-filled night...

The only novel by the twentieth century's most acclaimed surrealist painter, a richly visual depiction of a group of eccentric aristocrats in the years preceding World War II.

Two young deaf people, Abel and Janice, leave their punitive school and begin their life as a married couple 'Outside' - in the unwelcoming world of the hearing. A misunderstanding about the payment plan on a car kickstarts years of debt, hard labour and ostracization; but they find solace and ex...

Shot through with an unutterable sense of mystery, paranoia and dread, 'The King in Yellow' is a linked collection of tales that swirl around a single motif: a terrible book that prompts an obsessive madness in all who look upon its pages. From a dystopian New York to the streets of Paris, these ...