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By the bestselling author of The Drowning People

Joan McAllistair is about to embark on the ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ with her daughter Eloise; a journey back to her childhood South Africa and the family homestead in the old Boer Republic of the Orange Free State. For Eloise, a successful hedge fund manager, the trip is partly a gift, partly a means of assuaging the guilt she feels at moving her mother from her own flat to an expensive care home.

Joan has not visited the country since she was twenty-two but the chance discovery of her grandmother’s journal transports her to the troubled times of the Anglo-Boer war. Eloise, in the meantime, has gambled her company’s entire fortune on a promise made by an old lover – a scientist whose life’s work has been stalled by a broken heart.

As their stories unravel and Joan is faced with the prospect of being surrounded by strangers who do not understand her, she takes increasing refuge in the landscape of her mind – in journeys to her own past. She also finds an unexpected friend in a lonely teenager who shares her fascination with history, in particular the haunting story of a young girl and boy who once lived in the home.

Moving between nineteenth-century England and South Africa, war-time Paris and London, The Lighted Rooms is a stunningly incisive and poignant novel about family, duty and the challenging world of the mind.

A stunningly incisive and poignant novel about family, duty and the challenging world of the mind.

Joan McAllistair is about to embark on the ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ with her daughter Eloise; a journey back to her childhood South Africa and the family homestead in the old Boer Republic of the Orange Free State.

For Eloise, the trip is partly a gift, partly a means of assuaging her guilt at moving her mother into a care home. For Joan, the discovery of her grandmother’s journal transports her to the troubled times of the Anglo-Boer war. Eloise, in the meantime, has gambled her business’s entire fortune on a promise made by an old lover.

As their stories unravel, Joan takes increasing refuge in the landscape of her mind – in journeys to her own past. She also finds an unexpected friend in a lonely teenager who shares her fascination with history.

‘In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage.’ An outstanding debut novel of fractured family relationships in modern Sri Lanka.

Reverse a family tree and branches of blood are whittled down to one person – in this case, the young female narrator, Yalini – composed of all the women and men who came before her; the result of many marriages. Parents want nothing more than to prevent their children from colliding with inevitability: that in a different world, there is a different kind of marriage. Yet Tamil and Sinhalese parents – particularly after the great ethnic violence in Sri Lanka in 1983 – watch helplessly as their children cut themselves free of the need to please their ancestors. They walked out of the country to give their children opportunity, but this was not the opportunity they intended them to take: Western marriage.

For Yalini and her generation, they are the children of their parents, but have entered other countries in which the rules of marriage – Love Marriage, Arranged Marriage, and all that lies in between – dramatically do not apply.

Prize-winning historian Lawrence Freedman takes an exceptionally clear-eyed look at America’s strategic predicament in the Middle East, over the past 30 years.

The United States is locked into three prolonged conflicts without much hope of early resolution. Iran is pursuing a nuclear programme; the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has seen unrelenting intercommunal violence; and the Taliban have got back into Afghanistan.

Lawrence Freedman teases out the roots of each engagement over the last thirty years and demonstrates with clarity and scholarship the influence of these conflicts upon each other.

The story is complex and often marked by great drama. First, the countries in dispute with America are not themselves natural allies; second, their enmity was not, at first, America’s choice. Third, the region’s problems cannot all be traced to the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unique in its focus, this book will offer not only new revelations but also remind us of what has been forgotten or has never been put in context.

Prize-winning historian Lawrence Freedman takes an exceptionally clear-eyed look at America’s strategic predicament in the Middle East, over the past 30 years.

The United States is locked into three prolonged conflicts without much hope of early resolution. Iran is pursuing a nuclear programme; the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has seen unrelenting intercommunal violence; and the Taliban have got back into Afghanistan.

Lawrence Freedman teases out the roots of each engagement over the last thirty years and demonstrates with clarity and scholarship the influence of these conflicts upon each other.

The story is complex and often marked by great drama. First, the countries in dispute with America are not themselves natural allies; second, their enmity was not, at first, America’s choice. Third, the region’s problems cannot all be traced to the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unique in its focus, this book will offer not only new revelations but also remind us of what has been forgotten or has never been put in context.

Spellbinding memoir of a woman coping with the aftermath of her husband’s traumatic brain injury.

When Abigail Thomas’s husband, Richard, was hit by a car, it destroyed his short-term memory and consigned him to permanent brain trauma. He had been taking their dog, Harry, out for a walk, and Harry had come home alone.

Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, Rich must live the rest of his life in an institution. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life rather than abandon her husband. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude. It is also about her relationship with Rich, a man who lives in the eternal present, and the eerie poetry of his often uncanny perceptions. This wise, plain-spoken, beautiful book enacts the truth Abigail discovered in the five years since the accident: You might not find meaning in disaster, but you might, with effort, make something useful of it.

Forced to adapt to a life alone, Abigail finds solace at home, discovering that friends, family and dogs (Carolina, Harry and Rosie) can reshape a life of chaos into one that, while wrenchingly sad, makes sense – a life full of its own richness and beauty.

Definitive life of the author of CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, journalist, political commentator and biographer.

Thomas De Quincey’s friendships with leading poets and men of letters in the Romantic and Victorian periods – including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle – have long placed him at the centre of 19th-century literary studies. De Quincey also stands at the meeting point in the culture wars between Edinburgh and London; between high art and popular taste; and between the devotees of the Romantic imagination and those of hack journalism. His writing was a tremendous influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, William Burroughs and Peter Ackroyd.

De Quincey is a fascinating (and topical) figure for other reasons too: a self-mythologizing autobiographer whose attitudes to drug-induced creativity and addiction strike highly resonant chords for a contemporary readership. Robert Morrison’s biography passionately argues for the critical importance and enduring value of this neglected essayist, critic and biographer.

Definitive life of the author of CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, journalist, political commentator and biographer.

Thomas De Quincey’s friendships with leading poets and men of letters in the Romantic and Victorian periods – including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle – have long placed him at the centre of 19th-century literary studies. De Quincey also stands at the meeting point in the culture wars between Edinburgh and London; between high art and popular taste; and between the devotees of the Romantic imagination and those of hack journalism. His writing was a tremendous influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, William Burroughs and Peter Ackroyd.

De Quincey is a fascinating (and topical) figure for other reasons too: a self-mythologizing autobiographer whose attitudes to drug-induced creativity and addiction strike highly resonant chords for a contemporary readership. Robert Morrison’s biography passionately argues for the critical importance and enduring value of this neglected essayist, critic and biographer.

How the British, ANZACs and Canadians finally broke the German army on the most decisive day of the Great War.

The British attack at Amiens was the most decisive day of the Great War. In earlier offensives, a gain of a few hundred yards counted as a ‘victory’, but this time our troops advanced seven miles in a day and broke clean through the German defences. The long agony on the Western Front was nearly over.

Spearheaded by tanks and armoured cars and supported by the RAF, the attack was led by the Australian and Canadian Corps, with British and French troops on the flanks. Elaborate deception measures were employed to ensure surprise.

Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, as well as eyewitness accounts, this book describes how the attack was conceived, the preparations, and the actual assault itself, as well as what happened on the subsequent days and how Amiens paved the way for the final victorious Allied advance.

A timely, meditative book reasserting the power of the individual, from the author of THE COLOR PURPLE.

‘It is the worst of times. It is the best of times. Try as I might I cannot find a more appropriate opening for this volume’

Terrorist attacks, natural disasters such as the Asian tsunami and the flooding of New Orleans, the reality of global warming, ongoing warfare in Iraq and the de-stabilisation of the Middle East – sometimes the future can seem bleak, if not frightening. Yet this is not a pessimistic book. Taking a line from the poet June Jordan who said ‘We are the Ones we have been waiting for’ – Alice Walker reasserts the power of the individual in making political change happen. In short, we can ‘fix things’ by focusing on what we share as human beings rather than what separates us.

Looking at subjects as diverse as sending our children to war, the rich/poor divide, Nature, the I Ching, modern gender roles, women in the military, and even a piece on her dog Marley, Alice Walker looks towards an optimistic view of the future through a more intuitive understanding of the self and the world around us.

Orphaned at an early age, Jane Eyre survives an unhappy childhood at the grim Lowood School. Despite Jane’s deprived background, her intelligence and courage earn her a position as a governess at the imposing home of Mr Rochester. Overcoming her sense that all at Thornfield Hall is not as it seems, Jane finds herself becoming fond of her new life. But she finds it increasingly hard to maintain her composure. As her cautious friendship with her often moody master deepens, Jane opens herself up to the possibility of happiness at last. But Thornfield Hall conceals secrets that are conspiring against their happiness.

Bleak House in half the time

Esther Summerson finds herself caught up in the frustrations of a seemingly unending law-case involving her generous guardian Mr Jarndyce and her wards Ada and Richard.Brought into contact with poverty and disease, Esther suffers a serious illness.

Meanwhile the unscrupulous lawyer Tulkinghorn seeks to expose the past of the wife of a rich aristocrat, and the secret of Esther’s birth is revealed. But in the midst of tumultuous events, will she ever find love?

Nineteen year old Dorothea Brooke is determined to lead a worthwhile life and to help others. When she meets the middle-aged scholar, Mr Casaubon, she believes marriage to him will provide her with the useful role for which she longs. Meanwhile in Middlemarch Dr Lydgate, bent on medical reform, is distracted into romance with the alluring but superficial Rosamond Vincy.

Both Dorothea and Lydgate, disillusioned with their marriages, find their idealism frustrated: and for Dorothea, her husband’s enigmatic but fascinating nephew, Will, is an added complication.

Moby Dick in half the time

Moby Dick is the tale of one man’s fatal obsession and his willingness to sacrifice his life and that of his crew to achieve his goal. The story follows the fortunes of Captain Ahab and the eccentric crew of a whaling ship, The Pequod. The ship is on its last voyage in pursuit of Moby Dick – the great white whale which wounded Ahab in the past is his quarry now. The battle with the elements, the sea, the dangerous confrontations of the whale hunts are embodied in the thrilling narration of the survivor Ishmael.

The Mill on the Floss in half the time

Maggie Tulliver’s quick imagination is stifled by the claustrophobic constraints of family life in a provincial town. Her parents suppress her natural intelligence and instead focus their hopes and ambitions on her brother Tom. Disapproved of by all her relatives, Maggie yearns to be loved and admired as unconditionally as she loves and admires her morally unbending brother.

But when Maggie does find love it compromises her irretrievably, and she has to face the bleak consequences of not conforming …

Compact editions – David Copperfield in half the time.

David Copperfield’s happy childhood is abruptly ended by his mother’s remarriage to Mr Murdstone. After enduring the misery of Salem House Academy and a life of drudgery in his step father’s business, he runs away to his eccentric aunt, Betsey Trotwood, in Dover, and transforms his life a second time – finding friendship with the ever optimistic Mr Micawber and falling in love with the adorable but spoilt Dora. But David has to face tragedy, and outface the scheming Uriah Heep before he finds ultimate happiness.

Vanity Fair in half the time

Becky Sharp is the most alluring yet ruthless heroine ever to climb the social ladder. From sordid bohemian beginnings she moves upwards through Regency society, betraying her husband, her friend Amelia and all who cross her in her determination to acquire power.

In post-war London after Waterloo, Becky continues her manipulative schemes but finds herself thwarted by personal and social forces.

Anna Karenina in half the time

Anna Karenina is the heart-wrenching tale of a woman who recklessly throws away everything she has for a passionate affair with a young soldier. Beautiful, popular, wife to a wealthy man and mother to an adored son, Anna seems to be in an enviable position.

However, it takes only one encounter with Count Vronsky to fill her with the sense that her life has hitherto been empty. As the rest of the world fades into insignificance next to her great love, Anna faces an impossible choice¿

A masterly narrative survey of three centuries, from Alexander’s conquest and empire to the triumph of Rome.

The book begins with the personality and achievements of Alexander the Great, and continues with the military and political violence of the successor-kingdoms that fought over his inheritance.

This era saw many important developments: a shift from the oral to the written; a move from the public to the private and a new individualist ethos; a huge growth in slavery, and therefore a glut of slave-labour which destroyed the incentive to innovate; a growing gap between rich and poor; a growing taste for luxury.

WEDLOCK is the remarkable story of the Countess of Strathmore and her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary Eleanor Bowes was one of Britain’s richest young heiresses. She married the Count of Strathmore who died young, and pregnant with her lover’s child, Mary became engaged to George Gray. Then in swooped Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary was bowled over and married him within the week.

But nothing was as it seemed. Stoney was broke, and his pursuit of the wealthy Countess a calculated ploy. Once married to Mary, he embarked on years of ill treatment, seizing her lands, beating her, terrorising servants, introducing prostitutes to the family home, kidnapping his own sister. But finally after many years, a servant helped Mary to escape. She began a high-profile divorce case that was the scandal of the day and was successful. But then Andrew kidnapped her and undertook a week-long rampage of terror and cruelty until the law finally caught up with him.

WEDLOCK is the remarkable story of the Countess of Strathmore and her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary Eleanor Bowes was one of Britain’s richest young heiresses. She married the Count of Strathmore who died young, and pregnant with her lover’s child, Mary became engaged to George Gray. Then in swooped Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary was bowled over and married him within the week.

But nothing was as it seemed. Stoney was broke, and his pursuit of the wealthy Countess a calculated ploy. Once married to Mary, he embarked on years of ill treatment, seizing her lands, beating her, terrorising servants, introducing prostitutes to the family home, kidnapping his own sister. But finally after many years, a servant helped Mary to escape. She began a high-profile divorce case that was the scandal of the day and was successful. But then Andrew kidnapped her and undertook a week-long rampage of terror and cruelty until the law finally caught up with him.

Earth is in crisis, virtually destroyed by overpopulation, and mankind is teethering on the edge. ISTO – the Interstellar Trade Organization – had demanded man’s extinction, for a living planet is more important than any race upon it, and was about to start ‘reducing’ mankind when Earthgov agreed its demands, to sell 90 per cent of Earth’s inhabitants into bondage to alien races.

When Margaret is six, she imagines herself as a spy, a healer, a queen, a warrior, even a boy, to amuse herself; when she is nine, and 12, and 20, at crisis points in her life, she feels like parts of her have split off – like the Margaret who decided to follow her lover to Tercis and the Margaret who said no.

So now, as well as Margaret, she is Wilvia, learning to be a queen on B’yurngrad, and Ongamar, a spy on Cantardene, and Gretamara, a healer on Chottem, and even Naumi, a boy on Thairy, and she is many other Margarets besides.

And all these Margarets hold the key to mankind’s survival, if only they can survive and come together again as one Margaret, with all their different powers intact …

The story of the most famous revolt of the ancient world, and its legendary leader, Spartacus the Gladiator.

Spartacus was a Thracian gladiator who started a prison breakout with 74 men, armed with kitchen knives. It grew into a full scale rebellion against Rome, the most famous slave revolt in history. With an army of gladiators, ex-slaves and other desperadoes, he managed to defeat a succession of Roman armies and bring the Republic to its knees.

The story of the most famous revolt of the ancient world, and its legendary leader, Spartacus the Gladiator.

Spartacus was a Thracian gladiator who started a prison breakout with 74 men, armed with kitchen knives. It grew into a full scale rebellion against Rome, the most famous slave revolt in history. With an army of gladiators, ex-slaves and other desperadoes, he managed to defeat a succession of Roman armies and bring the Republic to its knees.