British Literary Fiction

A delightful collection from around the British Isles including Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold, Leisure by W. H Davis and To Autumn by John Keats. Featuring classic recordings by Richard Burton, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson.

"Matt" is a short novella thriller trilogy. "They murdered my wife two years ago... Tonight, you die. I am Matt, your nightmare!" On a quiet night like any other, Matt, a successful entrepreneur, returns home to his gorgeous villa, only to find his wife brutally murdered. A soft verdict against the culprits, a gang of violent teenagers, spins Matt's relatively calm and collected demeanor into something far more sinister. In a manic rage, he seeks vengeance for what has been stolen from him, and he lashes out against the weak system. Sleepless, lonely, tormented nights torture him, filling ...

Looking back to the Vienna of Klimt and Freud and forward to the shadow that is starting to fall over Europe, Sebastian Faulks' new novel is an intensely personal story that focuses on Lena, a spirited girl born with nothing, and Anton, a man of passion and self-doubt. Lena was born with nothing but her own strength of character to an alcoholic mother in a small town in southern Austria in 1906. Anton is the restless son of a bourgeois family who sets out to make his fortune in pre-First World War Vienna.

Giulia is ten. She has never left the tiny island she lives on. She never wants to. Her best friend on the island - besides her older sister - is a donkey. She ties ribbons around his head and thinks she will marry him when the time comes. Her island is one filled with widows. Widows that are watched over by the Shipmaster and his many sons. It is a place that feels stuck in time - verdant, plentiful, happy, peaceful. Until the men arrive. And the vines begin to fail. And everything changes.

It's autumn 2018, and a young woman moves into a rented room in university accommodation, ready to begin a job as a research assistant at Oxford. Here, living and working in the spaces that have birthed the country's leaders, she is both outsider and insider, and she can't shake the feeling that real life is happening elsewhere. Incisive, original and brilliantly observed, Three Rooms is the story of a search for a home and for a self. Driven by despair and optimism in equal measure, the novel poignantly explores politics, race and belonging.

World War Two vet Art Kenning is the alcoholic first-aid man in an isolated sawmill village in the interior of BC, where he dreads the sound of the five whistles that summon him to the mill floor whenever a worker is hurt. Traumatized by an incident in Holland, when he stood by while members of his unit committed a horrific act, he loses himself in drink, and in memories of the love affair he had with a woman in wartime Paris. Then one of the most powerful men at the mill arrives at his door late one evening to ask for his help.

Fired from his job and dumped by his girlfriend, Taiwanese-British photographer Sean flies to Taipei to find oblivion. But instead of escape in his parents’ homeland, all he finds is alienation. He spends his first days sleeping feverishly in an anonymous hotel bedroom and his nights chugging cheap coffee and munching on crappy doughnuts at a strip-lit doughnut bar. A chance encounter with a mysterious older man draws him into a friendship whose terms of engagement are quickly blurred, and into a world whose underpinnings seem to be shaking loose.

When Kwasi’s family moves abruptly from one side of London to the other, Kwasi is both excited by the change—the new house is so big—and unsettled by his new school and the pressures placed upon him by his parents and many aunties. One place Kwasi finds refuge and inspiration is the Chest of Small Wonders, an eclectic and run-down charity shop on the high street.

This quintessential classic: the famous tale by Washington Irving of Ichabod Crane, schoolmaster of Sleepy Hollow and his chance encounter with the spectral fiend, the Headless Horseman!