My bookshelf

Great art has dreadful manners. The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a...

Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short form. This book comes with an introduction by Natalie Haynes. When this book was first published in 1949 it was to outrage and scandal. Never before had the case for female ...

Smaug certainly looked fast asleep, when Bilbo peeped once more from the entrance. He was just about to step out onto the floor when he caught a sudden thin and piercing ray of red from under the drooping lid of Smaug's left eye...

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from ...

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire ...

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) wrote carefully structured fiction that probed the psychological and social elements guiding the behavior of her characters...

A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself...

Tom Ripley is struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors, and the law, when an unexpected acquaintance offers him a free trip to Europe and a chance to start over. Ripley wants money, success and the good life and he's willing to kill for it...

The number one bestseller and British Book Awards Book of the Year. London 1893. When Cora Seaborne's controlling husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness...

The Godfather is the Mafia leader Vito Corleone, a benevolent despot who stops at nothing to gain and hold power. Set in Long Island, Hollywood and Sicily, this is a story of a feudal society within society...

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. How do we carry on when someone close to us dies? Is it simply a case of putting one foot ...