‘Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark and everyone sailing under a different sky’Where do you go if you can’t feel at home in your own family? When the people who made you can’t...

Why do we set so much store by marriage? Jane Austen was fascinated by this question, subjecting it to her forensic eye and wonderfully ironic wit again and again. Here are stolen glances and nervous...

‘I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette....

‘Well, Watson, we seem to have fallen upon evil days’Sherlock Holmes: the quintessential British hero and the world's most popular detective. Through his powers of deduction, and with the help of his...

Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary collection, Virginia Woolf leads us on a transformative journey through the liberating...

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...

‘I want to change, but not if it means changing,' a patient once said to me in complete innocence What do we do when we find ourselves trapped by our own thoughts or behaviour? Drawing on his twenty-five...

‘Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?And, live we how we can, yet die we must’What is the true meaning of power? Are some simply born to it or can it be acquired like a skill? Does it always...

Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of...

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When...

Your sister might be the kindred soul who knows you best, or the most alien being in your household; she might enrage you or inspire you; she might be your fiercest competitor or closest co-conspirator,...

What’s the worst another drink could do? John Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball. From the calculating teenager who raids her parents’ liquor cabinet, only...

How do you remember the summers of your childhood?...

‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.’Is lying simply an uncomfortable truth about life or something...

‘Wealth and beggary, virtue and vice, repletion and the direst hunger, all treading on each other and crowding together’Could any writer portray London better than Charles Dickens? Dickens knew the city...

Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the day to day realities of fatherhood in the ultimate literary gift for dads....

Salman Rushdie, a self-described ‘emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two’, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether...

Can we truly know the one we love? In this painfully candid book Marcel Proust looks straight into the green eye of every lover’s jealous struggle. He broods on why we are driven to try possess one another,...

‘To myself alone could I look’Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are heroines who depend upon no one but themselves. In the face of hardship, from small sacrifices to great heartache, they cling resolutely to their...

How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? Tim Parks – lifelong sceptic of all things spiritual - finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question. With brutal...

Enjoy Helen Simpson’s sharply funny, humane take on the everyday joys and struggles of motherhood....

Have you ever tried to learn another language? When Zhuang first arrives in London from China she feels like she is among an alien species. The city is disorientating, the people unfriendly, the language...

Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog’s-eye view of the country’s best bathing holes – the rivers, rock pools, lakes, ponds,...

In this inspiring, witty and eminently sensible book, Nigella Lawson sets out a manifesto for how to cook (and eat) good food every day with a minimum of fuss. From basic roast chicken and pea risotto...

When it comes to death, is there ever a best case scenario? In this disarmingly witty book, Julian Barnes confronts our unending obsession with the end. He reflects on what it means to miss God, whether...

‘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,...

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.How do we choose between what is fair and just, and what our debtors demand of us? Yanis Varoufakis was put in such a dilemma in 2015 when he became...

Irvine Welsh, 'poet laureate of the chemical generation', exposes the seamy underbelly of rave’s utopian dream. Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and...

An exploration of race from one of the twentieth century’s primary chroniclers of the African American experience.Is who we are really only skin deep? In this searing, remonstrative book, Toni Morrison...

Bob Slocum is anxious, bored and fearful of his job. So why is it he wants nothing more than the chance to speak at the next company convention? In this darkly satirical book, Joseph Heller takes us for...