Set before and during the great war, this work captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself.

The winner of the Whitbread Best First Novel 1990, this is the story of Karim Amir, an Englishman born and bred - almost , who lives with his English mother and Indian father in the South London suburbs. It is written by the author of My Beautiful Launderette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid .

Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time.

It is off-season in a remote Highland sea port: 21-year-old Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket, wakes one morning to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on their kitchen floor. Morvern's laconic reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling.

A young drama teacher in the West of Scotland suffers deep psychological problems which affect all areas of her life. She fails to find meaning in anything around her, but in her search she strips situations of their conventional values and sees them in a sharp, new light.

Made for each other, clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier are gamblers - one obsessive, the other compulsive - incapable of winning at the game of love.