Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. But his delicate mission is overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night.

Recasts the storytelling heritage of the ancient and medieval worlds into perennial forms that inspired writers including Chaucer and Shakespeare. This book hovers between the fading glories of an aristocratic past - the Crusades, the Angevins, the courts of France, the legendary East - and the squalor of contemporary life.

A saga of a family and an account of addiction and failure as its helpless hero, notionally undergoing psychiatric help, manages spectacularly to fail to give up smoking, run his business or make sense of his private life.

As the head of the aristocratic family, Don Fabrizio is accustomed to knowing his own place in the world and expects his household to run accordingly. He is aware of the changes which are rapidly making men obsolete but he remains attached to the old ways. But Don Fabrizio will make few accommodations for the modern world.

A collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. It charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider.

When an epidemic threatens to wipe out the silk trade in France, Herve Joncour (a young silkworm breeder) has to travel overland to distant Japan, to smuggle out healthy silkworms. In the course of his secret negotiations with the local baron, Joncour's attention is arrested by the man's concubine, a girl who does not have oriental eyes.