The Dark Room tells three stories: that of Helmut a young photographer in the 1930s; Lore a 12-year-old girl at the end of the war; and Micha, a young school teacher, half a century later. Between them, the reader traces the legacy of the Nazi period on the lives of ordinary Germans.

This work confronts seven different objections to our self-image as moral, well-behaved creatures, and charts a course through the philosophical quicksands that often engulf us. In a godless world, has science unmasked us as creatures fated by our genes to be selfish and aggressive?

On a street in a town in the North of England, ordinary people are going through the motions of their everyday existence. A young man is in love with a neighbour who does not even know his name. An old couple make their way up to the nearby bus stop. But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening.

Edgar Allan Poe is the American boy, a child standing on the edge of mysteries. In 1819 two Americans arrive in London, and soon afterwards a bank collapses, a man is found dead and mutilated, a heiress flirts with her inferiors, and a schoolmaster struggles to understand what is happening.

When her parents abandon their seedy Streatham pub for a tearoom in Kent, life for April changes dramatically. She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous Ruby and by the creepy but immaculately dressed Mr Greenridge, who likes to follow her around the village.

Old-fashioned and eccentric in tone, this book could have been written in the 30's - it's a modern-day classic