In the early fifteenth century, as winter falls away, the people of Albania know that their fate is sealed. They have refused to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire, and war is now inevitable. Soon enough dust kicked up by Turkish horses is spotted from a citadel.

With her colleagues, Helen Barr, plays the violin and she seeks refuge from the everyday in the selfish magic of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under the occupation and her family is Jewish. In March 1944, Helene and her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent to Auschwitz. This is her journal.

From April 1942 to March 1944, Helene Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving, intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing literary maturity.

Once overshadowed by Sartre, Camus has proved the more durable of the two most celebrated French writer-philosophers of the last century. This collection of his work makes the reasons for his survival self-evident. In prose of bleak but piercing clarity, Camus cuts to the heart of each story he tells. After The Outsider (also published in Everyman) The Plague is his most powerful novel, at once ..

Two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to Albania in the 1930s with a tape recorder in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers. Their purpose, they say, is to show how Homer's epics might have been culled from a verbal tradition. The two dedicated scholars realise only too late that they have stumbled over an ants' nest.

What emerges from this biography of the French filmmaker Jacques Tati, is the portrait of a man at once dedicated, impassioned and shy, more an artist than a businessman. He died in 1982 but his comedy films are as popular now as in their heyday.

In the mid-1930s, two Irish-American scholars arrive in a small town in Northern Albania to carry out research on the surviving tradition of spoken verse epics, recording the last of the wandering ballad-mongers. They hope to solve the mystery of Homer's authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey .

This translation brings together for the first time in any language all of Spitzer's work on the literature of seventeenth-century France

Set in Paris, this novel addresses a particularly serious and chilling case of murder. Superintendent Adamsberg loves mysteries, but when the town crier begins reading disturbing messages that have been slipped in between the daily news, he knows this is no ordinary crime.

Tzvetan Todorov's book examines the history of the past century by analyzing its spectacular political conflicts and by offering moving profiles of individuals who, at great personal cost, resisted the strictures of the communist and Nazi regimes. .

This up-to-date account of the composition, structure, and achievement of Balzac's novel provides readers with the literary and historical knowledge needed to make sense of the text. Professor Bellos explains how Balzac challenged prevailing 19th-century expectations of what novels should be like.

A biography of Georges Perec, one of France's great 20th-century writers, who drew both on his Jewish cultural heritage and "l'esprit gaulois", with its undercurrent of subtle mockery and non-conformism.