A young Italian scholar was captured by pirates and put up for auction at the Istanbul slave market. Acquired by a brilliant Turkish inventor, he is set to work on projects to entertain the jaded Sultan.

A collection of poems that includes works like The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land .

Sir John Betjeman (1906-84) was born in Highgate, the son of a manufacturer of Dutch descent. His poetry enjoyed immense popularity, as did his personality, and his knighthood in 1969 and appointment as Poet Laureate in 1972 were universally welcomed.

Sylvia Plath (1932-63) possessed one of the most commanding voices in twentieth-century poetry. She published only one volume of verse, The Colossus , during her life and a single novel, The Bell Jar . After her death Winter Trees , Crossing the Water and, most notably, the remarkable poems in Ariel , brought her posthumous fame.

Right from the beginning, Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote in a way that set him apart from his contemporaries, as Simon Armitage puts it in his introduction. By the time he published his final collection, Birthday Letters in 1998, he had become a colossus on the literary landscape.

W H Auden (1907-73) came to prominence in the 1930s among a generation of outspoken poets that included his friends Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and C Day Lewis. But he was also an intimate and lyrical poet of great originality, and a master craftsman of some of the most cherished and influential poems of the past century.

The Bell Jar .

Elizabeth Regan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own, and her husband is straining against his job in the police force. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, this is a novel of haunting power.

For the first time in his life, Harry Joy sees the world as it really is and takes up a notebook to explore and notate the true nature of the Underworld.

Set in (what was then) Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent and the birth of Bangladesh, this title presents the story of the peculiar way in which the conflict impinges on the lives of Gustad Noble, an ordinary man, and his family.

A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast.

St Cedd's Church fete had been held in the grounds of Martingale manor house for generations. Mrs Maxie had to contend with the news of her son's sudden engagement to her new parlour maid, the sly single mother, Sally Jupp. On the following morning Martingale and the whole village are shocked by the discovery of Sally Jupp's body.

Presents the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman living alone in England, dwelling on the suicide of her daughter.

Karim lives with his Mum and Dad in a suburb of south London and dreams of making his escape to the bright lights of the big city. But his father is no ordinary Dad, he is 'the buddha of suburbia', a strange and compelling figure whose powers of meditation hold a circle of would-be mystics spellbound with the fascinations of the East.

Includes three interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a fresh genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness.

W B Yeats (1865-1939) was not only Ireland's greatest poet but one of the most influential voices in world literature in the twentieth century.