Treads the wafer-thin line between the evil and the everyday. This story centres on the correspondence of two paedophiles: one, the narrator, is a middle-aged child-killer serving his twenty-third year in prison; the other, his bland-speaking, sweet-seeming admirer, is a nineteenth-year-old woman intent on seducing a young neighbourhood boy.

A memoir about the experience of being a Bosnian refugee in Britain. It describes the beginning of the war - the machine gun fire that sounded like a sewing machine in the distance - and the author's family's growing anxiety, culminating in the decision to send her and her sister to Britain.

Offers a portrait of rural English society at a time of great change. This work talks about the nature of farming in an age of computerization and encroaching supermarkets; discusses the realities behind the rural idyll; and describes the daily pleasures and tribulations of village life.

Explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, this book presents the journeys which become the conductors of people and cultures who have had intense relationships with these places.

Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms, but it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This book is a journey from tumbleweed and American Indian tepees to the house where Bonnie and Clyde did their dirty work to the scene of the murders in Capote's In Cold Blood .

When he turned sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the day's events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed.

By the author of the best-selling Straw Dogs, this book is a characteristically trenchant and unflinchingly clear-sighted collection of reflections on our contemporary lot.

A guide to Shakespearean tragedy. Fintan O'Toole shows how the plays have been made unintelligible to modern students by being filtered through a series of ideas that have nothing to do with what Shakespeare wrote, and everything to do with keeping the world safe for conservative values.

A powerful analysis of the deepening instability of global capitalism.

When he turned sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. This boxed set contains paperbacks of The Smoking Diaries , The Smoking Diaries: The Year of the Jouncer , and The Smoking Diaries: The Last Cigarette .

Simon Schama, the author of The Embarrassment of Riches and Citizens , sets out to tell the history of two certainties, of two deaths. In discussing the speculations surrounding them, he finds himself involved in a history he cannot classify - the unpredictable history of stories.

Contends that in this age of infinite publication, the truly cultivated person is not the one who has read a book, but the one who understands the book's place in our culture. This work challenges those who ever felt guilty about missing some of the Great Books to consider what reading means, and how we absorb books as part of ourselves.

In the 1980s the author moved into a converted chicken coop on the roof of a house in a village in Egypt. This is the story of his decade of intimacy with the village. Mixing conversation and research, imagination and scholarship, it is also a history of the relationship between Egypt and India.

When he turned sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the day's events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed.

Set in both India and Africa, this is the story of three characters - an orphan, a police inspector and a madman - who try to find order in an increasingly chaotic world.

In 1966, the South African premier, Hendrik Verwoerd was stabbed to death in the South African parliament. Who was the killer and what was his motives? A political enemy of the system? A madman?

John Litchfield on how the French election exposed a national identity crisis.

An anthology of classic Granta pieces on India.