Critical generalizations about Mrs Gaskell have tended to portray her either as an essentially feminine novelist, full of charm, tenderness and little else, or as a pioneer of the 'social problem' novel. Neither view does sufficient justice to her best norvels, of which North and South (1855) is certainly one. Read More...

Paris, 1892. The American historian Henry Adams, is looking for Miriam Talbott, a young American woman studying in Paris. But when he goes looking for Miriam, no one at her given address has seen her. And when another woman's body is fished out of the Seine and identified as hers, Adam knows she is in trouble and needs his assistance. Read More...

It was Bill Eldon's feel for homespun characters, cattle, and crops - and not the manoeuvres of the smart lawyers and politicians who call him dated - which proved to be the deciphering factor of the two cases in one volume: The Case of the Runaway Blonde, and The case of the Hungry Horse. Read More...

Father Brown returns from the dead and solves his own murder, and applies the same gentle logic to seven more delightful mysteries. Read More...

"It may seem odd to class a man who has difficulty in rolling his umbrella... among the Supermen of detection, but Father Brown belongs among them." Read More...

Edwardian London: a city of cobbled streets, horse-drawn cabs, gaslights, and eccentrics. None were stranger than the member's of that gentle men's club known as the Club of Queer Trades. Read More...

Homeless, hungry, and broke, a young Pole wanders through the streets of Paris with his Hungarian girlfriend. Stan, wanted for a crime in his native Poland, has only one thing to sell, and only one possible buyer for it...the police. But if Stan betrays the gang, will he be an outlaw twice over? Read More...

'I am now in my twenty-second year and yet the only birthday which I can clearly distinguish among all the rest was my twelfth, for it was on that damp and misty day in September that I met the Captain for the first time...' Read More...

"H E Bates sensitiveness to beauty and to character is astonishing; it is, I think, greater than the sensibility of any other living English writer; and because of it, his work always reminds me of the painting of Renoir... his best stories do not impress by their strength so much as by their fragility..." David Garnett Read More...

Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager. An innocent in the ways of the world, an ingénue when it comes to pop and fashion, she does however rejoice in the exalted status of Elect of God of the Luskentyrian Sect, a small but committed religious cult based near Stirling. Read More...