Canons

WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHORNow that all the others have run out of air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making . . . So I’ll spin my own thread. Penelope . . . immortalised in legend and Greek myth as the devoted wife of the glorious Odysseus, silently weaving and unpicking and...

If he's in the right mood, divine Angus might grant you sight of your true love in a dream; you might even fall in love with him, but he'll never love you back. He's too busy making mischief, stealing the palace of the gods from his father, turning his enemies into pigs etc; until he is trapped...

Condemned to shoulder the world "for ever" by the gods he dared defy, freedom seems unattainable to Atlas. But then he receives an unexpected visit from Heracles, the one man strong enough to share the burden, and it seems they can strike a bargain that might release him ... Jeanette Winterson...

When Ariadne helped Theseus escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth with the aid of a ball of thread, she led the way for the bewildered victims of a twenty-first century Minotaur. Trapped in an endless maze of Internet chat rooms, a group of mystified strangers find themselves assigned obscure aliases and commanded by the Helmet of Horror, the Minotaur himself.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is the remarkable new piece of fiction from best-selling and famously atheistic author Philip Pullman. By challenging the events of the gospels, Pullman puts forward his own compelling and plausible version of the life of Jesus, and in so doing, does what all great books do: makes the reader ask questions.

This is not a gospel. This is a story. In this ingenious and spell-binding retelling of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman revisits the most influential story ever told. Charged with mystery, compassion and enormous power, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ throws fresh light on who...

We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we...

Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's remix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love...

Ragnarok is narrated by Harriet Walter and retells the finale of Norse mythology. A story of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves: what more relevant myth could any modern writer choose? Just as Wagner used this dramatic and catastrophic struggle for the...

As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on Britain, one young girl is evacuated to the countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new life, whose dark, war-ravaged days feel very removed from the peace and love being preached in church and at school. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods - a book of ancient Norse myths - and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. She feels an instant kinship with these vivid, beautiful, terrifying tales of the end of the gods - they seem far more real, far more familiar during these precarious days.

A New York Times bestseller A Guardian literary highlight for 2015 A Huffington Post 'One to Watch' in 2015 'Astounding' LENA DUNHAM, creator of Girls and author of Not That Kind of Girl 'The First Bad Man brings together all of July's talents - it's a book that must be read, a book that must...

MADONNA. ANDY WARHOL. KEITH HARING. FAB 5 FREDDIE. DEBBIE HARRY. JULIAN SCHNABEL. Jean-Michel Basquiat's transition from the subways to the chic gallery spaces of Manhattan brought the artist into the company of many of New York's established and aspiring stars. Unable to deal with the...

One boy, one boat, one tiger . . . British comedian, actor and broadcaster Sanjeev Bhaskar, OBE performs this brilliant edition of a work of fiction that is loved by fans around the world. After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific...

THE SICK BAG SONG chronicles Cave's journey with his band the Bad Seeds on a twenty-two-day, North American tour. Inspired by John Berryman's Dream Songs it is an epic exploration of inspiration, creativity, loss, love and death. The book blends poetry, lyrics, memories, musings, flights of...

NOW A MAJOR BBC DRAMA STARRING Romola Garai, Chris O'Dowd, Gillian Anderson, Richard E. Grant, Shirley Henderson and Mark Gatiss. The audio reader is Jill Tanner. 'Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them . . .' So begins this irresistible voyage into the dark side of...

Isserley spends most of her time driving. But why is she so interested in picking up hitchhikers? And why are they always male, well-built and alone? An utterly unpredictable and macabre mystery, Michel Faber's debut novel is an outstanding piece of fiction that will stay with you long after you...

Sitting down to write a book about his hero D. H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer finds himself compelled to write about anything else. He is in fact compelled to do more or less anything else instead of write. In Sicily he is too preoccupied by his hatred of seafood to follow the great writer's footsteps; in Mexico he cannot get beyond a drug-induced erotic fantasy on a nudist beach...and yet, incredibly, this attempt to write a 'sober academic study' reveals the hold Lawrence and his work still exert on us today.

An immersive collection of poetry to open your world, curated by the host of Poetry Unbound This inspiring collection, edited by Pádraig Ó Tuama, presents fifty poems about what it means to be alive in the world today. Each poem is paired with Pádraig's illuminating commentary that offers...