Charles Townshend The protracted, terrible fight for independence pitted the Irish against the British and the Irish against other Irish. It was both a physical battle of shocking violence against...

Natalie Zemon Davis The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer’s day in 1560, a man swaggered...

Roberto Bolano New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to...

Hella S Haasse Although he bears one of the most notorious names in all of Italy, Giovanni Borgia doesn't know his parentage. Hella Haasse uses the Italian Wars as a...

John Banville In this luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to...

Primo Levi The Sixth Day and Other Tales is a wonderful collection of short fantasy tales by Primo Levi. These works of supreme imagination demonstrate the breadth of Levi's graceful...

Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil The marvelous saga of the English language--from its origins as a dialect of a small European tribe to its present status as the...

Emylia Hall The Thousand Lights Hotel is the gorgeous new novel from Emylia Hall, author of Richard & Judy Summer Pick The Book Of Summers. Set in idyllic Italy, it's the perfect...

Andrzej Sapkowski Reinmar of Bielau, called Reynevan, flees after being caught in an affair with a knight's wife.With strange, mystical forces gathering in the shadows and pursued not only by...

Philip Gould In May 1997, the Conservatives were ejected from British office after 18 years in power, and the Labour Party which replaced them had itself changed irrevocably. Blair's majority...

John Farman Factually fascinating, incredibly unforgettable and fabulously funny, John Farman's updated hysterical history of Britain, Part II has new fact-filled chapters and cartoons to bring it bang-up-to-date. It's the...

Antonia Fraser Just how weak were the women of the Civil War era? What could they expect beyond marriage and childbirth in an age where infant and maternal mortality was...