MODERN CLASSICS

Genetic mutation has devastated the world. In the bleak, primitive society that has emerged from its ruins, any sign of deviation is ruthlessly hunted out and destroyed. David lives in fear of discovery, for he is part of a secret group of

After his father`s early death Jean-Paul Sartre was brought up at his grandfather`s home in a world even then eighty years out of date. This work provides background to the philosophy of one of the profoundest thinkers of the twentieth cent

From Timothy Leary's first trip (on psilocybin) in Mexico in 1960, his life;s work became exploring and preaching the benefits - social, aesthetic and spiritual - that psyche-delic drugs had to offer. Leary, with fellow psychologists Metzne

Carson McCullers's prodigious first novel was published to instant acclaim when she was just twenty-three. Set in a small town in the middle of the deep South, it is the story of John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute, and a disparate group of peo

Philip Marlowe, the original hard-boiled private eye, returns to walk the mean streets of the American underworld again in these three classic novels. In The Lady in the Lake a business tycoon sets Marlowe on the hunt for some very importan

Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family - and an attendant cast of colourful underwo

It is the fiesta Day of Death in Mexico and Geoffrey Firmin - ex-consul, ex-husband, an alcoholic and a ruined man - is living out the last day of his life. Drowning himself in mescal while his former wife and half-brother look on, powerle

Barley Blair is not a Service man: he is a small-time publisher, a self-destructive soul whose only loves are whisky and jazz. But it was Barley who, one drunken night at a dacha in Peredelkino during the Moscow Book Fair, was befriended by

In these dark, dreamlike love stories with a twist, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya tells of strange encounters in claustrophobic communal apartments, ill-fated holiday romances, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, tentative courtships, rampant infi

Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H. P. Lovecraft remade the genre in the early twentieth century, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisaging mankind at the mercy of a chaotic and malevolent universe. This sele

Brimming with gluttony, booze and lust, Roger Micheldene is loose in America. Supposedly visiting Budweiser University to make deals for his publishing firm in England, Roger instead sets out to offend all he meets and to seduce every woman

There is only one book to a man' Steinbeck wrote of East of Eden, his most ambitious novel. Set in the rich farmland of Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Tr

Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it... Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomi

Gandhi's non-violent struggles against racism, violence, and colonialism in South Africa and India had brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an