The critical response to Saturday must be making Ian McEwan a very happy man (not that his virtually unassailable position as Britain’s leading novelist has been in doubt). While contemporaries (and rivals) Martin Amis and Will Self have had much more hit-or-miss records recently, each new McEwan novel gleans a host of plaudits, and Atonement has...more

We are taught manners by our parents, the three R’s by our teachers, and social skills by our friends and peers, but who is there to school us in the nuanced ways of romance? The Love Academy, located in a majestic Venetian palazzo, promises just that — along with hands-on instruction in the art of amore, as only the Italians know how. But is t...more

"Boldly published, beautifully designed, dazzlingly written. . . . Profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parker."-Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The IndependentFor fifty years, Mollie Panter-Downes' name was associated with The New Yorker. She wrote a regular column ("Letter from London"), book reviews, and over...more

From master storyteller Carlos Ruiz Zafon, author of the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind, comes The Angel’s Game— a dazzling new page-turner about the perilous nature of obsession, in literature and in love.The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened those windows — my new windows...more

This slim, subtle, and devastating novella from Ian McEwan uses surgical precision to expose the psychological slips and physical mischances that threaten to ruin a young couple's happiness on their wedding night. The novel is set in the early 1960s, in a time when sexuality still had an aura of the arcane and forbidden, and Edward and Florence's f...more