General Fiction
20 books
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Alesiena
Author: J. Joans
Talented young pianist, Adrien, finds himself entangled in a web of love and heartache when he falls for the captivating Alessia. But when he brings troubled teenager, Siena, into his home, his love for Alessia is put to the test. Siena's chaotic past threatens to unravel Adrien's carefully constructed world as he grapples with feelings of guilt and betrayal. As tensions rise and emotions boil over, Adrien is forced to confront the deep-seated envy and jealousy that threatens his relationships w- Published on 2023
- 294 pages
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The Whispering Muse
Author: Laura Purcell
Be careful what you wish for... it may just come true. At The Mercury Theatre in London's West End, rumours are circulating of a curse. It is said that the lead actress Lilith has made a pact with Melpomene, the tragic muse of Greek mythology, to become the greatest actress to ever grace the stage. Suspicious of Lilith, the jealous wife of the theatre owner sends dresser Jenny to spy on her, and desperate for the money to help her family, Jenny agrees. What Jenny finds is a woman- Published on 2023
- 295 pages
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The Rose and the Ring
Author: William Makepeace Thackery
The Rose and The Ring is a satirical work of fantasy fiction written by William Makepeace Thackeray, originally published at Christmas 1854 (though dated 1855). It criticises, to some extent, the attitudes of the monarchy and those at the top of society and challenges their ideals of beauty and marriage. Set in the fictional countries of Paflagonia and Crim Tartary, the story revolves around the lives and fortunes of four young royal cousins, Princesses Angelica and Rosalba, and Princes Bul- Published on 2015
- 110 pages
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The Snow Child
Author: Eowyn Ivey
A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska, Eowyn Ivey's THE SNOW CHILD was a top ten bestseller in hardback and paperback, and went on to be a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Alaska, the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before. When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: i- Published on 2012
- 428 pages
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The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
Author: G.B. Edwards
Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of -
Hangover Square
Author: Patrick Hamilton
The seventy-fifth anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Anthony Quinn. London, 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation. Netta is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in a drunken hell, except in his 'dead' moments, when something goes click in his head and he realises, without a doubt, that he must kill her. In the darkly comic Hangover Square Patrick Hamilton brilliantly evokes a seedy, fo -
Alias Grace
Author: Margaret Atwood
Takes readers into the life and mind of Grace Marks, one of the most notorious women of the 1840s, who is serving a life sentence for murders she claims she cannot remember- Published on 1997
- 468 pages
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The Retreat
Author: Sarah Pearse
Will you brave The Retreat this summer? The new bestselling thriller from the author of The Sanatorium. They couldn't wait to stay here. An idyllic wellness retreat has opened on an island off the coast of Devon, promising rest and relaxation - but the island itself, known locally as Reaper's Rock, has a dark past. Once the playground of a serial killer, it's rumored to be cursed. But now they can't leave. A woman is found dead below the yoga pavilion in what seems to be a tragic -
Bread and Wine
Author: Ignazio Silone
In 1936, after fifteen years in exile, Pietro Spina, a member of the Communist Party, returns to Italy disguised as a priest and finds truth and a meaningful way of life among peasants of the countryside of Abruzzi. Reissue. -
The Tartar Steppe
Author: Dino Buzzati
Idealistic young officer Giovanni Drogo is full of determination to serve his country well. But when he arrives at a bleak border station in the Tartar desert, where he is to take a short assignment at Fort Bastiani, he finds the castle manned by veteran soldiers who have grown old without seeing a trace of the enemy. As his length of service stretches from months into years, he continues to wait patiently for the enemy to advance across the desert, for one great and glorious battle . . . Writte -
The Collector
Author: John Fowles
Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. A lottery win enables him to capture art student Miranda and keep her in the cellar of the Sussex house he has bought with the windfall. -
Norwegian Wood
Author: Haruki Murakami (春樹·村上)
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past. -
The Drinker
Author: Hans Fallada
Written in an encrypted notebook while incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum and only discovered after his death, The Drinker may be Hans Fallada’s most breathtaking piece of craftsmanship. It is an intense yet absorbing study of the descent into drunkenness by an intelligent man who fears he’s lost it all. *** This is a Hybrid Book. Melville House HybridBooks combine print and digital media into an enhanced reading experience by including with each title additional curated material called Illumi -
Life After Life
Author: Kate Atkinson
What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want t- Published on 2013
- 624 pages
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Any Human Heart
Author: William Boyd
Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in o- Published on 2017
- 512 pages
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Hunger
Author: Knut Hamsun
Nineteenth-century Kristiania is an unforgiving place, and work is thin on the ground. Roaming the streets of Norway's capital, a penniless young writer searches for inspiration whilst trying desperately to make ends meet. Driven to extraordinary lengths, sleeping under the stars with his stomach growling, the writer's behaviour becomes increasingly irrational and his world spirals into chaos. Hunger was Knut Hamsun's first novel and earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. A disturbin -
Journey to the End of the Night
Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. This edition contains a foreword by John Banville. Told in the first person, the novel is based on the author's own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in the USA - where he worked for a while at the Ford factory in Detroit - and later as a young doctor in a working-class suburb in Paris. Celine's disgust with human folly, ma -
Post Office
Author: Charles Bukowski
Henry Chinaski is a lowlife loser with a hand-to-mouth existence. His menial post office day job supports a life of beer, one-night stands and racetracks. Lurid, uncompromising and hilarious, Post Office is a landmark in American literature. -
Factotum
Author: Charles Bukowski
Henry Chinaski, an outcast, a loner and a hopeless drunk, drifts around America from one dead-end job to another, from one woman to another and from one bottle to the next. Uncompromising, gritty, hilarious and confessional in turn, his downward spiral is peppered with black humour. "Factotum" follows Charles Bukowski's bestselling "Post Office", his highly autobiographical first novel.- Published on 2009
- 163 pages
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Boredom
Author: Alberto Moravia
The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following the World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society. Boredom, the story of a failed artist and pampered son of a rich family who becomes dangerously attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, and imperiled masculinity. This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life is one of the masterworks of a w- Published on 1960
- 336 pages
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