Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this exquisite short story collection. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes these stories more powerful and compelling than anything she has written before. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009.

In Talking It Over Gillian and Stuart were married until Oliver - witty, feckless Oliver - stole Gillian away. In Love, etc Julian Barnes revisits the three of them, using the same intimate technique of allowing the characters to speak directly to the reader, to whisper their secrets, to argue for their version of the truth. Darker and deeper than its predecessor, Love etc is a compelling exploration of contemporary love and its betrayals. 

It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help. 

Into a wonderfully evocative tale, Dickens weaves what he considers to be the two great qualities of Christmas: joy in the home and practical charity towards the less fortunate outside our doors. 

The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Daisy, their black servant. 

The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman's discovery in the desert of a small boy from another planet - the Little Prince of the title - and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition. 

They were sisters, and the picture-perfect image of innocence. No one understood their brutal deaths, not even the man who killed them. But John Coffey is about to gain a new insight, about his life in prison, and about the one man who will walk him down that green mile... toward destiny. 

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.

For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.

Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous love affairs but unexpectedly bumps into his childhood sweetheart and sets his heart on destroying her marriage. His equilibrium is further disturbed when his friends all decide to come and keep him company and Charles finds his seaside idyll severely threatened by his obsessions.

First published in 1958, Iris Murdoch's funny and sad novel is about religion, the fight between good and evil and the terrible accidents of human frailty. Encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns, is a community of very mixed-up people waiting for the installation of a new bell, but then the old one is rediscovered.

The Office of the Public Defender is not known as a training ground for bright young litigators. Clay Carter has been there too long and, like most of his colleagues, dreams of a better job in a real firm. When he reluctantly takes the case of a man charged with a random street killing, he assumes it is just another of the many senseless murders that hit D.C. every week.

As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles on a conspiracy too horrible to believe. He suddenly finds himself in the middle of a complex case against one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and looking at the kind of enormous settlement that would totally change his life—that would make him, almost overnight, the legal profession's newest king of torts.

Here are some of the world's best-loved Christmas stories - from O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi to the tale of the Nutcracker. You'll also find best-loved tales by Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen, and more! 

World's Best Christmas Stories is a wonderful book to keep and treasure. 

Over the weeks that Clay Garrity had slept in the park with others of New York's 'homeless, ' Buddy and Calvin had become his family. Somewhere in the vast city, Clay's real father wandered, jobless and unable to bear it; his mother, too, was gone now from the welfare hotel that had been their shelter. Desperation had overcome her and swept her away. Clay couldn't leave the streets, for if he did he might never find Ma or Daddy again...

Suspected of killing Vera Donovan, her wealthy employer, Dolores Claiborne tells police the story of her life, harkening back to her disintegrating marriage and the suspicious death of her violent husband, Joe St. George, thirty years earlier. Dolores also tells of Vera's physical and mental decline and of her loyalty to an employer who has become emotionally demanding in recent years.

Truth time is approaching at Cold Moutain Penitentiary. Paul Edgecombe is taking a huge gamble, one where the stakes are high and the consequences deadly. He and his fellow guards take convicted killer John Coffey away from Death Row in the dead of night and bring him to the bedside of a woman writhing in torment. It is there they will find out once and for all if this mountain of a man is a miracle worker or a monster...

Since Georgia's been dating the yummy scrumboes Sex God, Robbie, her glossy lips are always at the ready, and her "red-bottomosity" is kept under wraps. Along with Naomi the Sex Kitten's new litter (thank you, Angus), Robbie's announcement that his band will be traveling to Hamburger-a-gogo land (Georgia can only hope to go with), and a class trip to France, Georgia is one camper in a state of teenage splendiosity. The small trouble is, Georgia also wonders if Dave the Laugh might still be the guy for her, and when Robbie gives a surprise-ending twist to his travel plans, she gets a "weird feeling of reliefosity" that makes her wonder if she must venture out and bravely use her "red bottom wisely."

A single sinful act ruins the lives of three people. None more so than Hester Prynne, a young, beautiful, and dignified woman, who conceived a child out of wedlock and receives the public punishment of having to always wear a scarlet "A" on her clothing.

She refuses to reveal the father of her child, which could lighten her sentence. Her husband, the aptly-named Roger Chillingworth, who Hester thought had died in a shipwreck but was actually being held captive by Native Americans, arrives at the exact moment of her deepest public shaming and vows to get revenge. Her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, remains safely unidentified, but is wracked with guilt.

Two people meet by chance on a Washington subway. Annie Blakemore, an aspiring opera singer with a romantic imagination, two delightful children, and a husband made bitter and abusive by an automobile accident, becomes obsessed with a handsome priest she sees on the train. Knowing that her pursuit of a stranger is irrational, but intuiting that there is something right about it too, Annie follows him, little realizing that he is not what he seems. For Will Huston is not a priest at all, but an Irish actor in disguise, out to find and punish the man responsible for his young brother's death. As their paths cross, we begin to realize that, impossible as it may seem, their futures lie in each other.

The Greggs are hunters who will shoot anything in the woods for fun. The little girl who lives next door hates it. She tries to talk them out of it, but they only laugh at her - so she turns her "magic finger" on them. The next morning, to their surprise, the Greggs wake up bird-sized, complete with wings. And before they know it, they're living in a nest, while four strange human-size ducks have taken over their house! Now the shoe is on the other foot - and that foot is webbed. 

Johanna Wise has always longed to be part of Dennis Arthur's rich, popular crowd, and she can't believe it when he finally asks her out. She thought she'd do anything to keep Dennis, but when he dares her to kill their teacher, she's not so sure. Will she really kill for love?

Brenda hates her cousin Halley. And Brenda isn't the only one. Because Halley keeps stealing other people's boyfriends.

So Brenda and her friends decide to plan the perfect murder. Something to go along with Brenda's perfect Halloween party.

Not that they're really going to kill anybody. It's just a joke? Right? 

'Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them . . .' So begins this irresistible voyage into the dark side of Victorian London. Amongst an unforgettable cast of low-lifes, physicians, businessmen and prostitutes, meet our heroine Sugar, a young woman trying to drag herself up from the gutter any way she can. Be prepared for a mesmerising tale of passion, intrigue, ambition and revenge.

The Cocaine industry is worth billions of dollars a year to the drug cartels who spread their evil seed across Western society. Its usage causes incalculable misery, poverty and death. Slowly, gradually, inexorably it is spreading... It is a blight which must be stopped.

A young American aid volunteer, Ricky Colenso, is brutally murdered in former Yugoslavia. His grandfather, the Canadian billionaire Steven Edmond, is bent on revenge. The quest to find Ricky's murderer leads Edmond to Cal Dexter, ex-Vietnam Special Forces, the one man who could bring the killer to justice. But what starts as a personal, domestic tragedy soon explodes into a terrifying drama on the centre stage of world terrorism. From the battlefield of Vietnam via war-torn Serbia to the jungles of Central America, Avenger is packed with riveting detail, breathtaking action and political suspense, while in Cal Dexter we meet an unforgettable hero in the most dynamic Forsyth tradition.

One frozen January morning at 5am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason.