In his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction, America's most original and controversial literary critic and legendary Yale professor writes trenchantly about 52 masterworks spanning the Western tradition.

One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy's life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed. Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim's brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, looks back.

Annie is not the first love of Graham’s life but she is, he thinks, his last and greatest. Very recently, he has faltered; but he means to put it right. Here they are in marriage, in late middle age, in comfort. Mismatched, and yet so well matched: the bookseller with his appetite, his conviviality, his bigness; the photographer with her delicacy, her astuteness, her reserve. The children are offstage, grown up and scattered on either coast; Graham’s first wife, Frieda, is peaceably in their lives, but not between them. 

It is 1909 in Spokane, Washington. The Dolan brothers live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While 16-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. When Rye finds himself drawn to suffragette Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, her passion sweeps him into the world of protest and dirty business. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all.... 

Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart. 

Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world. 

Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilisations and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste.

A transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved pieces, along with new essays on topics and stories ranging from nostalgia and science fiction to the true account of a refugee’s flight to the UK.

From beloved writer and renowned preacher Barbara Brown Taylor comes a new collection of stories and sermons of faith, grace, and hope. Full of Taylor's astute observations on the Spirit and the state of the world along with her gentle wit, this collection will inspire Taylor's fans and preachers alike as she explores faith in all its beauty and complexity. 

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency - a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. 

What could be a more tempting Christmas gift than a compendium of David Sedaris' best stories, selected by the author himself? From a spectacular career spanning almost three decades, these stories have become modern classics and are now for the first time collected in one volume. The collection will also feature an introduction by the author; two never-before-collected stories, 'Unbuttoned' and 'Undecided'; and a new interview with David Sedaris.

As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two - and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away. Years later, desperate to understand the opioid addiction that destroyed her brother's life, she turns to science for answers. But when her mother comes to stay, Gifty soon learns that the roots of their tangled traumas reach farther than she ever thought. 

Barbara Kingsolver's generous collection is divided into thematic sections that loop and interweave to form a carefully patterned whole: a series of 'How to' poems that smartly balance tongue-in-cheek pragmatism with revelatory wisdom, a complicated yet affirmative family pilgrimage to Italy, cherished childhood memories, the perils and pleasures of being a [female] writer, elegies to lost loved ones and elegies to the planet.

Rachel and Eliza are hoping to have a baby. The couple spend many happy evenings together planning for the future. One night Rachel wakes up screaming and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. She knows it sounds mad - but she also knows it's true. As a scientist, Eliza won't take Rachel's fear seriously, and they have a bitter fight. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question.   

Christie Tate has just been named the top student in her law school class and seems to finally have got her eating disorder under control. So why is she driving through Chicago fantasising about her own death? Desperate, she joins Dr Rosen’s psychotherapy group, and through his unconventional methods, he challenges everything she thought she knew, about herself and others. In group, secrets are not allowed.