Both witness to and victim of Stalin’s reign of terror, a courageous woman tells the story of her harrowing eighteen-year odyssey through Russia’s prisons and labor camps. Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Unrivalled and wholly immersive, Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy is a panorama of Russian society on the eve of the revolution and the story of its violent erasure. 100th Anniversary Edition Includes New Introduction In this acclaimed account, Figes follows workers, soldiers and peasants as their world is consumed by revolution. For what had started as a people's revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship. A People's Tragedy is a masterful and definitive record of the Russian Revolution - vast in scope, exhaustive in original research and written with passion, narrative verve and human sympathy.

The second collection of blazingly original short stories from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling author Ian McEwan.A two-timing pornographer becomes the unwilling object of one of his victim's vengeful fantasies. A millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress – passive, yet beautiful – but the union soon becomes a nightmare of jealousy and despair. And an ape reflects on the relationship with a young female writer, mourning their fading love and musing on the fateful deceptions of art. In these seven stories of dream-like lucidity, the wasteland of the human psyche is mapped with deadly precision.‘Resonant and frightening...totally original’ Observer‘Exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing’ The Times

One of David Bowie's 100 Must-Read Books of All TimeIt is a Thursday evening. After work Martin Blom drives to the supermarket to buy some groceries. As he walks back to his car, a shot rings out. When he wakes up he is blind. His neurosurgeon, Bruno Visser, tells him that his loss of sight is permanent and that he must expect to experience shock, depression, self-pity, even suicidal thoughts before his rehabilitation is complete. But it doesn't work out quite like that. One spring evening, while Martin is practising in the clinic gardens with his new white cane, something miraculous happens ...

Tomasi’s style is evocative of social change in this mid 19th century classic.NOW A MAJOR BBC DRAMATISATION FOR RADIO 4 - AVAILABLE ON BBC SOUNDSIn the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.INCLUDES RECENTLY DISCOVERED NEW MATERIAL

As discussed in The Da Vinci Code... Long buried and suppressed, the Gnostic Gospels contain the secret writings attributed to the followers of Jesus.In 1945 fifty-two papyrus texts, including gospels and other secret documents, were found concealed in an earthenware jar buried in the Egyptian desert. These so-called Gnostic writings were Coptic translations from the original Greek dating from the time of the New Testament. The material they embodied - poems, quasi-philosophical descriptions of the origins of the universe, myths, magic and instructions for mystic practice - were later declared heretical, as they offered a powerful alternative to the Orthodox Christian tradition. In a book that is as exciting as it is scholarly, Elaine Pagels examines these texts and the questions they pose and shows why Gnosticism was eventually stamped out by the increasingly organised and institutionalised Orthodox Church.

A discussion that covers almost the entire realm of Ritual and High Magic. Translated by A.E. Waite.