Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

This novel, set in Victorian London in its heyday, presents a picture, both horrific and authentic, of the 'underside' of life in the first city of the world. It tells of Godfrey Mann, a young painter, who has access to the golden world of privilege and yet is possessed by a compelling sexual...

The Black Boxer Tales, first published in 1932, H. E. Bates's third collection displays a growing emphasis on plot and characterisation, while amply displaying his established skill at creating plotless atmospheric pieces. Several stories explore a sense of a new and changing world of carnivals,...

How acute are your powers of perception? Do they begin to match those of Gervase Fen, Oxford don and sleuth supreme? First published in 1953, Beware of the Trains is a collection of sixteen short mysteries. Fen must link a missing train conductor to the murder of a thief, decipher cryptograms...

Colonel Julian and Other Stories was Bates's first collection following World War II, containing stories he wrote between 1941 and 1951. The New York Times called the collection 'distinguished...Mr. Bates avoids the sensational or the melodramatic; through an unerring selection of the exact...

The Beauty of the Dead (Jonathan Cape, 1940) featuring fifteen stories, was released to critical acclaim. Pamela Hansford Johnson wrote in John O'London's Weekly that "all have that delicate luminosity by which visions are seen more clearly than in the bright sunlight." 'Old' is a...

Charlie Chan is in San Francisco for one week only – he absolutely must leave on Wednesday's boat to get back to Hawaii, where a new son awaits his return. Never mind that Sir Frederic Bruce, a former Scotland Yard detective he's only just met, but for whom he already has great respect, has been...

First published in 1989, here is England's leading man of letters-as old as the century-at the height of his powers, the incomparable V. S. Pritchett, whose brilliantly observed short stories have become classics in his own lifetime. In these six beautifully crafted stories-his latest effort-we see...

The Daffodil Sky, first published in 1955 (Michael Joseph), mixes eclectic characters travelling to foreign lands with poetic treatments of rural life in Bates's Northamptonshire. 'A Place in the Heart' is set in Asia against a colourful backdrop of rickshaws and ceremonial drumming. An Englishman,...

First published in 1953, the first five stories in this collection are stories from Ireland, exploring the dark history of the country and the dogged optimism of its people. The following four tales are of the uncanny - striking studies of witchcraft and black magic, evoking a strange haunting...

First published in 1943, this is a selection of writings from Dr. Sitwell's private notebooks. It includes essays on prosody, the role of the poet, the nature of poetry, and includes her full length work 'A Notebook on William Shakespeare', as well as discussion of Chaucer, Herrick, Wordsworth, Pope...

The sea roars dismally round the shores of Inverara. A Stranger takes a room on the island. Here lives a couple whose married years have been joyless, until the presence of the Stranger unleashes their passions... For as spring softens the wild beauty of Inverara, the Stranger becomes conscious...

Dandelions, hearing aids, a blood-stained cat, a Leonardo drawing and a corpse with an alibi… Just some of the unusual clues that Professor Gervase Fen and his friend Inspector Humbleby are confronted with in this sparkling collection of short mystery stories. Employing a skilful balance of ingenuity...

The aristocratic Duke de Richleau faces new, sinister challenges in this macabre tale of the dark arts. When his good friend Simon Aron's naïve curiosity is tested, the Duke, along with his ever-patient friends Rex Van Ryn, and Richard Eaton, must intricately plot a means of both physical and spiritual...

In one of London's outer suburbs lived a shabby insignificant schoolteacher with a repulsive, drunken wife. Experimenting with his secret invention was his only escape - until a headmaster's pacifist daughter brought sex and idealism into his life. Then came the 'Peacemaker' - that curious...