Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

First published in 1988, A Time to Love is a a story of two lives meeting. Ellen Murphy was born to a world of rotting slums and starving children. Determined to escape from poverty and her drunken Irish father, she takes a job as a shop girl on Shoreditch High Street. David Cheifitz...

It isn't easy being born during The Great War. A young mother, desperate and alone, leaves her newborn on a church doorstep, whilst another dies in childbirth surrounded by wealth and family. Both baby girls are brought to the children's home, one to be adopted, and one to be looked after until her...

The door was not locked, and opened easily. He switched on the light, and Richard followed him into the room. Nella lay on the bed. She had on the nightdress she had been lent, but the bedclothes had been pulled halfway down. Her head was twisted back grotesquely. Her mouth gaped open and her tongue...

Anthony Newton has fallen hopelessly in love with the beautiful Cynthia, and feels desperate to secure her hand, putting an end to his carefree bachelor days. But there is one small problem. Cynthia is only nineteen, and Anthony, at thirty-six, is thought rather too old for her. Tearing himself from...

Glenn Bowman, the toughest and most cynical private investigator in New York, lands himself up to the chin in trouble by witnessing the disposal of a gravely injured man. Bowman plays it straight, calls the police, and finds he is caught between two fires. The law takes a mean view of private operators...

There was poison in the glass-and it was the detective in the case who drank it! But for the attentions of a conscientious drug-store attendant there would have been one dark handsome stranger the less to spend his free time on blondes! Glenn Bowman had been asked by District Attorney Eric...

In the West of Ireland in 1939 a young novelist rents a lonely cottage to write his new book in peace. Almost at once, and without great resistance, he is seduced by the wife of the local squire. Harriet's husband is an older man - hot-tempered, impoverished, gone to seed - who once fought...

Published in 1970, The Triple Echo was Bates's last significant novella, but one which he described as taking twenty-five years to complete. Set in the 1940s, the wife of a war prisoner lives in desperate loneliness and fear on an isolated farmstead. She encounters a young farmboy completely...

First published in 1968, The Four Beauties is Bates's last collection of novellas offering a mixture of comedy, adventure, a semi-autobiographical piece and an exploration of a dark love triangle. 'The Simple Life' is set at a country cottage offering the joys of a humble existence, and focuses...

James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, the soldier-poet who fought so magnificently and so fruitlessly for his King, Charles I.A tale of seduction and witchcraft and a promise made to Charles 1 to "raise Scotland for the King" Margaret Irwin's novels of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries...

The story of the romance between the Marquis of Montrose, the soldier-poet who fought so magnificently for Charles I, and the enchanting, wayward Princess Louise, sister of Rupert of the Rhine.

First published in 1986, Backcloth is volume four of Dirk Bogarde's best-selling memoirs Filling the gaps left between his previous memoirs, as well as highlighting new episodes, Backcloth explores the patterns of pleasure and pain that have made up Bogarde's extraordinary life. Based...

Eliciting comparisons to Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Pritchett's meditative work on Spain is comprised of a string of sketches, woven around the author's musings on the Spanish character.Having lived in Spain for four years during the 1920s, Pritchett is well placed to deliver such a report, and his resulting narrative is both well informed and delightfully written.

This is Ray Connolly's first novel, about a show business columnist into whose life a young nurse appears, creating "a tension which douses the dazzle of club-life, film stars, fashion models and glittering parties" that the columnist had been enjoying.