Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

Racing along on his roller-blades, Terry feels like he is almost flying, yet he is in perfect control - until the blades take over. Terrified, he is propelled through an overgrown garden and into a sinister-looking house...

As a novelist, biographer, editor, and screenwriter, Nicholas Mosley has always been concerned with the central paradox of writing: if by definition fiction is untrue, and biography never complete, is there a form that will enable a writer to get at the truth of a life? In Efforts at Truth Mosley...

First published in 1942, Anna is the story of a woman and an era. Against the background of France and Germany at the time of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Norman Collins tells with great brilliance the story of Anna, a beautiful woman. Born in Rhineland, when she was nineteen she fell in love...

"She could never, looking backwards, remember a time when she had not known that a woman's failure or success in life depended entirely upon whether or not she succeeded in getting a husband" When in the company of a young man a dutiful daughter should immediately assume an air of...

Young Tom and his father arrive in the Calder Valley on a dark stormy night in 1722. Tom is soon an orphan and finds himself a pauper in the workhouse until Mr Firth, a hilltop clothier, agrees to take him on as an apprentice. Tom tries his best but his life is made miserable by sullen journeyman-weaver...

American detective Grant Colwyn is on a leisurely holiday in a fashionable seaside hotel in Norfolk when one morning during breakfast the strange behavior of one of the other guests catches his attention. The young man's unusual conduct alarms other visitors as well – Colwyn suspects a severe case...

Juana Brett's hapless father has dragged her to England from her beloved home in Portugal. In Portuguese, she is not hindered by the stutter that plagues her when she speaks in English, and she is not at the mercy of her teasing stepsisters and icy stepmother. When Gair Varlow fixed his political...

The constant themes of the great poet, Birth, Death, Pity and Indignation, the unity of life, the re-birth that is brought by Spring, and the necessity for choice that informs all sentient life, are the core of this collection of poems by Dr. Edith Sitwell. The poet's awareness of the atomic...

This book - a most important and original contribution to the literature of interpretative criticism -contains the Clark Lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1946. Its theme is poetic imagery, not only in its stricter sense of simile, metaphor and image, but in the wider application of the...

Christabel Woodward is the darling of her prosperous, mill-owning father until one day he has a sudden and bewildering change of heart. He has read her mother's story, written in three exercise books and usually kept well hidden, and he knows her secret: Christabel is not his own child, but the illegitimate...

A collection of seven short stories, from the master of regional fiction, Phyllis Bentley. A native of Yorkshire, Bentley elegantly captures the essence of a simple rural life in her words, while expressing the lives, loves and difficulties of the people who live there with a real sensitivity...

The Camberwell Beauty is a collection of short stories which explore the close-knit world of antique dealers, their obsessions and suspicions, their hatred of customers and the fantasy lives that grow out of the objects they collect. The Lady from Guatemala tells of a celebrated progressive...

In this collection of five novellas, Bates contrasts two comic stories with the atmospheric title story, and includes a complex psychological tale alongside the romantically bleak. 'The Golden Oriole' features a fragile and troubled woman, frozen in a stultifying and unconsummated marriage,...

Rose Wood is almost thirteen and and lives in the Wood Briar Hotel, a cosy country guest house near the sea, which she helps run with her parents. But Rose, although favourite with all the guests and loved by her parents, feels very ordinary: she is clumsy and no matter how hard she tries, she can...