Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

First published in 1937, this thrilling novel tells the story of an expedition by three Englishmen into the Brazilian jungle; a journey which turns into an obsessive quest for the truth behind a missionary's disappearance seventeen years earlier. The three men are each linked in different ways...

'In our town, if you cough in the High Street the chemist up at the Town Hall has got the bottle of cough mixture wrapped up and waiting for you.' And nobody in the town provides such a wealth of delicious gossip as 'Noisy' Brackett and his wife Sally. Refusing to pay her bills, chasing her errant...

A favourite collection of short stories from the revered V. S. Pritchett

First published in 1941, this is the story of Mary Montague, who having married a man several years older than herself, craves love and attention to relieve the monotony of her days. Her husband, Gerald Montague, whose ill-running health is ruining his life, has little time to spare for his young...

First published in 1934, this book tells the story of the Balliol family as they exist through the suffrage movement and the end of the Edwardian era to the Great War. The Balliol children are subject to the effects of the war - the harsh discipline and the subsequent laxness, the breakup of...

In Love in These Days, first published in 1926, Alec Waugh explores themes of love, marriage and friendship in the vibrant and dynamic years of the early twenties. With his characteristic attention to detail he uses his characters to examine the social and cultural changes of the time and their impact...

First published in 1925, this is a rich tale centred around the lives of Marjorie Fairfield, a beautiful and penniless young woman who is the mistress of a wealthy business man; and the symbolically named Ransom Heritage, one of the many young men who were cast adrift after the First World War ended...

First published in 1957, this tells of Santa Marta, which to the casual visitor is a sub-tropical paradise, a small sister of Jamaica, Bermuda and Nassau, unmentioned in the colour-splashed brochures of travel agents: an island where the sun shines throughout the year on the sandy beaches of innumerable...

First published in 1960, this is a tale of an imaginary island on the Equator that has suddenly achieved importance through the discovery of oil - what will happen to the men and women living under the tensions of life on this island? At one end of this island is the oil refinery where the...

First published in 1952, this is a tale of Austria. February 1925. A date that would always remain special for Guy Renton.There his chance meeting with the young and beautiful, but married, Mrs Renee Burton, precipitated the first crisis in his life. Hitherto he had been sure of himself temperamentally...

First published in 1931, this is not the only one of Alec Waugh's novels in which he has described the agonies of a couple who are desperately in love but cannot marry, for it is a situation that he has himself lived through. But it is in this novel that he has drawn most specifically upon experiences...

If you enjoyed the powerful atmosphere of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby you may just have an inkling of the smoothly professional efficacy of Alec Waugh's The Fatal Gift. First published in 1973, this novel breathes the values and attitudes of the early decades of the 20th century. Raymond...

A sudden intolerably bright fireball lights up a remote and deserted Indian plateau. Searing heat melts rock into incandescent pools of glowing liquid. The earth heaves. A monstrous thunderclap of sound reverberates over the land. An ominous mushroom-shaped cloud boils skywards. For years afterwards,...

'Tense ... fascinating' Sunday Times When an object of undeniably extra-terrestrial origin appears, the world is thrown into panic. Is this alien race harmless or a danger to humanity? Nine weeks later, civilization is on the edge of a total breakdown more devastating than any nuclear war or...