Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

Today is Julia Clockhouse's twenty-fifth birthday. Her long-suffering Hindu servants are frantically trying to organise a party for her, but it's hard to do so amid the havoc wreaked by her wild spirit. They think she is possessed. Daughters of colonial tea-planters shouldn't have souls that escape...

When Hermione - eccentric, seventy and returned from India to a 'safe' life in the Home Counties - encounters Slug street-painting on the pavement, she employs him as assistant gardener. Slug, who has the motto ' Never Grow Old' tattooed across his head, will soon sort out Gerald, the pin-striped...

First published in 1991, Absolute Hush is set during the Second World War when the human race stands at the crossroads: self-destruction or a glorious evolutionary step to higher consciousness. In the grand and moated Plague House, served since the start of the war only by the spiteful charlady,...

Some further incidents in the lives of the children and grown-ups, whose previous adventures were recorded in the These Our Strangers and the film Those Kids from Town. Those Kids from Town is a 1942 British comedy-drama film, directed by Lance Comfort and starring George Cole, Harry Fowler...

When Nurse Vera Dean accepts a comfortable position in a country home in Virginia, she hopes to recover her nerves and health. In her new job she has only one patient to look after: a paralysed man named Craig Porter. Her patient is not demanding and her employer, Hugh Wyndham, is pleasant and understanding....

A moral thriller of the first order, The Racket is set in the darkly shadowed Latin American landscape of modern-day Brazil, a vast country on the brink of anarchic lawlessness on every level and bankruptcy both material and spiritual. Against the background of urban decay and the rape of nature,...

The passionate man who loves with strength and lives with violence... The silent, lonely boy who exists in a world of strange loves and longings... The evil, terrifying creature of the night, which destroys as it clings, which consumes as it touches... Through a nightmare world of fear and forbidden...

The War Against Chaos is set in a dystopian version of Britain that is similar in its depiction of a grey, shabby, philistine country, to Orwell's 1984. The principal character Hare, is a clerk for a vast conglomerate known as Universal Goods, who is dismissed from his job and his lodgings after his...

First published in 1967, this is a tale of Jordan Maddox who has so disciplined his own emotions that he has, in reality, little contact with life: indifferent, he no longer responds to the signs of love-even of desperation- from those who are close to him. Suddenly he finds himself accused...

Catastrophe Practice, in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, follows six characters trying to find their way through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our...

This vivid and strikingly witty novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, eighteen-year-old Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colourful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young,...

Judith is an aspiring young actress and the mistress of a writer on a popular satirical magazine. Her life has increasingly become a dangerous mixture of drugs and self-delusion. When she eventually suffers a breakdown, she seeks healing in an Indian ashram run by an eccentric and even possibly mad...

I Spy, first published in 1916, is set during the early years of WWI when it seems uncertain whether Allied forces will be able to rescue Europe from German invasion. This enjoyable espionage story combines unexpected twists, humor and even a romantic sub-plot.

John Piper's diary for Saturday December 7th read: Fritz Haupmann. Call 2.30 re factory insurance cover with Cresset. When Piper arrived at the house and saw his client lounging in an armchair listening to Mozart, he had no reason to think that this was one day he would never forget. It was...