Item category 1: Read Past/Discover Future

In a fast-paced narrative spiced with genuine wit, this novel describes the billionaires' banquet going on around us daily in contemporary Britain - who feasts and who pays the bill. Intriguing, disturbing and hugely entertaining, 'Billionaires' Banquet' is an immorality tale for the 21st century.

Kent, 1940. The women of Chilbury village have taken umbrage at the Vicar's closure of the choir now that its male singers are at war. But when spirited music professor Primrose Trent arrives, it prompts the creation of an all-female singing group. Dependable Mrs Tilling sees the choir as a chanc...

Far away on the planet Meta, Loma's going nowhere fast. She's dropped out of school, dumped her boyfriend and is bored out of her mind. She longs to feel things. That's where her idol, the lunatic poet Rac Shade, and his infamous madness coat come in. Loma steals the garment and makes a break acr...

There can be no relationship in Europe's history more creative, significant, vexed and uneasy than that between Scotland and England. From the Middle Ages onwards the island of Britain has been shaped by the unique dynamic between Edinburgh and London, exchanging inhabitants, monarchs, money and ...

When Mary Davidson, the eldest daughter of a whaling family in Eden, New South Wales, sets out to chronicle the particularly difficult season of 1908, the story she tells is poignant and hilarious, filled with drama and misadventure. It's a season marked not only by the sparsity of whales and the...

This book takes the reader on a journey from the wastes of Antarctica to the South African Highlands, from Canada's prairies to Australia's vineyards. It visits cities and deserted villages, scales mountain peaks and calls in at far-flung islands. All these places have one thing in common - the f...

'The Book of the New Sun' is an epic set a million years in the future. Earth is transformed to a time when present culture is no longer even a memory. This edition contains 'The Shadow of the Torturer' and 'The Claw of the Conciliator'.

'The Book of the New Sun' is an epic set a million years in the future. Earth is transformed to a time when present culture is no longer even a memory. This edition contains 'The Sword of the Lictor' and 'Citadel of the Autarch'.

This is the second volume of Kenneth Roy's magisterial trilogy on the history of Scotland since the Second World War. The first volume, 'The Invisible Spirit' was met with immediate acclaim. This volume brings the story much closer to the present day and traces enthrallingly the social, political...

The magnificent Highlands of Scotland represent, in so many ways, ancient Britain. But much of this apparently wild environment is, in fact, far more recent in origin - it has been shaped by the Victorians. 'Castles in the Mist' reveals how, for better or worse, the vast sporting estates of the V...