Literature

Hector bidding farewell to his wife and baby son, Odysseus bound to the mast listening to the Sirens, Penelope at the loom, Achilles dragging Hector's body round the walls of Troy - scenes from Homer have been reportrayed in every generation. The questions about mortality and identity that Homer's heroes ask, the bonds of love, respect and fellowship that motivate them, have gripped audiences for three millennia. Chapman's Iliad and Odyssey are great English epic poems, but they are also two of the liveliest and readable translations of Homer.

In this book, you hold time and truth in your hands: this is how I understand Andrea Demetriou's beautiful and moving poetry. Her words and her silences -for like all true poets, Demetriou understands the dignity and profound power of the pause- take us from a Cyprus shattered and divided by the horror of war and occupation, to an evocation of the sights and sounds of inner-city Melbourne streets and then they return us to the eastern Mediterranean to where another form of war, an economic war, again shatters and divides. In her poems, it is as if time and memory run through our fingers; we try and catch them but as is their nature, they slip away, fall to the ground. But they don't disappear; they nourish the earth, they leave their mark on our hands and we bring our fingers to our lips and we are refreshed. That's what every poem in this book is: a kiss, welcome and needed, on our lips. Each poem is a trace of time, of memory, of love, of friendship, of rage, of remembering, of forgetting, of a night in celebration and of a day in mourning.

'A writer at the peak of his powers . . . The book takes us from the first to the seventh circles of hell, from Salinger to de Sade' - Will SelfThe Informers is a collection of short stories with intertwining characters, from the author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. The characters go to the same schools. They eat at the same restaurants. They have sex with the same boys and girls. They buy from the same dealers. Fusing voices into an intense, impressionistic narrative that blurs genders, generations and even identities, these stories capture the lives of a group of people, connected in the way only people in L.A. can be - suffering from nothing less than the death of the soul.

'Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?'So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. He was making his first responses to the Old World - to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the 'Old Masters'. He responded with wonder and amazement, but also with exasperation, irritation, disbelief. Above all he displayed the great energy of his humour, more explosive for us now than for his beguiled contemporaries.

 A new novel from the Italian author of }God's Dog{, this follows on from }New Finnish Grammar{ and }The Last Of The Vostyachs{ to form a trilogy of novels on the theme of language and identity. Blends elements of a thriller, a quest and a comic picaresque caper, but also deals with the profound issues of existence. 

'One day there is life ...and then, suddenly, it happens there is death'. So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In "The Book of Memory" the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. "That these man-like creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their possibilities far worse than any definite fear." Edward Prendick, the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the South Pacific, is set ashore on an island where he meets the mysterious Doctor Moreau. Horrified by the discovery that Moreau is performing vivisection on animals to form monstrous human hybrids, Prendick flees into the jungle. But he soon realises that the island is populated with Moreau's terrible creations, and not all are divested of their savage habits . . . H. G. Wells pioneered ideas of society, science and progress in his works, which are now considered modern classics. Written in 1896, The Island of Doctor Moreau is an imaginative exploration of the nature of cruelty and what it means to be human.

The second volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon.

Taken together, Arthur Koestler's volumes of autobiography constitute an unrivalled study of a twentieth-century life. The Invisible Writing picks up where the first volume, Arrow in the Blue, ended, with Koestler joining the Communist Party. This second volume goes on to detail some of the most important, gruelling and electrifying experiences in his life.

This book tells of Koestler's travels through Russia and remote parts of Soviet Central Asia and of his life as an exile. It tells of how he survived in Franco's prisons under sentence of death and in concentration camps in Occupied France and ends with his escape in 1940 to England, where he found stability and a new home.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. "That these man-like creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their possibilities far worse than any definite fear." Edward Prendick, the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the South Pacific, is set ashore on an island where he meets the mysterious Doctor Moreau. Horrified by the discovery that Moreau is performing vivisection on animals to form monstrous human hybrids, Prendick flees into the jungle. But he soon realises that the island is populated with Moreau's terrible creations, and not all are divested of their savage habits . . . H. G. Wells pioneered ideas of society, science and progress in his works, which are now considered modern classics. Written in 1896, The Island of Doctor Moreau is an imaginative exploration of the nature of cruelty and what it means to be human.