Betrayed (Web Grange detective Book 8)

Photo by Jerry Finn. Chapter [part 2 of 3]. From the National Archives. Chapter [part 1 of 3]. How, after King Lisuarte returned to his lands from Firm Island, he was taken prisoner by enchantment, and what happened regarding that. Summary, Chapters to Wars are won, weddings are celebrated, and the story continues.

A carrack, a three- or four-masted ocean-going sailing ship that was developed in the 14th and 15th centuries in Europe. The King sent his daughter, Oriana, off in a fleet of ships to marry the Emperor of Rome, and Amadis and his frien. Photo by Elena F D. King Meliadus was the father of Tristan in the Arthurian legend. At the British Library. Chapter [part 5 of 5]. The story says that two weeks after Amadis and Grasandor left the Island of the Vermilion. Chapter [part 4 of 5].

Photo by Sue Burke. They arrived at the great port of Firm Island one morning,. Chapter [part 3 of 5]. Photo by Eviatar Bach. Chapter [part 2 of 5]. Photo by Ronny Siegel. A medieval tale about keeping your word. In fact she was honored by kings. But Arcalaus dedicated his life to doing harm. Chapter [part 1 of 5]. How Amadis, at the Island of the Vermilion Tower, was seated on some rocks overlooking the sea and speaking with Grasandor about his lady Oriana, when he saw a ship coming, from which he learned news about the fleet that had gone to the islands of Sansuena and Landas.

Chapter [part 4 of 4]. The Benedictine monastery was built in the 10th century. By then Galifon, lord of the castle, was fully conscious, and when he saw Landin unarmed. Chapter [part 3 of 4]. In the British Library. When he arrived, he found the gate open, and. Chapter [part 2 of 4]. Chapter [part 1 of 4]. How Darioleta lamented the great danger Amadis was in. When Amadis heard the answer, without hesitation he went to the port and immediately disembarked on the shore.

But first he took aside the man who had. From Estoire del Saint Graal, c. Chapter [part 2 of 2]. Then my unfortunate son begged his father so much that against his will he granted him the first joust, in which my son was struck so fiercely by. Chapter [part 1 of 2]. How Amadis departed with the lady who came by the sea to avenge the killing of the dead knight she brought in her boat, and what happened on that quest. From the British Library. Photo by Miguel Claro. When they were finally over, the Emperor asked Amadis for permission to leave, if he were pleased, because the Emperor wished to return to his lands with.

How Urganda the Unrecognized brought together all the Kings and knights that were at Firm Island, and the great things she told them that would happen in the past, present, and future, and how she finally left. Photo by Bernard Gagon. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Available for download now. Usually ships within 1 to 3 weeks. Available for immediate download. Only 1 left in stock more on the way.

Available to ship in days. Amadis of Gaul Book I Jan 19, Dokusou , Sue Burke. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Wishing to devote more time to his historical novels, Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in a final battle with the criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty in "The Final Problem" published , but set in Legend has it that Londoners were so distraught upon hearing the news of Holmes' death that they wore black armbands in mourning.

However, there is no known contemporary source for this; the earliest known reference to such events comes from After resisting public pressure for eight years, Conan Doyle wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles serialised in —02, with an implicit setting before Holmes's death. In , Conan Doyle wrote "The Adventure of the Empty House", set in ; Holmes reappears, explaining to a stunned Watson that he had faked his death to fool his enemies. Holmes aficionados refer to the period from to —between his disappearance and presumed death in "The Final Problem" and his reappearance in "The Adventure of the Empty House"—as the Great Hiatus.

In "His Last Bow", Holmes has retired to a small farm on the Sussex Downs and taken up beekeeping as his primary occupation. The move is not dated precisely, but can be presumed to predate since it is referred to retrospectively in "The Second Stain", first published that year. The story features Holmes and Watson coming out of retirement to aid the war effort.

Only one other adventure, " The Adventure of the Lion's Mane ", takes place during the detective's retirement. Watson describes Holmes as " bohemian " in his habits and lifestyle. Described by Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles as having a "cat-like" love of personal cleanliness, Holmes is an eccentric with no regard for contemporary standards of tidiness or good order.

In many of the stories, Holmes dives into an apparent mess to find a relevant item. Although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind He had a horror of destroying documents Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner.

The detective starves himself at times of intense intellectual activity, such as during " The Adventure of the Norwood Builder "—wherein, according to Watson:. While the detective is usually dispassionate and cold, during an investigation he is animated and excitable.

He has a flair for showmanship, preparing elaborate traps to capture and expose a culprit often to impress observers. Holmes derives pleasure from baffling police inspectors with his deductions and has supreme confidence—bordering on arrogance—in his intellectual abilities. While the detective does not actively seek fame and is usually content to let the police take public credit for his work, [37] he is pleased when his skills are recognised and responds to flattery. Except for that of Watson, Holmes avoids casual company. In "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott " , he tells the doctor that during two years at college he made only one friend: I never mixed much with the men of my year".

The detective is similarly described in A Study in Scarlet. As shooting practice during a period of boredom, Holmes decorates the wall of his Baker Street lodgings with a "patriotic" VR Victoria Regina in "bullet-pocks" from his revolver. His enjoyment of vocal music, particularly Wagner , is evident in " The Adventure of the Red Circle ". Holmes occasionally uses addictive drugs, especially in the absence of stimulating cases.

He uses cocaine , which he injects in a seven-percent solution with a syringe kept in a Morocco leather case. Although Holmes also dabbles in morphine , he expresses strong disapproval when he visits an opium den ; both drugs were legal in 19th-century England. As a physician, Watson strongly disapproves of his friend's cocaine habit, describing it as the detective's "only vice", and concerned about its effect on Holmes's mental health and intellect.

Watson and Holmes both use tobacco, smoking cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. Although his chronicler does not consider Holmes's smoking a vice per se , Watson—a physician—occasionally criticises the detective for creating a "poisonous atmosphere" in their confined quarters. The detective is known to charge clients for his expenses and claim any reward offered for a problem's solution, such as in " The Adventure of the Speckled Band ", "The Red-Headed League", and " The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet ".

In " The Problem of Thor Bridge ", the detective says, "My professional charges are upon a fixed scale. I do not vary them, save when I remit them altogether". In this context, a client is offering to double his fee, and it is implied that wealthy clients habitually pay Holmes more than his standard fee. Although when the stories begin Holmes needed Watson to share the rent for their residence, by the time of "The Final Problem", he says that his services to the government of France and "the royal family of Scandinavia" had left him with enough money to retire comfortably.

As Conan Doyle wrote to Joseph Bell, "Holmes is as inhuman as a Babbage 's calculating machine and just about as likely to fall in love". How can you build on such quicksand? Their most trivial actions may mean volumes Women are never to be entirely trusted—not the best of them". Watson says in " The Adventure of the Copper Beeches " that the detective inevitably "manifested no further interest in the client when once she had ceased to be the centre of one of his problems".

In " The Lion's Mane ", Holmes writes, "Women have seldom been an attraction to me, for my brain has always governed my heart," indicating that he has been attracted to women in some way on occasion, but has not been interested in pursuing relationships with them. Ultimately, however, in " The Adventure of the Devil's Foot ", he claims outright that "I have never loved". At the end of The Sign of Four , Holmes states that "love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things.

I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgement. Despite his overall attitude, Holmes is adept at effortlessly putting his clients at ease, and Watson says that although the detective has an "aversion to women", he has "a peculiarly ingratiating way with [them]". Hudson is fond of Holmes because of his "remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women.

He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent". Although this is her only appearance, she is one of only a handful of people who best Holmes in a battle of wits, and the only woman. For this reason, Adler is the frequent subject of pastiche writing.

The beginning of the story describes the high regard in which Holmes holds her:. To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler As the story opens, the Prince is engaged to another. Adler slips away before Holmes can succeed. Her memory is kept alive by the photograph of Adler that Holmes received for his part in the case, and he refers to her from time to time in subsequent stories.

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Shortly after meeting Holmes in the first story, A Study in Scarlet generally assumed to be , though the exact date is not given , Watson assesses the detective's abilities:. Subsequent stories reveal that Watson's early assessment was incomplete in places and inaccurate in others, due to the passage of time if nothing else. Despite Holmes's supposed ignorance of politics, in "A Scandal in Bohemia" he immediately recognises the true identity of "Count von Kramm".

His speech is peppered with references to the Bible, Shakespeare , and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , and the detective quotes a letter from Gustave Flaubert to George Sand in the original French. In "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans", Watson says that "Holmes lost himself in a monograph which he had undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus ", considered "the last word" on the subject. In A Study in Scarlet , Holmes claims to be unaware that the earth revolves around the sun since such information is irrelevant to his work; after hearing that fact from Watson, he says he will immediately try to forget it.

The detective believes that the mind has a finite capacity for information storage, and learning useless things reduces one's ability to learn useful things. The later stories move away from this notion: Holmes demonstrates a knowledge of psychology in "A Scandal in Bohemia", luring Irene Adler into betraying where she hid a photograph based on the premise that an unmarried woman will save her most valued possession from a fire.

Another example is in " The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle ", where Holmes obtains information from a salesman with a wager: I daresay that if I had put pounds down in front of him, that man would not have given me such complete information as was drawn from him by the idea that he was doing me on a wager". Maria Konnikova points out in an interview with D. Grothe that Holmes practices what is now called mindfulness, concentrating on one thing at a time, and almost never "multitasks. Though the stories always refer to Holmes' intellectual detection methodology as " deduction ", he primarily relies on abduction: In "A Scandal in Bohemia", Holmes infers that Watson had got wet lately and had "a most clumsy and careless servant girl".

When Watson asks how Holmes knows this, the detective answers:. It is simplicity itself Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey. Watson compares Holmes to C. Auguste Dupin , Edgar Allan Poe's fictional detective, who employed a similar methodology. Alluding to an episode in " The Murders in the Rue Morgue ", where Dupin determines what his friend is thinking despite their having walked together in silence for a quarter of an hour, Holmes remarks: This methodology allows Holmes to learn a stranger's occupation and other details.

He observes the dress and attitude of his clients and suspects, noting skin marks such as tattoos , contamination such as ink stains or clay on boots , emotional state, and physical condition in order to deduce their origins and recent history. The style and state of wear of a person's clothes and personal items are also commonly relied on; in the stories Holmes is seen applying his method to walking sticks, [54] pipes, [55] hats, [56] and other objects. Holmes does employ deductive reasoning as well. The detective's guiding principle, as he says in The Sign of the Four and other stories, is: Despite Holmes' remarkable reasoning abilities, Conan Doyle still paints him as fallible in this regard this being a central theme of " The Adventure of the Yellow Face ".

Though Holmes is famed for his reasoning capabilities, his investigative technique relies heavily on the acquisition of hard evidence. Many of the techniques he employs in the stories were at the time in their infancy for example, Scotland Yard's fingerprint bureau opened in Because of the small scale of much of his evidence, the detective often uses a magnifying glass at the scene and an optical microscope at his Baker Street lodgings. He uses analytical chemistry for blood residue analysis and toxicology to detect poisons; Holmes's home chemistry laboratory is mentioned in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty".

Ballistics feature in "The Adventure of the Empty House" when spent bullets are recovered and matched with a suspected murder weapon. Holmes displays a strong aptitude for acting and disguise. In the latter story, Watson says, "The stage lost a fine actor Holmes and Watson carry often pistols with them—in Watson's case, his old service weapon probably a Mark III Adams revolver , issued to British troops during the s.

As a gentleman, Holmes often carries a stick or cane. He is described by Watson as an expert at singlestick and uses his cane twice as a weapon. The detective is described or demonstrated as possessing above-average physical strength. Roylott demonstrates his strength by bending a fire poker in half. Watson describes Holmes as laughing, "'if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own. Holmes is an adept bare-knuckle fighter; "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott " mentions that Holmes trained as a boxer.

In The Sign of the Four , he introduces himself to McMurdo, a prize fighter , as "the amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison's rooms on the night of your benefit four years back. You might have aimed high if you had joined the fancy. The detective occasionally engages in hand-to-hand combat with his adversaries in "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist" and " The Adventure of the Naval Treaty ".

Although Holmes is not the original fictional detective, his name has become synonymous with the role. Sayers ' Lord Peter Wimsey became a successful character for a number of authors. The phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" is never uttered by Holmes in the sixty stories written by Conan Doyle. He often observes that his conclusions are "elementary", however, and occasionally calls Watson "my dear Watson". One of the nearest approximations of the phrase appears in "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" when Holmes explains a deduction: William Gillette is widely considered to have originated the phrase with the formulation, "Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow", allegedly in his play Sherlock Holmes.

However, the script was revised numerous times over the course of some three decades of revivals and publications, and the phrase is present in some versions of the script, but not others. Wodehouse 's novel, Psmith in the City —10 , [65] and "Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary" in his novel Psmith, Journalist neither spoken by Holmes.

It also appears at the end of the film The Return of Sherlock Holmes , the first Holmes sound film. Conan Doyle's 56 short stories and four novels are known as the " canon " by Holmes aficionados. The Sherlockian game also known as the Holmesian game, the Great Game, or simply the Game attempts to resolve anomalies and clarify details about Holmes and Watson from the canon.

The Game, which treats Holmes and Watson as real people and Conan Doyle as Watson's literary agent , combines history with aspects of the stories to construct biographies and other scholarly analyses of these aspects. Ronald Knox is credited with inventing the Game. One detail analyzed in the Game is Holmes's birth date. The chronology of the stories is notoriously difficult, with many stories lacking dates and many others containing contradictory ones.

A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective contend that the detective was born on 6 January , the year being derived from the statement in "His Last Bow" that he was 60 years of age in , while the precise day is derived from broader, non-canonical speculation. King also speculated about Holmes's birth date. She instead argues that details in "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott " a story with no precise internal date indicate that Holmes finished his second and final year of university in or If he began university at age 17, his birth year could be as late as Holmes's emotional and mental health have long been subjects of analysis in the Game.

At their first meeting, in A Study in Scarlet , the detective warns Watson that he gets "in the dumps at times" and doesn't open his "mouth for days on end". Klinger has suggested that Holmes exhibits signs of bipolar disorder , with intense enthusiasm followed by indolent self-absorption. John Radford speculated on Holmes's intelligence.

Snyder examined Holmes's methods in the context of mid- to lateth-century criminology. Both are still active, although the Sherlock Holmes Society was dissolved in and revived in The London society is one of many worldwide who arrange visits to the scenes of Holmes adventures, such as the Reichenbach Falls in the Swiss Alps. The two societies founded in were followed by many more, first in the U. There are at least societies worldwide, including Australia, Canada The Bootmakers of Toronto , India, and Japan whose society has 80, members.

For the Festival of Britain , Holmes's living room was reconstructed as part of a Sherlock Holmes exhibition, with a collection of original material. After the festival, items were transferred to The Sherlock Holmes a London pub and the Conan Doyle collection housed in Lucens , Switzerland by the author's son, Adrian. John Carter, a Confederate veteran turned gold prospector, is hiding from Indians in an Arizona cave when he is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to the locals as Barsoom. Butler single-handedly brought to the SF genre the concerns of gender politics, racial conflict and slavery.

Several of her novels are groundbreaking, but none is more compelling or shocking than Kindred. The hero Higgs finds himself in New Zealand as, for a while, did the chronic misfit Butler. Does it sound familiar? Higgs escapes by balloon, with the sweetheart he has found there. He ends up keeping his promise, witnessing the French revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath from the perspective of the Italian treetops.

In this novel, the domineering old spinster Queenie dies — a relief to those around her. Her niece Alison inherits the house, but soon starts to suspect that the old woman is taking over her eight-year-old daughter Rowan. A paranoid, disturbing masterpiece. Alice, while reading in a meadow, sees a white rabbit rush by, feverishly consulting a watch. She follows him down a hole Freudian analysis, as elsewhere in the story, is all too easy , where she grows and shrinks in size and encounters creatures mythological, extinct and invented. Morbid jokes and gleeful subversion abound. More donnish in tone, this fantasy follows Alice into a mirror world in which everything is reversed.

Her journey is based on chess moves, during the course of which she meets such figures as Humpty Dumpty and the riddling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. More challenging intellectually than the first instalment, it explores loneliness, language and the logic of dreams. The year is — and other times. Fevvers, aerialiste, circus performer and a virgin, claims she was not born, but hatched out of an egg.

She has two large and wonderful wings. In fact, she is large and wonderful in every way, from her false eyelashes to her ebullient and astonishing adventures. The journalist Jack Walser comes to interview her and stays to love and wonder, as will every reader of this entirely original extravaganza, which deftly and wittily questions every assumption we make about the lives of men and women on this planet.

The golden age of the American comic book coincided with the outbreak of the second world war and was spearheaded by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who installed square-jawed supermen as bulwarks against the forces of evil. It celebrates the transformative power of pop culture, and reveals the harsh truths behind the hyperreal fantasies. XB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. One of the first major works to present alien arrival as beneficent, it describes the slow process of social transformation when the Overlords come to Earth and guide us to the light.

At the centre of all is the terrifying Sunday, a superhuman force of mischief and pandemonium. Two rival magicians flex their new powers, pursuing military glory and power at court, striking a dangerous alliance with the Faerie King, and falling into passionate enmity over the use and meaning of the supernatural. The book is studded with footnotes both scholarly and comical, layered with literary pastiche, and invents a whole new strain of folklore: This classic by an unjustly neglected writer tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi-Browneyes on a far-flung alien world which undergoes long periods of summer and gruelling winters lasting some 40 years.

This is just the kind of jargon-free, humane, character-driven novel to convert sceptical readers to science fiction.

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This is a story about the end of the world, and the general falling-off that precedes it, as year-old Karen loses first her virginity, then consciousness. When she reawakens more than a decade later, the young people she knew and loved have died, become junkies or or simply lost that new-teenager smell. Wondering what the future holds? That said, the creepiness stays with you, especially the house that keeps stealthily remodelling itself: A curly tail, trotters and a snout are not far off. Joanna Biggs Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

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The setting is a post-apocalyptic future, long past the age of humans. The novel follows Lobey, who as Orpheus embarks on a quest to bring his lover back from the dead. With lush, poetic imagery and the innovative use of mythic archetypes, Delaney brilliantly delineates the human condition.

Here California is under-populated and most animals are extinct; citizens keep electric pets instead. In order to afford a real sheep and so affirm his empathy as a human being, Deckard hunts rogue androids, who lack empathy. As ever with Dick, pathos abounds and with it the inquiry into what is human and what is fake. The Axis has won the second world war.

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Imperial Japan occupies the west coast of America; more tyrannically, Nazi Germany under Martin Bormann, Hitler having died of syphilis takes over the east coast. The Californian lifestyle adapts well to its oriental master. Germany, although on the brink of space travel and the possessor of vast tracts of Russia, is teetering on collapse. The novel is multi-plotted, its random progression determined, Dick tells us, by consultation with the Chinese I Ching.

And in the character of Isserley — her curiosity, resignation, wonderment and pain — he paints an immensely affecting portrait of how it feels to be irreparably damaged and immeasurably far from home. Determined to extricate himself from an increasingly serious relationship, graduate Nicholas Urfe takes a job as an English teacher on a small Greek island. Walking alone one day, he runs into a wealthy eccentric, Maurice Conchis, who draws him into a succession of elaborate psychological games that involve two beautiful young sisters in reenactments of Greek myths and the Nazi occupation.

Appearing after The Collector, this was actually the first novel that Fowles wrote, and although it quickly became required reading for a generation, he continued to rework it for a decade after publication.

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Before long, he is embroiled in a battle between ancient and modern deities: The three narrative strands — young lovers in the s, the chaos of thebetweenalcoholics, English civil war and soldiers going native in a Vietnam-tinged Roman Britain — circle around Mow Cop in Cheshire and an ancient axehead found there. Dipping in and out of time, in blunt, raw dialogue, Garner creates a moving and singular novel. A fast-paced thriller starring a washed-up hacker, a cybernetically enhanced mercenary and an almost omnipotent artificial intelligence, it inspired and informed a slew of films and novels, not least the Matrix trilogy.

When the adults finally arrive, childish tears on the beach hint less at relief than fear for the future. When Haldeman returned from Vietnam, with a Purple Heart for the wounds he had suffered, he wrote a story about a pointless conflict that seems as if it will never end. Known for his intricate short stories and critically acclaimed mountaineering novel Climbers, Harrison cut his teeth on SF. In typical fashion, he writes space opera better than many who write only in the genre.

For all its star travel and alien artefacts, scuzzy 25th-century spaceports and drop-out space pilots, Light is actually about twisting three plotlines as near as possible to snapping point. This is as close as SF gets to literary fiction, and literary fiction gets to SF. Jon Courtenay Grimwood Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Amateur stonemason, waterbed designer, reformed socialist, nudist, militarist and McCarthyite, Heinlein is one of the most interesting and irritating figures in American science fiction.

This swinging 60s bestseller working title: The Heretic is typically provocative, with a central character, Mike Smith, who is raised by Martians after the death of his parents and questions every human assumption — about sex, politics, society and spirituality — on his arrival on Earth. Set on the desert world of Arrakis, this complex novel combines politics, religion, ecology and evolution in the rise to power of Paul Atreides, who becomes a revolutionary leader and a prophet with the ability to foresee and shape the future.

Epic in scope, Dune is primarily an adventure story, though Herbert was one of the first genre writers convincingly to tackle the subject of planetary ecology in his depiction of a drought-stricken world. After the Bomb — long, long after — humanity is still huddled in medieval-style stockades, cold, ignorant, superstitious and speaking in degraded English, the patois in which this book is written. Yet his story is still poignant. This is what happens to Robert Wringhim, who is brought up in the Calvinist belief in predestination.

When he encounters a devilish figure known as Gil-Martin, Wringhim is easily tempted into undertaking a campaign to purge the world of the Reprobate — those not selected for salvation. After a series of rapes and murders, and seemingly pursued by demons, Wringhim yields to the ultimate temptation of suicide. Sexist, racist, snob, Islamophobe … Houellebecq has been called many things, with varying degrees of accuracy. The charge of misanthropy is hard to deny, given his repeated portrayal of humankind as something that has lost its way, perhaps even its right to exist.

Atomised — set in the world we know but introduced by a member of the superior species that will supplant us — provides two more examples of our inadequacy in half-brothers Michel and Bruno, an introverted biologist and a sex-addict teacher. Conflict has been eradicated with the aid of sexual hedonism and the drug Soma; babies are factory-bred in bottles to produce a strict class hierarchy, from alpha to epsilon.

It is the year AF After Ford Eventually he recalls that he is an eminent concert pianist, scheduled to perform. The man is shepherded through an expanding and contracting world, his own memories and moods changing like the weather. Yet the dream-logic is rooted in real, poignant, human dilemmas. One for readers who have grown out of Philip K Dick. CO Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Hill House is haunted, but by what? The ghosts of the past or the people of the present?

Here is a delicious, quietly unnerving essay in horror, an examination of what makes us jump. Jackson sets up an old dark house in the country, garnishes it with some creepy servants, and then adds a quartet of intrepid visitors. But her lead character — fragile, lonely Eleanor — is at once victim and villainess. By the end, the person she is scaring most is herself.

Are the ghosts that a new governess in a country house believes to be steadily corrupting her young charges apparitions, hallucinations or projections of her own dark urges? The book divides SF critics and puzzles fans of her crime novels, but remains one of the great British dystopias and a trenchant satire on our times and values.

JCG Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. In the centre of England, a vast crystalline lake has formed. A strong candidate for the most beautiful of all Victorian novels. Owing debts to Jimi Hendrix and offering a decidedly 60s summer festival vibe, Bold as Love is the first in a series of novels that mix politics with myth, counterculture and dark age sensibilities. It deservedly won Jones the Arthur C Clarke award. On the morning of his 30th birthday, Josef K is arrested by two sinister men in dapper suits. PO Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The story has two central characters.

Algernon is a mouse, whose intelligence is surgically enhanced to the level of rodent genius. The same technique is applied to Charlie Gordon, a mentally subnormal fast-food kitchen hand. The narrative, told by Charlie as his IQ soars, traces the discontents of genius. Alas, the effects of the surgery are shortlived, and the end of the story finds Charlie back in the kitchen — mentally challenged but, in his way, happy. Being smart is not everything. The hotel is haunted by unexorcised demons from brutal murders committed there years ago.

Torrance is possessed and turns, homicidally, on his wife and child. Jack is beyond salvation.

Brownies & Betrayal

The film was brilliantly filmed by Stanley Kubrick in A young married woman, Melanie, scours antiques shops to furnish her new home and comes back with an old chaise-longue, which is perfect apart from an unsightly reddish-brown stain. She falls asleep on it and wakes up in an unfamiliar house, an unfamiliar time — and an unfamiliar body.

At first she assumes she must be dreaming. But gradually she starts to piece together the story of Milly, the young Victorian woman in the last stages of consumption whom she has apparently become, and the nature of the disgrace she has brought on the household run by her fearsomely stern elder sister. Why does the sight of the doctor make her pulse beat faster? And can she find a way back to her own life? AN Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. This is frequently judged the best ghost story of the Victorian period.

On the sudden death of her father, Maud, an heiress, is left to the care of her Uncle Silas, until she comes of age. Sinister in appearance and villainous by nature, Silas first plans to marry Maud to his oafish son, Dudley who is, it emerges, already married. When this fails, father and son, together with the French governess Madame de la Rougierre, conspire to murder their ward with a spiked hammer.

Told by the ingenuous and largely unsuspecting Maud, the narrative builds an impending sense of doom. Set in a near-future in a disintegrating city, where lawlessness prevails and citizens scratch a living from the debris, this dystopia is the journal of an unnamed middle-class narrator who fosters street-kid Emily and observes the decaying world from her window. Despite the pessimistic premise and the description of civilisation on the brink of collapse, with horror lurking at every turn, the novel is an insightful and humane meditation on the survivability of the species.

The world has entered the Second Enlightenment after the Faith Wars. In the Republic of Scotland, Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson investigates the murders of religious leaders, suspecting atheists but uncovering a plot involving artificial intelligence. Before his current incarnation as a thriller writer specialising in conspiracy theories and psychopathic gore, Marshall Smith wrote forward-thinking sci-fi which combined high-octane angst with humour both noir and surreal. His debut features a bizarre compartmentalised city with different postcodes for the insane, the overachievers, the debauched or simply those with unusual taste in interior design; as well as adventures in the realm of dreams, a deep love of cats and a killer twist.

Robert Neville is the last man standing, the lone survivor in a world overrun by night-crawling vampires. But if history is written by the winners, what does that make Neville: Clearly this was too much for the recent Will Smith movie adaptation, which ran scared of the very element that makes the book unique.

Francie Brady is a rambunctious kid in s Ireland. McCabe leads us on a freewheeling tour of a scattered, shattered consciousness, as Francie grows from wayward child to dangerous adult — nursing his grievances and plotting his revenge. Chances are that old Mrs Nugent has a surprise in store. These two figures are pushing south towards the sea, but the sea is poisoned and provides no comfort. In the end, all they have and, by implication, all the rest of us have is each other. During the Korean war and then the space programme, Yeremin closes down his emotions even as his horizons expand, from the Arctic skies to the moon itself.

The second of his sprawling steampunk fantasies detailing the alternate universe of Bas-Lag follows Armada, a floating pirate city, in its search for a rip in reality. Miller breathes new life into the Gothic antihero with his beautifully written Impac-winning first novel. In an epilogue, a spaceship leaves Earth with a cargo of monks, children and the Leibowitzian relics. The Wandering Jew makes recurrent and enigmatic appearances. Then it hops all the way back down again, resolving each story in turn. These include a camp Ealing-style misadventure, an American thriller and an interview with a clone, all connected by a mysterious comet-shaped tattoo.

Moorcock spills out such varied books that he often feels impossible to nail down, which is probably the point. Mother London, his most literary — it was shortlisted for the Whitbread — shows him at the height of his powers. Having gone to sleep on the London underground, the narrator awakes to find himself in 20th-century Hammersmith. He bathes in the now crystalline Thames and spends a day in what used to be the British Museum, airily discussing life and politics. He then travels up the river to Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed, going on from there to some idyllic haymaking in Oxford.

Sweet Home is a deceptive name for the Kentucky plantation where horrific crimes have been committed, as Beloved is for this shocking and unforgettable account of the human consequences of slavery. Sethe lives in Ohio in the s; she has escaped from slavery, but cannot escape the past, which quite literally haunts her.

It sparks off a page adventure that sees him trapped at the bottom of a well, marked with a strange blue stain and taken on many otherworldly adventures, all in search of his missing wife. Murakami has the Japanese trick of writing about surreal events in a matter-of-fact way, making them all the more disturbing. Ada or Ardor is part sci-fi romance, part Proustian memoir. It plays out on a fantasy planet, a marriage of contemporary America and pre-revolutionary Russia, and details the love affair of precocious Van Veen and his sister Ada, chasing them from lustful puberty to decrepit old age.

It is a gorgeous display of narrative wizardry, at once opulent, erotic, playful and wise. A moving affirmation of the continuities of love against unusual odds. JH Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. But this novel, which won Hugo and Nebula awards, reminds us he was once one of the most exciting names in hard sci-fi. Part of the Known Space series, it follows a group of humans and aliens as they explore a mysterious ring-shaped environment spinning around a star like a giant hula-hoop. Set in Manchester in the near-future and in a phantasmagorical virtual reality, Vurt is the story of Scribble, his gang the Stash Riders and his attempt to find his sister Desdemona, who is lost in a drug-induced VR.

Set in a rural Ireland that is also a vision of hell, it features policemen turning into bicycles; that SF standby, the universal energy source; and any number of scientific and literary in-jokes. According to Yoruba tradition, a spirit child is one who has made a pact with his fellows in their other, more beautiful world, to rejoin them as soon as possible.

Azaro breaks the pact, choosing to remain in this place of suffering and poverty, but the African shanty town where he lives with his parents teems with phantoms, spirits and dreams. An angry, impassioned fantasy of how to take down corporate America, and an ingenious modern version of the myth of the double. Thwarted in love, the hero Scythrop reads The Sorrows of Werther and considers suicide, but settles for the comforts of madeira instead. Sinister and sensual, overwrought and overwritten, Titus Groan is a guilty pleasure — a dank, dripping Gothic cathedral of a novel.

Titus himself is a minor character — literally: He inherits Gormenghast castle and its extraordinary household: But at its heart is a chilling glimpse of the nature of evil. With this gargantuan novel, Powys set out to take a location he knew well from his boyhood and make it the real hero of the story. It tells the story of Glastonbury through a year of turmoil, setting mystic mayor John Geard against industrialist Philip Crow.

Geard wants to turn the town into a centre for Grail worship, while Crow wants to exploit and develop the local tin mines. Complex and rich, this is a landmark fantasy novel. The novel is as much a study of their obsession as a brilliant examination of magic and rationalism. A Benedictine monk who gave it up to study medicine, Rabelais wrote this satirical tale of the giant Pantagruel and his even more monstrous and grotesque father Gargantua on the cusp between eras. In his portrayal of Gargantua, a belching, farting scholar given to urinating over the masses below his ivory tower, he satirises medieval learning as well as the emerging Renaissance thirst for knowledge.

Remind you of anything more contemporary? NB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. This was the novel that brought the one-time astrophysicist to the attention of the SF mainstream. What follows is a history of our world with Islam and Buddhism as the dominant religions and the major scientific discoveries and art movements we take for granted happening elsewhere. Necessarily schematic in places, but a stunning achievement all the same. Every now and then, a book comes along that is so influential you have to read it to be part of the modern world.

It is also a truly global phenomenon, and a nice little earner for the tribe of British character actors who have had the good fortune to be cast in the films. Claire Armitstead Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The offensive core of the novel depicts, under thin disguise, the prophet Muhammad, and wittily if blasphemously questions the revealed truth of the Koran.

Stranded in the Sahara, a pilot meets a boy. He claims to have come from an asteroid, which he shared with a talking flower, and to have visited many other worlds — one inhabited only by a king, another by a businessman, a third by a drunkard … On Earth, he has chatted with a snake and tamed a fox. Blindness is black, says an onlooker to the man who has suddenly ceased to see while sitting in his car at the traffic lights; but this blindness is white, a milky sea in the eye. Soon everyone is affected and the city descends into chaos. His flowing, opaque style can be challenging, but this parable of wilful unseeing, which resists reductive interpretations, is full of insight and poetry.

When Lily Bloom dies, she simply moves house: The classic Gothic tale of terror, Frankenstein is above all a novel of ideas. Victor Frankenstein is a young Swiss student who resolves to assemble a body from dead parts and galvanise it into life. As well as an exploration of nature and nurture, the book can be read as a reaction to motherhood and a comment upon creativity. High SF at its best. The world is gone, destroyed in an accident that gave humanity farcasters, controlled singularities that enable instant travel across galactic distances. The internet is now a hive mind of advanced AIs that control the gates and keep a vast empire in existence.

But someone or something is playing with time, and all is not as it seems. Hyperion won the Hugo award for best novel. Not so much a novel as a treatise on the nature and evolution of intelligence in the universe, Star Maker takes an unnamed Englishman on a tour of space and time as he observes human and alien civilisations rise and fall over a period of one hundred billion years. A short, dense book, it repays several readings. Fast, furious and containing more ideas in a single sentence than most writers manage in an entire book, Snow Crash has been credited with helping to inspire online worlds such as Second Life and established Stephenson as a cult figure.

This classic novel of horrific possession is supposed to have come to the author in a nightmare. It takes the form of a posthumous confession by Dr Henry Jekyll, a successful London physician, who experiments privately with dual personality, devising a drug that releases his depraved other self, Edward Hyde. The murderous Hyde increasingly dominates the appalled Jekyll, who finally kills himself to escape his double.

Others have seen it as a depiction of ineradicable dualisms in the Scottish character. The solicitor Jonathan Harker is sent to Transylvania on property business with Count Dracula and is vampirised by his client an interesting reversal of the normal estate agent-purchaser relationship. The count sails to England and embarks on a reign of bloodsucking terror, before being chased back to his lair by the Dutch vampirologist Dr van Helsing, and decapitated. He would, of course, rise again.

This unusual writer excels at the creation of skewed, dreamlike parallel worlds. In his fourth novel, the rootless, emotionally frozen Martin Blom is blinded by a stray bullet: A new nocturnal existence and highly charged affair with a nightclub waitress follow, in a phantasmagorical meditation on repression and transgression, absence and invisibility. Hank Morgan, an engineer from 19th-century Connecticut, is knocked out in a crowbar fight and mysteriously transported to sixth-century England. Vonnegut considered Sirens of Titan to be one of his best books , ranking it just below Slaughterhouse-Five.

Featuring a dimension-swapping ultra-rich space explorer who can see the future, a robot messenger whose craft is powered by UVTW the Universal Will to Become and the newly established Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, Sirens of Titan manages to be classic 50s pulp, a literary sleight of hand, a cult novel of the 60s counterculture and unmistakably Vonnegut all at the same time.

Young Jakob von Gunten enrols in a sinister academy that touchstone of Germanic fiction in which students learn how to be good servants. Kafka and Hesse were big fans of the Swiss writer; film-making duo the Brothers Quay turned the novel into a mesmerising stock-frame feature in Waters followed the rollicking Tipping the Velvet with this sombre, beautifully achieved meditation on love and loneliness set in the milieu of Victorian spiritualism.

Waters exploits the conventions of the ghost story to moving, open-ended effect, recreating a world of fascinating detail and beguiling mystery. On his return he reports that he has travelled to the year , Mankind has evolved into hyper-decadent Eloi and hyper-proletarian Morlocks, who live underground. The Eloi fritter, elegantly, by day. The Morlocks prey on the Eloi cannibalistically by night.

Before returning to his own time, the Time Traveller goes forward to witness the heat death of the Solar System.

At the end of the narrative, he embarks on a time journey from which he does not return. The most read, imitated and admired invasion fantasy of the 19th century. The Martians, a cold-bloodedly cerebral species, driven by the inhospitability of their dying planet and superior technology, invade Earth. Their first cylinders land at Horsell Common and are followed by an army of fighting machines equipped with death rays.

Humanity and its civilisation crumple under the assault, which is witnessed by the narrator, a moral philosopher. The novel can be read as an allegory of imperialism. As the narrator muses: The Sword in the Stone was initially published as a stand-alone work, but was subsequently rewritten to become the first part of a tetralogy, The Once and Future King. Only at the end of the book is it confirmed that the boy will grow up to be King Arthur. Kathryn Hughes Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Originally published in four volumes, this far-future story presents a powerfully evocative portrait of Earth as the sun dies.

Using the baroque language of fantasy to tell a story that is solidly science fiction, Wolfe follows Severian, a professional torturer exiled to wander the ruined planet and discover his fate as leader and then messiah for his people. Complex and challenging, this is perhaps one of the most significant publications in the last three decades of sci-fi. Triffids are possibly escapees from a Soviet laboratory; their takeover begins when a meteor shower blinds everyone who witnesses it. Bill Masen owes his survival to the fact that he was in hospital with his eyes bandaged at the time.

CA Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. It emerges, six months later, that every fertile woman in the village is pregnant. As they grow up with terrifying psychic powers, a perceptive Midwich citizen, Gordon Zellaby, contrives to blow them up and save humanity. What did the Soviet censors find so offensive? Until, that is, the mathematician D falls in love. Bakha, 18, is strong and able-bodied.

He is a latrine cleaner, a Dalit, an untouchable, and the novel traces a day in his life. Deep in thought and enjoying a sweet jalebi, Bakha brushes against a Brahmin. A novel written, some would say, before the genre was properly invented. Set in Surinam, which the author may or may not have visited, its hero is a highly cultivated African prince who is brought to the West Indies as a slave. They marry but, unwilling to have his children raised in servitude, Oroonoko raises a slave rebellion. It is and while the Irish war of independence rages outside the gates of their County Cork home, Sir Richard Naylor and his Anglo-Irish family continue their privileged life of tea and tennis.

Afrikaner teacher Ben du Toit lives a comfortable life in s Johannesburg. Yet his family do not want to look and his search for the truth makes him dangerously vulnerable. Nonetheless, Shirley is an important social novel, set in Yorkshire during the Luddite riots at the end of the Napoleonic wars, which revolves around two questions: Paul Laity Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Unable to reconcile his religion with his homosexuality, Kenneth Toomey wanders the world from the Paris of Joyce and Pound, via Nazi Germany and heyday Hollywood, to Malta where — mottled, sallow, emaciated — he awaits his death, sure of only one thing: Claire Armistead Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

Middle-aged Jeeter Lester is an impoverished cotton farmer. He married his wife, Ada, at the age of 11 and the couple have had 17 children. Incest rages in the Lester household. Tobacco Road created an image of poor white trash that is still with us. Not so much of an allegory, then, as a Kafkaesque parable Camus acknowledged the debt: Nicholas Lezard Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. His novel is set on Haiti, an island steeped in myth and voodoo.

Ti Noel is a slave when a rebellion begins in Having lost his job he moves in with his daughter on her remote farmstead, but then is a helpless bystander when three black men arrive and rape her. His life is becoming a tuition in humiliation. Yet the bleakness of any paraphrase is belied by the beautiful exactness of the prose, which mimics the intelligence and coldness of the protagonist. But the Magistrate is also a servant of the empire and his intervention in the case of a barbarian girl teaches him lessons about himself as well as the workings of power.

Technology with a human face. Only luck rescues her, and makes her penitent. The tale is the more compelling because she is looking back ruefully on her misadventures in older age, examining her own motives with withering candour. This novel really does attempt an anatomy of post-war America. It also combines the trickery of post-modern narration — a reverse chronology, sudden shifts of narrative perspective, interpolated passages of documentary reconstruction — with a simple and alluring fable. For the spine of this huge book is the story of what happens to a famous object, the baseball hit into the stands to win the World Series for the New York Giants in , just as the Soviet Union is successfully testing an atomic bomb.

Attuned like no other novel to the perplexities that hum away at the margins of everyday experience, White Noise remains the most precise, and killingly funny, portrayal of the way we live now. Lindesay Irvine Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The titular cities are Paris and London. It is the best and worst of times: The doctor, whose wits are gone, is rescued by a lawyer, Lorry, and brought to England with his daughter, Lucie.

A classic novel that helped to give lawyers their bad name. Bleak House is a vigorous satire on the old court of Chancery and the self-serving, pocket-lining nonsenses of the profession practiced there. Richard Carstone and Ada Clare are wards of the court in the eternal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce; thrown together, they secretly marry.

Also central are their friend, Esther Summerson, who nearly marries out of respectful devotion but loves another, and Lady Dedlock, who has a deep secret uncovered by the ruthless barrister Tulkinghorn. Written when the author was becoming more interested in narrative design and when the type of design he tended towards was palpably darker. The novel opens with the frigid Mr Dombey being presented with the son he hopes will one day take over the family business.

Mrs Dombey promptly dies and young Paul in a death scene of tear-jerking pathos follows a few years later. Dombey — desperate for an heir — marries a cynical beauty, Edith Granger. A ruined Dombey finally realises the worth of Florence, the daughter he has always neglected. Bubbles always burst; if only our financiers had learned from the story of Mr Merdle, in whose bank a deposit seems magically to accrue. Dickens targets greed in this novel, and pride, but he had two more specific targets — government bureaucracy the obstructive Circumlocution Office and the law of imprisonment for debt his own father had been in the Marshalsea.

The hero is Arthur Clennam, with whom Amy is in love and whose hateful mother has long-ago wronged the Dorrit family. Riches arrive and disappear, the pretensions and hypocrisies of society are uncovered, and the inevitable union of Amy and Arthur is long prolonged. Dickens, as always, bashes us over the head, but he does it brilliantly — a battering for our times. A woman arrives, exhausted, at the Mudfog workhouse. She gives birth and dies. The orphan is named Oliver Twist. Oliver discovers that he is gently born and the victim of a criminal conspiracy. Fagin is hanged, Sikes — pursued by an angry mob — hangs himself.