Apollo Library imprint: 11 books

Arina Petrovna rules the Golovlev family with an iron hand. Around her swarm her family; her alcoholic sons, dissipated grandchildren and degenerate husband. But in his darkened study, her son Porfiry schemes for an overthrow of power. In this powerful novel, the great Russian satirist presents a stark portrait of the Russian gentry sapped by generations of idleness and social irrelevance.

The drawing-room was entirely English. The Office of Works had provided deep armchairs, a sofa you could have slept on, though of course nobody had ever done so, and a low glass-topped table. A young English woman arrives in the Polish People's Republic to visit her older sister, who married...

What a place it was, that dark little house that was two rooms up and two down ... I don't remember to this day where we all slept, though there was a funeral now and then to thin us out. This is the powerful story of two hard-driven men – one a celebrated English novelist, the other a successful...

The Benedictine whisked a brush of multicoloured feathers over the top of the book, puffed out his plump cheeks like the god of winds in an old nautical map, blew black dust from the leather cover, and, with a shiver of what in the circumstances seemed delicate trepidation, laid the volume open on...

At precisely nine o'clock, as he did every evening, Don Sebastiano Sanna Carboni pushed back his armchair, carefully folded the newspaper which he had read to the very last line, tidied up the little things on his desk, and prepared to go down to the ground floor... Around the turn of the twentieth...

Coming back was worse, much worse, than Martin Stone had anticipated. Martin Stone returns to the city from which his family was driven in 1938. He has concealed his destination from his father, and hopes to win some form of restitution for the depressed old man living in exile in London. THE...

Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet... Hagar Shipley – an irascible, independent nonagenarian – has lived a quiet life full of rage. As she approaches her death, she retreats from the squabbling of her son and his wife to reflect...

When they buried the Old Warrior there was only one small wreath to go on the coffin... John Hamer Shawcross never forgot that moment. Hamer Shawcross is born into a poor but aspirational working-class family in Manchester. Studious and hard-working, he becomes a socialist activist, goes into...

The town governors... all flogged the inhabitants, but the first flogged them pure and simple, the second explained their zeal by referring to the needs of civilization, and the third asked only that in all matters the inhabitants should trust in their valour. One of the major satirical novels...

'A classic of historical fiction' HILARY MANTEL. 'By widespread assent, one of the finest historical novels ever written. It may even be the finest' TLS. Sir John Uvedale had business at Coverham Abbey in Wensleydale, lately suppressed, so he sent his people on before him to Marrick,...

There have been queer tales told of that shield, and maybe there are queerer yet to be told. It has been stamped for good or evil on this church, and on this town, for centuries, and every tavern loafer will talk to you about the 'nebuly coat'... A young architect is sent to the remote Dorset...