Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

Hundreds of years after civilisation has been destroyed by nuclear war, the Earth is divided between the Trackers of the Amtrak Federation – a community living in vast subterranean cities – and the Mutes, who have evolved to withstand the radiation that has driven their foes underground. A long...

First published in 1946, following on from Portrait of Elmbury, the second in the series shows an England which now seems almost foreign in its remoteness.Evoked with an unerringly accurate eye, Brensham Village contains a mixture of action and character, conveying the life of a country community...

When insurance assessor John Piper calls at the Daveys' flat in Hampstead, he has no idea that his visit will turn out to be anything but an ordinary professional appointment. But it would seem that someone else had already visited Flat 2A that Saturday afternoon... Shortly after Piper's arrival,...

Botanical writer James Thornberry's life is irrevocably changed when he meets up-and-coming artist, Katherine Gaunt. Falling madly in love with her, he begins to collect her paintings secretly and obsessively, until his relationship with them and with her merge into delusion, and the paintings take on a life of their own...

1918 dawns desolate over the fields of Flanders. Decimated by the worst war the world has ever seen, neither British nor German troops can break the deadlock of the trenches. After four years of murderous stalemate, peace seems buried for ever. But finally, one by one, the guns fall silent... By...

Magnificent novel of Empire and its aftermath First published in 1954 in the wake of the partition of India, John Masters' great novel Bhowani Junction has increased in stature over the years. Standing between E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and the widely acclaimed works of such writers...

Hugh Collins, a restless socio-anthropologist whose researches had taken him to many strange places, decided that the time had come to settle down in the northwest of Scotland, in the country he had known and loved as a boy. One night, on board ship off the African coast, a man died a very...

Mr J, blind from birth, tells the story of his life and loves and peculiar friendships among the English colony at the Cape. His method is to imitate the random action of memory, choosing those episodes which reveal most clearly the strange elements of his society and his own eccentric response to...

A small-town shopkeeper in the Orange Free State points a revolver at the South African Prime Minister. He is detained and questioned, but his eccentric explanations fail to provide the police with the neat motive they are searching for and he is judged insane. Yet Ebon Prinsloo's gesture of violence...

Victor England, the great film director, returns to Hollywood to finalise arrangements for his next production. Everything seems propitious: he has a firm contract with a studio that owes him a substantial debt of gratitude and whose top executives are top friends of his. Why, then, is he left to...

As a child-so tiny and delicate that her father calls her fairy-Morgan has a special relationship with nature, for she can hear the Silence, the harmonising force that creates and sustains all things. The humming of the Silence is her secret, even from her beloved father, as is the day that she walks...

All is fair in love and war... First published in 1988, it is a tale of two brought together by a drunken brawl in Oxford in 1937. Anthony Marvell and Frido von Arzfeld found friendship even as the threatening clouds of war were gathering over Europe. Then their families-sisters, cousins- found love...

Veronica Gaisford. Most men desired her, many loved her, some mistrusted her, but none was indifferent. Amid the violence and bitterness of the First World War and the years that followed, she bound together the lives of three very different men. She was exceptional - beautiful, passionate, and passionately...

The date is 1843; the occasion, the launch of the S.S. Great Britain. Bristol is alive with pageantry, awaiting the arrival of Brunel, the great engineer, and Prince Albert himself. The Stuckey men who helped build the ship now face hardship and unemployment, further humiliated by their womanfolk...