Alma Books: 225 books

On the eve of the Crimean War, the young, headstrong Yelena, the daughter of aristocratic Russian parents, falls in love with a revolutionary from Bulgaria named Insarov. Facing the wrath and disapproval of her family, Yelena abandons her home to follow Insarov to Bulgaria. Their fateful match sets...

La traviata was Giuseppe Verdi’s eighteenth opera and shows him at the height of his middle-period powers. Adapted from La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, it portrays the love between the courtesan Violetta Valéry and the young Alfredo Germont in fashionable Parisian society, with its...

Lightship Anthology 2 is the second collection of short stories, poems, flash fiction and a first chapter from the 2012 Lightship International Literary Prize winners. Lightship Publishing aims to discover and mentor the best new literary voices writing in English, and this is an exciting international collection from Indian, American, Australian, Swedish, French, Irish and British authors.

Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous and remarkable scientists of our age and author of the scientific bestseller "A Brief History of Time", which sold over 25 million copies across the world and will be adapted as a children's book in the Autumn of next year. In this compelling...

In this collection of short stories, drawing heavily from the authors own experiences as a medical graduate on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Bulgakov describes a young doctors turbulent and often brutal introduction to his practice in the backward village of Muryovo. Using a sharply realistic...

Set in Paris during the years of the Reign of Terror, The Gods Want Blood centres on the rise to power of the Jacobin sympathizer Evariste Gamelin, a young painter who becomes a juror on a local Revolutionary tribunal. Caught up in the bloodthirsty madness surrounding him, he helps to dispense cruel...

Considered one of the most influential authors of twentieth century Russian Literature, Ivan Bunin's "Dark Avenues" is the culmination of a life's work which unrelentingly questioned of the political doxa whilst taking his poetic mastery of language to dark new heights. Written between 1938 and 1944...

In the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire, Vivian is writing an article about the importance of lying, when he is interrupted by Cyril, who tries to tempt him away, but instead is drawn into a discussion about art, nature, literature and imagination. The Decay of Lying sees Wilde explore his...

Alongside his monumental Notebooks and the poems collected in Canti, which make him one of Italy's greatest and best-loved poets, Giacomo Leopardi penned a number of fictional pieces, mostly in the form of gently humorous dialogues, in which he dealt with philosophical ideas and many of the metaphysical...

Finding himself locked in his room for six weeks, a young officer uses his imagination to travel around his room, using the various objects it contains as inspiration for a delightful parody of contemporary travel-writing and exercise in Sternean picaresque, and humorously demonstrating what one can explore without having to travel to exotic locations. Contains a foreword by Alain de Botton

Turgenev’s final novel, Virgin Soil traces the destinies of several middle-class revolutionaries who seek to “go to the people” by working on the land and instilling democratic ideas in the countryside’s locals. They include the daydreaming impoverished young tutor Nezhdanov employed by the...

"Fathers and Children", arguably the first modern novel in the history of Russian literature, shocked readers when it was first published in 1862 - the controversial character of Bazarov, a self-proclaimed nihilist intent on rejecting all existing traditional values and institutions, providing a trenchant...

Inspired by Dostoevsky's own gambling addiction and written under pressure in order to pay off his creditors and retain his rights to his literary legacy, The Gambler is set in the casino of the fictional German spa town of Roulettenburg and follows the misfortunes of the young tutor Alexei Ivanovich....

A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official’s son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the task an ailing, world-weary “nobody” seized with the purposelessness of life and a sense of his own...