Profile: 418 books

Mesdames et Messieurs, presenting La Petite Mort, or, A Little Death ... A silent film, destroyed in a fire in 1913 at the Path? studio, before it was seen even by its director. A lowly seamstress, who makes the costumes she should be wearing, but believes her talent - and the secret she keeps too...

From Dictatorship to Democracy was a pamphlet, printed and distributed by Dr Gene Sharp and based on his study, over a period of forty years, on non-violent methods of demonstration. Now in its fourth edition, it was originally handed out by the Albert Einstein Institution, and although never actively...

Gods of Management is one of the classic works of management. Charles Handy has identified four management styles to be found in organisations, and using the allegory of Greek gods he explains the different values of each style, and how each style can create the culture of an organisation. To be successful...

When George Spencer, a salesman trouble-shooter, managed late one night to catch the last seat on a charter plane at Winnipeg, there was nothing to distinguish the flight from hundreds of others which take place all over the world every day. The fifty-odd passengers were ordinary, intelligent people...

Leonard March walks free from jail after fourteen years' hard time, served after turning state's witness against his Mafia boss Salvatore Lombard. It's only after Leonard is sentenced that the public learned that he was a Mob hitman with eighteen deaths to answer for. Leonard is released to...

The fields at Raven Fen yield barely enough for Agne and his family to live on, and his young son Klas can only watch as despair consumes his father. While Klas dreams of migrating birds - of escape - Agne imagines his crops devoured by insects never seen in Sweden, predicts endless cycles of storm...

The man who broke into Auschwitz. When he was captured in France in 1940 Sergeant-Major Charles Coward launched his own private war against the Germans (although he was being held as a prisoner-of-war). For several years he was the most incredible amateur espionage and sabotage agent of World War...

A foodie revenge for a broken marriage; a nosy grandmother takes spying on her neighbours too far; a woman teacher is groomed by an artistic man and his clever son; a brutally short haircut makes a woman reassess her life; a gang-related attack comes back to haunt the perpetrator; a woman revisits...

Meet Ash, thirteen years old, saying goodbye to his father before he goes to serve a stretch in prison. His dad's friend Kieran helps get rid of social services and then school's out for ever. But when his father's house begins to fill with stolen goods and armed gangsters, it's easy for Ash to get...

The Ring is Closed combines a central character as iconoclastic as that of Hunger with an evocation of the limitations of small-town life to equal Mysteries. Abel is the only son of a miserly lighthouse-keeper, after falling in love he leaves his life in a village in southern Norway and travels around...

Twenty stories ranging over every imaginable human emotion and situation, Tales of Love and Loss is a treat for all lovers of great writing. Knut Hamsun published only three collections of short stories during his lifetime and abandoned the form entirely after 1906. Most of these stories are translated...

Ove Rolandsen, the telegraph operator in an isolated fishing village in northern Norway, is a man of sudden passions, a cheerful rogue fond of girls and alcohol. He constantly hatches ambitious schemes to the despair of his fiancée, Marie, housekeeper at the vicarage. When a plan to manufacture glue...

"The last time Dodie sees her mother alive, Stella is unusually busy, tattily splendid in an old red velvet dress. Soon after this, Dodie's brother Seth goes missing: the only trace of him is through postcards signed 'Yours in the Lord' addresses from the Soul Life Centre, New York state. When...

Anytown, England. Jeremy Shepherd has reached post-ambition, giving up the trappings of his London life (flash job, flash cars, even flashier girlfriends) to move back to his home town and his parents' house. By day, he is a low-level civil servant, chained to his desk and content to idle away the...