Steerforth Press: 389 books

The less I felt in myself, the more strongly I was drawn to those places where the whirligig of life spins most rapidly. So begins an extraordinary day in the life of Mrs C - recently bereaved and searching for excitement and meaning. Drawn to the bright lights of a casino, and the passion...

Pierre ruins everything-friendships, love, fatherhood-in his headlong race against time. As he rushes through life, he fails to appreciate those things that are of true value-the tendernesses shown to him by his wife, Hedwige, the poetry of the world. He burns himself up, and burns up those around...

The folk tales collected by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were first published in 1812–15, and in many more editions up to the deaths of the brothers around 1860. While no one knows where the tales first came from; features of many are found in myths from all over the world. They were passed...

These four Stefan Zweig stories, newly translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, are among his most celebrated and compelling work. The titular tale is a devastating depiction of unrequited love, which inspired a classic Hollywood film, directed by Max Ophüls and starring Joane Fontaine. Elsewhere...

A doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty culminates in an almost lyrical death and...

A millionaire is killed. A golden statuette of a Buddha goes missing. A penniless student, who is afflicted by dream-like fits, is arrested and accused of murder. In typically crisp, unfussy prose, Gazdanov's delicately balanced novel is an irresistibly hypnotic masterpiece from one of Russia's...

Hungarian Antal Szerb is best known in the West as the author of three extraordinary novels, most notably Journey by Moonlight (1937), and a highly entertaining study of the Ancient Regime in France, The Queen's Necklace (1942). This selection of his stories and novellas, set variously in mythical...

The restless King Oliver VII of Alturia, an obscure Central European state whose only notable exports are wine and sardines, wants nothing more than an easy life: so, plotting a coup against himself, King Oliver VII escapes to Venice in search of ‘real’ experience. There he falls in with a team...

At an end-of-the London season soiree, the young Hungarian scholar-dilettante Janos Batky is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumours. Invited to the family seat, Pendragon Castle in North Wales, Batky receives a mysterious phone-call warning him...

In this collection of essays, ten leading writers from different countries consider the conflicts  that have informed their own literary lives. 1914-Goodbye to All That borrows its title from Robert Graves's "bitter leave-taking of England" in which he writes not only of the First World...

A single volume of the most beautiful texts by Herman Hesse including intimate memories of his final years. Hesse collected life sketches, poems, aphorisms and short essays dedicated to the ultimate challenge of a writer who had already accomplished a celebrated body of work — that of accepting his final years and the approach of death with grace.

A book of dining, flirting, dancing and smoking, celebrating the 175th anniversary of The London Library. With nineteenth-century fashions constantly changing, but the importance of the baffling social codes entirely rigid, a newly-prosperous and bewildered middle class was in dire need of...

Before becoming the Prophet of Islam, Mohammed was a simple man of flesh and blood who started life as a poor orphan in the Arabian city of Mecca. Through his union with Khadija, he became a prosperous merchant and caravaneer. He was visited by God at the age of forty to become a Prophet and visionary...

An account of a devastating mining disaster, celebrating the 175th anniversary of The London Library Although (shallow) coal mining dates back as far as the 13th century, it was the development of the steam engine which began a huge increase in the amount of coal raised from the ground. Mining was...