Transworld: 509 books

The train was late, and the wind was blowing Meng's coat open in the snow. With no sign of his cousin, he needed somewhere to stay the night. An old man enticed him to a second-rate hostel, and despite his annoyance, Meng couldn't shake the feeling that he'd seen this place, and the old man, before. Part...

In 'How the Ceremony Ends', it was last winter that the folklorist paid his visit to the village of Eight Pines. He wanted to collect folk tales and customs, to re-enact the ceremonies of life and death that only old men still remember. But somehow he managed to provoke the villagers. In 'The...

The madwoman was wearing a white velvet cheongsam. Standing on the bridge, she revelled in her own faded splendour. Normal people pay no attention to madwomen, but one woman from Shaoxing stayed on the bridge that afternoon to talk to this one; what was she coveting? Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Madwoman on the Bridge.

In the centenary year of the Great War, names such as Ypres, the Marne, the Somme, Passchendaele are heavy with meaning as settings for the near-destruction of a generation of men. It is this aura of tragedy that makes Huntly Gordon’s memoir, drawn from his letters written from the Front, such a...

At fifty the guarantee runs out... About to hit the big five-oh, obsessed with sex, cocaine-fuelled and gripped by a crippling fear of death, Professor Michael Cole is finding life a bit of a struggle. It's finding the time to squeeze everything in, really. He's supposedly writing the...

'This is a sacred treasury, a spiritual notebook which is very special to me, and which has touched and inspired me at different times over the years.' In To Live from the Heart: Mindful Paths to the Sacred, Sister Stan reveals how prayer can play an important part in all our lives, lifting...

There were four of them: young women, dressed decorously in black, employed at an exclusive jewellery store in the 1960s. Close friendships were forged as Natasha, Prudence, Rachel and Maisie worked together under the benevolent rule of the two Markham brothers. Now, in 1980, Natasha, newly...

Jess has just waved goodbye to her darling son, off backpacking to Oz. She's left with two teenage daughters and husband Matt - all of whom find themselves regularly featured in her popular and lighthearted newspaper column in which she conveys to her readers an enviably cheery muddle of family life. Things...

Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, or Sister Stan as she is affectionately known, has been described as a visionary and social innovator. Now, in The Road Home she looks back on her life - from her early years growing up on the family farm in the Dingle Peninsula, Co. Kerry, to the day when, at the age of...

Based on the traditional Book of Hours - psalms said daily, at set times, by religious communities throughout the world - Seasons of the Day reveals the enduring relevance of this ancient practice to contemporary living. In Seasons of the Day, Sister Stan, knowing that our modern-day understanding...

In Seasons of Hope, the follow up to her bestselling Day by Day, Sister Stan offers words of wisdom to calm the mind and refocus our energies. Through verse and inspirational quotations from many enlightened figures, she offers us a chance to step away from this frantic world – to stop, to look,...

The King is dead. A nation mourns... Having clawed his way up from C-list obscurity to the pinnacle of A-list superstardom, media personality and self-proclaimed King of Saturday Night Television, Simon Peters is found dead in 'suspicious circumstances'. Deluded, self-obsessed and with an ego the...

I have a husband, we have two children and we own our house. I am in good health and so are they, our lives are good; we have everything we need. Sometimes I look at them and wait, in vain, to be moved, as a mother should when watching her own family. Why do I no longer feel anything? Julia...

Following the National Theatre's success with plays based on novels by well-loved children's writers like Philip Pulman (***His Dark Materials),***Jamila Gavin (Coram Boy) and Michael Morpurgo (War Horse), the National now stages Mark Ravenhill's exhilarating adaptation of Terry Pratchett's witty...