Modern Classics As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Isabel Allende

'A magical storyteller' Daily Mail It is 18th century Saint Domingue, and Tété never knew her parents. All she knows is that her mother was a slave, and that her white father's identity will forever remain a mystery. As a child she is sold to the plantation-owner Toulouse Valmorain, and finds herself subjected to his unwanted attentions. Still, in spite of everything, she fin...

Manni Coe

AN iPAPER BEST NEW BOOK OUT IN AUGUST 2025'Beautifully written and deeply moving' CLARE BALDING 'An important voice' CATHY RENTZENBRINK'I devoured it in a day . . . An open-hearted book' CLOVER STROUDThe Corner is a place where birds with broken wings will come to heal.Looking to begin a new chapter after years on the move, Manni Coe and his partner take a risk and buy 'The Cor...

Juan Marsé

'Spain's finest contemporary novelist' Guardian 'Juan Marsé's contribution to European fiction has been consistently remarkable' Times Literary Supplement From one of Spain's most acclaimed authors, comes an extraordinary novel about ambition and longing set against the backdrop of post-war Barcelona. Teresa is everything he wants. She is beautiful, charming, rebellious, and...

Javier Cercas

"A father's worst nightmare - Melchor Marín's teenage daughter has disappeared. Years have passed since Melchor took revenge for his mother's murder and at last found peace with his daughter Cosette in the sleepy backwater of Terra Alta. But her idyll is shattered when one day Cosette, now seventeen, discovers that her father has been concealing the truth of her mother's death-...

Emilia Pardo Bazán

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Priests with shotguns, scheming lovers and a necrophiliac gravedigger haunt the fables of Emilia Pardo Bazán, the formidable Spanish aristocrat, intellectual and feminist. These stories paint a rich and variegated image of Old Spain - sometimes tender, often provocative, always entertaining. But if you decide to visit, be...

Mary Costello

THE IRISH TIMES BESTSELLERA marriage unravels in a Spanish hotel room as a young wife is haunted by a past love.A father travels to Paris to meet his scientist son and is exposed to his son's true nature.A woman attends a reading by a famous author and comes to some painful realisations about her own marriage.The stories in Barcelona reveal the underlying disquiet of modern lif...

Laurie Lee

A beautiful new edition of Laurie Lee's celebrated autobiographical trilogy: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War 'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.' 'This trilogy is a sequence of early recollections, beginning with the dazzling light...

Laurie Lee

A Moment of War is the powerful and harrowing final book in Laurie Lee's acclaimed trilogy that began with Cider with RosieLaurie Lee was still a young man when he decided to fight for the Republican cause in Spain's civil war. But though he braved icy, storm-swept mountains alone to contact Republican sympathisers, he was immediately suspected of being a Nationalist spy. Impri...

Laurie Lee

Andalusia is a passion, and 15 years after his previous visit Laurie Lee returned. He found a country broken by the civil war, but the totems of indestructible Spain survive: the Christ in agony, the thrilling flamenco cry, the pride in poverty, the gypsy intensity in vivid whitewashed slums, the cult of the bullfight, the exultation in death, the humour of hopelessness - the p...

Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee

At all times wonderfully evocative and poignant, Cider With Rosie is a charming memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a world that is tangibly real and yet reminiscent of a now distant past. In this idyllic pastoral setting, unencumbered by the callous father who so quickly abandoned his family responsibilities, Laurie's adoring mother becomes the centr...

Laurie Lee

In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain; to narrowly escape execution by your own side; to kill a man with a borrowed rifle and feel nothing but shame. Moving and shrapnel-sharp, A Moment of War recalls the defeat of idealism; 'that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that id...