Item category 1: General Fiction

Storm Boy saves the life of Mr Percival, and in return the pelican helps Storm Boy's father with his fishing and joins in the rescue of a shipwrecked crew. The boy and the pelican prove friends to the end.

Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, freethinking ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy - the 'crhme de la crhme' - who become ...

Review: Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and de...

The adventures of a family of people who are only six inches high, and who have long tails.

In the cloud-washed airspace between the cornfields of Illinois and blue infinity, a man puts his faith in the propeller of his biplane. For disillusioned writer and itinerant barnstormer Richard Bach, belief is as real as a full tank of gas and sparks firing in the cylinders... until he meets Do...

With a cover design by Lucienne Day When Mrs Hawkins tells Hector Bartlett he is a 'pisseur de copie', that he 'urinates frightful prose', little does she realise the repercussions. Holding that 'no life can be carried on satisfactorily unless people are honest' Mrs Hawkins refuses to retract her...

Saga, set in Spain, of medieval chivalry and treachery, of lust and love, of believers and infidels. By the author of .ư̐Taj'.

"The reputation of British novelist A. S. Byatt soared in this country after the publication of Possession. Winner of England's 1990 Booker Prize, Possession was the critical and commercial success that called national attention to a writer of extraordinary gifts. Yet it was clear even upon publi...

They say no one from the convict settlement of Sydney Town crossed the steep ranges of the Blue Mountains until 1813. But the rescally, quick-witted convict Clancy Fitzgerald did it in 1798, dragging with him the proud, but reluctant, Eliza Phillips. Faced with constant danger and wrenching iso...

CLASSIC FICTION (PRE C 1945). The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is stranded on an uninhabited island far away from any shipping routes. With patience and ingenuity, he transforms his island into a tropical paradise. For twenty-four years he has no human company, until one Friday, ...

"The setting is Lousiville, Kentucky in the 1970s. The Telfairs are four generations of an African American family of stonemasons. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw, a man who knows that 'true masonry is not held together by cement but ... by t...

CLASSIC FICTION (PRE C 1945). With an introduction by John S Whitley, University of Sussex, this book is the second of three volumes of "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" reproduced from original copies of "The Strand Magazine". This book comes with an introduction by John S Whitley, University ...

In Egypt, a Muslim on the run from a family feud seeks refuge in a Christian monastery. The novel traces the abrasive relationship between him and the monks. A clash of cultures.

In a world where America is ruled by a repressive Bible-inspired regime and past pollution means only 1% of women can bear children, anyone committing a crime and found to be a potential mother is put into an institution and is sentenced to become a Handmaid, duty bound to bear the children of th...

Seventeen exciting stories, full of adventure and magic, by much-loved writers, including Margaret Mahy, Ted Hughes and Malorie Blackman. From a naughty pirate to a very lonely lion, children will love the amazing characters they meet in this timeless collection! Perfect for five-year-olds to sha...

"A commemorative limited edition of the first publication of Banjo Paterson's complete works'.

"Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor." Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim? Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created ...

The story of Silver the little seagull whose impulsive nature would sometimes get her into trouble, and Vic Vincent whose love of birds almost loses him his place in the cricket team. Suggested level: primary.

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Fin...

"Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulen...

Ann Burton was born on a river bank the night her father tried to burn their house down. Six years later her sister Liza disappears while they are staying at their uncle's property. What Ann sees that day robs her of her memory and her speech. Ann escapes her anguished childhood, finding love and...

Snow in Vermont is as common as dirt. Why would anyone want to photograph it? But from the time he was a small boy, Wilson Bentley has thought of the icy crystals as small miracles, and he determines that one day his camera will capture for others their extraordinary beauty...

The Bluest Eye chronicles the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in 1940s Ohio. Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows.

Story of passion and power in the world of theatre and film. Australian author.

Who was Norma Jeane Baker? In Blonde we are given an intimate, unsparing vision of the woman who became Marilyn Monroe like no other: the child who visits the cinema with her mother; the orphan whose mother is declared mad; the woman who changes her name to become an actress; the fated celebrity,...

Clinging to each other in their loneliness and alienation, George and his friend Lenny dream, as drifters will, of a place to call their own. But after they come to work on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, their hopes, like "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men," begin to go awry.

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This book won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize of Literature. Here, in a perfectly crafted story is a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of a man's ...