The Valley of Fear
Moriarty's menace is academic before it is criminal. He is the author of a treatise on the binomial theorem and The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a…
Retailers that deliver to: USThe Picture of Dorian Gray
The founding text of the corrupting-book tradition. Lord Henry gives Dorian a poisonous unnamed yellow novel - universally understood to be…
Reservoir 13
The same year's second indefensible omission. A girl disappears in the Peak District, and the novel then refuses every convention of the…
Solar Bones
A single unbroken sentence narrated by a dead engineer in County Mayo, returned to his kitchen table on All Souls' Day. It won the Goldsmiths…
The Bone Clocks
Mitchell had been shortlisted twice when the judges declined to advance his most ambitious novel since Cloud Atlas - six decades, one woman's…
TransAtlantic
Coming off the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, McCann braided Frederick Douglass in famine-era Ireland, the first nonstop…
The Stranger’s Child
Hollinghurst, who won in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, was longlisted for its follow-up and was second favourite to win - then failed to make the…
Netherland
The most discussed literary novel of its year in America - a post-9/11 meditation on cricket, marriage, and immigrant New York - couldn't…
Beyond Black
Hilary Mantel's reputation now rests so heavily on Thomas Cromwell that it is easy to forget she spent decades writing strange, corrosive…
Parable of the Sower
Some books arrive at the right cultural moment by accident; Octavia Butler's 1993 novel arrives at the right moment because she saw it coming.…
Always Coming Home
Most books ask to be read in a straight line. Always Coming Home, published in 1985 and the strangest beast in Ursula K. Le Guin's…
The Shockwave Rider
Pick up The Shockwave Rider expecting a relic of 1975, and the queasy recognition starts within pages. Brunner saw it all, or near enough: a vast…
