Margaret Atwood

Julian Barnes

John Barth

H.E. Bates

Richard Brautigan

A. S. Byatt

Frank Clune

Monica Dickens

Delillo Don Better than any book I can think of, White Noise captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself. Naturally, it's a terribly funny book, and the prose is as beautiful as a sunset through a particulate-filled sky. Nice-guy narrator Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a small college. His wife may be taking a drug that removes fear, and one day a nearby chemical plant accidentally releases a cloud of gas that may be poisonous. Writing before Bhopal and Prozac entered the popular lexicon, DeLillo produced a work so closely tuned into its time that it tells the future.

Ben Elton Stark has more money than God and the social conscience of a dog on a croquet lawn. What's more, they know the Earth is dying, so deep in Western Australia a planet-sized plot takes shape. Unfortunately all that stands in the way of the conspiracy are four inept green freaks.

Ben Elton By the television comedy writer of "Blackadder" and "The Young Ones", this is an ecological disaster novel written with humour but containing an underlying seriousness. His first novel was "Stark".

Ben Elton

John Fowles

Giovanni Guareschi

Giovanni Guareschi

Richard Hayden

Lilian Lee This is a joint Hong Kong/Chinese film that won the Palme d'or jointly with Jane Campion's "The Piano" at Cannes in 1993. The story concerns the intense, long-term relationship of two men who were apprenticed to the Peking opera in the 1920s.

Doris Leslie

David Lodge Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the lovely Angelica are the jet-propelled academics who are on the move, in the air, and on the make, in David Lodge's satirical 'Small World'. It is a world of glamorous travel and high excitement, where stuffy lecture rooms are swapped for lush corners of the globe, and romance is in the air...'A wonderful tissue of outrageous coincidences and correspondences, teasing elevations of suspense and delayed climaxes' - "Observer".

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Ian McEwan On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Donald S. Olson Written in the form of confessional letters to a French priest, this novel weaves fictional incidents into the biographical facts of the life of Aubrey Beardsley to present a portrait of a modern artist who challenged the hypocrisies of Victorian England - and was made to suffer for it.

Marcel Pagnol Tells the story of Jean de Florette, a 35-year-old, city-bred, hunchbacked idealist, his wife, Aimee, and his daughter, Manon. In the second novel, Manon seeks revenge for her father's death, and it is she who brings the wheel full circle in a final dramatic retribution in the town square.

Daniel Pennac

Leslie Rees

Tom ROBBINS

Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins

Salman Rushdie

Alexander McCall Smith Is there anything funny about German professors? This novel features the endless mishaps of the inimitable Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld.

Dale Spender

Donna Tartt A misfit at an exclusive New England college, Richard finds kindred spirits in the five eccentric students of his ancient Greek class. But his new friends have a horrific secret. When blackmail and violence threaten to blow their privileged lives apart, they drag Richard into the nightmare that engulfs them. And soon they enter a terrifying heart of darkness from which they may never return.

Anne Tyler

ANNE TYLER

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler Morgan Gower has an outsize hairy beard, an array of peculiar costumes and fantastic headwear, and a serious smoking habit. He likes to pretend to be other people - a jockey, a shipping magnate, a foreign art dealer - and he likes to do this more and more since his massive brood of daughters are all growing up, getting married and finding him embarrassing. Then comes his first dramatic encounter with Emily and Leon Meredith, and the start of an extraordinary obsession.

P. G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse A "Crooning Tenor" is attempting to captivate the affections of the Rev. Rupert Bingham's fiancee, Lord Emsworth is trying to remove a pumpkin-shaped blot on the family escutcheon, and the Hon. Freddie Threepwood tries to convert Lady Alcester in this collection of stories.

P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse