Set during the Ancien Régime, this famous epistolary novel of 1792 exposes the depravity of the French aristocracy through the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont and their cynical plot to seduce a virtuous married woman and ruin her daughter. Translated by Thomas Moore (1779–1852).

In Melville’s famous novel the narrator is a young sailor who joins the whaler Pequod under the command of Captain Ahab. ‘A grand, ungodly, god-like man’, Ahab is bent on killing the great white whale that took his leg – and the crew set sail on his voyage of revenge.

Set the 1840s in St Petersburg, a fictional town modelled on Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up, these are the famous escapades of the young, energetic and inventive dare-devil Tom and his companion Huckleberry Finn.

A businessman and a scientist, Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor, use a gravity-defying substance to travel to the Moon, where they discover a race of intelligent creatures; then at least one of the travellers returns to Earth to tell of their fantastic adventure. First published in 1900.

This anthology draws on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Jules Verne and HG Wells were experimenting with ideas suggested by technology. These 41 tales by 21 authors feature robots, dystopian societies and time travel and set the scene for the genre’s success.

GK Chesterton's improbable super-sleuth, the Roman Catholic priest with wonderful powers of observation, intuition and reasoning, solves twelve cryptic cases, including The Hammer of God, The Invisible Man, The Sins of Prince Saradine and The Sign of the Broken Sword.

In 16th century Italy, rebellious teenager Serafina is sent to the convent of Santa Caterina. Once there, her influence threatens the stability of the institution, as the Counter-Reformation forces a regime of terrible oppression upon it.

This historical novel recounts Lady Anne Clifford’s decades-long battle to regain her stolen family inheritance. Drawing on her diaries, which detail life at home and at Court in the early 17th century, it tells of a woman defying family, law courts and even King James I in pursuit of what is hers by right.

The jealousies and deceptions of the London art world in the late 18th century are the setting for this tale based on the real life scandal of Ann Jemima Provis and her father who claimed they had a manuscript revealing the lost secrets of Titian.

The partly fictionalized story of author Alex Haley’s ancestors, Roots recounts the life of Kunta Kinte, a Gambian man enslaved and brought to the US in the 18th century, and of seven generations of his descendants, culminating with the author himself.

Moving from early 19th-century Brittany to 1930s London, this saga follows the struggles of five generations of the Orchiere witching dynasty, women whose magical inheritance is both a dangerous threat and an extraordinary gift. American cut pages

Based on a true story, this novel tells how US General Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, on a mission to war-torn London, fell in love with his British aide, Kay Summersby – and the consequences as news of their affair reached Washington.

Across war-torn Germany in late 1945, the widow of an executed resistance member undertakes a harrowing journey to seek out fellow survivors and confront the realities and consequences of the choices she and others made in the direst of circumstances.

Now a successful film, The Foreigner sees a long-retired soldier who had fought for the Viet Cong and the US Marines taking up arms once again when his only remaining family are killed in an IRA bombing campaign. Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on upper trimmed edge

Two American prisoners of war escape the 1815 massacre of their comrades at Dartmoor Prison and are determined to take revenge by assassinating the Home Secretary. Against a backdrop of political machination, thief-takers Peter and Paul Skillen are hired to stop them.

After stealing millions from the city bank where he works and redistributing the wealth, Joseph Ashcroft decides hiding in plain sight is the best way to evade capture. His army training helps, but he cannot escape from his past and the choices he had made. Slightly off-mint.

The ‘trick’ is writing and Frayn’s fictitious letter writer, an English literature lecturer, is obsessed with a novelist. He has read her books and taught them to his students, but now she is arriving as a guest speaker and he must confront the writer in the flesh.

On the brink of starting a new life in Australia, Tara becomes the chief suspect in a murder inquiry despite not knowing the victim. Old connections and secrets from the past are revealed as the investigation progresses.

When a woman with no memory stumbles out of the frozen depths of a Swedish forest, she is identified as psychological profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön. Her diary could be the key to solving the cold case murder she was investigating when she disappeared.

Motivated by an urge to help reunite adoptees with their birth parents, Katie Carroll joins an internet forum discussing the Irish mother and baby Home she worked at in the 1960s, unaware that by doing so, secrets affecting her own life will be revealed.

When Roxane’s brother is implicated in a woman’s disappearance, the wayward Private Investigator is drawn into a complex mystery involving murder and the mob in a bid to prove his innocence.

The second adventure for Seattle detective Alice Madison picks up a 20-year-old abduction and murder investigation. When fresh evidence in the case emerges, new crimes are committed that point to someone attempting to suppress the facts. Slightly off-mint.

Two sisters discovered dead in their Dublin home appear to have starved themselves to death, but investigating detectives Swan and Considine think the evidence suggests that someone was watching them die.

Night Vale is a fictional southwest American desert town where macabre, paranormal events are commonplace. This book, developed from a series of podcasts, tells a ghost story about the eponymous woman, and her interactions with the town’s living residents.

From the pitter-patter footsteps of a haunted porcelain doll to a shadowy spectre slumped by the fireside, the eerie apparitions conjured from the imaginations of writers including MR James, Edith Wharton and Charles Dickens provide an unsettling reminder that there are things beyond our understanding.

In this novel, which is loosely based on Tennessee’s Bell Witch haunting, writer David Binder becomes fascinated by the Faery Queen of the Haunted Dell, whose story he heard as a child, and takes his pregnant wife and daughter to investigate the myth..

DI Jimmy Perez, created by bestselling British crime author Ann Cleeves, has featured in eight novels since 2006, investigating suspicious deaths in the close-knit communities of the Shetland islands. The award-winning series inspired the popular BBC drama Shetland. The seven titles included in this set are: Cold Earth (Read more...) Thin Air (Read more...) Dead Water (Read more...) Blue Lightning (Read more...) Red Bones (Read more...) White Nights (Read more...) Raven Black (Read more...)

This bestselling novel and its sequel tell the story of Eddie, who died saving a girl called Annie in an amusement park accident. As he travels through different levels of heaven Eddie encounters people he was connected to in his life, before being reunited with Annie and learning about the life she led. The two titles are The Five People You Meet in Heaven and The Next Person You Meet in Heaven.

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) is recognised as one of the most significant 20th-century British novelists, noted for handling serious themes with a light touch. This collection of five titles includes The Bachelors, which deals with blackmail and fraud; Memento Mori, with its sinister phone calls; and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, capturing a London suburb on the cusp of social change; as well as The Abbess of Crewe and A Far Cry from Kensington.

In 1939 young Evie’s hopes for an Oxford education are dashed by a death in the family and the onset of war. Joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, she and two new friends, Jess and May, experience whirlwind wartime romances and find themselves far closer to the front lines than they ever expected. This collection includes books one and three in the series: The Ops Room Girls and Victory for the Ops Room Girls.

Anne Brontë’s masterpiece of epistolary fiction, widely regarded as one of the first feminist novels, boldly depicts Helen Huntington's experience of marital breakdown and her daring (by the standards of the day) response to it, including the challenges of raising her son on her own.

Published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s novel tells the story of Jane, a young governess, and her employer Mr Rochester, and how their love for each other is thwarted by the mysterious presence of a woman in the attic of Thornfield Hall.

Emily Brontë’s incomparable story of Cathy, Heathcliff and their passionate, but doomed love, played out on the windswept Yorkshire moors, first appeared in 1847 and has lost none of its romance and power.

Fleeing gambling debts in Argentina, Baron Bela Wenckheim returns to his small hometown in provincial Hungary, only to become embroiled with local politicians, con-men, and a professor conducting dangerous experiments with mosses. Winner of the Man Booker International.

An ageing poet and painter leaves Manhattan and returns to India for his final show. The journey becomes a voyage into the past, as a biographer interviews a series of people about his decadent work and his life of excess.

In one timeline, Peggy and Irving Alder's new-born baby is a girl named Louise, in a parallel one, Louis, a boy. Though they share identical looks, friends and ambitions, their gender defines the way their lives unfold – and how they react to life-changing events.

Having ricocheted between foster homes since she was abandoned as a baby on the steps of the local YMCA, Shannon eventually finds stability with single mother Miranda – a happy state of affairs threatened by her compulsive need to make sense of her past.

When seventeen-year-old 'Kid' finds herself stranded in a separatist elderly-only community on an island ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire, she soon discovers that the hostile ‘wrinklies' are unwilling to tolerate her youthful presence in their oasis.

In Julian Fellowes’s novel – a critique of the upper-class – socially ambitious estate agent Edith Lavery becomes engaged to an Earl, but life among the aristocracy is far more testing than she imagined. Slightly off-mint.

Set in the beautiful yet menacing Forest of Dean, and embodying a supernatural, dream-like quality, this dark fairy-tale tells of thirteen-year-old Ruby's quest to track down her birth parents, aided only by her mysterious friend, 'Shadow Boy'. Off-mint.

Eight-year-old Carmel is a sensitive, otherworldly girl, who disappears during an outing to a local festival. This intricate thriller follows Beth, her newly single mother, through her desperate search for her child, as well as Carmel’s own story.

The second novel in Turney’s Damned Emperors series is narrated by Marcia, a Christian woman who becomes Commodus’s mistress. As Rome faces conspiracies, fire and plague she is the only person who can control the emperor’s dark moods.

A classic of historical fiction, Young Bess was first published in 1944 and made into a film starring Jean Simmons in 1953. It tells the story of the young Princess Elizabeth, declared a bastard and banished from her father's court, yet facing even greater challenges after Henry VIII's death.

Discovered in a Berlin cabaret in the Roaring Twenties, Madou becomes a Hollywood superstar. Her rise to fame, and anguish as her beauty fades, are observed through the eyes of her unglamorous daughter, who longs to escape her mother’s shadow.

Military attaché Colonel Macrae hatches a secret plan to assassinate Hitler in Berlin, 1938. Gathering intelligence brings him to a Gestapo brothel, and its young hostess Sara Sternschein, who could be key to Macrae’s mission, or to his downfall.

As a child Evan Smoak was trained as an assassin in a secret government programme. Now he tries to protect society’s helpless, until the day he is ambushed, kidnapped, then locked in a cell with no apparent means of escape.

Chloe’s husband, a prominent Manhattan lawyer, was previously married to her wayward sister Nicky. When he is murdered and her stepson Ethan becomes a suspect, she has to reconcile with her sister, the boy’s mother, and confront their family secrets.

Driving home late one snowy night, Professor Nan Lewis hits what she believes is a deer. She awakes to find herself the prime suspect in the hit-and-run killing of her favourite student, a death eerily similar to that of her own daughter six years previously.

Psychiatrist Karen takes on a new patient in this thriller, who begins to reveal information known only to Karen and her two closest friends. The truths prove explosive to the tight-knit group.

Feisty journalist Hannah Weybridge reluctantly becomes involved in the case of a young woman from South London’s Asian community who has drowned. It appears to be suicide, but she increasingly suspects it is part of a series of honour killings.

As the cult of the 1920's rabble-rousing hedonists the Bright Young Things encroaches on the world of the Mitford sisters, their chaperone Louisa finds herself at the heart of a gripping murder mystery.

Set in the present day, the second volume in Welsh’s Plague Times trilogy focuses on London-based comic Marcus McFall. Desperate to find sanctuary from the pandemic known as 'The Sweats', he sets off for his family's remote Scottish island.

The ninth in the Edinburgh-based Bob Skinner series sees the eponymous detective tracking a dangerous terrorist en route to his city, while also investigating a disturbing pattern of apparent mercy killings which seem to threaten Skinner’s own life.

When the team from the Hampstead police station investigate the murder of a lawyer’s wife at an exclusive members’ club, they uncover serial adultery and upper-class feuding in this contemporary mystery that subtly references the Golden Age of detectives.

In this Brighton-based thriller a young woman dies after a mysterious Latin phrase is tattooed on her back with poisoned ink. Other similar deaths turn the mystery into a hunt for a serial killer for DI Francis Sullivan.

Driven off the road and left for dead, private detective Clara DeWitt knows someone from her past is trying to kill her. Making a break for it before the police arrive on the scene, she embarks upon an odyssey around Las Vegas and LA in search of the truth.

The sequel to the novel Layer Cake, which inspired the film of the same name, this is a fast-moving crime caper whose plot is based around high-tech gadgetry and money-laundering scams in the Caribbean and London. Off-mint.

Criminal psychologist Holly Wakefield is on the trail of a serial killer whose murders are particularly gruesome. In this blood-soaked thriller, secrets from Holly's own past give her a personal interest in the case.

This thriller, translated from the Italian, begins with a child abduction in a park in Rome. Attempting to solve the case are the battle-scarred detective Colomba Caseli and the socially awkward but brilliant Dante Torre, who was himself abducted as a child. Slightly off-mint.

With his instinct for spotting details and solving enigmatic crimes in the fictional town of Vigàta, Sicily, the sardonic Inspector Montalbano quickly became Andrea Camilleri’s most popular character. The long-running series, which was adapted for screen in 1999, has been translated into 32 languages and achieved worldwide success. The first four titles are included in this collection: The Shape of Water, The Terracotta Dog, The Snack Thief and The Voice of the Violin.

Tess Gerritsen (b.1953) has a degree in anthropology, trained as a doctor and, since 1986, has been a best-selling author. Written with first-hand knowledge of trauma and autopsy, her books featuring the detective Jane Rizzoli and forensic pathologist Dr Maura Isles are tense, chilling and gory thrillers. The six titles included in this set are: Keeping the Dead (Read more...) The Killing Place (Read more...) The Silent Girl (Read more...) Last to Die (Read more...) Die Again (Read more...) I Know a Secret (Read more...)

An award-winning freelance journalist, Nick Louth has been delighting thriller and mystery fans since releasing his bestseller Bite in 2007. Ten year later he began writing the fast-paced stories of the DCI Craig Gillard series, to which these two novels belong. Seventh and eighth in the series, the titles are The Body on the Moor and The Bodies at Westgrave Hall.

Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret are royal commissioners for William the Conqueror, charged with settling land disputes arising from Domesday Book, but often finding themselves embroiled in more violent altercations: arriving in Exeter they discover a key witness murdered; an Earl has been summarily executing poachers in the Forest of Delamere; and in Warwick, another noble lord is about to hang an innocent blacksmith. The three titles are The Foxes of Warwick, The Hawks of Delamere and The Wildcats of Exeter.

These romantic historical novels follow the residents of Greyladies, a 16th century house some consider to be haunted, from the turn of the century into the First World War. Harriet and Phoebe each progress from humble lives as servants to becoming lady of the manor, as the house is requisitioned, first as a hospital and then as a home for German internees. The three titles in this collection are Mistress of Greyladies, Heir to Greyladies and Legacy of Greyladies.

Penned by Anton de Beke of Strictly Come Dancing fame, these historical romances, set in the 1930s, focus on the lives and loves of the staff and guests of the exclusive Buckingham Hotel, Mayfair – where the grand ballroom forms the backdrop to passionate affairs and dark secrets. The two titles are One Enchanted Evening and Moonlight Over Mayfair.

Winter is coming to Westeros as the struggle for power in the Seven Kingdoms gains momentum, the Others threaten from beyond the ice Wall and, across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys Targaryen, with her dragons, looks to reclaim the Iron Throne. The whole dark, yet magical epic of ancient lands of ice and fire, from A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Dragons, is contained in this boxed set, along with a wall map of Westeros and the Free Cities.

Kings, warriors, giants and fantastical creatures inhabit John Gwynne's mythical land, which is threatened with destruction by a long-prophesized war in this complex tale of good versus evil. Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on upper trimmed edge

First sister is a nameless priestess; Lito Val Lucius, a faithless warrior. Caught on opposing sides of an interplanetary war, they are each forced to choose between staying true to themselves, and following their respective causes.

In this first of a fantasy trilogy, six mysterious strangers arrive in the city of Darien, at the heart of a dying empire. Twelve families compete for the throne, which will soon be made vacant by murder or civil war.

The Emperor of Shiang rules amid an uneasy peace, until a bloody event leads to chaos and violence. Meanwhile, four of his swordsmen have been sent to rival city Darien to hunt down an ageing traitor.

The success of Edward Caswall’s 1837 Sketches of Young Ladies prompted the young Dickens to write two companion pieces, which also paint satirical portraits of early Victorian character-types. All three sets are collected here, with the original illustrations by ‘Phiz’.

The daughter of Jacquetta, Elizabeth Woodville becomes the wife of the charismatic warrior king, Edward IV of York; but amid the Wars of the Roses, she must fight for her family’s survival – particularly that of her two sons, the future ‘Princes in the Tower’.

In 1744 Nicholas Ballantyne, a young Scottish aristocrat, boards a ship to join the British East India Company and meets Robert Clive, seeking his fortune on the subcontinent. This fictionalised story portrays the events that led to the ‘Company Raj’ and imperial rule.

Nicholas Notovitch flees tsarist Russia for Paris, where he finds himself among bohemians, revolutionaries and spies. It is just the start of a perilous journey that will lead him to a lost gospel that accounts for Christ’s missing years.

After his return from the First World War, Walter Langdon and his wife Rosanna settle on a remote farm in Iowa. This family saga follows the fortunes of their children through the Great Depression and the new war that will follow.

As a result of a bureaucratic error, the residents of 1933 Ivansk Street officially do not exist. These intertwined stories depict the cunning ways they devise to survive the chaotic years before and after the fall of communism.

Inspired by the true stories of female SOE agents in the Second World War, this novel follows the adventures of a Paris-based foreign correspondent who helps smuggle soldiers out of France and later trains as an agent and joins the Resistance.

Charles Dickens’ second novel tells the story of the workhouse orphan who commits ‘the impious and profane offence of asking for more’ and soon finds himself recruited into the criminal underworld inhabited by such memorable characters as Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy.

Originally intended to form part of a vast novel, Isherwood’s six semi-autobiographical sketches recreate the glamour and sleaze of Berlin society in the early 1930s and were the inspiration for the musical Cabaret.

Thackeray’s classic follows the fortunes of clever, unscrupulous Becky Sharp and her innocent schoolfriend Amelia Sedley as they make their way through the corrupt, decadent society of Regency London against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars.

Among Woolf’s most renowned works, Mrs Dalloway addresses themes of mental illness, feminism and homosexuality as it recounts a day in the life of a high-society woman in post-First World War England preparing for and hosting an evening soirée.

Bill Masen awakes in hospital to find most of the world’s population blinded by a strange meteor shower and subjugated by predatory plantlife in John Wyndham’s 1951 novel on individuality and the profound perils of military technology.

Written in 1948 and warning of things to come, Orwell’s dystopian novel is set in a totalitarian future, where history is rewritten and independent thought is outlawed, so that when Winston Smith dares to write a diary and fall in love, he falls foul of the Thought Police.

After receiving a cryptic letter, Sherlock Holmes sets off to warn a wealthy American ex-pat that he is in danger, only to find John Douglas already murdered. Investigating, Holmes uncovers the dead man’s past as a Pinkerton agent – and the hand of the arch-criminal Moriarty.

In the second volume of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, Thomas Cromwell is now Henry VIII’s chief minister. As the king tires of Anne Boleyn, it falls to Cromwell to engineer the queen’s downfall.

In this prize-winning satire of the Troubles, a teenager suffers the obsessive attentions of a psychopathic paramilitary much older than her. In their nameless city, based on Belfast, gossip, hearsay and paranoia are rife, and even memories are dangerous.

Set in 1859 as Tsarist Russia entered a period of modernization, this celebrated novel describes the conflict between generations; that of the father resistant to reform and the young Eugene Bazanov – Turgenev’s portrait of a nihilist. Translated by Constance Garnett.

From squalid origins on the streets of Paris, Nana trades on her sexuality to find fame and fortune as a high-class prostitute, advancing her career while destroying the lives of others. Nana (1880) is the ninth novel in Zola’s epic of French life in the Second Empire, the Rougon-Macquart series.

Set in the Antarctic, where a group of explorers make sinister discoveries, this is one of Lovecraft's most successful – and most chilling – works. In this edition, the novella is accompanied by two short stories: ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’.

Bukowski’s first novel is a fictionalized memoir of his time in the US Postal Service. It follows womanizing, gambling drunkard Henry Chinaski, whose darkly witty cynicism helps him through a daily grind of laborious work, sadistic bosses and odious co-workers.

In 1947, Marvellous is a 90-year-old woman who lives alone in a caravan in Cornwall; Freddie Drake is a traumatized soldier who is trying to fulfil a friend’s dying wish. When their paths cross, both their lives are transformed. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge

Chinese sisters Sylvie and Amy have grown up separately in New York and the Netherlands, but become close in their teens. After Sylvie disappears, Amy’s search reveals family secrets.

Essie leads an idyllic suburban life complete with beautiful home and loving family. When she befriends a misfit newcomer to the neighbourhood, Essie finds herself being harshly judged, and terrible secrets from her past come to light.

Rachel is enjoying a romantic break in Paris when Princess Diana dies in a car crash. After learning that the princess had just visited the last home of Wallis Simpson, she uncovers a sensational, long-forgotten link between the two.

When Doris becomes pregnant her mother forces her to leave the family home. As she struggles to find work and refuge in 1950s Essex she encounters prejudices directed at single mothers, the disabled, those with mental illness and her friends in the Windrush generation.