Irvine Welsh, \"poet laureate of the chemical generation\", exposes the seamy underbelly of rave\"s utopian dream. Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and beyond in this frazzled trip through Scottish clubland....

‘Well, Watson, we seem to have fallen upon evil days’ Sherlock Holmes: the quintessential British hero and the world\"s most popular detective. Through his powers of deduction, and with the help of his faithful companion Dr Watson, Holmes takes on all manner of devious criminals and dangerous villains – and wins....

‘Wealth and beggary, virtue and vice, repletion and the direst hunger, all treading on each other and crowding together’ Could any writer portray London better than Charles Dickens? Dickens knew the city inside out, walking the streets day and night, in all weathers, and drawing inspiration from everything he saw....

‘Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? And, live we how we can, yet die we must’ What is the true meaning of power? Are some simply born to it or can it be acquired like a skill? Does it always breed corruption and greed or can it be a force for good?...

‘I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see....

‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.’ Is lying simply an uncomfortable truth about life or something to be celebrated? In these dazzlingly witty pages we find deceptions of all kinds....

‘To myself alone could I look’ Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are heroines who depend upon no one but themselves. In the face of hardship, from small sacrifices to great heartache, they cling resolutely to their principles of self-reliance....

A high-pitched laugh echoes in an empty church. Servants discover their master dead in his bed, the only sign of disturbance an open window. The coffin of a woman hanged as a witch is found to be empty. A bed that hasn’t been slept in is crumpled and distressed come the morning....

How do you remember the summers of your childhood? For Laurie Lee they were flower-crested, heady, endless days. Here is an evocation of summer like no other – a remote valley filled with the scent of hay, jazzing wasps, blackberries plucked and gobbled, and games played until the last drop of dusk....

Enjoy Helen Simpson’s sharply funny, humane take on the everyday joys and struggles of motherhood in this perfect Mother’s Day gift. Welcome to motherhood – a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet kisses....

Have you ever tried to learn another language? When Zhuang first arrives in London from China she feels like she is among an alien species. The city is disorientating, the people unfriendly, the language a muddle of personal pronouns and moody verbs. But with increasing fluency in English surviving turns to living....

Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the day to day realities of fatherhood in the ultimate literary gift for dads. How to be a good father? Children’s birthday parties, unsuccessful family holidays, humiliating antenatal music classes: the trials of parenthood are all found in Knausgaard’s compelling and honest account of family life....

Salman Rushdie, a self-described ‘emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two’, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West....

Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of having babies, from the exhaustion of early pregnancy to first smiles and becoming acquainted with the long reaches of the night....

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed....