In the early 1980’s in American colleges, while intellectual students are wising up about Derrida and Lacan, Eugenides deftly introduces Madeline Hanna, an English major who is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George Elliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the great English novels. As Madeline studies the intricacies of the human heart in her safe ivory tower, two very different men interpose: Leonard Bankhead, a charismatic loner and college Darwinist who appears at a seminar and the other, an old friend, Mitchell Grammaticus, a student of Christian mysticism and convinced that Madeline is destined to become his wife. Through these two men, Eugenides juxtapositions two competing images of love and relationship ...more

In ‘The House of Silk’ Sherlock Holmes returns in the first new adventure officially approved by the Conan Doyle Estate. The Horowitz tale begins in November 1890 when an agitated gentleman arrives unannounced at Baker Street, begging Holmes for help with trouble relating to an American art deal gone awry. The case moves quickly towards a solution but then Ross, one of the young Baker Street Irregulars in Holmes’s employ, is brutally murdered. Feeling a deep responsibility for Ross’s murder ...more

One of the best-loved comic novelists of the twentieth century, P.G. Wodehouse, when not writing stories, lyrics or editing screenplays, wrote a profuse number of letters. The letters in this splendidly edited collection, many never previously published, not only demonstrate Wodehouse's writing flair but also occasionally reveal his private thoughts. Each chapter is preceded by a biographical section describing what happened in Wodehouse's life at the time the particular letters were written and are supplemented with invaluable footnotes. The editor, Sophie Ratcliffe, has clearly spent a long time with the Wodehouse archives and composes a most sympathetic and moving of character sketches ...more