Fiction: narrative themes

**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK**'A milestone in the campaign for racial equality' GuardianIn 1945, Rick Braithwaite, a smart, highly educated ex-RAF pilot, looks for a job in British engineering.

A Caribbean country on the verge of collapse.

Like no poetry you've ever known before, Fred D'Aguiar's novel-in-verse sweeps you up in the scintillating story of a young female slave who falls in love with the son of the plantation owner and runs away with him in search of a new life.

The modern classic from double Booker Prize winner J.

Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine.

Discover Joseph Heller's hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man's efforts to survive it.

This compelling and gripping novel by bestselling author John Macken takes the forensic thriller to the next level.

In a small town in South India, beneath the brutal summer sun, a young girl watches anxiously as tensions simmer, then boil over.

Young, newly married and intensely ambitious, Michael Davenport is trying to make a living as a writer.

Kurt Vonnegut has surpassed even his own giddy heights of hilariously bitter irony in Bluebeard.

One of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, Richard Yate's universally acclaimed debut novel is a masterful portrait of East Coast life in 1950s suburbia.

John Wilder is in his mid-thirties, a successful salesman with a place in the country, an adoring wife and a ten-year-old son.

William Grove is a nervous teenager trying to fit in at his new boarding school.

Read Pulitzer Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Anne Tyler's funny and uplifting exploration of what it is to be an outsider.

'Her brilliance in capturing the ripples on the surface of family life gives her a claim to be the Jane Austen of our age' Daily MailHaving sacked her handyman, newly-widowed Mrs Emerson finds a replacement in Elizabeth, a lanky, awkward girl.

Love, money, revenge and betrayal - this is the Jazz Age novel that became the great American classic.

If you like Philippa Gregory, you will love this vibrant and captivating historical page-turner from multi-million copy and international bestselling author Jean Plaidy - the perfect blend of history with romance and drama.

A beautifully evocative and enthralling historical novel from multi-million copy and international bestselling author Jean Plaidy - perfect for fans of Philippa Gregory.

A deliciously atmospheric, moving and evocative historical novel from multi-million copy and international bestselling author Jean Plaidy - perfect for fans of Philippa Gregory.

Historical romance at its very best: fans of Philippa Gregory will love this captivating journey back in time from multi-million copy and international bestselling author Jean Plaidy.

Will she ever uncover the secrets of her past?

Meet Jacob Smith, your good-old British policeman.

'Delightful.

Jenny has devoted her life to her husband, the famous naturalist Wilkie Walker.

In her latest collection of stories, Janice Galloway turns her unflinching gaze on relationships: the struggle to love against the odds, the overpowering yearning to communicate, and the extraordinary epiphanies where the World falls away leaving only the lovers.

'A masterpiece, a perfect book' David NichollsDiscover this unmissable modern classic where the fragile friendship between two teenage boys has devastating consequences that echo throughout the years.

Janie McCleary runs one of the first movie theatres in New Brunswick.

Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one main ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry.

A spectacular display of this key European writer's early workThis dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino's unique perspective and narrative gifts.

Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy.

A masterwork by the incomparable, genre-defying, wondrous Italo Calvino.

Fifty-five fictional cities, each described in beautiful detail - each with a woman's name.

In Enniskillen, Co.

Orphaned at a cruelly young age, little Hugo Dinsmore is torn from his pampered life and plunged into the nightmare world of brutish country relatives, a world where his refined ways and small stature are a constant source of mockery and torment.

Unique and highly erotic, Cannibals is a novel of eighty-eight bulletins that reveal the fractured essence of our age.

From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong.

Frank Ritz is a television critic.

Ruben Oliver's life is coming adrift from its moorings.

Sarajevo, 2003.

'If you're coming to Lurie for the first time, you must begin with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs' GuardianVinnie Miner is an American professor of children's literature on her way to London for six months of research.

'Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

'A rich, revolutionary novel.

The second book in the trilogy which began with the Booker prize-winning The Famished Road.

Isherwood's short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover, Jim.

Discover a novel which arose from the author's ambition to invent a hell of his own.

A real-time five-hour story set in an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster.

Marion Bishop's life has fallen apart.

There are some people you'd do anything for.

Camden Town.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEPhilip Roth s masterpiece provides a piercing look into the promises of prosperity, civic order and domesticity in twentieth century America Swede Levov is living the American dream.