In the summer of 1816, aged nineteen, Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein". A pioneering work of science fiction, it captured the popular imagination from the start. The daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollsto...

In "The Crossing Fee" Iain Bamforth re-stages the odyssey of the legendary German hero who falls into a lake in the Black Forest and emerges in the China Sea. Circulating between Europe, the Philippines and Indonesia (where Bamforth worked for five y...

Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a "barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions... old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz". Ethiopia Boy plunges the reader into praise poems th...

In "Quick Question" John Ashbery extends an invitation to readers to accompany him into the extraordinary worlds of the everyday, experienced through the box of tricks that is language. He revels in twist and transformation, the constant mutability o...

This book distils an adult lifetime into the intense magic of poetry. Wallace-Crabbe is a nature poet in the broadest possible sense: his poems, ranging widely in tone and subject-matter, seek above all to convey the richness and variety of our world...