649. Abe, Kobo: Secret Rendezvous

Published by Secker & Warberg, 1980

1st edition hardback in very good condition. The jacket is also very good. Translated by Juliet Carpenter. From the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous, the bizarrely erotic and comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital.From the moment that an ambulance appears in the middle of the night to take his wife, who protests that she is perfectly healthy, her bewildered husband realizes that things are not as they should be. His covert explorations reveal that the enormous hospital she was taken to is home to a network of constant surveillance, outlandish sex experiments, and an array of very odd and even violent characters. Within a few days, though no closer to finding his wife, the unnamed narrator finds himself appointed the hospital's chief of security, reporting to a man who thinks he's a horse. With its nightmarish vision of modern medicine and modern life, Secret Rendezvous is another masterpiece from Japan's most gifted and original writer of serious fiction.

650. Ackroyd, Peter: Hawksmoor

Published by Hamish Hamilton, 1986

Hardback 5th impression in very good condition. The dustwrapper is also very good. In the aftermath of the great fire, eighteenth-century London is a city of extremes. Squalor and superstition vie with elegance and reason as brilliant architect, Nicholas Dyer, is commissioned to build seven new churches. They are to stand as beacons of the Enlightenment - but Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each one. Two hundred and fifty years later, in the same vast metropolis, a series of murders occur on the sites of those same churches. Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates, but the gruesome crimes make no sense to the modern mind... Combining thriller, ghost story and metaphysical tract, Hawksmoor won the Whitbread Book Award and Guardian Fiction Prize in 1985.

651. Ackroyd, Peter: Chatterton

Published by Hamish Hamilton, 1987

Hardback 1st edition. Near fine in a very good unclipped d/w which is only slightly sunned, unusually at the fore-edge and not at the spine. Shortlisted for the '87 Booker prize. What is the mystery of Thomas Chatterton? a young poet and elderly female novelist try to decode the clues found within an eighteenth-century manuscript, only to discover that their investigation is disclosing other secrets for which there is no solution. But they are not alone in their quest: the mystery is being revived in an earlier age, as in the mid- nineteenth century Henry Wallis paints his celebrated portrait of Chatterton lying dead in an attic room. And Chatterton himself, the young man who was described as the originator and inspiration of the Romantic Movement, steps forward with his own story of the events that happened in august 1770.

82. Ackroyd, Peter: First Light

Published by Hamish Hamilton, London. 1989.

1st edition hardback very good condition.The book has no previous owner names or inscriptions. Pages edges browning, The dust wrapper has not been price clipped and still retains the original £12.95 net price. It is in very good condition with rubbing to extremities.Ackroyd's pastoral novel in which he meditates upon the nature of history, time and the English landscape.

1666. Ackroyd, Peter: Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golam

Published by Sinclair-Stevenson, London. 1994.

1st edition hardback in near fine condition. Page edges slightly yellowed and the unclipped dust wrapper is just a little rubbed at the edges otherwise fine and unmarked. In this novel the light and the dark sides of 19th-century London flow into each other, attracting the attention of famous names such as Marx and Gissing, but also of less well-known characters, who play a significant role in a tale that is a mixture of fable, adventure and Gothic comedy.

83. Ackroyd, Peter: Milton In America

Published by Sinclair Stevenson, London. 1996.

1st edition hardback in near fine condition.The book has no previous owner names or inscriptions. The dust wrapper also near fine has a small closed nick on the front near the spine, it has not been price clipped and still retains the original £15.99 net price.One of Ackroyd's finest achievements, "Milton in America" is a brilliant and mysterious novel which takes the reader into an enchanted world that is part dream and part history, part invention and part truth.

1667. Ackroyd, Peter: English Music

Published by Hamish Hamilton, London, 1992

1st edition hardback in near fine condition, there are no previous owner names or inscriptions, dustwrapper in very good condition and is not price clipped. "From the prize-winning author of "First Light," "Chatterton," and "Hawksmoor" -- a dazzingly inventive and powerfully moving novel about the intricate ties between father and sons, between inheritance and culture, and between our understanding of the past and our grasp of the present."

652. Adams, Richard: The Girl in a Swing

Published by Allen Lane, 1980

Hardback 1st edition, 2nd issue. Very good+ in a like unclipped d/w. Who is Karin, of no past, so vibrant, so beautiful? And what is to become of Alan Desland, the unworldly Englishman who falls under her spell? This is the haunted story of Alan's love for a woman beautiful and voluptuous beyond experience or even imagination, yet at the same time mysterious and disturbing as a pagan goddess. What darkness underlay the bliss and fear she inspired? Like a slowly intensifying August thunderstorm, the dark forces gather in a crescendo of terror.

654. Adams, Richard: Maia

Published by Viking, 1984

1st edition hardback in very good condition. The dustwrapper is also very good. The second book in the Beklan Empire series. Maia is a fifteen-year-old peasant beauty growing up in poverty beside Lake Serrelind. Seduced by her stepfather and betrayed by her jealous mother, Maia finds herself in the hands of slave-traders to be sold as a concubine. She attracts the attention of General Kembri who uses her to obtain information from her admirers and her adventures uncover a plot for civil war. Proclaimed as a heroine, she finds that one sinister result of fame is to have enemies in high places and Maia has to struggle for survival through treachery, cruelty, lost love and a final flight through a wild empire to escape a crumbling regime.

655. Alcott, Louisa May: The Chase

Published by Century, 1995

1st edition hardback in fine condition. The dustwrapper is also fine and unclipped. From the author of Little Women, the first publication of a novel which portrays the sensuality and spirit of its Victorian heroine Rosamond Vivien, who has been brought up as a recluse by her indifferent grandfather. When Philip Tempest appears one stormy night, nothing prepares her for the life he lures her into sharing with him.

656. Aldiss, Brian: Forgotten Life

Published by Gollancz, 1988

1st edition hardback in very good condition. The jacket is also very good. Mr Aldiss's foray into mainstream fiction. Spanning 50 years and three continents, from pre-war Suffolk to the Far East in the 1940s to Oxford and America in the present, this is the story of one man's re-examination of the meaning of his life, as juxtaposed with the lives of those around him.

Published by Verso, London, 2000

1st edition hardback in near fine condition. There is a previous owner gift inscription facing the title page and the book is signed by the author at the title page, otherwise fine. The dust wrapper is fine and not price clipped. Each year, when the weather in Istanbul becomes unbearable, the family of Iskender Pasha, a re-tired Ottoman notable, retires to its summer palace overlooking the Sea of Marmara. It is 1899 and the last great Islamic empire is in serious trouble. A former tutor poses a question which the family has been refusing to confront for almost a century: 'Your Ottoman Empire is like a drunken prostitute, neither knowing nor caring who will take her next. Do I exaggerate, Memed?' The history of Iskender Pasha's family mirrors the growing degeneration of the Empire they have served for the last five hundred years. This passionate story of masters and servants, school-teachers and painters, is marked by jealousies, vendettas and, with the decay of the Empire, a new generation which is deeply hostile to the half-truths and myths of the 'golden days.' The Stone Woman is the third novel of Tariq Ali's "Islam Quartet." Like its predecessors - Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree and The Book of Saladin - its power lies both in the story-telling and the challenge it poses to stereotyped images of life under Islam.

321. Amis, Kingsley: Difficulties With Girls

658. Amis, Kingsley: The Biographer's Moustache

Published by Flamingo, 1995

Very good 1st edition hardback in a very good unclipped dustwrapper. Gordon Scott-Thompson, a struggling hack, gets commissioned to write the biography of veteran novelist, Jimmie Fane. It is a task which proves to be fraught with extraordinary and unforeseen difficulties. Fane, an unashamed snob, has many pet hates, including younger men with moustaches and trendy pronunciation. Scott-Thompson, however, is extremely attached to his own moustache and not so particular about his use of language. It doesn't help matters that Fane's wife Joanna isn't yet sure what she feels about moustaches, but has decided views on younger men.

659. Amis, Kingsley: The Old Devils

Published by Hutchinson, 1986

Hardback 4th reprint. Both book and its jacket are in fine condition. Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one main ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when they are joined by professional Welshman Alun Weaver (CBE) and his wife, Rhiannon.

660. Amis, Kingsley: The Folks That Live On the Hill

Published by Hutchinson , 1990

Hardback 1st edition. Near fine book in a very good unclipped d/w. Top corners knocked, jacket slightly rubbed at the edges. Set in North London , a retired librarian is surrounded by his widowed sister, a hopeless son, a failed poet brother and a lesbian niece. From the author of "Lucky Jim" and "I Like it here". The author won the Booker Prize in 1986 for "The Old Devils".

27. Amis, Martin: The Information

Published by Flamingo, London. 1995.

1st edition hardback in near fine condition. There is a very slight lean to the book and a small closed tear at the top of the rear flap fold otherwise fine. There are no previous owner names or other marks. The jacket is not price clipped. How can one writer hurt another where it really counts? This is the problem facing novelist Richard Tull, contemplating the success of his friend and rival Gwyn Barry. Revenger's tragedy, comedy of errors, contemporary satire, The Information is an extraordinary novel of dark humour and piercing insight.

661. Anscombe, Roderick: Shank

Published by Bloomsbury, 1996

Hardback 1st edition in fine condition. The unclipped dustwrapper is also fine. Author's second novel. Dan loved his wife Janie; he loved her so much that he killed her, because she was HIV positive. Or so he says. Now, Dan's on the run with the newest object of his obsession: Carol the prison nurse. Their daring breakout has made the evening news, and Dan wants to set the record straight.

662. Anthony, Evelyn: No Enemy but Time

Published by Hutchinson, 1987

Hardback 1st edition in very good condition. The dustwrapper is also very good. A thriller about a girl who returns to Ireland and is besieged by memories as she contends with the fact that her brother, her dearest and closest friend, has gone missing, possibly kidnapped and maybe even murdered.

387. Appignanesi, Richard: Italia Perversa: Part Two The Mosque

Published by Quartet Books Ltd, 1985

1st edition hardback in near fine condition.The book has no previous owner names or inscriptions. The dust wrapper has not been price clipped and still retains the original £9.95 net price, it too is in near fine condition. The second volume in a remarkable trilogy - one called "a piece of infinite fascination."

664. Arnold, Elliott: The Camp Grant Massacre

Published by Simon & Schuster, 1976

1st edition hardback in very good condition. The dustwrapper is also very good. The Apache kills and robs as a means of livelihood. It is his normal condition. It is useless to try to negotiate with these Apache Indians. A fictional account of an actual event.

Published by John Murray, London. 2011

1st UK hardback edition in fine condition. The dust wrapper is not price clipped and is also fine. Signed at the title page by the author but there are no previous owner names or other marks. Book 2 of the Stryker Chronicles. England stands divided: king against Parliament, town against country, brother against brother. For Captain Stryker, scarred hero of a dozen wars, the rights and wrongs of the cause mean little. His loyalties are to his own small band of comrades - and to Queen Henrietta Maria's beautiful and most deadly agent, Lisette Gaillard. So when Prince Rupert entrusts him with a secret mission to discover what has happened to Lisette and the man she was protecting - a man who could hold the key to Royalist victory - nothing, not false imprisonment for murder, ambush, a doomed siege or a lethal religious fanatic will stand in his way.

665. Atwood, Margaret: Cat's Eye

Published by Doubleday, 1989

1st edition hardback in fine condition, the jacket is very good. Elaine Risley, a painter, returns to Toronto to find herself overwhelmed by her past. Memories of childhood - unbearable betrayals and cruelties - surface relentlessly, forcing her to confront the spectre of Cordelia, once her best friend and tormentor, who has haunted her for forty years. 'Not since Graham Greene has a novelist captured so forcefully the relationship between school bully and victim...Atwood's games are played, exquisitely, by little girls'

666. Auel, Jean M.: The Shelters of Stone

Published by Hodder & Stoughton, 2002

Hardback 1st edition. Near fine in a like unclipped d/w. Jean M Auel's The Shelters of Stone, is the latest title in the Earth's Children series--undoubtedly one of the most celebrated works in publishing history--and includes The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters and The Plains of Passage.

Published by Phoenix House, London. 1998

UK hardback, 1st edition in fine/as new condition. The dust wrapper is not price clipped. There are no previous owner names or inscriptions. Set in the blood-drenched chaos of Beerlight, "a blown circuit, where to kill a man was less a murder than a mannerism," Dante Cubit and his pill-popping sidekick, the Entropy Kid, waltz into First National Bank with some serious attitude and a couple of snub guns. Murderous, trigger-happy cops, led by the doughnut-chomping redneck police chief, arrive in force, firing indiscriminately into the crowd gathered outside. Surrender or capture is out of the question. Dante's beloved, the murderous assassin Rosa Control; packing a not-so-small arsenal; prowls the streets, trying to engineer her man's escape. Will Dante slip past the forces of corruption and disorder to join his Rosa? What happens next is a tangled mess of reality and virtual reality.

667. Azzopardi, Trezza: The Hiding Place

84. Baddiel, David: Time For Bed

Published by Little, Brown and Company, London. 1996.

1st edition hardback in very good condition. The book is signed on the title page by the author. There is also a previous owners gift inscription on the half-title page. Pages slightly browning. The dust wrapper is price clipped but otherwise very good.

2051. Bailey, F. Lee: Secrets

Published by Stein & Day, New York, 1979

Hardback, 2nd reprint, fine in a very good dust wrapper. What happens when a lawyer needs a lawyer? Find out here, in this, the first and only novel by one of America's most famous (infamous?) criminal defense lawyers.

669. Bainbridge, Beryl: Every Man for Himself

Published by Duckworth, 1996

Hardback 5th impression. Fine book & wrapper. Recapturing the four crucial days prior to the sinking of the Titanic and the loss of fifteen hundred lives, this story is told from the perspective of Morgan, the American nephew of the owner of the shipping line, and reveals how his destiny is linked to other passengers. A Booker prize nominee

670. Bainbridge, Beryl: Young Adolf

Published by Gerald Duckworth & Co, 1979

Hardback 2nd impression of the 1978 1st edition. Very good book and d/w although the jacket has a small area of damage at the bottom of the spine. The story of a five month period in 1912 when, according to reports, Hitler fled to Liverpool to avoid conscription. The young Adolf Hitler turns up in England, trying to escape conscription into the Austrian army. But his brother Alois is far from thrilled to see his peculiar relative. Worst of all, the lad has a way of getting himself into exceedingly nasty scrapes with the English.

671. Baker, Nicholson: The Fermata

Published by Chatto & Windus, 1994

Hardback UK 1st edition. No d/w as issued. Missing the publisher's plastic wrap otherwise fine. From the author of Vox. Nicholson Baker's new novel is the story of Arno Strine, a modest temporary typist, who has perfected the knack of stopping time in its tracks and taking women's clothes off. He is hard at work on his autobiography, THE FERMATA, which proves in the telling to be a very provocative, very funny and altogether morally confused piece of work. Hilarious and totally original, Nicholson Baker's new novel is a triumphant comedy about sexual fantasy and fantastic sexuality.

2102. Ballard, J. G.: The Day of Creation

Published by Gollancz, London, 1987

UK hardback, 1st edition. Both the book and the dust wrapper are in near fine condition. No previous owner names and just a small nick to the top edge of the dust wrapper, no loss. In parched Port-la-Nouvelle in central Africa, Dr Mallory watches his clinic fail as constant warfare between a ragged band of guerrillas and the local chief of police causes the tribal residents to flee. In this drought-plagued and poverty-ridden country he dreams of discovering a third Nile tributary to make the Sahara bloom. During his search for water an ancient tree stump is accidentally uprooted and water wells up, spreading until it becomes an enormous river. Naming the river after himself, Mallory becomes obsessed with his creation. But almost as soon as he has discovered it he resolves to destroy it. With the once arid land now abounding in birds and beasts, he forges up-river in an old car ferry, clashing with hostile factions in a dangerous quest to find the source of his own creation. A mesmerising tale from a master storyteller, this is a spellbinding fable for our times.

2143. Ballard, J.G.: The Unlimited Dream Company

Published by Jonathan Cape, London. 1979

Hardback 1st edition. Both book and the dust wrapper are in very good condition. The page edges are a little browned as is the top edge of the jacket. When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is surreally transformed into a reality more akin to a dreamscape. Vultures invade the rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man's urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations towards an apocalyptic climax.

672. Banks, Iain: The Business

Published by Little, Brown And Company, 1999

Hardback 1st edition. Near fine book and unclipped d/w. The Business, a nearly omnipotent enterprise, is so infinitely discreet that even its top executives are vague about its actual business. It predates the Christian church and counts among its vast riches dozens of Michelangelo's pornographic paintings and several sets of Crown jewels. The only thing it lacks is political clout, a problem the Business plans to solve by buying a nation and joining the United Nations. Kate Telman, the Business's foremost expert on emerging technologies, is chosen to lead the effort. As this beautiful, ambitious American woman pursues the ultimate prize for her highly secretive transglobal employer, Iain Banks -- whom The Times of London calls "the most imaginative British novelist of his generation" -- offers a portrait of today's ubiquitous multinational corporations. Already a bestseller in England, The Business paints a picture that is at once wickedly satirical and frighteningly familiar.

674. Banks, Iain: A Song of Stone

Published by Abacus, 1997

1st edition hardback in fine condition. The jacket is also fine. The war is ending, but for the occupants of the castle, their troubles are just beginning. Armed gangs roam a lawless land, and the castle becomes the focus of a dangerous game of desire, deceit and death to one particular outlawed captain.

2079. Banks, Iain: The Bridge

Published by Little, Brown, London, 2001

Hardback, 1st thus. Both the book and the unclipped dust wrapper are in fine/as new condition. There are no previous owner names or marks present. The man who wakes up in the extraordinary world of a bridge has amnesia, and his doctor doesn't seem to want to cure him. Does it matter? Exploring the bridge occupies most of his days. But at night there are his dreams. Dreams in which desperate men drive sealed carriages across barren mountains to a bizarre rendezvous; an illiterate barbarian storms an enchanted tower under a stream of verbal abuse; and broken men walk forever over bridges without end, taunted by visions of a doomed sexuality. Lying in bed unconscious after an accident wouldn't be much fun, you'd think. Oh yes? It depends who and what you've left behind.

675. Banks, Russell: Rule of the Bone

Published by Secker & Warburg, 1995

Hardback 1st edition. Nr fine in like unclipped d/w. Bone is a punked-out teenager, living in a trailer with his alcoholic mother and abusive stepfather. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he's now into drugs and shoplifting as he drifts through dope squats and shopping malls. Until, breaking away from a group of biker thieves, he finds refuge in an abandoned school bus with I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian who dramatically changes his life. 'An immediate American classic, a Huck Finn for our times ... A wonderful novel, a true story of redemption' Mail on Sunday.

85. Banville, John: The Sea

Published by Picador, London. 2005.

Hardback reprint in fine/as new condition. Later printing of Banville's 2005 Booker Prize winning novel. Max Morden has reached a crossroads in his life, and is trying hard to deal with several disturbing things. A recent loss is still taking its toll on him, and a trauma in his past is similarly proving hard to deal with. He decides that he will return to a town on the coast at which he spent a memorable holiday when a boy. His memory of that time devolves on the charismatic Grace family, particularly the seductive twins Myles and Chloe. In a very short time, Max found himself drawn into a strange relationship with them, and pursuant events left their mark on him for the rest of his life. But will he be able to exorcise those memories of the past?