ALMA BOOKSA publisher with a soul

The Song of Roland

£8.99 £7.19

After years of fierce battle, the Emperor Charlemagne’s army is finally on the brink of victory over the Saracens in Spain. Having proposed his stepfather Ganelon for the perilous task of serving as Charlemagne’s envoy in the negotiations over the surrender of the Saracen king Marsile, Count Roland…

Smoke

By Ivan Turgenev

£8.99 £7.19

On his way back to Russia after some years spent in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov, the son of a retired official of merchant stock, stops over in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancee Tatyana. However, a chance encounter with his old flame, the manipulative Irina – now married to a general and a…

Celebrations

By Alan Burns

£8.99 £7.19

Celebrations, Alan Burns’s third novel, brings the inherent violence and oppression so apparent in Europe after the Rain into the setting of a family-owned factory, where social hierarchies, legal structures and humiliation keep the workers in line. By bringing the differences between workers sharpl…

Babel

By Alan Burns

£8.99 £7.19

Babel, Alan Burns’s fourth critically acclaimed novel, contains all the hallmarks of the aleatoric style he helped to define – shot through with seemingly random newspaper headlines, poems, snatches of conversation and anecdote, which both heighten and undermine meaning, and characterized by extreme…

Manon Lescaut

By Antoine François Prévost

£7.99 £6.39

When the young nobleman Des Grieux lays eyes on the beautiful and charming Manon Lescaut, he immediately falls in love with her, and they elope to Paris, incurring the wrath of his family and forfeiting his inheritance. However, he struggles to satisfy her taste for luxury, frittering away the littl…

A Funny Sort of Minister

By Dominique Demers

£6.99 £3.50

At a train station on her way to meet her friends Marie and Leo to recover her pet rock, Madame Charlotte accidentally picks up the Prime Minister’s elephant-hide bag instead of her own. As it contains important documents and the politician is due to make an important speech on children’s education,…

The Owl and the Pussycat and Other Nonsense Poetry

By Edward Lear

£7.99 £6.39

Written for the poet John Addington Symonds’s young daughter Janet while she was ill and confined to her bed, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ sees the two enamoured animals sail away in a boat “for a year and a day / To the land with the bong tree grows”, where they get married. Long considered one of th…

Loveless Love

By Luigi Pirandello

£5.99 £4.79

In ‘The Wave’, a young man falls dangerously in love with the tenant downstairs, who is engaged to be married; in ‘The Signorina’, a flirtatious young woman is caught between her feelings and her parents’ desire for a good match; in ‘A Friend to the Wives’, the peerless Pia Tolosani leaves a trail o…

Hashish, Wine, Opium

By Charles Baudelaire

£8.99 £7.19

Among the earliest artistic descriptions of the hallucinogenic experience in European literature, the four pieces in this volume document Gautier’s and Baudelaire’s own involvement in the Club of Assassins, who met under the auspices of Dr Moreau to investigate the mind-enhancing effects of hashish,…

David Copperfield

By Charles Dickens

£6.99 £5.59

David Copperfield is as fresh and entertaining today as it was when it was first published over a hundred and fifty years ago

Jude the Obscure

By Thomas Hardy

£5.99 £4.79

Jude Fawley, an intelligent and sensitive young Wessex schoolboy, dreams of studying at the famous university in Christminster, Hardy’s fictional representation of Oxford. He embarks on years of private study, but his plans are thrown into disarray when he is deceived into marriage and then deserted…

The Government Inspector

By Nikolai Gogol

£7.99 £6.39

The mayor and local officials of a small provincial town in Russia have got it made: corruption is rife and they have all the power. Yet, when they learn that an undercover government inspector is about to make a visit, they face a mad dash to cover their tracks. Soon, the news that a suspicious per…