ALMA BOOKSA publisher with a soul

Prosecco: The Wine and the People Who Made it a Success

By Luigi Bolzon

£16.99 £13.59

Following in the footsteps of other illustrious Italian gastronomic successes – from pizza to pasta, from mozzarella to Parmesan and mortadella – Prosecco is the most recent “made in Italy” product to have colonized the world. But what is its history, and how did it come to be a global phenomenon? L…

The Monk: A Romance

By Matthew Gregory Lewis

£7.99 £6.39

A masterpiece of the Gothic genre, The Monk tells the story of the Capuchin friar Ambrosio and his fall from grace through desire, greed and lust. Favourably reviewed at first, the novel was later so widely and raucously denounced for its perceived licentiousness, blasphemy and corrupting influence…

Buster

By Alan Burns

£8.99 £7.19

Buster was the first, and arguably the most traditional, work of fiction by Alan Burns – dating from before his aleatoric style developed into “cutting up”, but displaying early examples of the trademark disjointed, brisk and biting style which earned him a cult following. Imbued with autobiographic…

Der fliegende Holländer

By Richard Wagner

£12.00 £9.60

Der fliegende Holländer is the first of Wagner’s operas that the author considered to be representative of his mature style. The Dutchman embodies one of the major themes that recur throughout Wagner’s work: that of a central character seeking redemption from a loving woman. Originally taken from a…

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…

Loveless Love

By Luigi Pirandello

£5.99 £3.00

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…

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 £4.00

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…