ALMA BOOKSA publisher with a soul

Moll Flanders

By Daniel Defoe

£5.99 £4.79

Born in Newgate Prison to an incarcerated mother, Moll Flanders is compelled from earliest childhood to make her own way in the world and to live off her wit and beauty. Her desire to climb the rungs of society leads her through a tangled web of incest, adultery, prostitution, deception and theft, b…

The Bérenger Plays: The Killer, Rhinocerous, Exit the King, Strolling in the Air

By Eugène Ionesco

£9.99 £7.99

This collection brings together the four plays that feature Ionesco’s everyman protagonist Jean Bérenger. In ‘The Killer’, he comes across a “radiant city”, an ideal civilization which is being terrorized by a killer, whom he tries to help apprehend. In ‘Rhinoceros’, he is the only person in a provi…

Politics and Literature

By Jean-Paul Sartre

£8.99 £7.19

First published in French magazines in the 1960s, the essays and interviews collected in this volume tackle two of Sartre’s most enduring concerns as a philosopher: politics and literature. With regard to the former, they develop the notion of the intellectual not only as an aloof theoretician, but…

Six Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, Cap and Bells, Honest as Can Be, The Vice, The Dream – or is it?

By Luigi Pirandello

£9.99 £7.99

This selection of plays by Luigi Pirandello contains some of his best-known works, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author – an absurdist piece in which the characters, actors and Pirandello himself interact during the rehearsal of a fictional play within the play – and Henry IV – a tragicomic…

The Four Little Girls and Desire Caught by the Tail

By Pablo Picasso

£5.99 £4.79

In the 1940s, Picasso wrote two plays in French: the first, Desire Caught by the Tail, was conceived during the German occupation of Paris and features a cast of grotesque allegorical characters such as the Onion, Silence or Fat Anxiety discussing the crucial wartime themes of hunger, cold and love;…

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…

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…

Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)

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…

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…

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…