The plot lines of The Campus Trilogy, radiating from its hub at the redbrick University of Rummidge, trace the comic adventures of academics who move outside familiar territory. Beginning in the late 60s Changing Places follows the undistinguished English lecturer Philip Swallow and hotshot American professor Morris Zapp as they exchange jobs, habitats and eventually wives. Small World sees Swallow, Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the beautiful Angelica Pabst jet-set about the international conference scene, combining academic infighting and tourism, esoteric chat and romance. And finally, the feminist lecturer Robyn Penrose swaps the industrial novel for a hard hat in Nice Work as she shadows the factory boss Victor Wilcox. Sparks fly when their beliefs and lifestyles collide.

How does the novel represent human consciousness on the page? In eleven sparkling essays on some of the great novelists of the last 200 years – from Charles Dickens to Martin Amis, Henry James to Philip Roth – David Lodge pursues this question with characteristic verve and wit. One of the best novelists and critics of his generation, Lodge is the perfect guide to look afresh at the mysterious workings of the creative mind.

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

Welcome to the Palladium, Brickley. Once the grandest music-hall south of the river, now its peeling foyer is home to stale popcorn, a depressed manager, and a cast of disparate picturegoers who touch and shape each other’s destinies. Amongst them is Mark, the cynical intellectual who seeks sensuality and finds spirituality; Clare, his girlfriend, who loses faith and discovers passion; Father Kipling, the scandalized priest; and Harry, the sexually frustrated Teddy boy. In his astutely observed first novel, David Lodge ushers in a congregation of characters whose hopes, confusions and foibles play out alongside the celluloid fantasies of the silver screen.

In this absorbing volume, David Lodge turns his incisive critical skills onto his own profession, salutes the great writers who have influenced his work, wonders about the motives of biographers, ponders the merits of creative writing courses, pulls the rug from under certain theoretical critics and throws open the curtains on his own workshop.

Meet the cynical paranormal investigator David Ash in James Herbert's Haunted, the first chilling novel in the David Ash trilogy. Three nights of terror at the house called Edbrook. Three nights in which David Ash, there to investigate a haunting, will be victim of horrifying and maleficent games. Three nights in which he will face the blood-chilling enigma of his own past. Three nights before Edbrook's dreadful secret will be revealed, and the true nightmare will begin . . .

Simon and David - a tall ten-year-old - are in a new land, together with a woman named Ines. The small family have found a home in which David can thrive. But David is spotted by Julio Fabricante, the director of a local orphanage, playing football with his friends. He shows unusual talent. When David announces that he wants to live with Julio and the children in his care, Simon and Ines are stunned. David is leaving them, and they can only love him and bear witness. The Death of Jesus is the completion of an incomparable trilogy in which J. M. Coetzee explores the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions.

A collection of essays on writers and writing by the Booker-shortlisted novelist and critic. Writing about real lives takes various forms, which overlap and may be combined with each other: biography, autobiography, biographical criticism, biographical fiction, memoir, confession, diary. In these thoughtful and enlightening essays David Lodge considers some particularly interesting examples of life-writing, and contributes several of his own. The subjects include celebrated modern British writers such as Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark and Alan Bennett, and two major figures from the past, Anthony Trollope and H.G.Wells. Lodge examines connections between the style and the man in the diaries of the playwright Simon Gray and the cultural criticism of Terry Eagleton, and recalls how his own literary career was entwined with that of his friend Malcolm Bradbury. All except one of the subjects (Princess Diana) are or were themselves professionally "in writing", making this collection a kind of casebook of the splendours and miseries of authorship. In a final essay Lodge describes the genesis and compositional method of his recent novel about H.G.Wells, A Man of Parts, and engages with the critical controversies that have been provoked by the increasing popularity of narrative and dramatic writing that combines fact and fiction. Drawing on David Lodge's long experience as a novelist and critic, Lives in Writing is a fascinating study of the interface between life and literature.

The restrictions of a wartime childhood in in London and subsequent post-war shortages have done little to enrich Timothy's early youth. But everything changes when his glamorous older sister, Kath, invites him to spend the summer at Heidelberg. Kath, who left home long ago to work for the American army, introduces her sixteen-year-old brother to a lifestyle that is deliriously fast, furious and extravagant. Dazzled by the indulgent habits of the American forces, but at the same time sensitive to the broken spirits of the German community beneath this sparkling surface, Timothy will find that his summer holiday is in more ways than one an unforgettable rite of passage.

The third in the classic trilogy of novels about the Eliots of Damerosehay. David Eliot finds his career as a successful and much acclaimed actor a definite strain and his brittle conversation and seeming arrogance earn him the dislike of his new secretary Sebastian Weber. But when he comes to stay at Damerosehay Sebastian learns that in the private world of his marriage and his children David is a very different person, and the warmth of his welcome there helps him to overcome his great personal suffering and unhappiness.

Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the rest are bound to lose their spiritual innocence as well as their virginities on the journey between university in the 1950s and the marriages, families, careers and deaths that follow. On the one hand there's Sex and then the Pill, on the other there is the traditional Catholic Church. In this razor-sharp novel David Lodge exposes the pressures that assailed Catholics everywhere within a more permissive society, and voices their eternal question: how far can you go?

Brandon Sanderson, the author of "Words of Radiance," coauthor of Robert Jordan s The Wheel of Time series, and creator of the internationally bestselling Mistborn trilogy, presents the second book in the Reckoners series: "Firefight." And don t miss "Calamity," the exciting conclusion to the Reckoners series available now!David Charleston has lived for one purpose: to kill Steelheart, the supremely powerful, seemingly invincible Epic who murdered his father. Now Steelheart is dead and David is beginning to question everything that he and the world understands about the superhumans they call Epics. David s suspicions are the reason he follows Prof to the flooded city once known as New York. But what he finds there could be what ultimately ends him. The truth might just burn deepest of all.

Brandon Sanderson, the author of "Words of Radiance," coauthor of Robert Jordan s The Wheel of Time series, and creator of the internationally bestselling Mistborn trilogy, presents the second book in the Reckoners series: "Firefight." And don t miss "Calamity," the exciting conclusion to the Reckoners series available now!David Charleston has lived for one purpose: to kill Steelheart, the supremely powerful, seemingly invincible Epic who murdered his father. Now Steelheart is dead and David is beginning to question everything that he and the world understands about the superhumans they call Epics. David s suspicions are the reason he follows Prof to the flooded city once known as New York. But what he finds there could be what ultimately ends him. The truth might just burn deepest of all.

The third and final updated edition of David Attenborough’s classic Life trilogy. Life on Earth covered evolution, Living Planet , ecology, and now The Trials of Life tackles ethology, the study of how animals behave. ‘This is, quite simply, the best thing I’ve ever done.’ Sir David Attenborough on the TV series, The Trials of Life, upon which this book is based. This is the third and last of Sir David’s great natural history books based on his TV series and competes his survey of the animal world that began with Life on Earth and continues with Living Planet. In Life on Earth, Sir David showed how each group of animals evolved. In Living Planet he looked at the way they have adapted to the whole range of habitats in which they live. Now, in Trials of Life, he completes the story by revealing how animals behave – and why.

'I drew my first breath on the 28th of January 1935, which was quite a good time for a future writer to be born in England...’ The only child in a lower-middle-class London family, David Lodge inherited his artistic genes from his musician father and his Catholic faith from his Irish-Belgian mother. Four years old when World War II began, David grew to maturity through decades of great social and cultural change - giving him plenty to write about. Candid, witty and insightful, Quite a Good Time to be Born illuminates a period of transition in British society, and charts the evolution of a writer whose works have become classics in his own lifetime.

A successful sitcom writer with plenty of money, a stable marraige, a platonic mistress and a flash car, Laurence 'Tubby' Passmore has more reason than most to be happy. Yet neither physiotherapy nor aromatherapy, cognitive-behaviour therapy or acupuncture can cure his puzzling knee pain or his equally inexplicable mid-life angst. As Tubby's life fragments under the weight of his self-obsession, he embarks - via Kierkegaard, strange beds from Rummidge to Tenerife to Beverly Hills, a fit of literary integrity and memories of his 1950s South London boyhood - on a picaresque quest for his lost contentment.