Showing results by publisher "HarperCollins Publishers Limited" in Literary Fiction

She's a teacher. She knows the rules. When recent college graduate Imogene Abney takes a job as a teacher at pricey and exclusive The Vandenberg School, an institution populated by the most privileged boys in America, she is plunged into an unfamiliar world. Struggling to adjust, Imogene welcomes the friendship of student Adam Kipling. But when Adam starts taking things too far, she crosses a line that could result in disaster - losing her job, jail, and the total ruin of her reputation.

How far would you go to change your life in a year? Emmy finds herself single for the first time in years. She vows to find a man on every continent for some pure no-strings-attached fun....

John has a perfect life until the day his daughter goes missing. Maisie cares for her patients but hides her own traumatic past. Miller should be an innocent child but is obsessed with something he can’t have. They all have something in common, though none of them know it - and the truth won’t stay hidden for long....

It is the winter of 1954, and in the rubble-strewn aftermath of the Korean war Marilyn Monroe has come to Seoul to perform to the US soldiers stationed there. Incongruous in her silk dress and flawless makeup, she sings of seduction and love, dazzling battle-scarred Americans and Koreans alike. Alice, the woman chosen to be Marilyn’s translator, was once Kim Ae-sun, before her name was stolen from her - along with so much else - by the war.

2007: at the end of a momentous day, Charlie, Stella and John cross paths under the arches of Paddington Station. As Charlie locks eyes with Stella across the platform, a brief, powerful spark of recognition flashes between them. But they are strangers...aren't they? Plunging back 30 years we watch as, unknown to them all, the lives of Stella and John, and Charlie and his girlfriend Beth, are pulled ever closer, an invisible thread connecting them across the decades and through London's busy streets.

Ten daring stories from the Booker Prize-shortlisted Philip Hensher. Backdrops vary in this collection of stories from the author of The Northern Clemency - from turmoil in Sudan following the death of a politician in a plane crash to Southern India, where a Soho hedonist starts to envisage the crump and soar of munitions. Each story, regardless of location, reveals a great writer at the peak of his powers.

Beasts Royal is the second book written by Patrick O'Brian - made available, at last, for the first time since the 1930s. Published when Patrick O'Brian was just 19, this is the enchanting, often bloodthirsty collection of 12 tales of animal adventure that would be published in 1934 as the author's second book. His first, Caesar, had been published in 1930 and was an instant success, seeing O'Brian hailed as the ‘boy-Thoreau'.

An utterly charming and tender story of the disparate tenants of a Brooklyn brownstone and the community they form around their ageing landlord when their home is suddenly threatened. Within a charming if dilapidated Brooklyn brownstone live a family of sorts: beautiful agoraphobe Adeleine, who surrounds herself with the past....

Winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize. Auntie Mei is a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers. She has worked for 126 families and looked after 131 babies, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. But the 132nd baby and his mother, Chanel, prompts a crisis in Auntie Mei's life - a tremor that threatens to destroy her resolute detachment.

How many women can you fit into one body? A novel of split personalities. A marriage, its breakdown, and a perforated heroine: one woman, many faces, many personalities, and more emerging: a crumbling house, and the rooms of that house (which in our dreams are aspects of the self). Any more traumas and it’s all over! Sir Edwin Rice has decided to divorce Lady Angelica, ex-rock star. She has behaved intolerably. He petitions the Court to set him free. Angelica fights back.

The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries are a set of six medieval tapestries. Beautiful, intricate, and expertly made, they are also mysterious in their origin and meaning.

England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the boy's sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant's beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes caught up in her family's twisted intrigues.

Maybe it was because I was about to turn the same age my mother was when I lost her. Maybe it was because my husband and I were running out of things to say to each other. But when the online study called “Marriage in the 21st Century” showed up in my inbox, I had no idea it would change my life. It wasn’t long before I was assigned both a pseudonym (Wife 22) and a caseworker (Researcher 101). And, just like that, I found myself answering questions. Before the study, I was Alice Buckle. But now, I’m also Wife 22.

An actual event, a bomb attack on Greenwich Observatory in 1894, provided the inspiration for The Secret Agent. But Conrad offers more than a simple account of a bungled attempt at revolution. He provides an absorbing study of characters who disturb us as much as they enlist our sympathies.

Paul Scofield evokes all the warmth and laughter of the unlikely adventures of the immortal Samuel Pickwick and the other members of the Pickwick Club - Tracy Tupman, Nathaniel Winkle and Augustus Snodgrass. Helped by Sam Weller, Pickwick's faithful manservant, the Pickwickians bumble through hilarious romantic misadventures and other twists of plot.

John the Pupil is a medieval road movie, Umberto Eco seen through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino, recounting the journey taken from Oxford to Viterbo in 1267 by John and his two companions, at the behest of the friar and magus Roger Bacon, carrying a secret burden to His Holiness Clement IV. As well as having to fight off ambushes from thieves hungry for the thing of power they are carrying, the holy trio are tried and tempted by all sorts of sins: Ambition, pride, lust - and by the sheer hell and heaven of medieval life.

When Helen moves abroad with her loving husband, Gary, she can’t wait to meet her fellow expat teachers from the local international school. But her new start is about to become her worst nightmare.... As soon as the charming family across the way welcome Helen into their home, she begins to suspect that all is not as it seems. Then Gary starts to behave strangely, and a child goes missing, vanished without a trace. When violence and tragedy strike, cracks appear in the community, and Helen realises her perfect neighbors are capable of almost anything....

Harry Tabor is about to receive the Man of the Decade award. As he enters his twilight years, this distinction seems like the culmination to a life well lived. A perfect life. A life spent helping Jewish refugees from all over the globe find better lives in America, giving them a second chance. Harry knows all about second chances. He has the perfect marriage - his wife, Roma, is an eminent child psychologist, and they tell each other almost everything. His three grown children, Phoebe, Camille, and Simon, are all accomplished.

Meet Stephen Florida: college student, amateur wrestler, visionary, outsider. Entering senior year, his sights are set on the championships. Every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness yet also a step further from reality. Profane, manic and tipping into the uncanny, this is Florida's chronicle of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.

From the author of The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart and set in the boom years of the West Virginia coalmining industry, this is an epic story of personal ambition, exile and return, and a grand heist. Keystone, West Virginia, 1910. In the hot August rain, the townspeople gather to witness the first public hanging in over a decade. At the gallows are none other than poker player Abe Baach and his lover, the madam of the town’s brothel, one Goldie Toothman.