A professor invites a colleague from the art department to his home to see a painting that he has kept secret for decades. The professor swears it is a Vermeer - why has he hidden this important work for so long ? The reasons unfold in a seies of stories that trace ownership of the painting back to the world War II and Amsterdam, and still further back to the moment of the work's inspiration.

Poetically written, absorbing, harrowing'' The Timesbr>br>''The raw and emotional account of an optician whose family fishing trip suddenly placed him amid the human tragedy of hundreds of drowning migrants is a story that needed to be told'' Fiona Wilson, The Timesbr>br>''An important book ... I cried all the way through'' Tracy Chevalierbr>br>From an award-winning BBC journalist, this moving book turns the testimony of an accidental hero into a timeless story about human fellowship and the awakening of courage and conscience.br>br>''I can hardly begin to describe to you what I saw as our boat approached the source of that terrible noise. I hardly want to. You won''t understand because you weren''t there. You can''t understand. You see, I thought I''d heard seagulls screeching. Seagulls fighting over a lucky catch. Birds. Just birds.''br>br>Emma-Jane Kirby has reported extensively on the reality of mass migration today. In The Optician of Lampedusa she brings to life the moving testimony of an ordinary man whose late summer boat trip off a Sicilian island unexpectedly turns into a tragic rescue mission.>

One of the BBC''s ''100 Novels That Shaped Our World''br>br>The Penguin English Library Edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelleybr>br>''Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness''br>br>A twisted, upside-down creation myth, Mary Shelley''s chilling Gothic tale lays bare the dark side of science, and the horror within us all. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who plunders graveyards to create a new being from the bodies of the dead - but whose botched creature causes nothing but murder and destruction. Written after a nightmare when its author was only eighteen, Frankenstein gave birth to the modern science fiction novel.br>br>The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.>

A real witch gets the same pleasure from squelching a child as you get from eating a plateful of strawberry and thick cream....

On her seventeenth birthday, Cassia meets her match. Society dictates he is her perfect partner for life. Except he's not.

Desmond Bates, professeur retraité de linguistique, devient sourd. Une surdité qui n'est pas apparue soudainement, mais graduellement et sournoisement et cela devient insupportable pour lui comme pour son entourage. C'est ennuyeux pour sa femme, qui vient de se lancer avec succès dans une nouvelle carrière et qui a autre chose à faire que de tout répéter deux fois, ennuyeux pour son père, qui souffre de cette même surdité et refuse toute aide. Et puis il y a Alex, l'étudiante que Desmond a accepté d'aider suite à un malentendu typique dû à sa surdité. Et malheureusement, il ne peut imputer ses demandes de plus en plus bizarres et déconcertantes à son audition imparfaite...