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Lady Chatterley’s husband returns from the War paralysed from the waist down. Frustrated by his attitudes as much as his disability, she begins a love-affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. She realises that to be fully alive she must live the life of the body as well as the mind, but in doing so she angers the conventions of her day. Banned for over 30 years for the explicit nature of its language and descriptions of sex, Lady Chatterley’s Lover also exposes the dehumanisation of the mechanical age, and underlines the profound power of tenderness.

Somewhere in Africa, a tiny, primitive tribe, the Amahaggers, live secretly amongst the debris of a lost Egyptian civilization, ruled by the beautiful semi-goddess Ayesha, or She-who-must-be-obeyed. Ludwig Horace Holly, a Cambridge academic, is reluctantly drawn into plans for a voyage in search of this legendary queen. With his adopted son, Leo, he sets out on a brave journey, following a trail of clues. Shipwrecked and captured by cannibals, their voyage soon turns into a nightmare. This masterpiece of suspense and adventure, by the author of King Solomon’s Mines, contains some of the most sensual, gently erotic passages in 19th-century literature.

Information is everything in Hard-boiled Wonderland. A specialist encrypter is attacked by thugs with orders from an unknown source, is chased by invisible predators, and dates an insatiably hungry librarian who never puts on weight. In the End of the World a new arrival is learning his role as dream-reader. But there is something eerily disquieting about the changeless nature of the town and its fable-like inhabitants. Told in alternate chapters, the two stories converge and combine to create a novel that is surreal, beautiful, thrilling and extraordinary.

Set in the days of the British Raj, Kipling’s finest novel is the exciting and touching tale of an Irish orphan-boy who has lived free in the streets of Lahore before setting out, with a Tibetan Lama, on a spiritual quest. Kim later enrols in the Indian Service and simultaneously embarks on an espionage mission of supreme importance. A thrilling climax in the Himalayas occurs when the two quests become entangled. Kim’s search for identity is staged within one of the most magnificent and affectionate portrayals of Indian culture in literature.

‘All things considered, I’m the most ordinary guy you could hope to find. So why do these weird things keep happening to me?’ Weird? Well, ghostly signs in the night, unexplained murders, a psychic teenager who can get vibes from cars, a one-armed, surfing Vietnam vet poet and a Sheep-Man, for example. All centred around the Dolphin Hotel, once a small, but profoundly idiosyncratic establishment, now transformed into a glistening symbol of economic success. But there’s a secret lurking behind its gleaming façade. Dance, Dance, Dance is a supernatural thriller, a detective novel and a love story, as unique as its extraordinary characters.

When Mr Earnshaw brings a black-haired foundling child into his home on the Yorkshire moors, he little imagines the dramatic events which will follow. The passionate relationship between Cathy Earnshaw and the foundling, Heathcliff, is a story of love, hate, pity, and retribution: the effects of which reverberate throughout the succeeding generations.

Like Proust’s ‘petite Madeleine’ Toru Watanabe’s memories of his student years, the girls, the tensions and the aspirations are jerked back into life by hearing the Beatles song ‘Norwegian Wood’ in an MOR version in an airplane. His first love, Naoko and a strange girl, Midori, intertwine in his life. Haruki Murakami is Japan’s leading contemporary novelist, a household figure in his own country and a cult figure in the Western world. Norwegian Wood has sold millions of copies in Japan and the rest of the world. This is the first of a series of Murakami novels Naxos AudioBooks will be recording over the next two years. Music – popular and classical – often plays a key role in Murakami novels and Naxos AudioBooks is the ideal label to produce these premiere recordings.