Alma Books: 225 books

Inside these covers you will find a collection of licentious limericks which have been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, some of them for over a hundred years. Until quite recently, few of these verses had ever appeared in print for public consumption, although many had been...

Presented as a collection of confessional letters written by the eponymous protagonist, The Sorrows of Young Werther charts the emotional journey of a young man who, during a stay in a picturesque German village, falls in love with Lotte, a local woman engaged to another man. As he realizes that his...

First published in 1797, The Italian, with its archetypal villain Schedoni, its intense romance and its sublime depiction of landscape, is the masterpiece of Gothic fiction. Enlisted by the Marchesa di Vivaldi, the perfidious monk Schedoni casts a malevolent presence throughout the book as he tries to...

As Cosmopolitans professional agony aunt for the last forty years, Irma Kurtz has had to deal with the most intimate problems of successive generations of readers, while having to keep up with the changing mores and attitudes in British and American society. In these memoirs, she looks back on the seismic...

One of Stevenson's most famous and enduringly popular works, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde describes the mysterious relationship between a respectable and affable doctor and his brutal associate. Set in the grimy streets of Victorian London, this tale of murder, split personality and obscure...

"Prisoner of God" is a revolutionary testimony against the Church and its methods, against the brainwashing to which many members are submitted, and the power and influence it exerts across a broad spectrum of society. It is also an account of the mysterious world of the abbeys: the monks' everyday life...

While Charles Dickens is best known and celebrated for his prolific journalistic output and novelistic creations, he also devoted some of his creative energies to verse. At turns sentimental, melancholy, playful, humorous and satirical, and ranging considerably in tone and format - from songs to narrative...

The only woman to serve as a soldier in the First World War, the Englishwoman Flora Sandes became a hero and media sensation when she fought for the Serbian Army and pursued a distinguished career in its ranks as officer. This account charts her incredible story, from her tomboyish childhood in genteel...

When the descendant of an ancient aristocratic family moves from Massachusetts to Exham Priory, his ancestral home in the south of England, he is plagued by the constant noise of rats scurrying within its walls. As the sound begins to haunt his dreams, he investigates the house and discovers a horrific...

By writing what he called a “secret book” taking the shape of a conversation between himself and St Augustine Petrarch aimed to compose a cathartic text which would alleviate his spiritual crisis and help him make further inroads towards knowledge and fulfilment.At once an intimate repository of...

In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey's innovative, idio-syncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, aesthetic and literary criticism, in a work strewn with examples ranging from antiquity to his own time, including the urban serial-killer John Williams....

Ivan Bunin’s first published work, The Village is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centering on episodes in the lives of two peasant brothers “characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely...

This Side of Paradise charts the life of Amory Blaine, an ambitious young man loosely based on Fitzgerald himself, as he moves from his well-heeled Midwest home to study at Princeton and then starts frequenting the circles of high society as an aspiring writer. Experiencing failure and frustration in...

Increasingly Samuel Beckett’s writing is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century succeeding the work of Proust, Joyce and Kafka. Beckett is a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare’s in the late Renaissance....