Alma Books: 225 books

Inspired by Boileau's Lutrin and illustrating the debate within European intellectual circles between the "Ancients", who argued that all essential knowledge was to be found in classical texts, and the "Moderns", who claimed that contemporary learning superseded the old sources, The Battle of the Books...

“Publish and be damned”, Wellington’s famous adage, runs like a leitmotiv through John Calder’s memoirs. He has been damned by a censorious press, by politicians, by other publishers and by organs of the state for publishing books on sensitive issues. Damned also for publishing such authors as...

When the mysterious and eccentric Miss Charlotte arrives in the village of Saint-Anatole to take over the tiny library, the locals are surprised to find out that she does things differently. Wearing a long blue dress and a giant hat, she takes her books out for a walk in a wheelbarrow and shows the...

Quest, a volume of seventeen stories aimed at children, will whisk you away from dark bedrooms to new dimensions and fantasy realms, via the Russian countryside and modern Rome. You'll encounter talking field mice, invisible friends, flying kraiks, white elephants, runaway books and wardrobes that...

Soon to be a major motion picture called The Theory of Everything, starring Eddie Redmayne as Hawking and Felicity Jones as his wife Jane. It chronicles their relationship, from his early development of ALS to his success in physics. In this compelling memoir his first wife, Jane Hawking, relates...

In June 1862, Dostoevsky left Petersburg on his first excursion to Western Europe. Ostensibly making the trip to consult Western specialists about his epilepsy, he also wished to see first-hand the source of the Western ideas he believed were corrupting Russia. Over the course of his journey he visited...

One of Tsutsui's best-known and most popular works in his native Japan, The Girl Who Leapt through Time is the story of fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Kazuko, who accidentally discovers that she can leap back and forth in time. In her quest to uncover the identity of the mysterious figure that she believes...

In this riveting and extensively researched account, Peter Conradi the celebrated author of The Kings Speech, on which the Oscar award-winning film of the same name was based offers an uncompromising portrayal of Europes royals and reveals the scandals, excesses, conflicts and interests hidden behind...

This selection from the diaries and letters of the Bulgakovs, mostly translated for the first time into English, provides an insightful glimpse into a fascinating period of Russian history and literature, telling the tragic tale of the fate of an artist under a totalitarian regime. The career of Mikhail...

On his way back to Russia after some years spent in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov, the son of a retired official of merchant stock, stops over in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancée Tatyana. However, a chance encounter with his old flame, the manipulative Irina now married to a general and a...

In a series of nine letters, the narrator tells his friend how he introduced Vera Nikolayevna, a married woman who had been forbidden as a child to read fiction and poetry, to the intellectual pleasures of Goethe’s masterpiece. Opening up in front of Vera’s eyes is not only the realm of imagination,...