Parthian Books: 86 books

Originally published in 1960, this popular novel about frustrated youth laid the groundwork for contemporary writers such as Tony Parsons and Nick Hornby. All about love, lust, and loneliness, the book introduces Vic Brown, a young working-class Yorkshireman. Vic is attracted to the beautiful but...

Widely acclaimed for its warm humor, lyricism, and honesty, this accurate evocation of the 1930s has become a classic. In this delightful autobiographical novel, Dannie Abse skilfully interweaves public and private themes, setting the fortunes of a Jewish family in Wales against the troubled backdrop of the times: unemployment, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and the Spanish Civil War.

Part black comedy and flashlight noir thriller, part meditation on the stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living, this fictional debut experiments with genre boundaries and paints detailed portraits of its characters. There is Digger Davies and his untimely death; the award-winning...

His Last Fire is historical fiction with a contemporary feel, meticulously researched, bursting with a rich and arcane vocabulary, and written in an engaging present. A stunning new voice emerges with these strange and gem-like stories that are a riot through the revolutionary alehouses, printshops,...

Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 p.m., U.S. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated as his motorcade hits town, watched by crowds of spectators and the world’s media. Watching too from the grassy knoll nearby is a young mother who, in the confusion, lets go of her daughter's...

An intense and deeply personal account of five months spent high in the Andes Mountains, this travelogue combines historical and anthropological details with the thrill of extreme adventure. Hiking at more than 10,000 feet for almost the entire trip, the author follows the great road of the Incas,...

An honest, funny, and moving memoir of a young woman from England transplanted into another culture by love, Between Two Rivers details the experience of vibrant 1960s Baghdad life and the city’s complex social customs, pre-Saddam. When Dorothy set off on a night out with her sister, she never dreamed...

A beautiful and personal account, this memoir recalls the time spent by Brenda Chamberlain on the Greek Island of Ydra in the early 1960s. Sea and harbor, mountain and monastery, her neighbors and friends are unforgettably pictured; these were the realities outside herself while within there was a...

The lives of locals and expatriates intertwine and collide as they strive to negotiate the shifting mores of the ever-changing emirate of Dubai in this debut short story collection. In one story, a young male journalist puts himself at risk when he dares to defy local custom by giving an Emirati female...

A classic selection of the best of Stan Barstow's stories, covering the last five decades of British life. A group of young tearaways on a night out that begins with horse-play and ends in tragedy; the loneliness of a drunken miner's wife; a war-shocked ex-sailor forced beyond endurance, a widower...

During the miners' strike in the 1980s, a worker is killed in the striking coalfields of Wales. Some months later, a government minister thought to be connected with the death is also shot. Lewis Redfern—once a radical but now a political analyst and journalist—pursues the sniper, a lonely hunt...

Lucian Taylor believes he has been damned through contact with an erotically pagan world—or possibly through something degenerate in his own nature—in this critically acclaimed horror story. Moving to London to shake off his fears of being trapped by the dark imaginings of a creature inside him,...

Beautiful widow Joan D'Silva is at Calcutta's Howrah Station, fleeing Calcutta with her 11-year-old son Errol. On the same train is Lakshmi, a charismatic, sensual, and powerful hijira prostitute. Both women are fleeing to Lucknow in northern India to escape danger, but soon their lives will become...

In What I Know I Cannot Say / All That Lies Beneath, Dai Smith combines a novella and a linked section of short stories to create a dazzling fictional synthesis that takes the reader on a tour of the South Wales Valleys during the twentieth century. Picking up where his 2013 novel Dream On left off,...