di Maria Edgeworth

Thady Quirk, devoted steward to the decaying estate of the Rackrent family, narrates a riotous story of four generations of a dying dynasty in Castle Rackrent (1800). Thady will defend his masters to the end, but eventually his naivety and blind loyalty cause him to ignore the warning signs as the family’s excesses lead them to ruin. This volume also includes Ennui, the entertaining ‘confessions’ of the Earl of Glenthorn, a bored, spoiled aristocrat. Desperate to be free from ‘the demon of ennui’, Glenthorn’s quest for happiness takes him through violence and revolution, and leads to intriguing twists of fate. Both novels offer a darkly comic and satirical exposé of the Irish class system, and a portrait of a nation in turmoil.

di Samuel Beckett

Krapp’s Last Tape was first performed by Patrick Magee at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1958, and described as ‘a solo, if that is the word, for one voice and two organs: one human, one mechanical. It fills few pages. It is perhaps the most original and important play of its length ever written.’ (Roy Walker)

The present volume brings together Krapp’s Last Tape and Beckett’s other shorter works or ‘dramaticules’ written for the stage. It will be complemented by a forthcoming Faber edition of dramatic works written for radio and screen.

Arranged in chronological order of composition, these shorter plays exhibit the laconic means and compassionate ends of Beckett’s dramatic vision.

KRAPP ‘Here I end this reel. Box – [Pause.] – three, spool – [Pause.] – five. [Pause.] Perhaps my best years have gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back. [Staring motionless before him.]

di Amitav Ghosh

‘Amitav Ghosh is such a fascinating and seductive writer… I cannot think of another contemporary writer with whom it would be this thrilling to go so far, so fast’ The Times

January 2001: A small ship, led by wealthy Scotsman Daniel Hamilton, arrives in the Sundarbans, a vast archipelago of islands in the mythical river Ganges, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea.

In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland, and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from Hamilton’s point of view, it is only a little less barren than a desert.

The eccentric Scotsman and the scientists on board the ship disembark to study this little-known environment, and to trace the journeys of the descendants of this society. Their goal? To create a utopian society, of all races and religions, and conquer the might of the Sundarbans.