"Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children's book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. Severely dyslexic and wanting to know more, he took it to his remedial English teacher Miss Iles, not realising the chain of events that he was setting in motion. Miss Iles became convinced that the book was the key to solving a puzzle, and that a message in secret code ran through all Twyford's...

To her latest novel, Beattie brings the same documentary accuracy and Chekhovian wit and tenderness that have made her one of the most acclaimed portraitists of contemporary American life. Marshall Lockard, a professor at the local college, is contemplating adultery, unaware that his wife is already committing it.

"A queer rom-com following once childhood best friends forced together to drive their former teacher across the country"--

A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their...

Fifteen years ago, English teacher Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at the elite Fayer Academy. Living on the campus off the coast of New England, she worked to become a beloved fixture of the school-and to shelter herself and her son, Peter, from a painful secret she left behind. Then she accepts the impulsive marriage proposal of ardent widower Tom Belou, and the prescribed life Vida has constructed begins to come apart. As Peter bonds with...

This 1945 classic British mystery from "a master of the whodunnit . . . combines a flawless plot, witty dialogue and a touch of surreal hilarity" (The New York Times Book Review). On holiday in the town of Tolnbridge with his butterfly net in hand, Prof. Gervase Fen, Oxford don of English Literature, is all set for a good frolic when he learns that the cathedral organist has been murdered. With Scotland Yard unable to make sense of the crime,...

"The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of 2015 In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions--personal, moral, artistic, practical--as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city she is made to confront aspects of living she has,...

A teenager casually suggests playing a cruel trick on the English teacher, but did he intend to end it with murder?

This playful whodunit featuring an Oxford don and a permanently silenced opera singer is "a splendidly intricate and superior locked-room mystery" (The New York Times). When an opera company gathers in Oxford for the first postwar production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, its happiness is soon soured by the discovery that the unpleasant Edwin Shorthouse will be singing a leading role. Nearly everyone involved has reason to loathe Shorthouse, but...

"Richard Cadogan is at loose ends in Oxford, very late at night indeed. Charmed by the window display of an old-fashioned toyshop, he is worried to find the door unlocked; surely the owner should be alerted to the potential for danger. At least that's what Cadogan tells himself, as he slips into the darkened store and up the narrow stairway to the apartment above. But rather than a snoring toyman, Cadogan finds a very dead old lady, the marks of murder...