Narrative theme: Social issues

  • Beartown

    £10.99

    Beartown is a small town in a large Swedish forest. For most of the year it is under a thick blanket of snow, experiencing the kind of cold and dark that brings people closer together – or pulls them apart. Its isolation means that Beartown has been slowly shrinking with each passing year. But now the town is on the verge of an astonishing revival. Everyone can feel the excitement. Change is in the air and a bright new future is just around the corner. Until the day it is all put in jeopardy by a single, brutal act. It divides the town into those who think it should be hushed up and forgotten and those who’ll risk the future to see justice done. At last, it falls to one young man to find the courage to speak the truth that it seems no one else wants to hear. With the town’s future at stake, no one can stand by or stay silent. Everyone is on one side or the other. Which side would you be on?

  • Swing Time

    £9.99

    Two girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, ‘Swing Time’ is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them.

  • Jane Eyre

    £10.99

    A beautiful collector’s edition of Charlotte Brontë’s most popular novel

  • Catcher In The Rye

    £9.99

    A 16-year-old American boy relates in his own words the experiences he goes through at school and after, and reveals with unusual candour the workings of his own mind. What does a boy in his teens think and feel about his teachers, parents, friends and acquaintances?

  • American Wife

    £9.99

    On one of the most important days of her husband’s presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led them to the White House, and faces contradictions years in the making. Weaving race, class, wealth and fate into a tapestry, this novel lays bare the pleasures and pain of intimacy and love.

  • Vintage Classics To Kill A Mockingbird

    £9.99

    ‘Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’. This is a lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of the story – a black man charged with raping a white girl in the 30s.

  • PMC Things Fall Apart

    £9.99

    ‘Things Fall Apart’ tells the story of Okonkwo, an important man in the Igbo tribe in the days when white men were first on the scene. Okonkwo becomes exiled from his tribe, as a result of his pride and his fears, with tragic consequences.

  • PMC Grapes Of Wrath

    £10.99

    Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer prize-winning epic remains his undisputed masterpiece. It tells of the Joad family who travel West in search of the promised land, and find only broken dreams.

  • Wide Sargasso Sea

    £10.99

    Inspired by Jane Eyre, Wild Sargasso Sea is Jean Rhys’s powerful and compassionate story of Antoinette Cosway who is haunted by her brother’s death and the madness of her mother and who is trapped in an unstable marriage.

  • PMC Breakfast At Tiffany’s

    £9.99

    Immortalised in the film starring Audrey Hepburn, Truman Capote’s classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s is full of sharp wit. Its exuberant cast of characters vividly captures the restless, slightly madcap era of early 1940s New York.