Lord Malquist and Mr MoonTom Stoppard's first novel, originally published in 1966 soon after the premiere of his runaway success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, is a dazzling fantasy set in modern London. The cast includes a penniless, dandified Malquist with a liveried coach, his Boswellian biographer, Moon, who frantically scribbles as a bomb ticks in his pocket, a couple of cowboys, a lion who's banned from the Ritz, an Irishman on a donkey claiming to be the Risen

Bodies continue to build up around them

Hope decides to write her autobiography

lover of women

close at hand

he's done a quiet favour for his uncle

and it will do almost anything to achieve this - but bribing the ChronoGuard

the butterflies that he catches and kills

but hes finding he gets a thrill out of working for Khan

A powerful elegy to the idiocies and intimacies of family love

Packed with incident

Perfect for fans of Cormac McCarthy and True Grit

The Middle Ground is a brilliant and witty novel about communication and non-communication across the barriers of sex