National Network for Equitable Library Service

Charlie Gordon has an IQ of only sixty-eight and, the gentle butt of everyone's jokes, he conscientiously sweeps the floor in his local bakery until he is recommended to some university researchers. They have successfully operated on Algernon, a laboratory mouse, to enhance his intelligence and now they are looking for a human subject. The experiment turns Charlie into a genius but then he watches Algernon fade and die and recognises his own fate.

An old Roman senator, embarks on what will most likely be his last endeveavour, the retelling of the story of human creation. He recounts the history of the Clefts, an ancient commmunity of women living in an Edenic, coastal wilderness, confined within the valley of an overshadowing mountain. They have no need, nor knowledge of men, until the unheralded birth of a new child - a boy - threatens the harmony of their community.

Where do we come from? Where do we belong? For David and Nathalie, this need to know is more urgent than for most people, because they are adopted. Born to different mothers, brought up by the same parents, they have grown up as brother and sister and are fiercely loyal to one another. However, their decision - in their late thirties - to embark on a journey to find their birth mothers is no straightforward matter.

Haunted by the memory of the hijacked Paris-New York flight on which his mother was killed when he was a teenager, Lowell has been receiving calls from a stranger obsessed with learning the whole truth about Air France 64 badgering him for information about the flight she was also on as a child.

In Victory (1915) Conrad returns to the Malay Archipelago, to the setting of his first mature novel, Lord Jim, and in Axel Heyst he creates a hero who is in many ways similar to Jim, a noble altruist destroyed by his ideals.