The Magus

Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time. Alone and desperate, Miranda must struggle to overcome her own prejudices and contempt if she is understand her captor, and so gain her freedom.

Charles Smithson, a respectable engaged man, meets Sarah Woodruff as she stands on the Cobb at Lyme Regis, staring out to sea. Charles falls in love, but Sarah is a digraced woman, and their romance will defy all the stifling conventions of the Victorian age.

In the title story in this collection of five novellas, a journalist visits a celebrated but reclusive painter. He is intrigued .by the complicated erotic relationship between the elderly artist and the beautiful young women who share their lives with him.

On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games. John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of human complexities. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a feast for the mind and the senses.

A late work by the great master novelist John Fowles. In his prologue, John Fowles tells us that A Maggot began as a vision he had of five travellers riding with mysterious purpose through remote countryside. This image gives way to another - a hanging corpse with violets stuffed in its mouth - which leads us into a maze of beguiling paths and wrong turnings, disappearances and revelations, unaccountable motives and cryptic deeds, as this compelling mystery swerves towards a startling vision at...

An extraordinary work of fiction, from one of the world's most exceptional writers. A journalist visits an elderly painter and becomes intrigued by his young female companions. Four years' worth of book research is set on fire in front of a writer. A successful MP disappears without a trace. Written with stylistic innovation, this sequence of novellas exploring the nature of art echoes the themes and preoccupations of Fowles' earlier work and cements his position as a master storyteller.