Roddy Doyle

Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly's pub for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor's name and to remember him from school. Says his name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes too the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin but spent most of his life living with Nora Barnacle in various parts of Europe. Apart from a collection of verse, Dubliners was his first published work in 1914. In Dubliners, Joyce portrays quite brilliantly human relationships in Ireland at the turn of the century. His characters are so vital and exciting and the stories so fresh, evocative, and entertaining that they could well have been written today.

Born in the slums of Dublin in 1901, his father a one-legged whore-house bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he's out robbing, begging, often cold, always hungry, but a prince of the streets. At 14, already six-foot-two, Henry's in the General Post Office on Easter Monday 1916, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army, fighting for freedom.

Ricky with comedian chums and eminent guests discuss the big issues. Entertaining, thought-provoking and often taboo-crunching chat about ethics, science and art.

The sequel to A Star Called Henry, sees our hero, Henry Smart, arrive in New York in 1924. This being Prohibition, Henry ends up bootlegging hooch for the speak-easies of the Lower East Side. But when this catches the attention of the mobsters who run the district, Henry realises it's time to leave. In Chicago, Henry discovers music. Furious, happy music played by a man with a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong.

Marcus Conway has come a long way to stand in the kitchen of his home and remember the rhythms and routines of his life. Considering with his engineer's mind how things are constructed - bridges, banking systems, marriages - and how they may come apart. Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose, a whole life suspended in a single hour.

A collection of 17 wonderful short stories showing that Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor. A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country's civil war. A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game - and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN's newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves.

Seeking to uncover the holy grail of science, the elusive Theory of Everything that lies at the heart of the cosmos, Professor Stephen Hawking takes us to the cutting edge of theoretical physics. In a realm where truth is often stranger than fiction, he explains in layman's terms the principles that control our universe.

In the autumn of 1988, Michael Palin set out from the Reform Club with an ambitious plan: to circumnavigate the world, following the route taken by Jules Verne's fictional hero Phileas Fogg 115 years earlier. The rules were simple. He had to make the journey in 80 days using only forms of transport that would have been available to Fogg.

Ever since he can remember, Dom Joly has been fascinated by travel to odd places. In part this stems from a childhood spent in war-torn Lebanon, where instead of swapping marbles in the schoolyard, he had a shrapnel collection -- the schoolboy currency of Beirut. These early experiences left Dom with a profound loathing for the sanitized experiences of the modern-day travel industry and a taste for the darkest of places.

The Art of War is a classic Chinese military treatise, published in the fifth century BC. Lionel Giles' English translation was first published in 1910. It has remained popular to this day, finding use in business, the law, and negotiations.

The long-awaited autobiography of one of Britain’s best-loved actors. Born the son of a Billingsgate market porter at the height of the Second World War, David Jason spent his early life dodging bombs and bullies, both with impish good timing.

Audible Originals takes to the high seas to bring to life this timeless tale of pirates, lost treasure maps and mutiny. When weathered old sailor Billy Bones arrives at the inn of young Jim Hawkins' parents, it is the start of an adventure beyond anything he could have imagined. When Bones dies mysteriously, Jim stumbles across a map of a mysterious island in his sea chest, where X marks the spot of a stash of buried pirate gold.

Bringing together the imaginative strategies of fiction storytelling and new ways of narrating true, real-life events, creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing part of the creative writing world. It's a cutting-edge genre that's reshaping how we write (and read) everything from biographies and memoirs to blogs and public speaking scripts to personal essays and magazine articles.

A new collection of Christmas adventures, starring 12 incarnations of the Doctor plus many of his friends and enemies. Inside this festive audiobook of Doctor Who stories, you'll find timey-wimey mysteries, travels in the TARDIS, monster-chasing excitement and plenty of Christmas magic. Find out what happens when the Third Doctor meets Jackie Tyler, the Seventh Doctor and Ace encounter an alien at Macy's department store, and the Ninth Doctor tries to get Rose a red bicycle for Christmas.