Most Popular Books by Mark Haddon

Narrated by a 15-year-old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, this dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions.

An explosive, highly charged, and hilarious middle-grade adventure from Mark Haddon, acclaimed author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. From the moment that Jim and his best friend, Charlie, bug the staff room and overhear two of their teachers speaking to each other in a secret language, they know there's an adventure on its way. But what does "spudvetch" actually mean, and why do Mr. Kidd's eyes flicker with fluorescent blue light when Charlie says it to him? Perhaps Kidd and Pearce are bank robbers talking in code. Perhaps they're spies. Perhaps they are aliens. Whatever it is, Jimbo and Charlie are determined to find out. There really is an adventure on its way. A nuclear-powered, one-hundred-ton adventure with reclining seats and a buffet car. And as it gathers speed and begins to spin out of control, it can only end one way . . . with a BOOM!

From the “terrifyingly talented” (London Times) author of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG-IN THE NIGHT-TIME and THE PORPOISE, eight mesmerizingly imaginative, deeply-humane stories that use Greek myths and contemporary dystopian narratives to examine mortality, moral choices and the many variants of love. Greek myths have fascinated people for millenia, seeing in them lessons about fate and hubris and the contingency of existence. Mark Haddon digs into the heart of these ancient fables and sees them anew. The dawn goddess Eos asked asks Zeus to give her lover Tithonus eternal life, but forgets to ask for eternal youth. In “The Quiet Limit of the World” Haddon imagines Tithonus’ life as he slowly ages over thousands of years, turning the cautionary tale of tempting the gods into a spellbinding meditation on witnessing death from the outside, and ultimately, how carnal love evolves into something richer and more poignant with time. In “The Mother’s Story,” Haddon takes the myth of the minotaur in his labyrinth, in which the beast is the spawn of the monstrous lust of the king’s wife Pasiphae, and turns it into a wrenching parable of maternal love for a damaged child, and the more real monstrosities of patriarchy. In “D.O.G.Z.” the story of Actaeon, who was turned into a stag after glimpsing the naked goddess Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about the continuum of human and animal behavior. Other stories play with contemporary mythic tropes – genetic engineering, trying to escape the future, the viciousness of adolescent ostracism – to showcase how modern humans are subject to the same capriciousness that obsessed the Greeks. Haddon’s tales cover a vast range, from the mythic to the domestic, from ancient Greece to the present day, from stories about love to stories about cruelty, from battlefields to bed and breakfasts, from dogs in space to doors between worlds, all of them bound together by a profound sympathy and an understanding of how human beings act and think and feel when pushed to the very edge. Throughout Haddon’s supple prose showcases his astonishing powers of observation, of both the physical world and the workings of the psyche. His vision is clear-eyed, but always resolutely empathetic.

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood or of manly bonhomie. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.” Some things in life can’t be ignored, however: his tempestuous daughter Katie’s deeply inappropriate boyfriend Ray, for instance, or the sudden appearance of a red circular rash on his hip. At 57, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden and enjoying the freedom to be alone when he wants. But then he runs into a spot of bother. That red circular rash on his hip: George convinces himself it’s skin cancer. And the deeply inappropriate Ray? Katie announces he will become her second husband. The planning for these frowned-upon nuptials proves a great inconvenience to George’s wife, Jean, who is carrying on a late-life affair with her husband’s ex-colleague. The Halls do not approve of Ray, for vague reasons summed up by their son Jamie’s observation that Ray has “strangler’s hands.” Jamie himself has his own problems — his tidy and pleasant life comes apart when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to Katie’s wedding. And Katie, a woman whose ferocious temper once led to the maiming of a carjacker, can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob. Unnoticed in the uproar, George quietly begins to go mad. The way these damaged people fall apart — and come together — as a family is the true subject of Haddon’s hilarious and disturbing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely. A Spot of Bother is Mark Haddon’s unforgettable follow-up to the internationally beloved bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Once again, Haddon proves a master of a story at once hilarious, poignant, dark, and profoundly human. Here the madness — literally — of family life proves rich comic fodder for Haddon’s crackling prose and bittersweet insights into misdirected love.

A magical celebration of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing from the bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

From Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother, and The Red House, nine dazzling stories diverse in style but united in emotional power The tales in Mark Haddon’s lyrical and uncompromising new collection take many forms—Victorian adventure story, science fiction, morality tale, contemporary realism—but they all showcase his virtuoso gifts as a stylist and the deep well of empathy that made his three bestselling novels so compelling. The characters here are often isolated physically or estranged from their families, yet they yearn for connection. In aggregate the stories become a meditation on the essential aloneness of the human condition but also on the connections, however tenuous and imperfect, that link people to one another. In the title story, an unnamed narrator describes with cool precision a catastrophe that strikes a seaside town, both tearing lives apart and bringing them together. In the prizewinning story “The Gun,” a boy’s life is marked by the afternoon he encounters a semiautomatic pistol belonging to his friend’s older brother; in “The Island,” a Greek princess is abandoned on an island by her abductor; in “The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear,” a group of adventurers travel deep into the Amazonian jungle but discover the gravest danger lurking among their own number; and in “The Woodpecker and the Wolf,” a woman wonders whether she has chosen to travel to Mars only to escape the entanglement of human relationships back here on Earth. Drawing inventively from history, myth, folktales, and modern life, The Pier Falls showcases Haddon’s immense gifts of invention and penetrating insight.

"The novel's pleasure, there in spades, lies in Haddon's caustic wit, his pitch-perfect nailing of each of his characters, and in his absurdly concise descriptions of the most banal activities. . . . In providing it, Haddon proves himself, once again, to be a brilliant, modern observer and cataloguer of human vice and frailty." —National Post The setup of Mark Haddon's brilliant new novel is simple: Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister, Angela, and her family to join his for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Richard has just remarried and acquired a willful stepdaughter in the process; Angela has a feckless husband and three children who sometimes seem alien to her. All eight arrive with low expectations for a pleasant holiday. But because of Haddon's extraordinary narrative technique, the stories of these eight people are anything but familiar. Told through the alternating viewpoints of each character, The Red House becomes a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly guarded secrets and illicit desires, all adding up to a portrait of contemporary family life that is bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt.

Polar Bears is a captivating tale by award-winning writer Mark Haddon. Balancing humour and pathos, it tells of one man's struggle to love, support and live with someone suffering from a psychological condition. With an elliptical structure and teasing timeline, the play handles the subject sensitively, with vivid, sympathetically-drawn characters and nicely-balanced dialectics. Polar Bears is thought-provoking and intelligent, with echoes of Nietszchean philosophy, and it refuses to offer any easy answers for those embroiled in mental instability. The plot is as follows: John has never met anyone like Kay. When the moon is in the right phase, she is magnetic and amazingly alive. But when the darkness closes in, she is lost to another world, a world in which John does not belong. Mark Haddon is a hugely celebrated writer who is best known for his 2003 novel The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time, which won a string of prestigious awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year. It quickly became an international bestseller, was printed in 32 countries and translated into 15 languages. Polar Bears is his first work for the theatre and enjoyed a high profile premiere at the Donmar Warehouse 1 April - 22 May 2010, directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring Jodhi May and Richard Coyle.

From the phenomenally bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time comes Mark Haddon’s first collection of poems. The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea reveals a poet of great versatility and formal talent. All the gifts so admired in Haddon’s prose are in strong evidence here—the humanity, the dark humour, and the uncanny ventriloquism—but Haddon is also a writer of considerable seriousness, lyric power, and surreal invention. This book will consolidate his reputation as one of the most imaginative writers in contemporary literature.

In a bravura feat of storytelling, Mark Haddon calls upon narratives ancient and modern to tell the story of Angelica, a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her father. When a young man named Darius discovers their secret, he is forced to escape on a boat bound for the Mediterranean. To his surprise he finds himself travelling backwards over two thousand years to a world of pirates and shipwrecks, of plagues and miracles and angry gods. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, Haddon conjures the worlds of Angelica and her would-be savior in thrilling fashion. As profound as it is entertaining, The Porpoise is a stirring and endlessly inventive novel from one of our finest storytellers.

A magical story from Mark Haddon, author of the phenomenally best-selling ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time’

Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. With her husband, Leonard Woolf, she started the Hogarth Press in 1917: the list ranged widely in fiction, poetry, politics and psychoanalysis, and published all Virginia Woolf’s own work. Its first publication appeared in 2017: Two Stories, bound in bright Japanese paper, contained a short story from both Virginia and Leonard. Typeset and bound by Virginia, with illustrations by Dora Carrington, 134 copies were printed by Leonard using a small handpress installed in the dining room at Hogarth House, Richmond. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of ‘Publication No. 1’ this new edition of Two Stories takes the original text of Virginia’s story, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (with illustrations by Dora Carrington), and pairs it with a new story, ‘St Brides Bay’, by Mark Haddon, a lifelong reader of Virginia Woolf. TWO STORIES also includes a portrait of Virginia Woolf by Mark Haddon, and a short introduction from the publisher about the founding of the Press.

In any 24 hours there might be sleeping, eating, kids, parents, friends, lovers, work, school, travel, deadlines, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, the news, the TV, Playstation, music, movies, sport, responsibilities, passions, desires, dreams. Why should you stop what you're doing and read a book? People have always needed stories. We need literature - novels, poetry - because we need to make sense of our lives, test our depths, understand our joys and discover what humans are capable of. Great books can provide companionship when we are lonely or peacefulness in the midst of an overcrowded daily life. Reading provides a unique kind of pleasure and no-one should live without it. In the ten essays in this book some of our finest authors and passionate advocates from the worlds of science, publishing, technology and social enterprise tell us about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken forgranted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on your time and attention - make books one of them. Carmen Callil Tim Parks Nicholas Carr Michael Rosen Jane Davis Zadie Smith Mark Haddon Jeanette Winterson Blake Morrison Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, each title in the 'Sparknotes' series contains complete plot summary and analysis, key facts about the work, an analysis of the major characters, suggested essay topics, themes, motifs, and symbols, and an explanation of important quotations.

On a rainy day at the seaside, Joe sets out on a magical journey on the Ocean Star Express.

Titch Johnson wants to be a special and a champion. But all he's good at is balancing a fork on the end of his nose. 8 yrs+.

The titles in this series of puzzle books aim to keep children amused for hours. Each book contains a range of different puzzles including spot-the-difference, anagrams, crosswords and more.

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.

„Uimitor de ambițios și de inovator, o carte superb scrisă." Pat Barker Unicul supraviețuitor al unui oribil accident aviatic este o nou-născută. Fetița va fi crescută în totală izolare de un tată putred de bogat și incestuos. Ajunsă o tânără frumoasă, ea trăiește într-un lux de basm, victimă însă a propriului părinte monstruos. Asta până când un necunoscut se îndrăgostește de ea și declanșează un blestem implacabil. Un roman ce sare din contemporaneitate în lumea antică, din realismul actualității într-o fantezie atemporală: pirați, prințese, strigoiul lui Shakespeare și o legendă străveche ce-și desface firele narative în timp și spațiu. Marsuinul este teribil de violent, de o ferocitate luminoasă, inocentă... Haddon reușește să restituie rolul de primă mână personajelor feminine lăsate în umbra de legendă lui Antiochus. The New Yorker Marsuinul declanșează plăcerea pură a lecturii. Max Porter Marsuinul lui Mark Haddon e un candidat serios la titlul de Romanul anului 2019. The Observer Mark Haddon (n. 1962) este un poet, prozator, autor de cărți pentru copii, dramaturg și fotograf britanic. Romanul său din 2003, O întâmplare ciudată cu un câine la miezul nopții, a câștigat nu mai puțin de 17 premii literare, inclusiv prestigiosul Whitbread Book Award. În prezent predă creative writing la Oxford University.

Una novela que no se parece a ninguna otra. Nominada por los estadounidenses como una de las 100 mejores novelas en la serie de PBS The Great American Read. Elogiada con entusiasmo por autores consagrados como Oliver Sacks e Ian McEwan y ganadora del Premio Whitbread y el Premio de la Commonwealth al Mejor Primer Libro, ha merecido la aprobación masiva de los lectores en todos los países donde se ha publicado. Su protagonista, Christopher Boone, es uno de los más originales que han surgido en el panorama de la narrativa internacional en los últimos años, y está destinado a convertirse en un héroe literario universal de la talla de Oliver Twist y Holden Caulfield. A sus quince años, Christopher conoce las capitales de todos los países del mundo, puede explicar la teoría de la relatividad y recitar los números primos hasta el 7.507, pero le cuesta relacionarse con otros seres humanos, Christopher es autista. Le gustan las listas, los esquemas y la verdad, pero odia el amarillo, el marrón y el contacto físico. Si bien nunca ha ido solo más allá de la tienda de la esquina, la noche que el perro de una vecina aparece atravesado por un horcón, Christopher decide iniciar la búsqueda del culpable. Emulando a su admirado Sherlock Holmes -el modelo de detective obsesionado con el análisis de los hechos-, sus pesquisas lo llevarán a cuestionar el sentido común de los adultos que lo rodean y a desvelar algunos secretos familiares que pondrán patas arriba su ordenado y seguro mundo. Reseñas: «Conmovedora, verosímil y muy divertida.» -Oliver Sacks «Soberbia. Mark Haddon escribe con sabiduría y sentido del humor.» -Ian McEwan «No pierdan la oportunidad de mirar el mundo a través de sus ojos.» -El Periódico «Reflexiones de una belleza y una profundidad inusuales.» -Babelia «Páginas llenas de ternura.» -El Cultural «Un libro apasionante.» -Blanco y Negro Cultural «Excepcional. Al mirar a través de los ojos de Christopher, vemos el mundo con mayor claridad y nos comprendemos mejor a nosotros mismos. ¿Qué más se puede pedir a un libro?» -The Sunday Telegraph ENGLISH DESCRIPTION A bestselling modern classic—both poignant and funny—about a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor's dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

Day-dreamer Ben finds himself involved in real action when he meets Agent Z. Suggested level: intermediate.

First published 1994. Thanks to Agent Z, Ben escapes from a holiday in hell with mad Aunt Gwen and Uncle Roger

A man remembers his boyhood fascination with the moon and the night mankind first bounced through the dust in the Sea of Tranquillity.