Russell Hoban

When eighty-three-year-old Irving Goodman falls in love with actress Justine Trimble she's been dead for forty-seven years. Irving may not know how he's going to attain his heart's desire but he knows a man who does. Istvan Fallok, a wizard of high technology, sees her on Irving's TV screen and hi-techs Justine out of the video...

In a not-so-distant future when lions are extinct Jachin-Boaz, a middle-aged mapmaker, leaves home with the wonderful map that was to tell his son where to find everything. In the ruins of a palace at Nineveh his son Boaz-Jachin finds the wall-carving of a great lion dying on the spear of an ancient king. In a series of rituals he evokes the...

On a day like any other, Kleinzeit gets fired. Hours later he finds himself in hospital with a pair of adventurous pyjamas and a recurring geometrical pain. Here he falls instantly in love with a beautiful night nurse called Sister. And together they are pitched headlong into a wild and flickering world of mystery ... Kleinzeit. In German that...

In the aquarium at the London Zoo, three sea turtles swim endlessly in 'their little bedsitter of ocean'. Two lonely people, William G and Neaera H, become obsessed with the turtles' captivity, and resolve to rescue them and release them in to the sea. William's and Neaera's diaries tell the story of how they achieve the...

He climbs a ladder to reach another man's wife and gives himself up to her beauty, but then Pilgermann descends into a mob of peasants inspired by the Pope to shed the blood of Jews. Alone on the cobblestones, mutilated and unmanned, he cries out to Israel, to the Lord his God, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He is answered instead by Jesus...

Recently separated Phil Ockerman falls hard for Bertha Strunk at a tango lesson in Clerkenwell. Bertha also bears a strong resemblance to the seventeenth-century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (with whom Phil happens to be obsessed), to the point where Phil is no longer sure which is which... Navigating several London Underground...