Confessions of an ugly stepsister
by Gregory Maguire
Extreme beauty is an affliction Set against the rich backdrop of seventeenth-century Holland, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister tells the story of Iris, an unlikely heroine who finds herself swept from the lowly streets of Haarlem to a strange world of wealth, artifice, and ambition. Iris's path quickly becomes intertwined with that of Clara, the mysterious and unnaturally beautiful girl destined to become her sister.

Grendel
by John Gardner
Grendel is a beautiful and heartbreaking modern retelling of the Beowulf epic from the point of view of the monster, Grendel, the villain of the 8th-century Anglo-Saxon epic. This book benefits from both of Gardner's careers: in addition to his work as a novelist, Gardner was a noted professor of medieval literature and a scholar of ancient languages.

Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
On two voyages, an Englishman becomes shipwrecked in a land where people are six inches high, and stranded in a land of giants. This, the most famous of Jonathan Swift's works, has been a classic for over two centuries.

Hidalgo and other stories : the complete works of Frank T. Hopkins, with a comprehensive study by an international team of experts
by Frank Hopkins
During the 1930s and 40s the self-proclaimed legend, Frank Hopkins, told a naïve American public that he had won nearly five hundred endurance races, including an imaginary race across Arabia on a mythical mustang named "Hidalgo." Hopkins’ remarkable career supposedly began when he became a dispatch rider for the US government on his twelfth birthday in 1877. According to his mythology, this Renaissance Man of the Old West went on to work as a buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, African explorer, endurance racer, trick rider, bounty hunter, Rough Rider, big game guide, secret agent, Pinkerton detective and star of the Wild West show. Experts beg to differ. This book contains an unprecedented study, undertaken by more than seventy experts in five countries, ranging from the Curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum to the former Sultan of Yemen. These academics investigated the historical improbability of Hopkins’ claims and weighed him on his merit, not his myth.

The Big Over Easy: a nursery crime
by Jasper Fforde
It's Easter in Reading-a bad time for eggs-and no one can remember the last sunny day. Ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Dumpty, minor baronet, lover of women, ex-convict, and former millionaire philanthropist, is found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Yes, the big egg is down. All those brittle pieces sitting in the morgue point to foul play. Jack Spratt and his new partner, Sergant Mary Mary, search through Humpty's sordid and secretive past in hopes of finding the key to his death.

The Djinn in the nightingale's eye
by A. S. Byatt
The magnificent title story of this collection of fairy tales for adults describes the strange and uncanny relationship between its extravagantly intelligent heroine--a world renowned scholar of the art of story-telling--and the marvelous being that lives in a mysterious bottle, found in a dusty shop in an Istanbul bazaar. The companion stories in this collection each display different facets of Byatt's remarkable gift for enchantment. They range from fables of sexual obsession to allegories of political tragedy; they draw us into narratives that are as mesmerizing as dreams and as bracing as philosophical meditations; and they all us to inhabit an imaginative universe astonishing in the precision of its detail, its intellectual consistency, and its splendor.

Watership Down
by Richard Adams
This enchanting tale chronicles the adventures of a group of rabbits searching for a safe place to establish a new warren where they can live in peace. Though this has been hailed as one of the greatest children's books of all time, however, it also has a strong appeal for adult readers.

Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West : a novel
by Gregory Maguire
When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil? Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again.