Scarlett Thomas

From the author of The Seed Collectors comes a darkly comic take on power, privilege, and the pressure put on young women to fit in--and be thin--at their all-girls boarding school. It's already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school. She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Natasha finds...

Can a story save your life? Meg Carpenter is broke. Her novel is years overdue. Her cell phone is out of minutes. And her moody boyfriend's only contribution to the household is his sour attitude. So she jumps at the chance to review a pseudoscientific book that promises life everlasting. But who wants to live forever? Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche,...

Post-worldquake, when electricity is infrequent and the Internet is extinct, but magic is flourishing, five students at the Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange pool their resources and magical abilities to defeat an evil publisher who intends to use the power bound up in books to destroy the universe.

For tens of thousands of years, the oaks have stood proud and tall, and along with the other trees around this planet helped provide the air that we all breathe. They give us shelter from the rain, shade from the hot sun and provide a home for a variety of animals. They even provide stability to the ground we all walk on. We little creatures have made a big impact on our home since we first arrived here. See how the story unfolds, seen through the...

When six young, clever people, all of whom are disaffected with their lives and looking for an escape, respond to a newspaper advert requesting "bright young things" for a "big project", they find themselves prisoners on an island. They must work out why they are there, and how to get away.

"After winning her local tennis club tournament, Scarlett Thomas, 41-year-old novelist, decided to dedicate a year of her life to tennis. At 12, Scarlett discovered her father was not the punk photographer who'd brought her up, but was in fact the man she previously knew as her godfather. At 14, she was sent to Mexico to connect with her terrifying grandmother. She was sent to a conservative boarding school in the middle of nowhere, her only link...