Books published by publisher Fourth Estate

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a short story about a young boy’s coming of age.While on holiday with his mother, a young boy sees a group of older children jumping from a rock into deep sea. He feels compelled to challenge himself to match them, and in doing so will take his first steps away from childhood.An amazingly vivid short story, Through the Tunnel explores the difficulties of childhood and ageing, resonating with many of Doris Lessing’s acclaimed novels.This story also appears in the collection To Room Nineteen.

From the much-loved, witty and excoriating voice of journalist Nick Cohen, a powerful and irreverent dissection of the agonies, idiocies and compromises of mainstream liberal thought. Nick Cohen comes from the Left. While growing up, his mother would search the supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit and despair. When, at the age of 13, he found out that his kind and thoughtful English teacher voted Conservative, he nearly fell off his chair: 'To be good, you had to be on the Left.' Today he's no less confused. When he looks around him, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, he sees a community of Left-leaning liberals standing on their heads. Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam that stands for everything the liberal-Left is against come from a section of the Left? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the Left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal-Left, but not, for instance, China, the Sudan, Zimbabwe or North Korea? Why can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a liberal literary journal as in a neo-Nazi rag? It's easy to know what the Left is fighting against - the evils of Bush and corporations - but what and, more to the point, who are they fighting for? As he tours the follies of the Left, Nick Cohen asks us to reconsider what it means to be liberal in this confused and topsy-turvy time. With the angry satire of Swift, he reclaims the values of democracy and solidarity that united the movement against fascism, and asks: What's Left?

The classic, heartrending story of a British boy’s four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp.One of the ten books – novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography – that make up our Matchbook Classics’ series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist. Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai – a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.Rooted as it is in the author’s own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered, but judged.

The enhanced audio/video content in this edition works on the Kindle App for iOS device (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch).Includes an original theme song, 10 designs from the artist Stainboy, and a custom-made map of Telegraph Avenue. Also includes audio excerpts read by Clarke Peters (The Wire, Treme) and a video interview with the author.The immensely gifted writer and magical prose stylist Michael Chabon delivers another bravura epic – a big-hearted, exhilarating novel exploring the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland families.The Title Page features a playbar. Tap to access the recording of the Telegraph Avenue theme written by Peter Lerman and performed by The Wakanda Philharmonic Orchestra. Go to Featured Enhancements for links to the specially commissioned artwork , video interviews with the author, audio extracts from the book and the Telegraph Avenue Mix Tape. Tap the song titles to link through to the iTunes store where you can purchase the listed tracks.

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Jean Sibelius hailed from the ‘small nation’ of Finland. Working in isolation, far from the great artistic capitals of Europe, Ross shows how Sibelius’s reinvention of classical forms went on to set the pace for classical composers around the world.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome dance with politics, social and cultural change.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.