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Pure by Andrew Miller
Paris, 1785.
A year of bones, of grave dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests. A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love...
A year unlike any other he has lived.
Paperback £8.99
* Winner of the Costa Prize for Fiction 2012 *
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Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White
Jack Holmes is in love. Sadly for him, his feelings are not returned, at least not in the way he would like them to be. It doesn't look as if there will ever be anyone he falls for: the other men he takes to bed never stay long.
Jack's friend Will Wright comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer and, like Jack, works on the Nothern Review. He is shy and lives with his sister, working on his novel. Jack will introduce Will to the beautiful, brittle young woman he will marry, but is discrete about his own adventures in love - for this is sixties New York, literary and intense, before gay liberation; a concoction of old society, bohemians rich and poor, sleek European immigrants and transplanted Midwesterners. Against this charged backdrop, the different lives of Jack and Will intertwine, and as thier loves come and go, they will always be, at the very least, friends.
Edmund White's startling perceptions of American society are here deployed to dazzling effect, as character after character is delicately and colourfully rendered and one social milieu after another brought vivdly to life. White is a connoisseur of the nuances of personality and mood, and here unveils his very human cast in all thier radical individuality. With fabulously a point insights, narrative daring and a gifted sense of the rueful rough-and-tumble of life, Jack Holmes and His Friend is a beautifully sculpted exploration of sexuality and sensibility.
Hardback £18.99 |
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Girl Reading by Katie Ward
An orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena, and an artist's servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. In a Victorian photography studio, a woman holds a book that she barely acknowledges while she waits for the exposure, and in a Shoreditch bar in 2008 a woman reading catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture.
Paperback £7.99
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A Man of Parts by David Lodge
Isoltaed in his blitz-battered Regent's Park house in 1944, the ailing Herbert George Wells, 'H. G.' to his family and friends, looks back on a life crowded with incident, books and women. Charting his unpromising start as a draper's asistant to his rapid rise to fame as a writer with a prophetic imagination, his immersion in socialist politics and his belief in and practice of free love, A Man of Parts is an astonishing novel of passion, ambition and controversy.
Paperback £7.99 |
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The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
Julie Otsuka's long awaited follow-up toWhen the Emperor Was Divine is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as picture brides nearly a cenutry ago.
In eight incantory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces thier extraordinary lives, from thier arduous journey by boat, where the girls exchange photographs of thier husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women in their homes; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history ; to the deracinating arrival of war.
In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel the American dream.
Hardback £12.99 |
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Married Love by Tessa Hadley
Lottie announces at the breakfast table that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a composer of religious music and lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior. We follow as Lottie's life unfolds; her marriage to Edgar, the tiny flat they share, the children that follow. It is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties tested but holding, and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments. Evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, it marks the beginning of what is an astonishing new collection.
On full display in these stories are the qualities Tessa Hadley has been praised for often before: her unflinching examination of family relationships; her humour, warmth and psychological acuity; her powerful and precise prose. In this collection there are domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies - captured and distilled to remarkable effect.
Married Love is a collection to treasure, a masterful new work from one of the most accomplished storytellers of today.
Hardback £14.99 |
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The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt
It is 1851, and a lust for gold has swept the American frontier. Two brothers - the notorious Eli and Charlie Sisters - are on the road to California, following the trail of an elusive prospector, Hermann Kermit Warm. On this odyssey Eli and his brother cross paths with a remarkable cast of characters - losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life - and Eli begins to question what he does for a living, and whom he does it for.
Paperback £7.99 |
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A Kind Man by Susan Hill
Tommy Carr was a kind man; Eve had been able to tell that after half an hour of knowing him. There had never been a day when he had not shown her some small kindness.
The birth of a daughter, Jeannie Eliza, crowns the young couple's happiness -- just as her shockingly early death casts them low. But they do not need to talk about Jeannie because she remains with them, and their love does not change.
In some ways it is no wonder that one of them falls ill, for grief takes its toll, and one Christmas even Eve's sister Miriam is remarking that Tommy looks unwell. But what happens next is entirely unexpected, not least for the kind man...
Paperback £6.99 |
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The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness, until she meets Ernest Hemingway and finds herself captivated by his energy, intensity and literary ambition. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they soon fall in with a circle of lively and volatile expatriates, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
But Jazz Age Paris - febrile, glamorous, its inhabitants running headlong from the shadow of the Great War - does not lend itself to family life and fidelity. As Hadley, now mother to a beloved baby son, struggles with jealousy and self-doubt, Ernest's ferocious literary endeavours begin to bear fruit, and they face the ultimate crisis of their marriage - a deception that will lead to the unravelling of everything they made for themselves in Paris, their 'great good place.'
A searing novel of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people.
Paperback £ 7.99 |
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Maine by Courtney Sullivan
The Kelleher clan's beachfront holiday house creaks under a weight of secrets. Won in a bar-room bet after the War, it is a place where cocktails follow morning mass, children eavesdrop, and ancient grudges fester. One summer, three generations of Kelleher women descend on the shore. Kathleen, finally sober, hoped never to set foot there again.
Maggie, pregnant, has left her hopeless boyfriend. Ann-Marie, bound to the family by marriage, fantasizes about an extra-marital affair. In the middle of all this is matriarch Alice, who drinks to forget her failings as a parent and the events of a single night, decades before. As changeable as the sea in front of their house, the Kelleher family is by turns fierce and loving, cruel and unforgiving.
Maine is a novel of sibling rivalry and painful secrets, alcoholism and denial; it lays bare the paradoxical nature of family and the love that we are bound to, no matter how savage the storm.
Paperback £12.99 |
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The Sea is My Brother by Jack Kerouac
Before he became famous with On the Road, Jack Kerouac was a sailor. This, his first novel, was inspired by his love affair with the sea. It follows the fortunes of Wesley Martin, a taciturn loner who 'loved the sea with a strange, lonely love', and Bill Everhart, a firebrand intellectual who longs for elemental freedoms and the simple life. After a last-minute decision to work their passage on ship, they find themselves on the S.S. Westminster in Boston. Bound for Greenland, they argue, drink Scotch, play cards, dodge torpedoes, contemplate the vast isolation of their surroundings, and wonder if they will reach their destination. Kerouac weaves their story into an intense portrait of friendship and brotherhood; an existential meditation on the desire to escape society and, above all, on the rugged, untameable power of the sea.
Kerouac began this novel shortly after his first tour as a Merchant Marine in the late summer of 1942, where he kept a journal detailing the gritty daily routine of life at sea and the character traits of his fellow shipmates. Shortly after his return, he wove these spontaneous observations into a 158-page handwritten manuscript, which was lost during his lifetime. Now published in its entirety, along with fragments of early stories and letters, and commentary illuminating his development as a writer, The Sea is My Brother give as a unique insight into the young Kerouac and the formation of his genius.
Hardback £25.00 |
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The London Train by Tessa Hadley
Paul sets out in search of his eldest daughter Pia, who has gone missing somewhere in London. At first he thinks he wants to rescue her, nut as time passes he is drawn deeper into the excitements of the capital, and of a life lived in jeopardy - he forgets his own way home.
In the opposite direction, Cora is moving back to Cardiff, to the house she has inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage, and the disappointments of her London life. Then she receives a telephone call to say that herhusband has disappeared...
Paperback £7.99 |
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There But For The by Ali Smith
Imagine you give a dinner party and a friend of a friend brings a stranger to your house as his guest. He seems pleasant enough.
Imagine that this stranger goes upstairs halfway through the dinner party and locks himself in one of your bedrooms and won't come out.
Imagine you can't move him for days, weeks, months. If ever.
This is what Miles does, in a chichi house in the historic borough of Greenwich, in the year 2009-10, in There but for the. Who is Miles, then? And what does it mean, exactly, to live with other people?
Sharply satirical and sharply compassionate, with an eye to the meanings of the smallest of words and the slightest of resonances, There but for the fuses disparate perspectives in a crucially communal expression of identity and explores our very human attempts to navigate between despair and hope, enormity and intimacy, cliché and grace.
Ali Smith's dazzling new novel is a funny, moving book about time, memory, thought, presence, quietness in a noisy time, and the importance of hearing ourselves think.
Hardback £16.99 |
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The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the great English novels.
As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different suitors, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner and college Darwisnist - turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged relationship with him. At the same time, her old freind Mitchell Grammaticus - who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange, resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his wife. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle graduate from college and enter the real world, they will be forced to re-evaluate everything.
Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, pre-nups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
Hardback £20 |
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Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James *
The year is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the nursery, Elizabeth's beloved sister Jane and her husband Bingley live nearby and the orderly world of Pemberley seems unassailable. But all this is threatened when, on the eve of the annual autumn ball, the guests are preparing to retire for the night when a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley's wild woodland. As it pulls up, Lydia Wickham - Elizabeth's younger, unreliable sister - stumbles out screaming that her husband has been murdered.
In a pitch-perfect recreation of the world of Pride and Prejudice, P.D. James elegantly fuses her lifelong passion for the work of Jane Austen with her talent for writing detective fiction. She weaves a compelling story, combining a sensitive insight into the happy but threatened marriage of the Darcys and the excitement and suspense of a brilliantly crafter detective story. Death Comes to Pemberley enshrines the qualities her readers have come to expect: psychological and emotional richness of characterisation, vivid evocation of place, and a credible and superbly structured plot, in a powerful and distinguished work of fiction.
Hardback £18.99 *Signed copies available (while stocks last!) |
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The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Echo
Nineteenth-century Europe, from Turin to Prague to Paris, abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian priests are strangled with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses by night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat.
But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay just one man? What if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all?
Hardback £20.00 |
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The Fear Index by Robert Harris
His name is carefully guarded from the general public but within the secretive inner circles of the ultra-rich Dr Alex Hoffmann is a legend - a visionary scientist whose computer software turns everything it touches into gold.
Together with his partner, an investment banker, Hoffmann has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that tracks human emotions, enabling it to predict movements in the financial markets with uncanny accuracy. His hedge fund, based in Geneva, makes billions.
But then in the early hours of the morning, while he lies asleep with his wife, a sinister intruder breaches the elaborate security of their lakeside house. So begins a waking nightmare of paranoia and violence as Hoffmann attempts, with increasing desperation, to discover who is trying to destroy him.
His quest forces him to confront the deepest questions of what it is to be human. By the time night falls over Geneva, the financial markets will be in turmoil and Hoffmann's world - and ours - transformed forever.
Hardback £18.99 *Signed copies available (while stocks last!) |
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1Q84: Book 1 & 2 by Haruki Murakami
The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo. Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult.
Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true?
Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining.
Hardback £20 |
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