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Thursbitch: From the author of the 2022 Booker longlisted Treacle Walker
By Alan Garner. 2003
A gripping time-slip novel by the author of the 2022 Booker Prize-longlisted Treacle WalkerHere John Turner was cast away in…
a heavy snow storm in the night in or about the year 1755. The print of a woman's shoe was found by his side in the snow where he lay dead. So reads an enigmatic memorial stone, high on the bank of a prehistoric Pennine track in Cheshire, a mystery that lives on in the surrounding hill farms. John Turner was a packman. With his train of horses he carried salt and silk, travelling distances incomprehensible to his community. John brought ideas as well as gifts, from market town to market town, from places as distant as the campfires of the Silk Road.In the twenty-first century, two hundred and fifty years after John's life, Ian and Sal's world resounds with the echo John's death. Walking on the moor one day they slip between time and are lost somewhere between Jack's vanished world and their own. This poetic, fantastical novel is is an evocation of the lives and the language of all people who are called to the valley of Thursbitch.'Eerie and immaculately written' Olivia Laing, ObserverThe Three Musketeers
By Alexandre Dumas. 2012
'Pure swashbuckling pleasure' Daily Telegraph Read this fresh modern translation of Dumas’s great work.The young D'Artagnan travels to Paris determined…
to join King Louis XIII's elite guards. Hot-headed and raring to prove himself, D'Artagnan challenges three strangers to a duel. These strangers are none other than the daring band of Musketeers, Porthos, Athos and Aramis. D'Artagnan's fearless spirit impresses them and the Musketeers take him under their wing. Soon, the wicked plots of Cardinal Richelieu and Milady de Winter propel the four musketeers to adventures on horseback, across seas and over rooftops to defend the honour of the Queen and protect the life of the King. This is a rousing tale of thrilling swordplay and royal intrigue, brave friends and the basest treachery.The Three Musketeers
By Alexandre Dumas. 2013
All for one, and one for all!The young D'Artagnan and the legendary musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis are 'the inseparables'…
- ready to sacrifice everything in a duel or game of dice in order to defend their honour or that of the King and Queen of France. Handsome and hot-tempered, they dive into raging battles or back-street conspiracies with gusto, especially if by their daring deeds they can thwart the wicked devices of their arch-enemy, Cardinal Richelieu, and his mysterious accomplice, Milady de Winter.'Pure swashbuckling pleasure' Daily TelegraphTRANSLATED BY WILL HOBSONVINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.Thomas and Mary: A Love Story
By Tim Parks. 2016
‘Somehow it seemed to him the only thing that would really solve the problem would be to return to the…
sea and find the old ring with their names and the wedding date engraved inside, in 22-carat gold, and put it on again and then the world would magically return to what it had been before. Many years before.This did not happen.’Thomas and Mary have been married for thirty years. They have two children, a dog, a house in the suburbs. But after years of drifting apart, things – finally – come to a head. In this love story in reverse, Tim Parks recounts what happens when youthful devotion has long given way to dog walking, separate bed times, and tensions over who left the fridge door open. Lurching from comedy to tragedy, via dependence, cold re-examination, tenderness and betrayal, Thomas and Mary is a fiercely intimate chronicle of a marriage – capturing the offshoots of pain sent through an entire family, when the couple at its heart decide it’s all over.This Other Eden
By Ben Elton. 1993
SMALL, WELL APPOINTED FUTURE. SEMI DETACHED.If the end of the world is nigh, then surely it's only sensible to make…
alternative arrangements. Certainly the Earth has its points, but what most people need is something smaller and more manageable. Of course there are those who say that's planetary treason, but who cares what the weirdos and terrorists think? Not Nathan. All he cares is that his movie gets made and that there's somebody left to see it.In marketing terms the end of the world will be very big. Anyone trying to save it should remember that.Thérèse Raquin
By Emile Zola. 2013
Mysterious disappearances, domestic cases, noiseless, bloodless snuffings-out… the law can look as deep as it likes, but when the crime…
itself goes unsuspected… oh yes, there's many a murderer basking in the sun...When Thérèse Raquin is forced to marry the sickly Camille, she sees a bare life stretching out before her, leading every evening to the same cold bed and every morning to the same empty day. Escape comes in the form of her husband’s friend, Laurent, and Thérèse throws herself headlong into an affair. There seems only one obstacle to their happiness; Camille. They plot to be rid of him. But in destroying Camille they kill the very desire that connects them…First published in 1867, Thérèse Raquin has lost none of its power to enthral. Adam Thorpe’s unflinching translation brings Zola’s dark and shocking masterwork to life.A NEW TRANSLATION BY ADAM THORPE‘Adam Thorpe's version deserves to become the standard English text’ Daily TelegraphTess of the D'Urbervilles
By Thomas Hardy. 2011
‘Thomas Hardy's thrilling story of seduction, murder, cruelty and betrayal’ The TimesTess is an innocent young girl until the day…
she goes to visit her rich 'relatives', the D'Urbervilles. Her encounter with her manipulative cousin, Alec, leads her onto a path that is beset with suffering and betrayal. When she falls in love with another man, Angel Clare, Tess sees a potential escape from her past, but only if she can tell him her shameful secret...The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
By Anne Bronte. 2009
'A powerful novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal' Daily Mail When the mysterious and beautiful young widow…
Helen Graham becomes the new tenant at Wildfell Hall rumours immediately begin to swirl around her. As her neighbour Gilbert Markham comes to discover, Helen has painful secrets buried in her past that even his love for her cannot easily overcome. 'Courageous and controversial' The Times **One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**The Temple-goers
By Aatish Taseer. 2011
A young man returns home to Delhi after several years abroad and resumes his place among the city's cosmopolitan elite…
- a world of fashion designers, media moguls and the idle rich. But everything around him has changed - new roads, new restaurants, new money, new crime - everything, that is, except for the people, who are the same, only maybe slightly worse.Then he meets Aakash, a charismatic and unpredictable young man on the make, who introduces him to the squalid underside of this sprawling city. Together they get drunk and work out, visit temples and a prostitute, and our narrator finds himself disturbingly attracted to Aakash's world. But when Aakash is arrested for murder, the two of them are suddenly swept up in a politically sensitive investigation that exposes the true corruption at the heart of this new and ruthless society.In a voice that is both cruel and tender, The Temple-goers brings to life the dazzling story of a city quietly burning with rage.Talking About O'Dwyer
By C. K. Stead. 1999
In his new bachelor flat, too close to comfort to his former family home, Mike Newall, Oxford don and Wittgenstein…
scholar seeks to rebuild his life, but feels increasingly weighed down by the past.When Donovan O'Dwyer, his colleague and fellow expatriate New Zealander dies, Newall attends the funeral. Afterwards, Newall reveals to his old friend Bertie Winterstoke the secret that O'Dwyer carried with him to his grave. During the battle for Crete in the Second World War, a soldier in New Zealand's Maori battalion died in harrowing circumstances. Believing his commanding officer, O'Dwyer, was responsible for the death, the soldier's family placed a makutu, a Maori curse, on him.Winterstoke demands to be told all, and in the days that follow Newall obliges. But Newall's life and O'Dwyer's are curiously interconnected and Newall finds that he must interweave O'Dwyer's tale with his own - his childhood in New Zealand, his self imposed exile in Oxford, his marriage and divorce, the pilgrimage recently made to Croatia and the promise of a new beginning that this may hold. Gradually, through a series of entwined stories, beautifully told, reflecting on decades of war and of peace, on memory and its failures, and on language and its limitations, Mike Newall comes to see a way of laying the ghosts of O'Dwyer's - and his own - past to rest.The Tale of Genji: Scenes From The Worlds First Novel (Kodansha's Illustrated Japanese Classics Ser.)
By Murasaki Shikibu. 2001
The first complete new translation for 25 years of the acknowledged masterpiece of Japanese literature. Lady Murasaki's great 11th century…
novel is a beautifully crafted story of love, betrayal and death at the Imperial Court. At the core of this epic is Prince Genji, the son of an emperor, whose passionate character, love affairs and shifting political fortunes, offer an equisite glimpse of the golden age of Japan. Royal Tyler's superb new translation is scrupulously true to the Japanese original but appeals immeadiately to the modern reader. This edition also includes notes, glossaries, character lists and a chronology to enable the reader to appreciate the richness of this classic of world literature.Take-Off
By Daniel Del Giudice. 1994
Take-off: almost a ton of inert matter transformed by the pilot as it lifts off the runway into a thing…
of spirit and beauty. Take-off: lifting one's shadow off the earth, entering a new element where movement is the very condition for existence, for, as the author observes, "in life, to choose the wrong wife or the wrong lift is conventionally viewed as being matters of varying gravity, but in piloting an aircraft an act of petty oversight, due to the obvious but decisive fact that in flight there can be no stopping, could be fatal."Whether he is reliving his first solo flight or a frightening experience as he pilots a light aircraft through storm clouds, his training and his instincts constantly at odds, or the mysterious loss of an airliner on an internal flight, or the brief, adrenaline-charged lives of Italian torpedo-bombers in World War Two, Del Giudice focuses on the edge of experience in which a person learns to take nothing, but nothing, for granted. While Take-off has much of the charm, humour and poetry to be found in the best of Saint-Exupéry (whose last flight is evoked in the final chapter), it will also remind the reader of Robert Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance by its close focus on the question of how the mind approaches problem-solving.Winner of the Bagutta, Campiello and International Flaiano Prizes.The Swing Around
By Barbara Anderson. 1949
New Zealand twenty years ago, when margarine was sold on prescription in pharmacies and protective tariffs ruled- The Minister of…
Cultural Links and Trade, an ex-dairy farmer called Hamish Carew, sets off on a 'Swing Around' of New Zealand's Asian friends and neighbours. With him are his wife Molly and two young officials, Freddy Manders and Violet Redpath. It should be a routine affair. But Molly doesn't like shopping, Freddy is consumed by bitterness at the wife who left him and the superiors who have sidelined his career, Violet finds herself unexpectedly ready for romance- and lurking on the horizon is the shadowy terrorist group Lightning Storm.Swansong
By Kerry Andrew. 2018
‘Swansong is the real thing, right from the start: spiky, strange and contemporary, but always with a dark undertow of…
myth and folklore tugging at its telling…this is a brilliant novel by a writer - and musician - of frankly alarming talent.’ Robert MacfarlaneIn this stunningly assured, immersive and vividly atmospheric first novel from the celebrated musician, a young woman comes face-to-face with the volatile, haunted wilderness of the Scottish Highlands. Polly Vaughan is trying to escape the ravaging guilt of a disturbing incident in London by heading north to the Scottish Highlands. As soon as she arrives, this spirited, funny, alert young woman goes looking for drink, drugs and sex – finding them all quickly, and unsatisfactorily, with the barman in the only pub. She also finds a fresh kind of fear, alone in this eerie, myth-drenched landscape. Increasingly prone to visions or visitations – floating white shapes in the waters of the loch or in the woods – she is terrified and fascinated by a man she came across in the forest on her first evening, apparently tearing apart a bird. Who is this strange loner? And what is his sinister secret?Kerry Andrew is a fresh new voice in British fiction; one that comes from a deep understanding of the folk songs, mythologies and oral traditions of these islands. Her powerful metaphoric language gives Swansong a charged, hallucinatory quality that is unique, uncanny and deeply disquieting.The Suicide Club
By Rhys Thomas. 2009
Craig Bartlett-Taylor was always trying to kill himself, but when he took an overdose at the back of Mrs Kenna's…
classroom, Richie thought he'd finally succeeded: it was a real-life Worst Case Scenario. But then the new kid, Freddy, steps in and saves Craig's life, and for Richie the lure of this mysterious newcomer is irresistible. Freddy is like nobody Richie has ever met. Dark, sardonic and dangerous, he gives flight to Richie's imagination, introducing him to a way of life he'd never thought possible. But when a night-time prank goes gut-wrenchingly wrong, Richie begins to question Freddy's motives, and all too soon he finds himself committed to a sinister pact, with inescapably tragic consequences. It's true that Freddy saved a life - but could he take one, too?With great wit and an unflinching eye for the muddle and drama of adolescence, The Suicide Club is a pitch-perfect portrait of teenage disaffection that sets boy against boy, imagination against reason - and, ultimately, life against death.Sudden Times
By Dermot Healy. 1999
Ollie Wing is barely surviving. Back home in Sligo, he collects trolleys in a supermarket car park and lives in…
a run-down house with a group of art students. He can't escape what has happened in London and is tormented by old fears and regrets. Finally, he decides to confront his demons.Street Haunting: Bulwell And A Name Loosely Attached (Little Clothbound Classics)
By Virginia Woolf. 2017
Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the…
award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.'The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful'. In such conditions, Virginia Woolf takes to London's streets in search of a pencil. The account of her journey - the people, the places, the pleasure - soon becomes one of the great paeans to city life. This collection also includes other wonderful essays, such as 'How Should One Read a Book?' and 'The Sun and the Fish'.'One of the great writers of the twentieth century' GuardianJames: A Novel
By Percival Everett. 2024
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told…
from the enslaved Jim's point of view • From the &“literary icon&” (Oprah Daily) and Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the basis for Cord Jefferson&’s critically acclaimed film American Fiction"Genius"—The Atlantic • "A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."—Chicago Tribune • "A provocative, enlightening literary work of art."—The Boston Globe • "Everett&’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful."—The New York Times"If you liked Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, read James, by Percival Everett" —The Washington PostWhen the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river&’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim&’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a &“literary icon&” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.Tomás Nevinson: A novel
By Javier Marías. 2021
The final novel from Spain's most acclaimed writer, a novel about a charismatic half-Spanish, half-English man who is recruited by…
British intelligence • &“Marías&’s best work.&” —El País&“Compelling, hypnotic, and exciting at the same time.&” —Los Angeles Review of Books Retired spy Tomás Nevinson—once an agent for the British Secret Service, now living a quiet life in his hometown, Madrid—is approached by his former handler, Bertram Tupra, with an offer to bring him back in from the cold for one last assignment.The mission: to go undercover again, in a small Spanish town, to find out which of three women who moved there a decade ago is in fact a terrorist trained by the IRA, on the run after masterminding several deadly attacks.Everything about the assignment is shadowy, from exactly who is in charge, to the question of what &“justice&” Nevinson will need to mete out once he unmasks the terrorist. But, lured by the appeal of being back on the inside, he accepts the job.Nevinson soon becomes intimately involved with each of the three women. How—or whom—to choose among them? Under increasing pressure, he must choose, and then act . . .Charting a world in which right and wrong, good and evil, are irreparably blurred, Javier Marías takes us on a journey of rare and unforgettable suspense in this, the final novel written before his untimely passing.Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories
By Kate Atkinson. 2023
A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life,…
which offer the gimlet eye and delightful social critique that have made Atkinson one of the most lauded writers of our time.Nothing is quite as it seems in this collection of eleven dazzling stories. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man who bets on a horse that may—or may not—have spoken to him. Everything that readers love about the novels of Kate Atkinson is here: the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop. A startling and funny feast for the imagination, these stories conjure a multiverse of subtly connected worlds while illuminating the webs of chance and connection among us all.