- Table View
- List View
In Paris With You
by Clementine BeauvaisEugene and Tatiana could have fallen in love. If things had gone differently. If they had tried to really know each other. If it had just been them, and not the others. But that was years ago and time has found them far apart, leading separate lives. Until they meet once more in Paris. What really happened back then? And now? Could they ever be together after everything?
Based on a True Story: A Novel
by Elizabeth RenzettiIt might not have happened precisely that way... Fresh out of rehab, badly behaved diva Augusta Price has one last chance to turn her life around. Her memoir, Based on a True Story, has become an unlikely hit, and she's going to use that fame to start afresh. But Augusta is her own worst enemy. Augusta discovers that her former lover is planning a tell-all book of his own. Enraged - and concerned that perhaps her version of events may not have been the most accurate - Augusta decides to ensure that her story is the only one that will see the light of day. Aided and abetted by Frances, her newly employed ghostwriter, Augusta finds her way back to California, and to her lost love. It's time to face up to her past: something that will be the making - or breaking - of Augusta Price. Hilarious, honest, and unforgettable, Augusta will find her way into your heart - and steal it, and all your vodka.
The Rock Boy
by Jan MichaelA boy is washed up on the rocks in St Thomas Bay, Malta. He is injured and unable to speak. Who is he? What terrible secret is he hiding? All Josephine knows is that he needs her help. She cannot tell her parents in case the boy is one of the refugees her father says should be sent back to their own country. Jo enlists the help of her friend Andreas. Together they find a hiding place for the rock boy, but it becomes harder and harder to keep their secret. Finally, the only safe place left is The Hypogeum, an ancient underground temple that holds the bones of thousands of people killed in ritual sacrifice...
Ducks, Newburyport: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019
by Lucy EllmannSHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019 | OBSERVER FICTION PICKS 2019 | THE HERALD FICTION PICKS 2019 | THE IRISH TIMES FICTION PICKS 2019 | SCOTTISH REVIEW OF BOOKS FICTION PICKS 2019 | COSMOPOLITAN FICTION PICKS 2019Latticing one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of "happy couples", Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks ’n’ beans?A scorching indictment of America's barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.
Ungentlemanly Warfare
by Howard LinskeyA soldier and a spy, an officer but not quite a gentleman, Captain Harry Walsh is SOE's secret weapon.Loathed by his own commanding officer, haunted by the death of his closest friend and trapped in a loveless marriage, Harry Walsh is close to burn out when he is ordered to assassinate the man behind the ME 163 Komet, Hitler's miracle jet fighter. If Walsh fails, there is no prospect of allied victory in Europe.Harry Walsh is ruthless, unorthodox and ungentlemanly. He is about to wreak havoc...Ungentlemanly Warfare is a captivating historical thriller about a pivotal and dramatic event from the Second World War.Praise for Howard Linskey'One of the single most dramatic events of the Second World War, Linskey makes the mission of Jan Kubis and Joseph Gabcik impossible to put down' - Northern Echo'Linskey delivers a flawless feel for time and place, snappy down to earth dialect dialogue mixed in with unrelenting violence and pace' - Times'Howard Linskey is a powerhouse storyteller of exceptional skill. One of the best UK writers working today' - Steve Cavanagh
The Wind Dog
by Tom PaulinThe 'wind dog' is a broken rainbow, but, in the title poem of Tom Paulin's sixth collection, it provides this most agile of poets with a perfect bridge into childhood and its 'lingo-jingo of beginnings'. The poem is a gloriously singing meditation on the life of the ear - 'the only true reader' - and the meaning and music of both words and pre-verbal sounds are a recurring theme in this rich, cogent and prosodically adventurous volume.
Hedda Gabler: Large Print
by Henrik IbsenJust married. Bored already. Hedda longs to be free.This vital new version by Patrick Marber (Closer, Three Days in the Country) opened at The National Theatre, London, in December 2016.
Before the Feast
by Saša StanišicA dazzling, award-winning new novel by the 'offensively gifted' author of How the Soldier Repairs the GramophoneIt's the night before the feast in the village of Fürstenfelde (population: an odd number). The village is asleep. Except for the ferryman - he's dead. And Mrs Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells - the only problem is that the bells have gone. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit life than smoking.Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners and noble robbers in football shirts bump into each other. They all want to bring something to a close, in this night before the feast.The highly regarded and bestselling author Saša Stanišic was born in 1978 in what was then Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina), and currently lives in Germany. Before the Feast, his second novel, was a bestseller in Germany and won the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize; his award-winning debut How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone has been translated into 30 languages, and is also published by Pushkin Press.
Until We Meet Again
by Margaret ThorntonIt’s the summer of 1914 – the last peaceful summer Britain will see for four long years. Tilly Moon has long looked to her elder half-sister, Maddy, as a role model. Maddy’s love of music inspired Tilly to follow in her footsteps, becoming an accomplished pianist. If there is one thing she loves more than playing the piano though, it is her twin brother’s best friend Dominic. But, in the first tentative steps of romance, what they all feared has come to pass. The country is at war.Following the Moon family’s triumphs and tragedies during the outbreak of the First World War, Margaret Thornton’s heartfelt and highly evocative narrative brings those turbulent times to life, perfectly capturing the horror of war and the devastating sorrow it brought, but also the heroism it engendered in ordinary people.
Leaving Everything Most Loved: A gripping investigation in inter-war London (Maisie Dobbs #10)
by Jacqueline WinspearLondon, 1933. Some two months after an Indian woman, Usha Pramal, is found murdered in a South London canal, her brother turns to Maisie Dobbs to find the truth about her death. Not only has Scotland Yard made no arrests, but evidence indicates they failed to conduct a full and thorough investigation.Before her death, Usha was staying at an ayah’s hostel, a refuge for Indian women whose British employers had turned them out. As Maisie learns, Usha was different from the hostel’s other lodgers. But with this discovery comes new danger — soon another Indian woman who was close to Usha is found murdered before she can speak out.As Maisie is pulled deeper into an unfamiliar yet alluring subculture, her investigation becomes clouded by the unfinished business of a previous case. And at the same time her lover, James Compton, gives her an ultimatum she cannot ignore...
Travels with Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer
by Aidan DooleyTWO MEN Tom Crean, the Kerryman, whose phenomenal feats of bravery in the unexplored Antarctic earned him a rare medal for valour, pinned on him by King George. Aidan Dooley, the Galway man, who rejected a job in the bank for a life on the stage. ONE STORY In this enthralling, funny and moving account, actor Aidan Dooley tells the story of his journey with Tom Crean. His one- man show about this unsung hero grew from an unknown play with an unknown actor into an award-winning hit that has been performed from Dublin to Dubai, and from Broadway to the Antarctic ice. This is a tale of fortitude and courage – on stage and in the savage beauty at the bottom of the world.
House of Memories: House Of Memories (Mossgrove Ser. #3)
by Alice TaylorSet in rural Ireland in the early 1960s, a sequel to The Woman of the House and Across the River, House of Memories concludes the story of two neighbouring farms and their feuding families. Following his brutish father's death, young Danny Conway strives to rescue the family farm from ruin. When all seems hopeless, help comes from the most unexpected quarter. A story of grief and trying to cope with loss, but also of resilience in the face of family tragedy. No one knows the minutiae of country life as Alice Taylor does, and again she displays her unique ability to capture its rhythms and cadences.
This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs 1978–1986
by David KeenanSHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTHLRB BOOK OF THE WEEKCAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTHSHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock. It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends. Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.
The Divine Comedy
by Craig RaineThe Divine Comedy is a fugue and a black comedy. In delicious and bawdy detail, an unnamed narrator offers snapshots into the lives and loves of an astonishing cast of philanderers and fuckups while along the way, the evidence amasses for a comic, cosmic conspiracy. Craig Raine's second novel, The Divine Comedy, is a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body - its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals.
Remains of Elmet: Remains Of Elmet, Cave Birds And River
by Ted Hughes'The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall tothe Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge forcriminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution intextiles, and the upper Calder became "the hardest-worked river in England". Throughout my lifetime, since1930, I have watched the mills of the region and their attendant chapels die. Within the last fifteen years the endhas come. They are now virtually dead, and the population of the valley and the hillsides, so rooted for so long,is changing rapidly.' Ted Hughes, Preface to Remains of Elmet (1979)Ted Hughes's remarkable 'pennine sequence' celebrates the area where he spent his early childhood. It mixessocial, political, religious and historical matter - a tapestry rich in the personal and poetic investment of alandscape that both creates and is inured to its people, whose moors 'Are a stage for the performance of heaven./ Any audience is incidental.' Remains of Elmet is one of Hughes's most personal and enduring achievements.
The Third Brother (Books That Changed The World Ser.)
by Nick McDonellMike is spending the summer working for a magazine in Hong Kong when Christopher Dorr, a brilliant journalist, goes missing in Thailand. Mike's editor decides to send him to Bangkok to report on the drug-tourism crackdown, but Mike's real mission is to find Dorr, who is also an old friend of his parents. This is the beginning of a vertiginous journey that propels Mike into fast and seedy nights in Thailand and back to New York, to a home wrecked by violence.The Third Brother moves with the speed of a bullet to portray a young man - and a family - shattered by lies and by excess.
Where the Dead Men Go
by Liam McIlvanneyAfter three years in the wilderness, hardboiled reporter Gerry Conway is back at his desk at the Glasgow Tribune. But three years is a long time on newspapers and things have changed - readers are dwindling, budgets are tightening, and the Trib's once rigorous standards are slipping. Once the paper's star reporter, Conway now plays second fiddle to his former protégé, crime reporter Martin Moir. But when Moir goes AWOL as a big story breaks, Conway is dispatched to cover a gangland shooting. And when Moir's body turns up in a flooded quarry, Conway is drawn deeper into the city's criminal underworld as he looks for the truth about his colleague's death. Braving the hostility of gangsters, ambitious politicians and his own newspaper bosses, Conway discovers he still has what it takes to break a big story. But this is a story not everyone wants to hear as the city prepares to host the Commonwealth Games and the country gears up for a make-or-break referendum on independence. In this, the second book in the Conway Trilogy, McIlvanney explores the murky interface of crime and politics in the New Scotland.
The Nostradamus Prophecies: The Complete Prophecies For The Future (The Antichrist Series #1)
by Mario ReadingNostradamus wrote a thousand prophecies. Only 942 have survived. What happened to the missing predictions? And what secrets did they contain to make it necessary for them to remain hidden? Adam Sabir, a writer, sets off to unearth the missing prophecies. He is accompanied by enigmatic Achor Bale, a member of an ancient secret society that has dedicated itself to the protection of the 'Three Antichrists' foretold in Nostradamus's verses: Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, and the unnamed 'one still to come'... The pair embark on a terrifying chase through the ancient Romany encampments of France in a quest to locate the missing verses. If they are successful, life will never be the same for Sabir, Bale - or the rest of the world.
Lost In Vegas
by Ian JonesJohn Smith is a man who solves problems, just don’t try to stop him. He is in Las Vegas trying to track down a missing woman, which should be a simple job. But he soon discovers he is not welcome, and there are those who want to make sure he leaves the city fast, in one way or another.
The Eight-Year-Old Legend Book
by Isabel WyattThis collection of stories is based upon tales told by the Buddha to his monks 2500 years ago. Isabel Wyatt’s enchanting retelling conjures up a rich world of eastern legend, ruled by courtly kings and wise men, and populated by brave princes, faithful elephants and cunning monkeys. The stories tell of great adventures and heroes, of danger and courage, and most importantly of how wisdom and thoughtfulness always triumph over selfishness and greed.This anthology was compiled with children around the age of eight in mind -- children who are embarking on more and more adventures in their own lives, and themselves learning to become clever and brave.
Grove: A Field Novel
by Esther KinskyAn unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, travels to Olevano, a small village south-east of Rome. It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery, she embarks on walks and outings, exploring the banal and the sublime with equal dedication and intensity. Seeing, describing, naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place within it. Written in a rich and poetic style, Grove is an exquisite novel of grief, love and landscapes.‘Like a landscape painter who day after day sets up their easel outside, Esther Kinsky directs her eyes onto the terrain, studies it at particular times and in ever-changing weather, and seeks to understand its anatomy as well as the way it is used by people.’— Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
Please Do Not Ask for Mercy as a Refusal Often Offends (G - Reference,information And Interdisciplinary Subjects Ser.)
by Paul Bassett DaviesA darkly comic dystopian crime novelDetective Kilroy is assigned to investigate a horrible murder. He’s a fine cop, from the brim of his hat to the soles of his brogues, but his inquiries, far from solving the mystery, lead him into a deeper one – and to Cynthia, an enigmatic woman with a secret that could overturn Kilroy’s entire world.But where is this world? It seems both familiar and uncanny, with electric cars, but no digital devices, and the audience for a public execution arriving by tram. Meanwhile, the seas are retreating, and the Church exerts an iron grip on society – and history. Power belongs to those who control the narrative.Kilroy is forced to take sides between the Kafkaesque state that pays his wages, and the truth-seekers striving to destroy it, all the while becoming increasingly besotted with a woman who may only love him for his mind – in an alarmingly literal way.Please Do Not Ask for Mercy as a Refusal Often Offends is a dystopian satire that manages to be funny and frightening in equal measure.
The Girl from the Hermitage
by Molly GartlandGalina was born into a world of horrors. So why does she mourn its passing?SHORTLISTED: Impress PrizeLONGLISTED: Bath Novel AwardLONGLISTED: Grindstone Novel AwardIt is December 1941, and eight-year-old Galina and her friend Vera are caught in the siege of Leningrad, eating soup made of wallpaper, with the occasional luxury of a dead rat. Galina’s artist father Mikhail has been kept away from the front to help save the treasures of the Hermitage. Its cellars could now provide a safe haven, provided Mikhail can navigate the perils of a portrait commission from one of Stalin’s colonels.Nearly forty years later, Galina herself is a teacher at the Leningrad Art Institute. What ought to be a celebratory weekend at her forest dacha turns sour when she makes an unwelcome discovery. The painting she embarks upon that day will hold a grim significance for the rest of her life, as the old Soviet Union makes way for the new Russia and Galina’s familiar world changes out of all recognition.Warm, wise and utterly enthralling, Molly Gartland’s debut novel guides us from the old communist world, with its obvious terrors and its more surprising comforts, into the glitz and bling of 21st-century St Petersburg. Galina’s story is at once a compelling page-turner and an insightful meditation on ageing and nostalgia.‘A beautifully written book that takes you right into the characters’ world. Highly recommended’ LUCINDA HAWKSLEY
The English Spy
by Donald SmithThis tale of intrigue and betrayal goes to the heart of events surrounding the Treaty of Union in 1707. Daniel Foe (better known as Defoe), sent to Scotland to sway opinion towards Union, reports to his English spymaster. But Edinburgh is already a hotbed of counter-plots and nascent rebellion. Foe's encounters with a landlady who is not what she seems, and with a beautiful Jacobite agent, lead him to become a novelist, against his better instincts.
But n Ben A-Go-Go
by Matthew FittWritten entirely in Scots, this is a science fiction novel set in a future where the Scottish Highlands are the only unsubmerged area of Britain. With strong characters and a gripping plot, the well-defined settings create an atmosphere of paranoia and danger. The exciting denouement has a surprising twist and is set on Schiehallion. The introduction includes a section on how to read the Scots in this book, Matthew has made the spelling as straightforward as possible for a population used to English spelling conventions.