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Engleby: A Novel
by Sebastian FaulksMike Engleby has a secret...This is the story of Mike Engleby, a working-class boy who wins a place at an esteemed English university. But with the disappearance of Jennifer, the undergraduate Engleby admires from afar, the story turns into a mystery of gripping power. Sebastian Faulks's new novel is a bolt from the blue, unlike anything he has ever written before: contemporary, demotic, heart-wrenching - and funny, in the deepest shade of black.
A Week in December
by Sebastian FaulksTHE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Seven wintry days to track the lives of seven characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life, and the group is forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit. Sweeping, satirical, Dickensian in scope, A Week in December is a thrilling state of the nation novel from a master of literary fiction.
The Rights Of Desire
by André BrinkRuben Oliver's life is coming adrift from its moorings. He has been obliged to take early retirement from his job as a librarian due to 'rationalisation' and the new political realities of South Africa. His wife has died. One of his sons has settled in Australia, the other is about to emigrate to Canada while trying to persuade Ruben that it is too dangerous to remain. The only constants are his old family home, haunted by the ghost of a young slave woman; and his housekeeper, Magrieta, with whom he has a shared history that goes back more than half his life. When Tessa Butler comes out of the rain one night in response to an advertisement for a lodger, Ruben is captivated by her. She restores passion to his life, but brings with her a turbulent past.
Tilt (Cape Poetry Ser.)
by Jean SpracklandJean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in free-fall. Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way - all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of natterjack toads, ice on the beach ('dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic') or 'the fund of life' in a used contraceptive. Bracken may run wild across the planet 'waiting for the moment/to pounce on the accident/of the discarded match' but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they've inherited. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat - for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning a birth.
The Exchange-rate Between Love and Money
by Thomas LeverittSarajevo, 2003. Best friends Frito and Bannerman roll into town, still in search of the fortune they missed out on in the dot-com years. For a while it seems that soaking up reconstruction money isn't the worst plan ever. But then they both meet Clare, a prosecutor with the international war crimes tribunal, and they both realise she is the best person they've has ever met, and that they can't both have her as much as they would, ideally, like. Meanwhile the city is overrun by black marketeers, poker hustlers, intelligence officers, and expat hedonists all high on Dayton money. By the time Frito and Bannerman have started bounty hunting men accused of war crimes, their lives have taken on all the risk - but very little of the money - that they'd bargained for...Winner of the Betty Trask Award.
White Blood: A Novel
by James FlemingThe son of an English father and Russian mother, Charlie Doig is a big man - big in stature and big in spirit. A naturalist, he roughs it around the world collecting birds and insects for museums. In 1914 he is on a mission for the Academy of Sciences in Russian Turkestan when war breaks out. His pay is stopped and his companion goes off to enlist. Doig, however, has no intention of volunteering to be killed. He returns to the Pink House, his family's home near Smolensk, adn to the woman he loves, his cousin Elizaveta.At first the Pink House remains untouched by outside events, and the familiar ways continue as before. But Imperial Russia is doomed and with in all the old certainties. Trapped by the snow with Doig and Elizaveta are a motley collection of old aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on - and the two soldiers, one of whom Doig is convinced is a Bolshevik out to destroy them all.
Thomas Gage
by James FlemingThomas Gage is a happy man. He has a fine house in Norfolk, two delightful children, a wife who brought with her a nice income from her father's paint firm, a Waterloo medal, and a painting on show at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Then, a few months after Thomas Gage's fiftieth birthday, Julius Gooby enters his life. Mr Gooby is a man of the future, manager of the proposed North Norfolk Railway from Norwich to Cromer, and the route of the railway crosses Gage's land. With the railway comes tragedy, and Thomas Gage's life begins to unravel until, at the end, medal on his chest, he travels to London to watch the Duke of Wellington's funeral and to take his revenge. With Thomas Gage James Fleming has fashioned another historical fiction of the very first rank, a portrait of a good man undone by grief, by others' greed and, ultimately, by progress.
The Temple Of Optimism
by James Fleming Robert FlemingFamously, Jane Austen created a fictional universe for 'three or four families in a country village'. In this remarkable first novel James Fleming achieves something very similar: out of the relationships of two men and one woman in Derbyshire in 1788 he has created a fiction that bears comparison with the great novelists of the nineteenth century.Anthony Apreece covets the land of his young neighbour, Edward Horne. Edward covets Daisy, Anthony's wife. On such simple foundations, James Fleming builds a novel of extraordinary richness, at once a wholly convincing representation of an eighteenth-century world and an utterly modern dissection of two of mankind's most powerful passions: greed and love
Raymond Chandler: A Biography (Everyman's Library Classics Series)
by Tom HineyBorn in Nabraska of Irish Quaker parents, educated at Dulwich College, and in the `mean streets' of Los Angeles about which he wrote, Raymond Chandler-writer, oil executive, poet, recluse, charmer, gentlman, drunk-was full of contradictions as his origins. His seven Philip Marlowe stories had sold 5 million copies by the time of his death in1059. Since the first authorised biography 20 years ago, much new material can be revealed about the man and his life. For this major new biography, Tom Hiney has had some access to unseen personal papers, as well as previously unrecorded reminiscences by those who knew him well and he vividly evokes the strange early years, brings alive the danerous glamour of the Hollywood era, and puts Chandler`s writing in the context of the crime and corruption in Prohibition LA. He gives illuminating details of friendships with Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham, the Spenders, Alfred Hitchcock and fully records for the first time his relationship with Cissy, his wife of 30 years, 17 years his senior, and his paradoxical relations with other women.
The Voyages Of Alfred Wallis
by Peter EverettAlfred Wallis was born in 1855 and died in a workhouse in Cornwall in 1942. A fisherman, sailing from Newlyn, Mousehole and St Ives, he began to paint in the 1920s - strange, brilliant pictures of ships and the sea. In 1928 he was discovered in St Ives by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood and for the rest of his life, alone in his tiny cottage, attacked by periods of madness, he painted furiously. In MATISSE'S WAR, Peter Everett explored the psyche of one of the most celebrated painters of our age. Here he performs a similar feat for another artist, one who knew no fame in his lifetime but whose paintings have found vast popularity since his death.
Bellocq's Women
by Peter EverettIn 1912, in Storyville, the notorious red-light district of New Orleans, a photographer named E. J. Bellocq took a series of photographs of the women who worked in the brothels. Rediscovered in the 1950s, Bellocq's photographs have become famous, but the man himself remains a mystery.In Bellocq's Women, Peter Everett performs as remarkable a feat of fictional reconstruction as he did in Matisse's War and The Voyages of Alfred Wallis. All we have of Bellocq are his photographs and a few fragmentary memories; in this extraordinary novel Everett not only brings the photographer to life - and with him his strange, tortured relationship with his mother and two young girls, one his landlady's daughter, the other a child whore - but also his world - the opium dens and bar rooms of New Orleans and the whore houses with their surreal combination of violence and homeliness.
The Asylum Dance
by John BurnsideLucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in The Asylum Dance - which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry - are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. This is territory that Burnside has made his own: a domestic world threaded through with myth and longing, beyond which lies a no man's land - the 'somewhere in between' - of dusk or dawn, of mists or sudden light, where the epiphanies are.Using the framework of four long poems, 'Ports', 'Settlements', 'Fields' and 'Roads', the poet balances presence with absence; we are shown the homing instinct - felt in the blood and marrow - as a pull to refuge, simplicity, and a safe haven, while at the same time hearing the siren call from the world beyond: the thrilling expectancy of fairground or dancehall, the possibilities of the open road. With a confident open line and complete command of the language, John Burnside writes with grace, agility and profound philosophical purpose, confirming his position in the front rank of contemporary poetry.
The Dumb House: A Chamber Novel
by John BurnsideAs a child, Luke’s mother often tells him the story of the Dumb House, an experiment on newborn babies raised in silence, designed to test the innateness of language. As Luke grows up, his interest in language and the delicate balance of life and death leads to amateur dissections of small animals – tiny hearts revealed still pumping, as life trickles away. But as an adult, following the death of his mother, Luke’s obsession deepens, resulting in a haunting and bizarre experiment on Luke’s own children.
Matisse's War
by Peter EverettAt seventy, Henri Matisse is a trim, clean old gentleman with a passion for naked women. He is UN MONSTRE SACRE who depicts with passion and conviction only what he takes pleasure in, only what he chooses to see. He is art personified. If there were no Matisse there would be no art as such. . . . He has purged everything from his painting except anxieties concerning structure and colour; his struggle is with these alone! MATISSE'S WAR is a minutely researched yet fictional account of Matisse's life during the years 1939-1945. It is also a superb portrait of the lives of the major French artists and writers under the German occupation. Louis Aragon, Malraux, Picasso and Bonnard all appear prominently in the narrative.
Sketches In Pen And Ink: A Bloomsbury Notebook
by Vanessa BellVanessa Bell, artist, sister of Virginia Woolf, wife of Clive Bell and lover of Duncan Grant, is one of the most fascinating and modern figures of the Bloomsbury set, but unlike most of them she rarely put pen to writing paper. When she did, she was witty and illuminating about their early lives. The eldest of the Stephen family, she grew up with Virginia in Victorian gloom at Hyde Park Gate and later blossomed in bohemian style in Bloomsbury. From the twenties to the forties she lived and painted at Charleston Farmhouse like a heroine of the sixties and seventies, at the centre of a colourful world of family, friends, artists and intellectuals. Sketches in Pen and Ink is a unique collection of largely unpublished memoirs - most of them written to be read at meetings of the Memoir club, in which Vanessa writes with wit and charm about herself, her childhood, her remarkable family and friends, her moving relationship with Roger Fry, and her art. Her daughter, Angelica Garnett, has written a vivid and personal introduction which adds considerably to our understanding of this extraordinary woman and artist.
A Shorter Life
by Alan JenkinsIn his most eloquent and formally satisfying collection to date, Alan Jenkins plays a series of powerful and haunting variations on love and loss. The themes that run through our lives are relatively few, for all that they sound subtly different to each of us, with their own rich freight of places and faces. In poems that pay homage to what is unique to his own past experience - a suburban fifties upbringing, a heady youth of rebellion and exploration - Jenkins reminds us vividly of what is experienced by us all. The search for love (or failing that, sex), the passing of time and the inevitability of pain and grief, the struggle for transcendence against our awareness of limitation: these are the things that can suddenly seem to compose a life - a life not so much reduced to essentials as seen in its passionate essence, a 'shorter' life. Though not in any formal sense a sequel, this poignant book recapitulates some of the motifs of The Drift (2000) and earlier volumes, to offer an extended meditation on memory and recurrence, and a statement - compelling, candid, sorrowful and subtle - of life's beauty and brevity.
River Of The Brokenhearted: A Novel
by David Adams RichardsJanie McCleary runs one of the first movie theatres in New Brunswick. A successful woman in a world of men, she is ostracized, a victim of double-dealing and overt violence. She trusts no one outside her family. Spanning generations, River of the Brokenhearted explores the life of this formidable woman, a pioneer before the age of feminism, and her legacy as it unfolds tragically in the lives of her son and grandchildren. Written with aching compassion and masterful sophistication, River of the Brokenhearted muses on the tyranny of memory and history, and peers into the hearts of these extraordinary characters.By the author of Mercy Among the Children.
The Italian Woman: (Medici Trilogy) (Medici Trilogy #2)
by Jean PlaidyIn the days when the word 'Italian' was synonymous with 'poisoner', there was no woman the French despised more than their own Queen Regent, Catherine de' Medici... When Catherine de' Medici was forced to marry Henry of Orleans, her's was not the only heart broken. Jeanne of Navarre once dreamed of marrying this same prince, but like Catherine, she must comply with King Francis's political needs. And so both Catherine and Jeanne's lives are set on unwanted paths, destined to cross in affairs of state, love and faith, driving them to become deadly political rivals.Years later Jeanne is happily married to the dashing but politically inept Antoine de Bourbon, whilst the widowed Catherine continues to be loved by few and feared by many - including her children. But Catherine is now the powerful mother of kings, who will do anything to see her beloved second son, Henry, rule France. As civil war ravages the country and Jeanne fights for the Huguenot cause, Catherine advances along her unholy road, making enemies at every turn...
Flaunting, Extravagant Queen: (French Revolution) (French Revolution #3)
by Jean PlaidyJean Plaidy's last French Revolution novel, featuring the tragic Marie Antoinette. At the age of fifteen, Marie Antoinette, beautiful and charming bride to the impotent Dauphin, is plunged into the intrigue of Versailles. Frivolous and reckless, she flouts the strict and demanding etiquette of the glittering court, and discovers the true nature of love, hate and jealousy.But the clouds of revolution are overhead, and Marie Antoinette, who only wishes to enjoy life, learns too late that the price of her enjoyment is very high...
The Road to Compiegne: (French Revolution) (French Revolution #2)
by Jean PlaidyThe second of Jean Plaidy's flamboyant French Revolution series.No longer the well-beloved, Louis XV is becoming ever more unpopular - the huge expense of his court and decades of costly warfare having taken their toll. As the discontent grows, Louis seeks refuge in his extravagances and his mistress, the powerful Marquise de Pompadour. Suspicions, plots and rivalry are rife as Louis's daughters and lovers jostle for his attention and their own standing at Court. Ignoring the unrest in Paris, Louis continues to indulge in frivolities. But how long will Paris stay silent when the death of the Marquise de Pompadour leads to yet another mistress influencing the King?
Louis the Well-Beloved: (French Revolution) (French Revolution #1)
by Jean PlaidyThe first of Jean Plaidy's flamboyant French Revolution series. France eagerly awaits the day the young King, Louis XV, comes of age and breaks free from the rule of his ministers. The country hopes Louis will bring back glory and prosperity to France. However, he is too preoccupied with the thrills of hunting and gambling to notice the power struggle going on in his own court. Soon, the King is introduced to the pleasures of mistresses and a succession of lovers follows. From the gentle persuasions of Madame de Mailley to her overtly ambitious sister, Madame Vintimille, France stands by and watches a King ruled by his women...
The Captive Queen of Scots: (Mary Stuart) (Mary Stuart #2)
by Jean PlaidyThe concluding novel in Jean Plaidy's Tudor/Stuart series, where two powerful cousins finally end their battle for England's crown.Scotland has been torn apart by civil war and the young and passionate Catholic Mary Queen of Scots is in the hands of her enemies. Under duress, Mary abdicates in favour of her son, James VI, and fleeing to England she boldly seeks refuge from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. But Elizabeth has never trusted the ambitious Mary, and consequently has her imprisoned.So begins a treacherous battle between two of history's most powerful and ruthless women. Without once meeting her cousin, Mary is held captive for nineteen years, whilst Elizabeth rules in the shadow of countless Catholic plots against her life...
Royal Road to Fotheringay: (Mary Stuart) (Mary Stuart #1)
by Jean PlaidyJean Plaidy's Tudor/Stuart series continues with the story of Mary Stuart's turbulent years of reign before her 19 year imprisonment by Elizabeth I.At just six days old, Mary Stuart became Queen of Scots. At just six years old she was betrothed to the Dauphin François, the future King of France. Reluctantly leaving Scotland, Mary is raised in the decadent French court in preparation to become the Queen of France. But her reign with François is short-lived. Widowed at just eighteen years old, Mary is once again forced to leave her home to return to Scotland. Now a Catholic queen of a Protestant country, Mary must rule with caution and choose her next husband prudently...
Lord Robert: (Tudor Saga) (Tudor Saga #10)
by Jean PlaidyThe tenth novel in Jean Plaidy's Tudor series - the passionate story of Elizabeth I's love affair with Robert Dudley.In the grim recesses of the Tower of London, two captives begin a passionate love affair that will last years but is destined to destroy them; one is Robert Dudley, the other is the future Queen of England, Elizabeth I. Pardoned by Queen Mary, Dudley and Elizabeth are freed, but their mutual longing must be from a distance: Dudley is married, and as the next heir to the throne, Elizabeth must tread carefully...
Mary, Queen of France: (Tudor Saga) (Tudor Saga #9)
by Jean PlaidyThe ninth of Jean Plaidy's Tudor novels - the story of Princess Mary Tudor, a celebrated beauty and born rebel who would defy the most powerful king in Europe; her brother, Henry VIII.Princess Mary Rose is the youngest sister of King Henry VIII, and one of the few people whom he adores unconditionally. Known throughout Europe for her charm and beauty, Mary is the golden child of the Tudor family and is granted her every wish. Except when it comes to marriage. Henry, locked in a political showdown with France, decides to offer up his pampered sister to secure peace between the two mighty kingdoms. Mary is unwillingly sent to France to marry the ailing King Louis, leaving behind her true love, Charles Brandon. But she will do anything to be reunited with Charles, even defy her brother, the most feared man in Europe...