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Noonday (Life Class Trilogy Ser. #3)
by Pat BarkerIn Noonday, Pat Barker - the Man Booker-winning author of the definitive WWI trilogy, Regeneration - turns for the first time to WWII.'Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered, galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire...'London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, they now find themselves caught in another war, this time at home. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three of them reach out for quick consolation. Old loves and obsessions re-surface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice.Completing the story of Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville, begun with Life Class and continued withToby's Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy.'Bold, hard-hitting, unforgettable... a virtuoso rendition of the bombing, as huge swathes of London blaze away with the brightest of bright lights... Barker shows us how the city's finest moment was indubitably also its most terrifying, with luminous and unsparing insight.' Independent on Sunday'Barker's command of detail and gift for metaphor are as sharp as ever... As a tribute to those who dared and suffered on the home front, Noonday is in the first rank.' Antony Garner, Mail on Sunday'Narrative jumps colourfully alive, fizzes with energy.' Michele Roberts, Independent'Tremendously good.' Daily Mail'Pat Barker's Noonday marked the end of another war trilogy which shows no end to her talent in describing how conflicts rupture the soul.' Arifa Akbar, IndependentPraise for Pat Barker:'She is not only a fine chronicler of war but of human nature.' Independent 'A brilliant stylist... Barker delves unflinchingly into the enduring mysteries of human motivation.' Sunday Telegraph'You go to her for plain truths, a driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world.' The GuardianOther titles in the trilogy:Life ClassToby's Room
The Separation
by Dinah JefferiesFROM THE NUMBER 1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TEA PLANTER'S WIFE The Separation by Dinah Jefferies is a sweeping novel set in 1950s Malaya, about a mother searching for her daughters.What happens when a mother and her daughters are separated; who do they become when they believe it might be forever? 1953, the eve of the Cartwright's departure from Malaya. Eleven-year-old Emma can't understand why they're leaving without their mother; why her taciturn father is refusing to answer questions.Lydia arrives home to an empty house - there's no sign of her husband Alec or her daughters. Panic stricken, she embarks on a dangerous journey to find them through the hot and civil-war-torn Malayan jungle - one that only the power of a mother's love can help her to survive.Dinah Jefferies was born in Malaya in 1948 and moved to England at the age of nine. She has worked in education, once lived in a 'rock 'n roll' commune and, more recently, been an exhibiting artist. She spends her days writing, with time off to make tiaras and dinosaurs with her grandchildren. The Separation is her first book.
Pentatonic: A Story of Music (Penguin Specials)
by Jonathan CoeJonathan Coe's Pentatonic is a daring and original story about family and memory inspired by music.When a family celebrates the prize-giving day at their daughter's secondary school, thoughts turn to their own childhoods. The father remembers his living room piano recital, recorded on a well-worn cassette tape. The mother remembers her own father's war tragedy. As the father searches for the physical reminder of his past and the mother longs to forget her own, they confront the breakdown of their marriage in the present.In Pentatonic, Jonathan Coe movingly explores the memories that unite us and the experiences that drive us apart. The story is simultaneously available as a digital download with the piece of music which originally inspired the story.Praise for Jonathan Coe:'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby'Coe has huge powers of observation and enormous literary panache' Sunday Times 'Jonathan Coe's a fine writer who seems to try something new with every book' David Nicholls Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the author of eight bestselling novels including What a Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club, and a biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year.
Twilight
by Elie WieselTwilight is a haunting novel by Nobel Peace prize-winning author Elie Wiesel.Raphael Lipkin hears voices and talks to ghosts. Spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a New York psychiatric hospital, he is not a patient but rather a visiting professional with a secret, highly personal quest.A Holocaust survivor who has painstakingly rebuilt his life, he has watched, horrified and helpless, as it all started coming apart. He longs for Pedro, the man who rescued him in postwar Poland - who became his mentor, hero, saviour and friend - and taught him truth from falsehood. But Pedro vanished into Stalin's gulags . . .Desperate to explain his own survival, Raphael now seeks among the delusional patients the answers to the mysteries of good, evil and madness.Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, which is now part of Romania. He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. After the war, Elie Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist. During an interview with the distinguished French writer, Francois Mauriac, he was persuaded to write about his experiences in the death camps. The result was his internationally acclaimed memoir, La Nuit or Night, which has since been translated into more than thirty languages.
A Shorter History of Tractors in Ukrainian with Handcuffs
by Marina LewyckaMarina Lewycka returns to the characters from A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, with a hilarious erotic twist, in this laugh-out-loud short story, A Shorter History of Tractors in Ukrainian with Handcuffs.'Ever since she'd first read Sherlock Holmes, Laura Carter had dreamed of being a detective . . . Books were both her escape and her guilty pleasure, which eased her through the boring days and enlivened the nights when her husband was too tired for love. She devoured everything from Proust to Harry Potter, from James Joyce to EL James, she adored detective stories, but maybe her favourite author was Marina Lewycka, whose A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian had strangely echoed a case she had once worked on.'Marina Lewycka was born in Kiel, Germany, after the war, grew up in England and lives in Sheffield. Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award. Her second novel, Two Caravans, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Two Caravans, We Are All Made of Glue and Marina's fourth novel, Various Pets Alive and Dead, are all available in Penguin.
Here I Am
by Jonathan Safran FoerThe New York Times bestselling new novel about modern family lives from the author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly CloseDiscover Jonathan Safran Foer's greatest novel yet.'Towering and glorious: a tale of social, familial and marital breakdown and the End of the World. The funniest literary novel I have ever read' The TimesJacob and Julia Bloch are about to be tested . . .By Jacob's grandfather, who won't go quietly into a retirement home.By the family reunion, that everyone is dreading.By their son's heroic attempts to get expelled.And by the sexting affair that will rock their marriage.A typical modern American family, the Blochs cling together even as they are torn apart. Which is when catastrophe decides to strike . . . Confronting the enduring question of what it means to be human with inventiveness, playfulness and compassion, Here I Am is a great American family novel for our times, an unmissable read for fans of Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon, a masterpiece about how we live now.'A rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives' Evening Standard 'Lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it's impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family' Time'Astonishing. So sad and so funny and so wry' Scotland on Sunday
Aren't We Sisters?
by Patricia FergusonFollowing on from The Midwife's Daughter, Aren't We Sisters? is a gripping novel about buried secrets and unlikely friendship.Norah Thornby can no longer afford to live in her grand family home in the centre of Silkhampton. Unless, perhaps, she can find a respectable lodger.But Nurse Lettie Quick is not nearly as respectable as she seems. What's really going on at the clinic she has opened? And why has she chosen Silkhampton?Meanwhile the beautiful Rae Grainger has found the perfect place to stay, in an isolated house miles away from the town. It's certainly rather creepy, especially at candlelit bedtime, but Rae knows that all she has to do is stay out of sight, until others - paid, professional others - are ready to take her little problem away. Then she can just forget the whole ghastly business . . . can't she?No one guesses, of course, that there's a killer quietly at work in Silkhampton; that in one way or another all three women are in danger . . .
Em and the Big Hoom
by Jerry PintoBrilliantly comic and almost unbearably moving, Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom is one of the most powerful and original fiction debuts of recent years.She was always Em to us. There may have been a time when we called her something ordinary like Mummy, or Ma, but I don't remember. She was Em, and our father, sometimes, was the Big Hoom.In a tiny flat in Bombay Imelda Mendes - Em to her children - holds her family in thrall with her flamboyance, her manic affection and her cruel candour. Her husband - to whom she was once 'Buttercup' - and her two children must bear her 'microweathers', her swings from laugh-out-loud joy to dark malevolence. In Em and the Big Hoom, the son begins to unravel the story of his parents: the mother he loves and hates in the same moment and the unusual man who courted, married and protected her - as much from herself as from the world. 'It is utterly persuasive and deeply affecting: stylistically adventurous it is never self-indulgent; although suffused with pain it shows no trace of self-pity. Parts of it are extremely funny, and its pages are filled with endearing and eccentric characters' Amitav Ghosh'Pinto chases the elusive portrait of a mother who simply said of herself that she was mad. As I read this novel, that also portrays a very tender marriage and the life of a Goan family in Bombay, it drowned me. I mean that in the best way. It plunged me into a world so vivid and capricious, that when I finished, I found something had shifted and changed within myself. This is a world of magnified and dark emotion. The anger is a primal force, the sadness wild and raw. Against this, the jokes are hilarious, reckless, free falling .... This is a rare, brilliant book, one that is wonderfully different from any other that I have read coming out of India' Kiran Desai'A child's-eye view of madness and sorrow, full of love, pain, and, unaccountably, much wild comedy. ne of the very best books to come out of India in a long, long time' Salman RushdieJerry Pinto has been a mathematics tutor, school librarian and journalist and is now associated with MelJol, an NGO that works in the sphere of child rights. He has edited several anthologies including, most recently, an anthology on his native city, Mumbai.
The Strangler Vine: The Blake and Avery Mystery Series (Book 1) (The Blake and Avery Mystery Series #1)
by M. J. CarterFor lovers of Sherlock, Shardlake and Ripper Street. A gripping and pulse-racing mystery thriller with a great detective double act. 'Splendid, enthralling, an exotic mystery that captivated me.' Bernard CornwellCalcutta 1837. Young officer William Avery is tasked by his employers-the East India Company-with tracking down disgraced poet and spy Xavier Mountstuart, lost in the jungles of central India. Accompanied by the dissolute and mysterious Jeremiah Blake, Avery is sure the mission is doomed. When their search leads them into Kali-worshipping Thug territory, the pair are soon fighting for their lives, but impelled to solve the horrifying mystery behind their mission. With death and danger on every side, is it too late for them to save themselves?Shortlisted for the John Creasey New Blood Dagger for Best Debut Crime novel of the year 2014, and the HWA Debut Crown for Best Historical Novel 2015, Longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year 2015 and the Bailey's Woman's Prize for Fiction 2014
The Pleasures of Summer
by Evie HunterThe Pleasures of Summer is a steamy erotic story of romantic obsession and explosive sexual chemistry for fans of Fifty Shades of Grey, The Pleasures of Winter and Sylvia Day's stories.Summer O'Sullivan is rich, beautiful and in mortal danger. Her father has made powerful enemies who are targeting his precious daughter. Until the threat passes, Summer needs a bodyguard - someone to protect her and, she expects, to treat her with the reverence she's used to.Into Summer's gilded cage comes former ranger, Flynn Grant. As far as Flynn is concerned, this is the assignment from hell, minding the spoilt daughter of a multi-millionaire. Summer and Flynn are poised to hate each other on sight. Even his devastating looks do not make up for how Flynn's rules cramp Summer's style. Unsurprisingly, the sparks fly between them. But when Summer breaks the rules one time too often, Flynn teaches her a lesson that leaves them shattered - and bound together in a way that astonishes them both.In their remote hideout, the two start a battle over who is the tamer, and who is the tamed. It's a duel that stretches their minds and bodies beyond every limit. And in time their hearts begin to surrender too.But when the dark forces that have been stalking Summer finally track them down, the battle is no longer a game, but a matter of life and death ...The Pleasures of Summer is a breath-taking, steamy and romantic summer read for fans of Evie Hunter's fantastic debut, The Pleasures of Winter, and all lovers of hot erotic fiction.
The Pleasures of Autumn: Erotic Romance
by Evie HunterLet Evie Hunter, the bestselling Irish erotica author, light up your autumn fires with her latest sizzling novel, The Pleasures of Autumn. This is another of hot-hot-hot tale of romantic obsession and explosive sexual chemistry, a novel that fans of Sylvia Day, Kitty French and E.L. James will love and devour. When museum curator Sinead O'Sullivan is charged with stealing the Fire of Autumn, a dazzling ruby with a history of violence and treachery, bail is set at one million Swiss francs. Investigator Niall Moore is hired to stop her fleeing and to find the jewel.Their sexual chemistry is electric but logic says to ignore it. Desperate as she is to convince Niall of her innocence, Sinead cannot reveal everything she knows. And the feisty red-head's improbable tale tells him that she is not to be trusted.Yet it's impossible to ignore the carnal heat between them. Niall, an expert interrogator, uses every trick of the trade - and every weapon in his erotic armoury - to get at the truth. Sinead, a fast learner, counters his every move with one of her own. Thief and thief-taker fight for dominance and there can be only one winner.But what happens in their red-hot game of cat-and-mouse when criminals chasing the precious jewel come after Sinead ... and the stakes become deadly?In just a year Evie Hunter has shown that you can tell an addictive erotic story with a page-turning plot. The Pleasures of Autumn is the new must-have read all her fans have been waiting for. And if you're new to Evie, well you're in for a delcious treat ...
Succession: A Novel
by Livi Michael'In Succession Livi Michael engages meticulously with the diverse historical accounts of the Wars of the Roses, but she also invests intimate and poignant humanity into the personal tragedies of an era wrought with conflict and terror.' Elizabeth Fremantle, author of Queen's GambitBehind the bloody battle scenes of the Wars of the Roses lie the sinewy political skills of a remarkable pair of women.Margaret of Anjou, French, beautiful, unpopular; her marriage in 1444 to a young Henry VI causes national uproar. As English rule in France collapses, Henry goes insane, civil war erupts, and families are pitted against each other. With Henry VI incapacitated, Margaret Anjou is left to fight alone for her son's position as rightful heir. Meanwhile Margaret Beaufort, nobly born but far more distant from the throne, becomes a great heiress while only an infant. Her childhood is lived in echoing remote castles and she is lonely and vulnerable: everyone at Henry's court competes to be her guardian and to engineer an advantageous alliance through marriage to her. By the age of thirteen, she has married twice and given birth to her only son - the future King of England. But then she is separated from him . . . and her fight really begins Succession is the intense and powerful story of the women who gave birth to the Tudor dynasty.
Rebellion (War Of The Roses Trilogy Ser.)
by Livi Michael'Fine, taut writing . . . packs an emotional punch' - The TimesMargaret Beaufort and Margaret of Anjou - two women who will stop at nothing to place their sons on the English throne.In exile in France with her young son Prince Edward, Margaret of Anjou at last gives up on promises of aid by King Louis and sets sail for England. There, she will return her husband Henry to the throne - and ensure young Edward will be its heir.Meanwhile, Margaret Beaufort, separated from her son Henry of Richmond when he was an infant, sees the unrest surrounding the Lancastrian defeat as her chance to finally get him back. But the steps she takes to return her son imperil the kingdom and the throne's current occupant - King Edward IV. With rebellions tearing the country apart, how far will each woman go to further the interests of their sons? And who can stand in their way?
Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York and London
by Mohsin HamidDiscontent and its Civilizations is the essential first collection of non fiction from Mohsin Hamid. Discontent and its Civilizations collects the best of Mohsin Hamid's writing on subjects as diverse and wide-ranging as Pakistan; fatherhood; the death of Osama Bin Laden and the writing of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.Unified by the author's humane, clear-headed and witty voice, the book makes a compelling case for recognizing our common humanity while relishing our diversity - both as readers and citizens; for resisting the artificial mono-identities of religion or nationality or race; and for always judging a country or nation by how it treats its minorities, as 'Each individual human being is, after all, a minority of one'.Mohsin Hamid writes regularly for The New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he has since lived between Lahore, London and New York.'Mohsin Hamid is a master critic of the modern global condition, using humanization, wit, parody and other devices to examine how the fast pace of social and economic change has affected the individual' Foreign Policy'The new voice of a generation. A writer at the top of his game' Metro'One of the most talented writers of his generation' Daily TelegraphMohsin Hamid writes regularly for The New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he has since lived between Lahore, London and New York.
The Devil's Feast: The Blake and Avery Mystery Series (Book 3) (The Blake and Avery Mystery Series #3)
by M. J. CarterFor lovers of Sherlock, Shardlake and Ripper Street. A hugely enjoyable heart-pounding Victorian thriller- murder, a celebrity chef and a great detective double-act.Longlisted for a CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger'Wonderful... The Devil's Feast proves to be a sumptuous treat' The Times'Criminally good... I love this mystery series - it just gets better and better' Woman & Home London, 1842. There has been a mysterious and horrible death at the Reform, London's newest and grandest gentleman's club. A death the club is desperate to hush up. Captain William Avery is persuaded to investigate, and soon discovers a web of rivalries and hatreds, both personal and political, simmering behind the club's handsome façade-and in particular concerning its resident genius, Alexis Soyer, 'the Napoleon of food', a chef whose culinary brilliance is matched only by his talent for self-publicity. But Avery is distracted, for where his mentor and partner-in-crime Jeremiah Blake? And what if this first death was only a dress rehearsal for something far more sinister?
Expo 58
by Jonathan CoeExpo 58 - Good-looking girls and sinister spies: a naive Englishman at loose in Europe in Jonathan Coe's brilliant comic novelLondon, 1958: unassuming civil servant Thomas Foley is plucked from his desk at the Central Office of Information and sent on a six-month trip to Brussels. His task: to keep an eye on The Brittania, a brand new pub which will form the heart of the British presence at Expo 58 - the biggest World's Fair of the century, and the first to be held since the Second World War.As soon as he arrives at the site, Thomas feels that he has escaped a repressed, backward-looking country and fallen headlong into an era of modernity and optimism. He is equally bewitched by the surreal, gigantic Atomium, which stands at the heart of this brave new world, and by Anneke, the lovely Flemish hostess who meets him off his plane. But Thomas's new-found sense of freedom comes at a price: the Cold War is at its height, the mischievous Belgians have placed the American and Soviet pavilions right next to each other - and why is he being followed everywhere by two mysterious emissaries of the British Secret Service? Expo 58 may represent a glittering future, both for Europe and for Thomas himself, but he will soon be forced to decide where his public and private loyaties really lie.For fans of Jonathan Coe's classic comic bestsellers What a Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club, this hilarious new novel, which is set in the Mad Men period of the mid 50s, will also be loved by readers of Nick Hornby, William Boyd and Ian McEwan.'Coe has huge powers of observation and enormous literary panache' Sunday Times'No one marries formal ingenuity with inclusiveness of tone more elegantly' Time Out'Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times' Observer'Thank goodness for Jonathan Coe, who records what Britain has lost in the past thirty years in his elegiac fiction' Scotland on SundayJonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. Expo 58 is his tenth novel. The previous nine are all available in Penguin: The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up! (which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), The House of Sleep (which won the 1998 Prix Medicis Etranger), The Rotters' Club (winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize), The Closed Circle, The Rain Before It Falls and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. His biography of the novelist B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year. Expo 58 was nominated for the 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Spike Milligan: Warning - Don't Eat The Fish
by Spike MilliganSpike Milligan's letters contain some of the best material he ever wrote . . . Collected here for the first time are the funniest, rudest and most revealing of them - most of which have never been seen before - from one of the greatest comics of the twentieth century to some of its most famous politicians, actors, celebrities and rock stars (as well as a host of unlikely individuals on some surprising subjects):- rounded teabags ('what did you do with the corners?')- backless hospital gowns ('beyond my comprehension') - heartfelt apologies ('pardon me for being alive') and the imbalance of male and female ducks in London's parks. Here, then, is the real Spike Miligan: obsessive, rude, generous and relentlessly witty.'Milligan's zaniness shines through' Telegraph 'The godfather of alternative comedy' Eddie IzzardSpike Milligan was one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Born in India in 1918, he served in the Royal Artillery during WWII in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he forged a career as a jazz musician, sketch-show writer and performer, before joining forces with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe to form the legendary Goon Show. Until his death in 2002, he had success as on stage and screen and as the author of over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children's stories.
These Days Are Ours
by Michelle HaimoffA vivid, electric tale set in New York and personally recommended by bestselling author Nick Hornby (Fever Pitch, About a Boy): These Days Are Ours is an irresistible coming-of-age story for the Lena Dunham generation from debut author Michelle Haimoff.New York City, six months after 9/11: everything has changed and nothing has. Hailey graduated college months ago but she's still living in her family's Fifth Avenue penthouse, spending her nights falling in and out of bars across Upper East Side Manhattan - and the thrill is starting to wear off. It isn't easy being young, rich and beautiful.Overnight, it seems like everyone suddenly has their lives completely sorted. Katie has a great job at Morgan Stanley, Michael Brenner is training to be a human rights lawyer and trust-fund kid Randy is just content to carry on having fun. Hailey is lost somewhere in the middle, torn between chasing down the next wild party and admitting that it might be time to grow up. She craves something more meaningful - but what?Perhaps Brenner holds the answer: gorgeous, charismatic and aloof, Hailey is convinced he is the missing piece in her puzzle. But when she meets Adrian, a man so totally different from her usual privileged crowd, she begins to realise she's been looking for happiness in all the wrong places...These Days Are Ours captures the feverish excitement and exhilarating uncertainty of the city, where bright young things are forever brimming with possibility and buckling under the pressure.Michelle Haimoff is a writer and blogger whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, PsychologyToday.com and The Huffington Post. She is a founding memebr of NOW-New York State's Young Feminist Task Force and blogs about feminist issues at genfem.com. She was raised in New York City, curently lives in Los Angeles, and can be found online at MichelleHaimoff.com. These Days Are Ours is her first novel.
Number 11: Or Tales That Witness Madness
by Jonathan CoeThis is a novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between thepublic and private worlds and how they affect us all.It's about the legacy of war and the end of innocence.It's about how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won.It's about how 140 characters can make fools of us all.It's about living in a city where bankers need cinemas in their basements and others need food banks down the street.It is Jonathan Coe doing what he does best - showing us how we live now.'Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times' ObserverNumber 11 is Jonathan Coe's eleventh novel. His previous ten novels are all published by Penguin and include the highly acclaimed bestsellers What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep and The Rotters' Club.
The Parrots
by Alexandra ShulmanOutsiders see things others don't. Blessed with status, love, wealth and connections the Tennisons seemed the most enviable of families - until Antonella and Matteo Fullardi, dangerously attractive Italian siblings and offspring of an Italian fashion dynasty, enter their well-managed lives. Calligrapher Katherine, gallery owner Rick and their student son Josh discover that the Fullardis are just as unsettling and alluring as the exotic parrots that now inhabit their tranquil London garden. But this damaged pair are the catalyst that propel the Tennisons into a spiral of chaos, calling into question their place in a changing world of new money, new morality and new menace.
The Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye In The Door; The Ghost Road (The\wwi Trilogy Ser. #1)
by Pat BarkerThe Regeneration Trilogy is Pat Barker's sweeping masterpiece of British historical fiction. 1917, Scotland. At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, army psychiatrist William Rivers treats shell-shocked soldiers before sending them back to the front. In his care are poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. . .Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road follow the stories of these men until the last months of the war. Widely acclaimed and admired, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy paints with moving detail the far-reaching consequences of a conflict which decimated a generation.'Harrowing, original, delicate and unforgettable' Independent'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians. Constantly surprising and formally superb' A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph'One of the few real masterpieces of late twentieth-century British fiction' Jonathan CoePat Barker was born in 1943. Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration (1991); which was made into a film of the same name; The Eye in the Door (1993), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road (1995), which won the Booker Prize, as well as the more recent novels Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, Life Class and Toby's Room. She lives in Durham.
Beggar's Feast
by Randy BoyagodaRandy Boyagoda's Beggar's Feast is a tour de force of a novel set in Sri Lanka about a man living in defiance of fate.Sam Kandy, born in 1899 in a poor village in the heart of Ceylon and abandoned by his family ten years later at the gates of a remote temple, resolves to make his own luck amongst the cheats and chancers of the world. When twenty years reckoning with the streets of Colombo, the docks of Sydney and the brothels of Singapore lead Sam back to his blighted birth village, he returns as a steely self-made man. He marries a nobleman's daughter and coldly pursues a life of wealth, prestige, and power.And so begins a devastating chain of events, in which families are torn apart, fortunes are made and lost, and old ways and wants collide with modernity's new machines and money and desires. Just as Sam Kandy is called back to his roots and longs for a chance to prove himself to a people and a place that gave up on him long before, ambition, reinvention, tradition and family each demand an answer: what does it cost a man to rewrite his history?Beggar's Feast is a masterpiece - a raw, profound and magnificent novel about origins and endings, about what we forsake to survive. 'Gleaming . . . An ambitious book that seeks to convey the sweep of history through the prism of one island' Sara Wheeler, New York Times 'A brilliant book. This novel reminds us of the values we are taught as children but which we might forget as we enter adulthood: love should be the ultimate reason behind each one of our actions; never think you can deceive anyone without any cost to yourself; nor does a lie become truth just because a hundred people are telling it'Nadeem Aslam, author of The Blind Man's GardenRandy Boyagoda's first novel, Governor of the Northern Province, was nominated for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize in 2006. He has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, and Harper's Magazine. His second novel, Beggar's Feast, was nominated for the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. He lives in Toronto with his wife and four daughters.
The Snow Goose and The Small Miracle (Penguin Essentials Ser.)
by Paul Gallico'Did you run across that queer sort of legend about a wild goose? It was all up and down the beaches. You know how those things spring up. Some of the men I brought back were talking about it. It was supposed to have appeared at intervals the last days between Dunkirk and La Panne. If you saw it, you were eventually saved. That sort of thing.''Hmm, a wild goose. I saw a tame one. Dashed strange experience. Tragic in a way, too. And lucky for us. Tell you about it ...'The Snow Goose is a beautiful tale of a hunchbacked artist, a girl, a wounded bird and a courageous act at Dunkirk. Also included in this volume is The Small Miracle, a contemporary fable inspired by St Francis of Assisi. Both tales are endearing classics of the storyteller's art.
Frog: A Novel
by Mo Yan Howard GoldblattFrogs is a richly complex new novel about China's one-child policy by Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2012.A respected midwife, Gugu combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies. After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself into enforcing China's draconian new family planning policy by any means necessary. Her blind devotion to the party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself.Spanning the pre-revolutionary era and the country's modern-day consumer society, Mo Yan's taut and engrossing examination of Chinese society will be read for generations to come.'Mo Yan deserves a place in world literature. His voice will find its way into the heart of the reader, just as Kundera and Garcia Marquez have' Amy Tan'One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity' Time'His idiom has the spiralling invention and mytho-maniacal quality of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie' ObserverMo Yan was born in 1955 in Gaomi County in Shandong province, China. He is the author of various novellas and short stories and numerous novels including Red Sorghum, The Republic of Wine, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and The Garlic Ballads. In 2012 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.Howard Goldblatt is the award-winning translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese into English.
Gretel and the Dark: A Novel
by Eliza GranvilleGretel and the Dark is Eliza Granville's dazzling novel of darkness, evil - and hope.For fans of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.Vienna, 1899. Josef Breuer - celebrated psychoanalyst - is about to encounter his strangest case yet. Found by the lunatic asylum, thin, head shaved, she claims to have no name, no feelings - to be, in fact, not even human. Intrigued, Breuer determines to fathom the roots of her disturbance.Years later, in Germany, we meet Krysta. Krysta's Papa is busy working in the infirmary with the 'animal people', so little Krysta plays alone, lost in the stories of Hansel and Gretel, the Pied Piper, and more. And when everything changes and the real world around her becomes as frightening as any fairy tale, Krysta finds that her imagination holds powers beyond what she could have ever guessed . . .'Atmospheric and beautifully written. Gretel and the Dark will be one of the best books of 2014' The ListEliza Granville was born in Worcestershire and now lives in the Welsh Marches. She has had a life-long fascination with the enduring quality of fairytales and their symbolism, and the idea for Gretel and the Dark was sparked when she became interested in the emphasis placed on these stories during the Third Reich.