Contemporary fiction titles are those which focus on the present or near past. Stories rooted in the current cultural, social, and political landscape which feature characters we can all recognise.
Contemporary Fiction Books
Kodansha America, Inc Attack on Titan 34
Book SynopsisEren's titanic Rumbling claims thousands of lives beyond the walls of Paradis, and the boy who once lived in fear of the Titans becomes the world's most feared man. Determined to stop the destruction wrought by their childhood friend, Armin, Mikasa, and their surviving comrades reach the Attack Titan and decide to face him head on in an ultimate showdown. Will humanity finally be set free from the cycle of fear, oppression, and destruction, or will the Titans outlive their victims?
£10.44
Kodansha America, Inc Attack on Titan: Colossal Edition 6
Book SynopsisContains Vol. 26-30 of Attack on Titan in an extra-large size, on premium-quality paper! 16 and up. Attack on Titan: Colossal Edition 5 is an oversized collection of Vols. 26-30 of the Attack on Titan manga series. Weighing in at over 900 pages and a 7-inch by 10.5-inch trim, Colossal Edition 5, like its predecessors, contains the same material as the original volumes, but bigger and on higher-quality paper. The best reading experience and the ultimate collector's item for any Attack on Titan fan!
£37.49
Kodansha America, Inc When Will Ayumu Make His Move? 2
Book SynopsisYaotome's the cute president of the shogi (Japanese chess) club at her high school, and she's pretty sure that her underclassman Ayumu, the only other member, has a huge crush on her. They get together to play shogi every day after school, but no matter what she does, she can't seem to coax or trick him into confessing his feelings! What she doesn't know is that Ayumu has made a pact with himself to reveal his love after he's beaten Yaotome at shogi for the first time. Yet there's one big issue with this plan - he really sucks!
£11.69
Kodansha America, Inc ADO 4
Book SynopsisA brash young woman and a boy with a mysterious arm search for answers while evading military assassins in this dystopian sci-fi action manga, perfect for fans of Akira and Sakamoto Days.PUPPETS AND PUPPET MASTERSHovering between life and death after shielding Eito from the army's bullets, Riko awakes in the same facility that Eito fought to escape. Colonel Tsujiura then reveals that Riko owes her life to an A-DO named Ewan and his miraculous healing powers. Back in the outside world, an extortionist cult learns of Ewan's existence and hatches a scheme to kidnap him. With danger now pressing on every side, Eito and Ewan must decide who holds the strings to their fates.
£12.59
Skyhorse Publishing Dead Stars
Book SynopsisBruce Wagner weaves together tales of desperation and depravity of the modern age in Dead Stars, his uproarious and sharply critical take on the obsessions of Hollywood. Telma, the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor, is threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old that’s undergone a mastectomy. Reeyonna, a pregnant teenager, believes she will befriend Kanye West by auditioning for pregnant teenage porn. A photographer, Jacquie, rejuvenates her career by turning her lens toward dead babies. And Michael Douglas searches for purpose and meaning when his wife, Catherine, guest-stars on the television series, Glee. Wagner gives a tour through the lowest depths of fame-seeking behavior and idolatry in what The New York Times called a “collagelike picture of Hollywood as a sewer of depravity.”
£14.24
Skyhorse Publishing Marvel Universe
Book SynopsisThe Marvel Universe details the lives and deaths of Wagner’s cast of characters: an orphaned billionairess, a black man wrongly convicted of murder, a schizophrenic child obsessed with the comic book character Wolverine, a cancelled TV star, and the love child of Elon Musk. Their intertwining stories take place during the pandemic, a year of tectonic social unrest, ushering in a new reality that surpasses anything any Hollywood franchise could hope to imagine.
£11.69
Amazon Publishing Every Drop of Blood Is Red
Book SynopsisLives intersect for a young woman on a quest for revenge and a family man with a violent past in a haunting and provocative novel by the author of Such a Beautiful Thing to Behold. In Jos, Nigeria, Dareng Pamson is slowly winning back the trust of his pregnant wife after his infidelity shook their marriage. When a young Muslim woman comes in out of the rain looking for work in Dareng's auto repair shop, Dareng cautiously agreesagainst his better judgment. She's passionate and willing to learn. Besides, it's time he started doing things differently. After being back in her hometown for only a week, Murmula Denge finds who she's looking for: Dareng, the Christian man whose coldhearted ambition and greed shattered her family. At first, she wants only to destroy his tenuous peace by introducing chaos. Until Murmula realises that for true closure and justice, she must go to extremes. Blood for blood. Neither is prepared for the mysterious turning point that changes their lives forever
£8.54
Amazon Publishing The Autumn of Ruth Winters
Book SynopsisIn this heartwarming story about second acts and second chances, a no-nonsense retiree, very much set in her ways, must learn to adapt and make peace with her past in order to build a fulfilling future.Ruth Winters is retired, widowed, and resigned to spending the rest of her life alone in her suburban home. She likes her routine and uses it to avoid having to spend time with other people. She probably wouldn’t call herself fulfilled, but it’s too late now to go chasing happiness.Then three things happen at once: a beloved niece makes a big announcement, an old flame reaches out, and her estranged sister receives life-changing news. Ruth finds herself reconnecting with people she thought were long gone from her world, as she is forced to reconsider her expectations for this phase of her life.None of this fits into Ruth’s routine—in fact, the whole thing just blows to bits. But when Ruth starts to pick up the pieces, she discovers t
£8.54
Amazon Publishing Hill of Secrets
Book SynopsisIn a desert outpost, nuclear scientists and their families face the toll of the secrets they keep from the world and from each other in this gripping wartime novel from debut author Galina Vromen.Los Alamos, 1943. The US Army has gathered scientists to create the world’s first nuclear weapon. Their families, abruptly moved to the secret desert base with no explanation, have simple orders: Stand by. Make do. Above all, don’t ask questions.Christine, forced to abandon her art restoration business in New York for her husband’s career, struggles to reinvent herself and cope with his increasing aloofness.Gertie, the inquisitive teenage daughter of a German Jewish refugee physicist enlists Christine to help her unravel hidden truths and deal with parents haunted by their past.Gertie’s father, Kurt, anguished by what the Nazis have done to his family and bent on defeating them, carries burdens he longs to share but cannot confide i
£8.54
Amazon Publishing When We Were Widows
Book SynopsisIn this heartfelt story about finding love in loss, three widows are forced under the same roof, where they’ll need to overcome grief, anger, and old secrets to put their family back together.Since her husband’s death six months ago, Yesica Diaz-Taylor seems to be taking her grief in stride. Then an angry outburst at work shatters the illusion. Her mandated support group counseling doesn’t help much. Yesica has always kept her feelings close, so even when an unlikely friendship blossoms with the group’s facilitator, she still has reasons for holding back. She’s just not ready to share.Ana Diaz has been widowed for five years and continues to live life exactly as she did with her late husband. When her house floods, she’s forced to shake things up. Although it was never part of her plan, Ana moves in with her eldest daughter, Yesica. But the new living arrangement tests their already strained relationship.Shadowed by unr
£8.54
Simon & Schuster Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories
Book SynopsisA startling and vivid debut novel in stories from acclaimed poet and translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain featuring deeply compelling Asian women who reckon with the past, violence, and exile—set in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, and New York.“Cooking for Madame Chiang,” 1946: Two cooks work for Madame Chiang Kai-shek and prepare a foreign dish craved by their mistress, which becomes a political weapon and leads to their tragic end. “Death at the Wukang Mansion,” 1966: Punished for her extramarital affair, a dancer is transferred to Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution and assigned to an ominous apartment in a building whose other residents often depart in coffins. “The White Piano,” 1996: A budding pianist from New York City settles down in Paris and is assaulted when a mysterious piano arrives from Singapore. “The Invisible Window,” 2016: After their exile following the Tiananmen Square massacre, three women gather in a French cathedral to renew their friendship and reunite in their grief and faith. Evocative, vivid, disturbing, and written with a masterly ear for language, Dear Chrysanthemums renders a devastating portrait of diasporic life and inhumanity, as well as a tender web of shared memory, artistic expression, and love.Trade ReviewPraise for Dear Chrysanthemums "In nimble, evocative prose, these stories follow Chinese women from 1946 to 2016 as they brave moments of personal and national turmoil." —New York Times Book Review “A haunting debut… At once brutal and tender, this novel of women’s lives has the power to move and complicate our understanding of the long shadow cast by revolution as well as the inextinguishable longing every person has for beauty, love, art, and selfhood.” —Asymptote "Dear Chrysanthemums may be short at just 160 pages, but the unique structure of connecting the stories through the many decades of modern Chinese history and some of the same characters gives it the feel of a longer novel." —Asian Review of Books “Attention to detail, especially with respect to numbers and music, is part of what makes the novel a joy to read… Sze-Lorrain pushes the boundaries of the Asian American novel into a global conversation... Dreamy and haunting...” —Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism "Sze-Lorrain is to be praised for her ornate, intimate stories. Sze-Lorrain has a gift for capturing distinctive voices, and this shines through in all of her characters." —No Man is an Island "Provocative... In Dear Chrysanthemums, women try to free their bodies to be instruments of life as much as death, of self-expression as much as silence..." —Mekong Review “Sze-Lorrain does not only shed light on the losses but also on the hypocritical nature of communist regimes. Perspectives on modern Chinese history like these are rare — and for a reason. A recommended read to those who wonder, but do not seek answers.” —Mochi Magazine “Elegant… Sze-Lorrain's lyrical writing suggests that rebellion, even if it has tragic consequences in the present, might bear fruit in the future through artistic expression.” —Shelf Awareness “With shattering clarity, Sze-Lorrain teases apart the layers of complicity and survival that create a web of secrets, casting doubt on ever knowing the full truth behind each person’s story.” —Booklist “Graceful… Sze-Lorrain effortlessly evokes the spirit of each setting, be it the ardent fervor of nationalism during the Chinese Civil War or the seedy glamor of a dive bar in Paris, and she imbues her characters with haunting melancholy as victims ‘doomed to the mishaps of verity and the equally hurtful edges of fiction.’ This author is one to watch.” —Publishers Weekly "Sze-Lorrain excels in the lyrical mode as her attention to sensory observation illustrates how seemingly minor details such as the play of light from a shattered stained-glass window or the geometrically interlocking joints in a table can become microcosmic worlds if one knows how to look. Weaving these details together with an orchestral sensibility, the novel serves as a multilayered meditation on intergenerational trauma, memory, and resilience... By turns delicate and wild, this novel will linger like a chrysanthemum’s fragrance long after the last page." —Kirkus “In Dear Chrysanthemums, Fiona Sze-Lorrain collects the shards of modern Chinese history and builds a prismatic, gorgeously intimate story of women who face impossible choices and losses in order to survive. Unflinching and haunting, the novel is a vivid portrayal of disillusionment and exile. Step by step, Sze-Lorrain constructs an intricate and deeply moving web that will leave you stunned by the end.” —Tsering Yangzom Lama, author of We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, shortlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize “How can a book be simultaneously so beautiful and so heartbreaking? Dear Chrysanthemums explores the repercussions of the major events of modern Chinese history—the Chinese civil war, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre—as they echo throughout lives in the diaspora. Sze-Lorrain’s storytelling is graceful yet fierce—this is an important novel about histories that have changed the world.” —Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island and Water Ghosts "Dear Chrysanthemums weaves together the stories of Asian women whose lives are shaped, with and without their knowledge, by the storm of history and cultural upheaval. The political is always personal in this remarkable debut, in which the practice of art—dance, music, writing, even the art of cooking—is opposed to oppression, violence, loneliness, displacement, and death. With uncompromising detail, in language that is at once precise and evocative, author Sze-Lorrain takes us inside the individual struggles of her characters to reveal fascinating patterns of connection and hidden truth." —Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The World of Pondside and The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia "I read this book with my heart in my throat. Taken one by one, each of these delectable stories offers an intimate, sensuous portrait of the life of otherwise mysterious girls and women, their desires and obsessions and griefs. Taken as a whole, the novel is a heady, energetic, global mosaic that conveys just how deeply one human soul can relate to another." —Susanna Daniel, author of Sea Creatures and Stiltsville "Just beneath the precisely-rendered quotidian world of these linked narratives lies a fathomless well of menace. Given this, Sze-Lorrain seems to ask, what are life’s chances?" —Frederick Turner, author of The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years and 1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age "Exquisite… Dear Chrysanthemums achieves the aesthetic ambitions of a novel with lyrical prose and imagery. Sze-Lorrain probes into our complex, volatile society, expressing her thought and lucidity." —Ma Jian, author of China Dream, The Dark Road, and Beijing Coma
£9.49
Simon & Schuster Next Stop
Book SynopsisFor readers of Leave the World Behind and Exit West, an astonishingly resonant novel that explores the precariousness of Jewish American life through one family after a black hole consumes the State of Israel and similar strange events occur in major cities around the world, ushering in a time of chaos as well as miracles.When a black hole suddenly consumes Israel and as similar anomalies spread across the globe, a conspiracy takes hold: will the holes swallow the Jews, or will they swallow the earth? Against a backdrop of antisemitic paranoia, restrictions on Jewish life, and spasms of violence, Ethan and Ella, Jewish citizens of a nameless American city, meet and fall in love. Ella, a photojournalist, documents the changes in daily life, particularly among the city’s Jewish residents. Some Jews, feeling inexplicably drawn to the unusual events, go underground to an abandoned subway system that seems to connect the entire world. Other
£17.00
The New York Review of Books, Inc Girlfriends, Ghosts, And Other Stories
Book Synopsis"Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories brings together eighty-one brief texts spanning Robert Walser''s career, from pieces conceived amid his early triumphs to later works written at a psychiatric clinic in Bern. Many were published in the feuilleton sections of newspapers during Walser''s life; others were jotted down on slips of paper and all but forgotten. Together they string together small nutshells of consciousness, idiosyncratic and vulnerable, genuine in their irony, wistful in their humor. The portraits and landscapes here are observed with tenderness and from a place of great anxiety. Some dwell on childish or transient topics--carousels, the latest hairstyles, an ekphrasis of the illustrations in a picture book--others on the grand themes of nature, art, and love. But they remain conversational, almost lighter than air. Every emotion ventured takes on the weight of a sincerity that is imperiled as soon as it comes into contact with the outside world, which retains all of the novelty it had in childhood--and all of the danger. Walser''s speakers are attuned to the silent music of being; students of the ineffable and neighbors to madness, they are now exhilarated, now paralyzed by frequencies inaudible to less sensitive ears"--
£14.24
The New York Review of Books, Inc Castle Gripsholm
Book Synopsis
£999.99
The New York Review of Books, Inc Diary of a Foreigner in Paris
Book SynopsisExperience postwar Europe through the diary of a fascinating and witty twentieth-century writer and artist. Recording his travels in France and Switzerland, Curzio Malaparte encounters famous figures such as Cocteau and Camus and captures the fraught, restless spirit of Paris after the trauma of war. In 1947 Curzio Malaparte returned to Paris for the first time in fourteen years. In between, he had been condemned by Mussolini to five years in exile and, on release, repeatedly imprisoned. In his intervals of freedom, he had been dispatched as a journalist to the Eastern Front, and though many of his reports from the bloodlands of Poland and Ukraine were censored, his experiences there became the basis for his unclassifiable postwar masterpiece and international bestseller, Kaputt. Now, returning to the one country that had always treated him well, the one country he had always loved, he was something of a star, albeit one that shines with a dusky and disturbing light. The journal he kept while in Paris records a range of meetings with remarkable people—Jean Cocteau and a dourly unwelcoming Albert Camus among them—and is full of Malaparte’s characteristically barbed reflections on the temper of the time. It is a perfect model of ambiguous reserve as well as humorous self-exposure. There is, for example, Malaparte’s curious custom of sitting out at night and barking along with the neighborhood dogs—dogs, after all, were his only friends when in exile. The French find it puzzling, to say the least; when it comes to Switzerland, it is grounds for prosecution!
£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc End of Me
Book SynopsisA moving tale about middle age, divorce, modern love, and returning home by one of the great American storytellers.Asher’s career as a Hollywood screenwriter has come to a humiliating end; so has his latest marriage. Returning to New York, where he grew up, he takes a room at a hotel and wonders what, well into middle age as he is, he should do next. It’s not a question of money; it’s a question of purpose, maybe of pride. In the company of the arch young poet Michael, Asher revisits the streets and tenements of the Lower East Side where he spent his childhood, though little remains of the past. Michael introduces Asher to Aurora, perhaps his girlfriend, who, to Asher’s surprise, seems bent on pursuing him, too. Soon the older man and his edgy young companions are caught up in a slow, strange, almost ritualized dance of deceit and desire. The End of Me, a successor to Hayes’s In Love and My Face for the World to See, can be seen as the final panel of a triptych in which Alfred Hayes anatomizes, with a cool precision and laconic lyricism that are all his own, the failure of modern love. The last scene is the starkest of all.
£13.49
The New York Review of Books, Inc Margery Kempe
Book SynopsisLust, religious zeal, and heartache come together in this provocative novel about two infatuations, one between a man and his young lover in the late 20th century and another between a 15th-century woman and Jesus Christ.First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century. The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel. Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery''s Bob."
£14.39
The New York Review of Books, Inc Kapo
Book SynopsisA devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia''s great literary voices.The Book of Blam, The Use of Man, Kapo: In these three unsparing novels the Yugoslav author Aleksandar Tišma anatomized the plight of those who survived the Second World War and the death camps, only to live on in a death-haunted world. Blam simply lucked out—and can hardly face himself in the mirror. By contrast, the teenage friends in The Use of Man are condemned to live on and on while enduring every affliction. Kapo is about Lamian, who made it through Auschwitz by serving his German masters, knowing that at any moment and for any reason his “special status” might be revoked.But the war is over now. Auschwitz is in the past. Lamian has settled down in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, where he has a respectable job as a superintendent in the railyard. Everything is normal enough. Then one day in the paper he comes on the name of Helena Lifka, a woman—like him a Yugoslav and a Jew—he raped in the camp. Not long after he sees her, aged and ungainly, Lamian is flooded with guilt and terror.Kapo, like Tišma’s other great novels, is not simply a document or an act of witness. Tišma’s terrible gift is to see with an artist’s dispassionate clarity how fear, violence, guilt, and desire—whether for life, love, or simple understanding—are inextricably knotted together in the human breast.
£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc Marshlands
Book SynopsisA slim but powerful work of metafiction by a Nobel Prize-winning French writer and intellectual.André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and of autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing, Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader’s hand. Marshlands is both a poised satire of literary pretension and a superb literary invention, and Damion Searls’s new translation of this early masterwork by one of the key figures of twentieth-century literature brings out all the sparkle of the original.
£13.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc Family and Borghesia
Book SynopsisTwo novellas about domestic life, isolation, and the passing of time by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century.Carmine, an architect, and Ivana, a translator, lived together long ago and even had a child, but the child died, and their relationship fell apart, and Carmine married Ninetta, and their child is Dodò, who Carmine feels is a little dull, and these days Carmine is still spending every evening with Ivana, but Ninetta has nothing to say about that. Family, the first of these two novellas from the 1970s, is an examination, at first comic, then progressively dark, about how time passes and life goes on and people circle around the opportunities they had missed, missing more as they do, until finally time is up.Borghesia, about a widow who keeps acquiring and losing the Siamese cats she hopes will keep her company in her loneliness, explores similar ground, along with the confusions of feeling and domestic life that came with the loosening social strictures of the 1970s. “She remembered saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse,” thinks one of Natalia Ginzburg’s characters, beginning to age out of youth: “Hypocrisy, resignation, and unhappiness. But it was impossible to shield yourself from those three things. Life was full of them and there was no holding them back.”
£14.39
The New York Review of Books, Inc Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Book SynopsisA new collection of the renowned Russian writer''s best short work, including a masterful translation of the famous title story.Nikolai Leskov is the strangest of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His work is closer to the oral traditions of narrative than that of his contemporaries, and served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin''s great essay "The Storyteller," in which Benjamin contrasts the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the strange, melancholy, but also worldly-wise yarns of an older, slower era that Leskov remained in touch with. The title story is a tale of illicit love and multiple murder that could easily find its way into a Scottish ballad and did go on to become the most popular of Dmitri Shostakovich''s operas. The other stories, all but one newly translated, present the most focused and finely rendered collection of this indispensable writer currently available in English.
£16.14
The New York Review of Books, Inc The Dead Girls' Class Trip: Selected Stories
Book Synopsis
£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc Kilometer 101
Book SynopsisA new collection of short fiction and nonfiction by a Russian master of bittersweet humor, dramatic irony, and poignant insights into contemporary life.The town of Tarusa lies 101 kilometers outside Moscow, far enough to have served, under Soviet rule, as a place where former political prisoners and other “undesirables” could legally settle. Lying between the center of power and the provinces, between the modern urban capital and the countryside, Tarusa is the perfect place from which to observe a Russia that, in Maxim Osipov’s words, “changes a lot [in the course of a decade], but in two centuries—not at all.” The stories and essays in this volume—a follow-up to his debut in English, Rock, Paper, Scissors—tackle major questions of modern life in and beyond Russia with Osipov’s trademark blend of daring and subtlety. Deceit, political pressure, ethnic discrimination, the urge to emigrate, and the fear of abandoning one’s home, as well as myriad generational debts and conflicts, are as complexly woven through these pieces as they are through the lives of Osipov’s fellow Russians and through our own. What binds the prose in this volume is not only a set of concerns, however, but also Osipov’s penetrating insights and fearless realism. “Dreams fall away, one after another,” he writes in the opening essay, “some because they come true, but most because they prove pointless.” Yet, as he reminds us in the final essay, when viewed from ground level, “life tends not towards depletion, towards zero, but, on the contrary, towards repletion, fullness.”
£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc Arabesques
Book SynopsisA luminous, inventive, and deeply personal exploration of living in the liminal space between Jewish and Arab, ancient and modern, by a gifted Palestinian writer.Chosen by The New York Times as one of the best books of 1988, Arabesques is a luminous novel that engages with history and politics not as propaganda but as literature. That engagement begins with the language in which the book is written: Anton Shammas, from a Palestinian Christian family and raised in Israel, wrote in Hebrew, as no Arab novelist had before. The choice was provocative to both Arab and Jewish readers.Arabesques is divided into two sections: “The Tale” and “The Teller.” “The Tale” tells of several generations of family life in a rural village, of the interplay of past and present, of how memory intersects with history in a part of the world where different people have both lived together and struggled against each other for centuries. “The Teller” is about the writer’s voyage out of that world to Paris and the United States, as he comes into his vocation as a writer, and raises questions about the authority of the storyteller and the nature of the self. Shammas’s tour de force is both a personal and a political narrative—a reinvention of the novel as a way of envisioning and responding to historical and cultural legacies and conflicts.
£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc Ariane, A Russian Girl
Book Synopsis“Men speak freely of the women they’ve had, and we’re condemned to silence. Why? Aren’t we as free as you? Don’t we, like you, have the right to take pleasure wherever we find it? . . . They praise seducers in art, poetry, and literature and put a mask of infamy on any woman who’s had many lovers. This is the point where the fight must be fought. Women’s morality must triumph, and that’s what I’m working at . . .”Thus Ariane, unconventional, irrepressible, and irre-sistible, at seventeen the queen bee of the provincial Russian town where, after her mother’s early demise, she lives with her freethinking aunt. But Ariane is tired of breaking hearts in the sticks. Her father may wish to marry her off, but she means to go to the university in Moscow, and she will do whatever it takes to make her way the way she likes.In Moscow, Ariane is in her element. She loves the glamour of the big city. She’s undaunted by its dangers. Before long, she meets Constantin Michel, businessman, man of the world, man-about-town. A new struggle begins.The inspiration for Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, Ariane has the perverse glitter of Nabokov and the disabused curiosity and keen emotional intelligence of Colette. It is a brilliant exploration—engrossing, unnerving, comic, and cunning—of the matchless cruelty of desire.
£13.49
The New York Review of Books, Inc A Love Affair
Book SynopsisAccomplished in his career but unaccomplished in love, a middle-aged architect is torn apart by his obsession with an enigmatic young woman in this delicately told story of desire and abjection by a titan of Italian literature.Antonio Dorigo is a successful architect in Milan, nearing fifty, who has always been afraid of women. A regular at an upscale brothel for years, he mourns the lack of close female companionship in his life. One afternoon, the madam at the brothel introduces Tonio to “a new girl,” Laide. Tonio sees nothing especially remarkable about her, though it intrigues him that she dances at La Scala and also at a strip club, and yet in a very short time he becomes completely obsessed with her.Laide leads Antonio on, confounds him, uses and humiliates him, treats him tenderly from time to time, lies to him, makes no apologies to him, and he loves her ever more. This helpless and hopeless love, he feels, is what he is, even as it prevents him from ever seeing Laide for who she is. Because Who is she? is the question at the heart of Buzzati’s clear-eyed and darkly comic tale of infatuation.Is A Love Affair a love story or is it a story of anything but love? Buzzati’s novel, with its psychological subtleties, vivid cityscapes, unsettling comedy, and compassion, keeps the reader guessing till the end.
£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc The Lily of the Valley
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£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc Blue Lard
Book SynopsisThe Russian master''s most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination.Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author’s books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines.The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese—peppered with ample neologisms—and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collect
£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc Mourning a Breast
Book Synopsis
£15.29
Insight Editions Sea of Thieves: Athena's Fortune
Book SynopsisDive into a world of pirates, plunder, and peril with this novel based on Rare’s thrilling adventure game, Sea of Thieves.Long ago, at the height of the Golden Age of Piracy, the infamous pirate Ramsey and his shipmates sacrificed everything to embark on an impossible journey into the Sea of Thieves. In the present day, Larinna, an ambitious stowaway determined to leave her mark on history, joins forces with a wild and adventurous captain seeking the greatest treasure ever buried. Separated by time but united by their drive to uncover the secrets of the Sea of Thieves, both crews will face tricks, traps, and malevolent horrors unleashed from the depths of the sea as each draws nearer to Athena’s Fortune. Take a deep breath and dive into an epic story based on Rare's thrilling shared-world adventure game Sea of Thieves, where aspiring pirates can set sail on exciting voyages. Discover the tales of famously fearsome pirates whose legends endure and whose plunder still lies buried, ready for the taking.
£12.59
Fantagraphics The NWord of God
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£22.94
Melville House Publishing Tell Her Everything
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£17.00
Melville House Publishing Oh God, The Sun Goes
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£15.29
Penguin Random House Group Liquid Fragile Perishable
Book Synopsis
£16.19
Penguin Random House Group Juliet the Maniac
Book Synopsis
£15.29
Melville House Publishing The Italy Letters
Book Synopsis
£11.69
ZE Books The Devil's Treasure
Book Synopsis"What is in the bag behind the Devil's chair? Knowledge of some kind? Surely something a little girl did not know should be left alone. I've been criticized- and sometimes admired-for what some readers see as my affinity with cruelty, both in my depictions of it and my supposed infliction of it on characters." In The Devil's Treasure-aptly subtitled A Book of Stories and Dreams-the iconic author Mary Gaitskill has created a chimerical hybrid of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art that transcends categorization. This collage of four novels (one a work in progress), interspersed with and thematically linked by a single short story, then woven together with the author's commentary, is a kind of director's cut revealing the personal and societal forces that inform each individual piece of work, an ongoing, passionate exploration of core human emotions and experience, the ideally, sometimes quixotically high and grossly, confusedly low. With the stylistic daring and preternatural acuity that has made her one of America's most original writers, Gaitskill has created a layered vision of modern life that simultaneously blends the huge prehistoric creatures that swim at the bottom of our collective ocean with a family that picnics on the beach while a podcast natters about politics and a perhaps dangerously curious child explores the lapping waves.Trade Review"About sex she is an especially distinctive writer. She catches cruelty and inexplicable desire, what she has called "the dirt within," as well as any writer we have. Once you've read her, her little hammer continues to tap in your head." - Dwight Garner, New York Times "Gaitskill is something special. She doesn't grandstand; she lacks self-pity. She has an intuitive sympathy for people acting on their worst impulses and a gift for portraying cruelty without condemnation. She manages to be an erotic writer without being, precisely, a sex writer." - Emily Nussbaum, New York Magazine "Bracing in its rigorous truth-seeking, subtle and capacious in its moral vision, Gaitskill's work feels more real than real life and reading her leads to a place that feels like a sacred space." - Boston Globe "What is most amazing about Gaitskill is her ability to portray the heart of human longing and suffering, and to see in each gesture of our lives the disturbing and conflicting pool of drives that marks our every gesture." - Sheila Heti, The Believer "Devotees of Gaitskill's work are likely to appreciate the opportunity to revisit her masterworks on something of a guided tour where the author herself is able to instruct us... This impressionistic construction rewards those looking for a deeper connection to Gaitskill's rigorous imagination." - Kirkus Review
£21.25
Heloise Press ABANDONMENT
Book SynopsisA tale of love and betrayal in colonial Eritrea.
£11.66
Into Creative The Newspaper Man
Book SynopsisFormer journalist, Tony Moscardini has exchanged life in a rain-lashed Scottish city packed with incident for the sun-baked predictability of a small medieval hilltop town in rural Italy.
£10.99
Muswell Press Queer Life, Queer Love: The Second Anthology
Book SynopsisThe anthology will be published in May 2023, just ahead of Pride. Containing 30 stories, non-fiction pieces, flash fiction and poetry, the winning entries from an international competition to capture the best of Queer writing today. Entry is open to anyone, without restriction. Submissions will open on 15th August and close on 1st October 2022. Winning authors will be notified in November 2022.Trade Review"Celebrating queer love...multiple, fleeting, varied'. Kevin Brazil TLS. 'Beautiful writing, original ideas and a few suprises'. Matt Cain. 'A great initiative'. Paul Burston, author, journalist, curator of the Polari Salon"
£9.49
3TimesRebel Press Beloved
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£13.49
3TimesRebel Press This House
Book Synopsis
£11.69
Weatherglass Books How to be a French Girl
Book SynopsisHow to be a French Girl is a fierce, disturbing and funny debut novel about desire, art and what we'll risk to change ourselves.
£10.79
Pilot Press Ripcord
Book Synopsis
£13.99
BUI JONES Limited Hello Kitty and Other Stories
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£9.49
CHEERIO Publishing Pariah Genius
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£16.99
Muswell Press Darkness Falls in Jakarta
Book SynopsisBeautifully written, with sumptuous and enchanting descriptions of Indonesia, this is a haunting, menacing novel that completely transports you to a specific time and place and perfectly portrays that shared sense of guilt in all of us about mistakes or inactions of the past.
£10.44
Muswell Press In Search of the Missing Eyelash
Book SynopsisIn Search of the Missing Eyelash is a novel about home and love and what can become undone when we try to make it all better. It's also about gender and sex and it flips from heart-breaking to hilarious within the stoke of an eyelash.
£10.44
