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
Valley Press The Layers
Book Synopsis
£9.00
Canongate Books All Over Creation
Book SynopsisTwenty-five years after running away from her family's farm in Idaho, Yumi Fuller returns home to care for her ailing parents and to confront her best friend and her conflicted past. She finds a world changed beyond recognition; and with the arrival of a group of young anti-GM activists, she finds herself caught up in a new revolution.All Over Creation is an exploration of the dichotomies of love and responsibility and a celebration of the capacity for renewal that resides within us all.Trade ReviewOzeki shows more courage than most in melding a well-crafted, often comic story of the personal with the political * * Observer * *Sophisticated . . . Seamlessly done . . . A nice blend of humour and strangely affecting optimism. Ozeki has written a book where dread and hope coexist. Neither is given short shrift or magicked away * * New York Times * *Highly original * * Daily Mail * *Amusing, moving and delicately controlled * * Big Issue * *All Over Creation opens wider with every plot twist as it moves from tenderness to comedy to sobering truth and the world in the eye of one family's storm -- BARBARA KINGSOLVERThis winning novel . . . is a feast of humour and wisdom about family and friendship * * Glamour * *Ozeki is a gifted storyteller. All Over Creation buzzes and blooms with the cross-pollination of races and subcultures, death and birth, betrayal and reconciliation, comedy and tragedy * * Los Angeles Times * *Ozeki deftly and sensitively folds the variegated topics together, whipping up a savoury treat * * Entertainment Weekly * *Captivating . . . Ozeki joins the constellation of such environmentally aware writers as Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx and Margaret Atwood, bringing her own shrewd and playful humour, luscious sexiness and kinetic pizazz . . . A busy, darkly humorous and cunningly entertaining novel, weaving canny psychological insights into each twist in her purposeful yet anarchically tinged plot * * Chicago Trubune * *Bewitching . . . Ozeki's story splices a bit of Edward Abbey into an Anne Tyler plot. The fruits of this mix are definitely worth tasting * * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * *
£10.44
Vintage Publishing The Future Future: ‘Unlike anything else’ Salman
Book Synopsis*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE*It's the eighteenth-century and Celine is in trouble'A terrific novel'FINANCIAL TIMES'A radically beautiful new novel'SHEILA HETI, author of Pure ColourParis, 1775: Celine's husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. Meanwhile men are inventing stories about her - about her affairs, her sexuality, and addictions...All these stories are lies, but the public loves them - spreading them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in this society ruled by men high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, and crimes against women. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth and beauty.Fantastical, funny and blindingly bright, The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.Trade ReviewThe Future Future is a terrific novel: a testament to female friendship, an adventure story, a political commentary and a hymn to the power of language crafted into a unique and compelling shape * Financial Times *Adam Thirlwell considers the celestial and the political on the same plane, creating wondrous new ways of seeing history, nature, friendship and time. He weaves together so many wisps of reality, and the result is a radically beautiful new novel that is funny, touching, memorable and bright -- Sheila Heti, author of Pure ColourA luminous book, brimming with originality and cleverness * Mail on Sunday *Sex, revolution and death in eighteenth-century France and America, described in the language of the future, and featuring an astonishing visit to the moon. A dazzling performance, unlike anything else you'll read this (or any other) year -- Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight's ChildrenThirlwell's prose is hypnotic and coolly beautiful. The writing is full of dreamlike leaps, not just at the level of plot, but in its sentences, too... The Future Future has a beauty and a mysterious power that reflect its enigmatic protagonist * Guardian *A book filled with imaginative leaps, brave decisions and tiny details that give delight -- Colm Tóibín, author of BrooklynA complex, brilliant book... Engrossing * Times Literary Supplement *Sharp and witty and burningly original: a book that feels joyfully new -- Katherine Rundell, author of Super-InfiniteI am utterly obsessed by Adam Thirlwell's dazzling, effervescent The Future Future. More epic than The Favourite, more vivid than Marie Antoinette, his prose sandblasts the dust off history, revealing the untold stories of real women - raw, sexy, funny and glinting with life. The Future Future is a parachute in time, both modern and timeless, unflinching and hilarious. Mesmerising. I'm transfixed -- Polly Stenham, author of That FaceA landmark - precisely because it's so deeply embedded in our history and is so unthinkably original -- Edmund White, author of A Previous Life
£17.09
Istros Books Let's Go Home, Son
Book SynopsisThere are three of them and they have no names: they are a family whose roles superseded by destiny. This is the story of man's struggle for dignity of a man who has only a short time left to live. In the first months of lockdown a mother and son struggle against bureacracy to be able to visit the father in hospital and to fulfil his last wish to return to their Dalmatian terrace just as the cherries blossom and the swallows' nests are full of hatchlings. In this novel, Prtenjaca deals with loss, short-lived hope and memory, his voice is that of a child - one that asks questions - alongside that of a mature voice of a man who has to make difficult decisions. These voices overlap in a rhythmical exchange of scenes and images from the past and the present, comprising an elegy in which love reverberates like the sound of cymbals. There's three of them, and they have no names. Sometimes they seem alone in this world.
£11.69
Transworld Publishers Ltd Idol
Book Synopsis''Darkly delicious'' ELIZABETH DAY''Fresh, glamorous, surprising'' MARIAN KEYES''Compulsive, brilliant'' ABIGAIL DEAN''Utterly gripping and unsettling'' LUCY FOLEY''An absolute page turner; addictive'' CECILIA AHERNPICKED AS ONE OF STYLIST MAGAZINE''S ''FICTION BOOKS YOU CAN''T MISS IN 2022''******''Follow your heart and speak your truth.''For Samantha Miller''s young fans - her ''girls'' - she''s everything they want to be. She''s an oracle, telling them how to live their lives, how to be happy, how to find and honour their ''truth''. And her career is booming: she''s just hit three million followers, her new book Chaste has gone straight to the top of the bestseller lists and she''s appearing at sell-out events. Determined to speak her truth and bare all to her adoring fans, she''s written an essay about her sexual awakening as a teenager, with her femal
£13.49
Profile Books Ltd Alison: a stunning and emotional graphic novel
Book Synopsis'Alison is a haunting book, complex and intimate. Lizzy Stewart has written and drawn the aches and confusions of love and growing up with immense skill' Posy Simmonds Alison is newly married, barely twenty and struggling to find her place in the world. A chance encounter with an older artist upturns her life and she forsakes convention and her working-class Dorset roots for the thrumming art scene of London in the late seventies. As the thrill of bohemian romance leads inevitably to disappointment, Alison begins to find her own path - through art, friendship and love.Trade ReviewSubtle and deliciously complicated -- Tessa HadleyA delicious portrait of 80s and 90s London and a more universal tale of a working-class young woman making a life in a world that has not been designed for the likes of her. For all its effortlessness [...] Alison ends up carrying a great emotional heft. It's a lovely book, and I cried at the end. * Guardian *Every page is a marvel; I absolutely loved it to death -- Jenny ColganAlison is a haunting book, complex and intimate. Lizzy Stewart has written and drawn the aches and confusions of love and growing up with immense skill -- Posy SimmondsNuanced, lovely, and very real, Alison haunted me for days and left me wanting to give it to everyone I know -- Jessie Greengrass, author of The High HouseI totally loved Alison. It's the story of the life of an artist told with subtlety and truth. It made me cry and I immediately wanted to share it with female friends -- Amy LiptrotSad and sweet and joyful and hopeful. -- Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled GroundA genius graphic novel (but lots of words) about a young woman from Dorset who leaves her life to be with a much older famous artist in London. It's also brilliant on relationships, creativity and friendship (and the art world) -- India KnightHer compassionate depictions of women alone, women together, will undoubtedly find welcoming audiences * Shelf Awareness *Her every page looks exquisite, which is entirely fitting, given that this is a book about an artist. Alison is Posy Simmonds meets Edward Bawden - and really, what higher praise could there be? * Observer *A vivid and moving book about friendship, art and making hard choices to stay on a creative path -- Sinéad Gleeson, author of ConstellationsAlison absorbed, delighted and moved me with its quiet truthfulness. No shouting, no hatred, no bitterness-just a patient, determined tackling of the eternal question: how can a woman artist fight her way out of the back seat and get behind the wheel? -- Helen GarnerLizzy's work is beautifully executed with an eye for composition, colour and fine detail * It's Nice That *This book is a testament to the right to choose your own life. It is a tender, heartbreaking meditation on the bonds between women, the dazzle of the city, the struggle to become a female artist within the bounds of patriarchy, and the desire to make a mark on the world. It made me long for my friends; the dreams we have shared over the years and the ways in which they make the world feel possible. I want to give a copy to everyone I love. -- Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater and Milk TeethA captivating new graphic novel that could have been dreamt up by Edna O'Brien and Judith Kerr of The Tiger Who Came To Tea fame, had they ever collaborated. * The Gloss Ireland *What is it like to be a muse who is also an artist? Lizzie Stewart's Alison is a tender and powerfully precise work about class, gender, patriarchy and race in the art world of the late 20th century. And, like Alison's own paintings, its clear perspective on the wrongs of this world never overshadows its generous capacities for beauty, love and joy -- Joanna Walsh, author of Girl OnlineEvery now and again a book comes along that is such a bright joy, so true, so beautiful and moving. Alison is one of those books. I loved it -- Jessie Burton, author of The MiniaturistBeautiful ... A coming-of-age tale with stunning artwork that will resonate with women everywhere * Red *Alison's various relationships, which are few but complex, are beautifully drawn - both figuratively and literally - especially a friendship she strikes up with a female sculptor. And the author skilfully manages to tease out all the nuances of a life in a tale that, despite being as old as the hills, manages to feel fresh and relevant * the Crack *A beautiful depiction of life as an artist, of the movements of love and time. I absolutely loved it. -- Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start FromStewart does a wonderful job * Buzz Mag *Alison is a marvel. A compassionate story of art, friendship, agency and desire, beautifully told through pictures and prose -- Chloë AshbyA highlight ... subtle and sympathetic * Daily Telegraph *Stewart's artwork is sensuous, lush and gorgeously textured. The best-looking book of the year * Herald *Praise for It's Not What You Thought It Would Be: 'This brilliant debut collection explores the intensity of teenage ennui and female friendship, with a deft feel for its slights and tensions -- Rachel Cooke * Guardian *Mournful, lovely ... Stewart's dynamic, warm, flowing art invites the reader in * The New York Times *A quietly powerful book, and Stewart's well chosen and often witty dialogue goes straight to the heart. Her artwork is filmic and beautiful -- Isabel Greenberg, author of Glass Town
£11.69
Istros Books Engagement
Book SynopsisThis harrowing tale, which spans sixteen hours and is told through the eyes of a mysterious narrator, delves into the bad blood between two timeless villages in Turkey. Based on a true story, the book tells of geographical complexities, tangled relations, hazy memories and unreliable witnesses: a story in which perhaps is nothing as it seems...
£11.69
Swift Press Tiananmen Square
Book Synopsis''An extraordinary book. Truly important'' William Boyd''Outstanding ... Intimate as well as epic'' Sunday Times''Poignant and powerful'' Daily Mail''Utterly gripping'' The Spectator''Beautiful and devastating'' Irish NewsSunday Times Best Summer Reads 2024Longlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2025Shortlisted in the British Book Awards 2025A stunning, deeply moving novel about growing up in Beijing in the 1970s and 80s and taking part in Tiananmen Square protestsIt is Beijing in the 1970s, and Lai lives with her parents, grandmother and younger brother in a small flat in a working-class area. Her grandmother is a formidable figure no-nonsense and uncompromising, but loving towards her granddaughter while her ageing beauty of a mother snipes at her father, a sunken figure who has taken refuge in his work.As she grows up, Lai comes to discern the realities of the country she lives is: an early encounter with the police haunts her for years; her father makes her see that his quietness is a reaction to experiences he has lived through; and an old bookseller subtly introduces her to ideas and novels that open her mind to different perspectives. But she also goes through what anyone goes through when young the ebbs and flows of friendships; troubles and rewards at home and at school; and the first steps and missteps in love.A gifted student, she is eventually given a scholarship to study at the prestigious Peking University; while there she meets new friends, and starts to get involved in the student protests that have been gathering speed. It is the late 1980s, and change is in the air...A truly remarkable novel about coming to see the world as it is, Tiananmen Square is the story of one girl's life growing up in the China of the 1970s and 80s, as well as the story of the events in 1989 that give the novel its name: the hope and idealism of a generation of young students, their heroism and courage, and the price that some of them paid.5 STAR READER REVIEWSCaptivating, intimate and so moving, I finished it in tears'Wow! This was a stunning novel'Probably one of the most memorable, poignant, emotional books I''ve ever read This will crawl for a while under my skin. Can I give a 6th star?'A brilliant and important read'Beautifully written. I read it slowly as I wanted to savour every word'There is something so deeply touching, tender yet powerful in the writing This coming-of-age story is compelling, haunting, emotive and written beautifully. By the end, it left me in tears. It is a book I will long remember'
£17.00
Profile Books Ltd Harrow
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction A Sunday Times Book of the Year A Times Paperback of the Year In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. 'When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me ' New Yorker Books of the Year 2021 'This is the apocalypse as reimagined by a committee headed by Dalí, Kafka and Yorgos Lanthimos.' Observer Winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 LA Times Prize Longlisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked for greatness as a baby when she died for a moment, then came back to life. After Khristen's boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and her mother disappears, she ranges across the dead landscape and finds a 'resort' on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call 'Big Girl'. In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. Rivetingly strange and delivered with Williams' searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is a tale of paradise lost and the reasons to try and recover something of it.Trade ReviewShe practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams's imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her. -- A.O. Scott * The New York Times Book Review *As our world disintegrates, it will take what we think of as reality with it. Addressing this in fiction will be the job, partly, of a certain kind of modern mystic. Williams - great virtuoso of the unreal - is one of them. -- Sam Byers * Guardian *A magnificent and moving novel [that excavates] the middle distance between silence and experience . . . Harrow is a piece of writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humor weaponized by rage. -- David L. Ulin * Los Angeles Times *Harrow's dark humour, nihilism and absurdist bent bear the author's idiosyncratic stamp ... [there are] glistening nuggets of humour and wordplay amid the doom. * The Irish Times *Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction . . . A crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision . . . To read this novel is to know and to be known (Galatians 4:9) by a profound and comfortless alterity, to encounter the cosmic otherness at the very core of the self. -- Justin Taylor * Bookforum *Death-haunted and perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss . . . [She] remains our great prophet of nothingness. -- Anthony Domestico * Atlantic *The ridiculous, pigheaded, bemused, endlessly distracted and continuously self-sabotaging state of the future is the subject of this wonderfully goading satire . . . A blackly comic portrait of futility . . . This is sarcasm of a high, artistic order, reminiscent of no one quite so much as William Gaddis. -- Sam Sacks * Wall Street Journal *Elegantly deranged . . . A hypnotizing novel, funny in places and chilling in others, filled with wacky and tragic characters, that unspools the absurdity in just one of our many very possible bad futures. -- Emily Temple * Literary Hub *Williams's tone achiev[es] a new, perfectly hostile register . . . [Her] vision of an annihilated earth seems to have flown from the brain of Francisco Goya . . . As the novel continues, it plumbs ever-deeper zones of dystopian weirdness . . . She practices a kind of hallucinogenic realism, which takes at face value the psychological flights of characters deranged by loss . . . Williams has long written to the side of conventional English, pursuing a form that feels more commensurate with actual experience-with the terror, comedy, and mystery of moving through the world. -- New Yorker * Katy Waldman *Who better than Williams to capture pure-hearted but absurd efforts to retrieve paradise lost? * The Millions *Climate collapse is well underway and Joy Williams's Harrow deserves the Pulitzer Prize * Bookforum *The return of an American original ... Odd, witty and original. * Guardian 2022 in books highlights *Brilliant and inspiring. Anyone new to her has a treat in store * The Times *Among the strangest, most exciting authors at work today * Daily Mail *Praise for Joy Williams: 'One of the great writers of her generation' * The New York Times *To read Joy Williams is to be arrested in a state of relentless awe and wonderment ... why we aren't worshipping Joy Williams in public squares is beyond me * Vanity Fair *She belongs in the company of Céline and Flannery O'Connor -- James SalterWilliams is a flawless writer * NPR *Deep, dazzling, disconcerting -- Adam FouldsJoy Williams is simply a wonder -- Raymond CarverElectric and dangerously human -- Philip HensherCracked, morbidly hilarious ... a splintered vision of environmental collapse that seems somehow both gleefully nihilistic and yearningly spiritual * Wall Street Journal Top Ten Books of 2021 *Beautiful ... It's all pleasure, if pleasure of a bleak and violent sort. It's also often pretty funny, in a deadpan way -- Christian Lorentzen * Daily Telegraph *Her works are almost a well-kept secret. They should be much more widely read. Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder... Harrow's short, dense pages unfold into a world of Kafkaesque distortion, its sharp wit and cruelty pierced with dreamlike language and imagery, and moments of almost unbearable poignancy. As the book draws to its dark conclusion, a hint of something miraculous, borne out from its opening chapter, flutters over the final paragraphs. In Williams's shattered world, destruction appears almost like the possibility of renewal. * Financial Times *Harrow is unyielding in its moral purpose and raucously impious in its methods ... she has the syntactic equivalent of perfect pitch * the TLS *In the murky "postdisaster present" of this novel, "all the prisons had been emptied, the opera houses and theaters closed". Its narrator, Khristen, treks across the desert. This bizarre novel may be a hard read, but its fragmentary, hallucinatory form captures something essential about a world in disintegration -- Robert Collins * Sunday Times *Strangely beautiful and grimly funny -- Jane Shilling * Daily Mail *
£8.54
Comma Press The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction
Book SynopsisUnlike most other Palestinian cities, Ramallah is a relatively new town, a de facto capital of the West Bank allowed to thrive after the Oslo Peace Accords, but just as quickly hemmed in and suffocated by the Occupation as the Accords have failed. Perched along the top of a mountainous ridge, it plays host to many contradictions: traditional Palestinian architecture jostling against aspirational developments and cultural initiatives, a thriving nightlife in one district, with much more conservative, religious attitudes in the next. Most striking however - as these stories show - is the quiet dignity, resilience and humour of its people; citizens who take their lives into their hands every time they travel from one place to the next, who continue to live through countless sieges, and yet still find the time, and resourcefulness, to create. Translated by Basma Ghalayini, Alexander Hong, Thoraya El-Rayyes, Mohammed Ghalaieny, Raph Cormack, Adam Talib, Yasmine Seale, Andrew Leber, Emre Bennett & Raph Cohen.
£10.44
Fitzcarraldo Editions The Long Form
Book SynopsisIt’s early morning and there’s a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she’ll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas. Trade Review‘An exquisite study of care and attention, The Long Form explores the mysterious, often unbridgeable gulf between daily life and narrative fiction like nothing else.... Written in crystalline prose as tender as it is precise, as clean as it is challenging, this is the most thorough investigation of what the novel, as form, can really do; it asks who or what it is for, how it may or may not interact with our various realities, how it holds time and space and might better equip us to make sense of the world beyond the page. Kate Briggs has created a quietly radical masterpiece.’ — Maddie Mortimer, Goldsmiths Prize judge‘'[S]ometimes she seems to achieve the impossible, weaving an invisible emotive thread between polemic and experience to powerful effect.... [M]akes for exhilarating reading. There is a sense of new ground being broken.' — Jo Hamya, The Guardian‘The Long Form is gripping, with all the satisfactions of more traditional narratives, albeit in unprecedented places…Reading Briggs, I felt the novel, as a genre, lift its head and look around the room, with all the effort, focus, and luminous curiosity of a newborn, seeing in a way it hadn’t seen before.’ — Audrey Wollen, New Yorker‘The Long Form is… an exhilarating experiment in form, an examination of the function of time in the novel, which includes an irresistible graphic element that punctuates the narrative and helps to conjure the stagelike setting occupied by the maternal dyad. Briggs invokes E. M. Forster—“Every novel needs a clock”—and indeed her novel’s timepiece has us on the edge of our seat, turning the pages in anticipation. I finished The Long Form and started again from the beginning; I wanted to understand how this miracle of a book had come to be; I was not ready to let go.’ — Moyra Davey, The Paris Review‘I got the feeling ... not of interrupting my life by reading it but understanding what it means to interrupt a book with a life. And in this sense the book comes to life in a way none other has for me – not a thing to be consumed but a force exerting its own energy on me.’ — Elisa Wouk Almino, Los Angeles Times‘The Long Form is an absorbing and profound novel in which Kate Briggs breathes extraordinary life into the quiet moments of a young woman: one who is also a new mother, a reader, a daughter, a friend. With every carefully weighted sentence, action and thought, one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing, its principles of collectivity and its feminist commitment to making the smallest, most everyday act worthy of consideration within a literary canon. A beautifully written book about the art of reading, of criticism, and of surviving through the strangest yet most normal of times.’ — Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath‘Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form – with its recursive structure, its subtle connections and reverberations, its attentiveness to physical and social life, and its animated conversation with other works of fiction and theory – presents the novel form as the most elastic of containers. Kate Briggs is a brilliant writer and thinker.’ — Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch‘Kate Briggs treats the quotidian rhythms of Helen and Rose, mother and baby, with unusual attentiveness, perspicacity and, most importantly, largeness of thought. This makes The Long Form a radical, celebratory and quite magical consideration of the profound creative possibilities inherent in, and intrinsic to, everyday experience. It’s such a lively and generous book.’ —Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move‘The Long Form looks at this detail within the context of the structures that surround it, and in doing so Kate Briggs has built a novel that is simultaneously warm and exact, far-reaching and meticulous, generous and wise.’ —Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes‘Briggs is a fantastic writer: that is clear by the end of this eminently strange novel…Briggs has written a work that will constantly reward a re-reading, with a voice that combines a deep complexity with moments of piercing clarity. It is an intelligent and well-read book: but it is also emphatically convincing and moving.’ — Patrick Maxwell, The Big Issue‘[T]his is a novel on novel-ness, both of the new baby and the new possibilities for form. Briggs’s project is to try and break the novel and unfurl this transcendent vision where each element and character, however minor and tangential, is equally important…. [Let] there be trumpets, heralding Briggs and the possibilities of this long form.’ — Jennifer Kabat, 4Columns‘[The Long Form] offers another form of protest, a call to action. Let us be enacted upon by other bodies – human, non-human, literary, all. Let us stretch and lunge, affect one another’s rhythms, converse with cultural histories, interrupt those histories, burst open doors, and, with all the care, softness, and curiosity that any new life might inspire, expand and deepen.’ — Georgie Devereux, The Rumpus‘Kate Briggs’s This Little Art shares some wonderful qualities with Barthes’s own work – the wit, thoughtfulness, invitation to converse, and especially the attention to the ordinary and everyday in the context of meticulously examined theoretical and scholarly questions. This is a highly enjoyable read: informative and stimulating for anyone interested in translation, writing, language, and expression.’ — Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t (Praise for This Little Art)‘I have been thinking, many weeks after having finished it, of Kate Briggs’s truly lovely This Little Art, a book-length essay on translation that's as wry and thoughtful and probing as any book I’ve read in the past year. My favourite works are those in which one feels the writer wrestling with genre even as she is writing; Kate Briggs does this with her own kind of magic, never failing to write beguilingly and intelligently and passionately about the little art of translation, which in the end shows itself to be not so little, at all.’ — Lauren Groff, author of Matrix (Praise for This Little Art)
£13.49
Comma Press The BBC National Short Story Award 2023
Book Synopsis
£8.99
Atlantic Books Freeman's Conclusions
Book SynopsisOver the course of ten years, Freeman's has introduced the English-speaking world to countless writers of international import and acclaim, from Olga Tokarczuk to Valeria Luiselli, while also spotlighting brilliant writers working in English, from Tommy Orange to Tess Gunty. Now, in its last issue, this unique literary project ponders all the ways of reaching a fitting conclusion.For Sayaka Murata, keeping up with the comings and goings of fashion and its changing emotional landscapes can mean being left behind, and in her poem 'Amenorrhea' Julia Alverez experiences the end of the line as menopause takes hold. Yet sometimes an end is merely a beginning, as Barry Lopez meditates while walking through the snowy Oregonian landscapes. While Chinelo Okparanta's story 'Fatu' confronts the end of a relationship under the spectre of new life, other writers look towards aging as an opportunity for rebirth, such as Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who takes on the role of being her own elder, comforting herself in the ways that her grandmother used to. Finally, in his comic story 'Everyone at Dinner Has a Max Von Sydow Story,' Dave Eggers suggests that sometimes stories don't have neat or clean endings - that sometimes the middle is enough.With new writing from Sandra Cisneros, Colum McCann, Omar El Akkad and Mieko Kawakami, Freeman's: Conclusions is a testament to the startling power of literature to conclude in a state of beauty, fear and promise.Trade ReviewThe definitive issue of a venerated literary journal...Filled with expertly crafted stories, essays, and poems, this volume is a triumph * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) *
£11.69
Canongate Books Unlikely Stories, Mostly
Book SynopsisA man finds a bald patch on the back of his head that looks curiously like a face, then discovers he's splitting in two. A bored student suggests digging a tunnel into the foundations of the art school. An elderly man is healed by hundreds of tiny people working on repairs inside his own head.Unlikely Stories, Mostly is Alasdair Gray's first collection of short stories. Gloriously illustrated, darkly funny, and steeped in myth and fable, they capture Gray's singular imagination.Trade ReviewUnsettling, otherworldly . . . Not since William Blake has a British artist wed pictorial and literary talent to such powerful effect * * Financial Times * *His work is masterly . . . Temperamental radicalism, militant humanism and a number of recurring sexual, linguistic and aesthetic themes are woven together into a prose full of recondite allusions and brilliant innovations * * London Review of Books * *As you'd expect from a writer as talented as Gray, there are enough idiosyncratic pleasures knocking around to make the book well worth reading * * Independent * *A series of fantastical fables, showing the influence of Kafka, Swift and Johnson's Rasselas . . . Memorable * * Guardian * *A necessary genius -- ALI SMITHOne of the brightest intellectual and creative lights Scotland has known in modern times -- NICOLA STURGEONGray is a true original, a twentieth century William Blake * * Observer * *Too clever for its own good in parts, but otherwise a damned good read -- "Colonel Sebastian Moran * * Simla Times" * *This anthology may be likened to a vast architectural folly imblending the idioms of the Greek, Gothic, Oriental, Baroque, Scottish Baronial and Bauhaus schools. Like one who, absently sauntering the streets of Barcelona, suddenly beholds the breathtaking grandeur of Gaudi's Familia Sagrada, I am compelled to admire a display of power and intricacy whose precise purpose evades me. Is the structure haunted by a truth too exalted and ghostly to dwell in a plainer edifice? Perhaps. I wonder. I doubt -- "Lady Nicola Stewart, Countess of Dunfermline * * The Celtic Needlewoman" * *
£9.49
Honno Ltd Only May
Book Synopsis
£8.54
Canongate Books Pity
Book SynopsisA SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2024A BBC MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024AN INDEPENDENT BEST FICTION TO READ IN 2024A NEW STATESMAN FICTION HIGHLIGHT OF 2024A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024AN i-D FICTION HIGHLIGHT TO BE EXCITED FOR IN 2024'A deeply felt and rich enactment of love, loneliness and personal triumph that leaves an indelible mark on modern Queer life' OCEAN VUONGThe town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shovelling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something. Once, the town provided, it was important; it had purpose. But what is it now?Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the town where their father lived and his father, too. Now in his middle age and still reeling from the collapse of his personal life, Alex must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to conceal. His only child Simon has no memory of the mines. Now in his twenties and working in a call centre, he derives passion from his side hustle in sex work and his weekly drag gigs. Set across three generations of South Yorkshire mining family, Andrew McMillan's magnificent debut novel is a lament for a lost way of life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change.Trade ReviewTender and true. It explores with brilliance and deep empathy how our lives - and our secrets - are always intertwined with those who went before us -- DOUGLAS STUARTThe poet's deft first novel conveys the personal and political pain felt by three generations in his home town . . . This is not a novel specifically about the strike and its outcome, although its embittered legacy is skilfully threaded through its pages . . . the narrative is impressively ambitious . . . a novel of huge compassion * * Guardian * *A deeply felt and rich enactment of love, loneliness and personal triumph that leaves an indelible mark on modern Queer life. With the poet's precision and capacious resistance to resolution, wherein doubt is transformed into force, McMillan's first foray into fiction is a magical one -- OCEAN VUONGWe already knew that Andrew McMillan could turn a phrase. With his debut novel, he also shows us a rare gift for storytelling. Pity digs deep into the heart and history of South Yorkshire and brings out the black gold of love, longing and loss. A triumph -- JON McGREGORPity pays a great poet's tough but tender attention to the unspoken layers and historic fissures which lie beneath the wounded town of the self. This beautiful book about the marks that are left on people and places in turn leaves a deep empathic mark on the reader -- MAX PORTERA magnificent kaleidoscope of a novel: sad, wise, enlightening and empathetic * * Independent * *Pity is as tough, glittering and multilayered as the coal upon which it rests. With lyrical prose and deep tenderness, Andrew McMillan beautifully explores the complex hauntings of love and grief across generations -- LIZ BERRYBeautiful, sparing and impassioned . . . [a] tender exploration of the ties that bind generations * * Literary Review * *Full of intrigue . . . McMillan displays his poet's knack for linguistic playfulness * * New Statesman * *McMillan's writing is at its most powerful . . . he fearlessly explores masculinity and desire . . . bringing to the novel the clarity and economy of a poet who looks unflinchingly at life and longing, sex and angst, the sparseness and vividness of his prose clothes the bare political bones of this raging lament. Nor is he sentimental. There is honesty, and occasionally humour in his depiction of the town and its inhabitants, his loose ends and unresolvedproblems a mirror of life. A slim but potent tale * * Herald * *
£13.49
Atlantic Books Children of Paradise: Longlisted for the Women's
Book SynopsisWhen Holly applies for a job at the Paradise - one of the city's oldest cinemas, squashed into the ground floor of a block of flats - she thinks it will be like any other shift work. She cleans toilets, sweeps popcorn, avoids the belligerent old owner, Iris, and is ignored by her aloof but tight-knit colleagues who seem as much a part of the building as its fraying carpets and endless dirt. Dreadful, lonely weeks pass while she longs for their approval, a silent voyeur. So when she finally gains the trust of this cryptic band of oddballs, Holly transforms from silent drudge to rebellious insider and gradually she too becomes part of the Paradise - unearthing its secrets, learning its history and haunting its corridors after hours with the other ushers. It is no surprise when violence strikes, tempers change and the group, eyes still affixed to the screen, starts to rapidly go awry...Trade ReviewOne of Britain's best young short story writers... eerie... festers in glorious style... there's nothing vanilla in the dark of the Paradise, and even when the corporate takeover comes, complete with managerial drone, it all feels smooth and unearthly - an allegory for lost stories, youth and time. * The Telegraph *There's a strange, tortured beauty to Children of Paradise... Grudova has created a magnificently spiky commentary on the detrimental nature of work hierarchies and zero-hours contracts. * Guardian *Fluent and transporting... utterly enthralling * TLS *A remarkable and memorable achievement. To combine the gothic, the carnivalesque, the ghastly and the sublime in a relatively slender novel shows considerable talent indeed. * Scotland on Sunday *What commends Children of Paradise... is the deft hand of an auteur at work. * Financial Times *Camilla Grudova is Angela Carter's natural inheritor. Her style is effortlessly spare and wonderfully seductive. Read her! Love her! She is sincerely strange - a glittering literary gem in a landscape awash with paste and glue and artificial settings. * Nicola Barker, author of Darkmans *Grudova understands that the best writing has to pull off the hardest aesthetic trick - it has to be both memorable and fleeting. * Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk *It's easy to write what everybody else writes and that's not what Camilla Grudova is doing. ... We need work like this in the world. * Sinead Gleeson, Arena RTE Radio 1 *The Paradise, a festering and dilapidated cinema, is the perfect ground for Camilla Grudova's filthy, grotesque and exquisitely kaleidoscopic talent. Peeping under the stained red curtain, we meet a cast of ramshackle characters: bloody, bejewelled, debauched and sucking ferociously on cigarette butts - this uniquely eccentric troop of misfits could only have been drawn by Grudova. Children of Paradise is a linguistic joy, an ode to a by-gone era of cinema and, above all, a wonderfully alive carnival of peculiarity. * Alice Ash, author of PARADISE BLOCK *I used to work at an independent cinema that was a lot like the Paradise - full of sticky floors and strange atmospheres and rumours of secret screens. Children of Paradise is a haunting love letter to that work, and to film itself. The world Grudova conjures here is both delightful and disturbing, textured by the rich details that make her stories in The Doll's Alphabet so distinctive: stolen trinkets, brooches and ticket stubs; cocktails crafted with pickled eggs and maraschino cherries. Intimate and claustrophobic, Children of Paradise captures all the dark enchantment that comes with slipping in and out of movie screens for a living. * Laura J Maw *Brilliant in the way only Camilla Grudova can be brilliant. Capitalism, cinema, strangeness - everything you hope it will be. * Heather Parry, author of ORPHEUS BUILDS A GIRL *Gloriously disgusting, bloody, alluring - an ode to a vanishing world of filthy, gaudy independent cinemas and the curious souls who work there. One for any fan of their local fleapit. * Helen McClory, author of BITTERHALL *A weird and haunting examination of the slow decay of the old ways, and the sly encroachment of careless, brave new worlds... A wry cautionary tale for cinema lovers, revealing the rotten core behind the creative industries, the grubby death knell of artistic romanticism. It is, in both senses, an entirely revolting work. * The Skinny *An enjoyable satire on film culture and labour exploitation * Literary Review *
£8.54
World Editions Ltd My Mother Says
Book Synopsis
£12.59
Little, Brown Book Group A Wreath Of Roses
Book Synopsis*Elizabeth Taylor is one of the most acclaimed 20th century writers*With a new introduction by Helen Dunmore
£9.49
Little, Brown Book Group The Sleeping Beauty
Book SynopsisINTRODUCED BY DAVID BADDIEL''Elizabeth Taylor is finally being recognised as an important British author: an author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth. As a reader, I have found huge pleasure in returning to Taylor''s novels and short stories many times over. As a writer I''ve returned to her too - in awe of her achievements, and trying to work out how she does it'' SARAH WATERSVinny Tumulty is a quiet, sensible man. When he goes to stay at a seaside town, his task is to comfort Isabella, a bereaved friend, and and he is prepared for a solemn few days of tears and consolation. But on the evening of his arrival, he looks out of the window at the sunset and catches sight of a beautiful woman walking by the seashore. Before the week is over Vinny has fallen in love, completely and utterly, for the first time in his middle-aged life. Emily, though, is a sleeping beauty, her secluded life hiding bitter secrets from the past.
£9.49
Galley Beggar Press Beasts Of England
Book Synopsis
£10.44
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Azucar: a novel
Book SynopsisAzúcar is a novel about belonging in a world where all things are on the move: people, ideas, foods and not least music. Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr, henceforth Yunior, leaves his family in Accra to travel to the mythical Caribbean island of Fumaz where the revolutionary philosophy of peopleism just about keeps its flame alive against the forces of an old-style command centre political bureaucracy and a stifling trade blockade from the big imperialist neighbour to the North. Yunior brings the knowledge of the scientist, the skills of a farmer and the heart and invention of a musician to his life in Fumaz. As scientist, he must find some way of rescuing the island’s famed sweet rice industry from collapse; as a farmer, he sees how much of his West African food has journeyed across the Atlantic to make the island’s unique cuisine; as musician he becomes part of the spirit that puts the island on the world stage, out of all proportion to its size. This is a novel of ideas – how much is accidental in the world? How much can be planned? It has much to say about the impact of colonialism on the fragile ecology of the island – but it is the pursuit of love and the tragedy of death, the interweaving of moments of harmony and moments of conflict and the motives of vividly drawn characters that are the drivers of this sometimes zany narrative. And there is always the texture of the language to enjoy in a book whose prose is as flowing, elegant and heartfelt as the music that moves freely back and forth across the seas between Africa and the Caribbean.
£10.44
Scribe Publications The Voids
Book SynopsisA BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2022 FOR BBC, i-D MAGAZINE, AND FOYLES An unsparing story of modern-day Britain, told with brilliant flashes of humour and humanity. In a condemned tower block in Glasgow, the final occupant, a young man uplifted by angels and plagued by demons, searches for life in the voids: vacant flats that will never be lived in again. Out in the world, he stumbles into the city, moving from one surreal situation to the next, encountering others on the margins of society, embracing friendship and camaraderie wherever it is offered, grappling with who he is and what shape his future might take.Trade Review‘Luminous … a writer capable of revealing the humanity in everyone … In an era when contemporary fiction is leaning ever more towards identity and relatability, it’s gratifying to know there’s still a place for a literary ride as wild as this.’ -- Benjamin Myers * The Guardian *‘Reading The Voids is a sensory experience. There is never a word too much, it never lingers. There is tragedy but no melodrama. O’Connor’s lightness of touch, the pace, economy, characters … are all perfect, all harmonious, poetic, but unadorned, even in the blackest of moments. Part of me is still in that high rise or watching the sunlight through the fire exit door at The Satellite. It is beautiful and perfect. I want to say this is a book God would like.’ -- Paul Buchanan, The Blue Nile‘A novel about a young man in Glasgow whose life is spiralling downwards, told in almost hallucinogenic prose. I catch glimpses of Alexander Trocchi and William Burroughs in it, but it retains its own unique quality.’ -- Ian Rankin * The Guardian *‘A sensory portrait of the city, set in a dizzyingly surreal Glasgow.’ -- Katie Goh * i-D Magazine *‘A startling debut … Benders are integral to the Scottish literary tradition, but O’Connor sets the bar high in a series of absurd, visionary, uproarious episodes … A triumph of the grotesque … Comedy at its most existential.’ -- John Burnside * TLS *‘At times disturbing, and at others hilarious, there are characters that appear for a page that have haunted me ever since. A wild ride that journeys through the underbelly of our society.’ -- Paul McVeigh, author of The Good Son‘There are echoes of J.G. Ballard in the setting, and of Don DeLillo in the prose. But The Voids is distinctively and brilliantly Ryan O’Connor’s own, rich with precise observations, full of haunting images, and replete with deft vignettes of character, place, and context. This is a novel that confidently generates its own unnerving atmospheres. Extraordinary work.’ -- Kevin Power, author of Bad Day in Blackrock‘The Voids is a wild, magical, and magnetically mad picaresque … it had me bellowing with laughter on one page and needing to weep on the next. I tore through it, and it through me. A brilliant debut.’ -- Niall Griffiths, author of Sheepshagger and Broken Ghost‘It is rare to discover a book that is simultaneously beautiful and devastating, where characters are frightening to behold but also worthy of compassion.’ -- Simon Van Booy, author of Night Came with Many Stars‘In the space of a few pages, I was there, right in the world of The Voids, in its chaos and sadness, its life and humour. Melodrama and sentimentality have no place in Ryan O’Connor’s writing. Instead he gives us warmth and bleakness, humanity and beauty. The “voids” might be empty but this novel is brimming with feeling and perception.’ -- Wendy Erskine, author of Sweet Home‘Poignant, poetic, and compassionate, The Voids is a tender tale of alienation, and the need to escape and, paradoxically, to belong.’ -- Lisa Harding, author of Bright Burning Things‘Finely written … O’Connor creates a world ex nihilo, showcasing the lives of the forgotten.' * The Irish Times *‘Ryan O’Connor succeeds in conjuring beautiful imagery out of a desperate situation. A whirlwind tour of Glasgow, in the wake of a protagonist plagued by addiction and failure is lifted by the narrative’s breakneck pace, and frequent moments of real humour. Reminiscent of James Kelman’s work, The Voids should be on everyone’s reading list this year.’ -- Polly Markham, Golden Hare Books‘A moving and thoroughly enjoyable tale of life in the liminal spaces. A masterly debut.’ -- Denise Mina, author of Conviction‘One to watch!’ * The Bookseller *‘An engulfing read.’ -- Heather McDaid * The Skinny *'This distinctive debut leaves you wanting to read more from O’Connor.’ -- Anthony Cummins * The Daily Mail *‘Ryan O’Connor’s debut novel The Voids has him earmarked as the new “overnight sensation” of the literary world … Critics and fellow authors have been going mad for The Voids.’ -- James Trimble * Falkirk Herald *'An unflinching yet poetic portrait of addiction, this bleak tale is leavened by glimmers of hope and humour.’ -- Dan Shaw * Happy Mag *‘Remarkable … perhaps the most intriguing Scottish debut for a decade.’ -- Stuart Kelly * The Scotsman *‘Beautiful, and both explicit and allusive, The Voids is a brave and moving work.’ -- Penelope Cottier * The Canberra Times *‘I recently visited Glasgow, the city where I grew up, and was reminded (in the miraculous sunshine) of the atmospheric scope of the Necropolis in the east end of the city ... The Voids by Ryan O’Connor makes an ideal accompaniment to your visit.’ -- Peter Scalpello * Galley Beggar Press *‘One of Scotland’s most talented new authors.’ * Falkirk Herald *‘Scottish author O’Connor delivers a searing and passionate debut from the voice of an angsty young Glaswegian who squats in a mostly abandoned high rise he calls “the voids.” … Readers will be lifted by his protagonist’s commitment to finding beauty in the darkness.’ -- Publishers Weekly, starred review‘Not only the best debut of the year, but my book of the year.’ * SNACK Magazine *‘When all the lists are totted up at the end of the year, it would be a little disappointing if Ryan O’Connor’s remarkable debut hadn’t scored a respectably high placing among the best Scottish novels of 2022. Already, O’Connor has found a voice: one which is convincingly authentic, and yet mercurial enough to chart both the transcendent highs and soul-destroying lows of alcoholism.’ -- Alastair Mabbott * The Herald *‘Compelling and well-written … The episodic darkness can be unrelenting at times, but what redeems the material is not only O’Connor’s effortless prose but also his hope for humanity rooted in his surprising optimism.’ -- June Sawyers * Booklist *‘Ryan O'Connor's superb debut treads familiar territory within Scottish fiction, such as Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain, it is lyrical and poetic, humorous and heartbreaking, unnerving and disorientating … Simply brilliant, and highly recommended.’ -- Jeremy Delgado‘The prose in Scottish newcomer Ryan O’Connor’s The Voids soars higher than the condemned Glasgow skyscraper in which his solitary protagonist lives, transcending the grungy, grinding plot with brutal lyricism.’ -- Michael Winkler, Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2022‘A debut that puts your brain to work! The reading experience was akin to electroconvulsive therapy, exciting my grey matter like never before.’ -- James Goodall * Yorkshire Times *
£8.54
Granta Books The Appointment
Book Synopsis'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.' So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them; to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers; and to Paul, her lover and the one person she can trust. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street.And what she discovers there suddenly puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment is a pitiless rendering of the terrors of a crushing regime.Trade ReviewA brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. * New York Times *Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism ... Müller has an exceptionally rare talent - to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful * Prospect *Herta Muller is a passionate artist of protest. -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *A strange, lyrical and disturbing allegory of life in Ceausescu's Romania. -- Hari Kunzru * Observer Books of the Year *A tour de force in storytelling, which manages to turn the barest of prose into poetry ... Expertly translated by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm, it is a chilling story, exquisitely told * Independent *The Appointment is both a pleasure to read and horrifying. Written with painful clarity, it is seductively conversational, yet every sentence demands attention ... The control of ideas and pace in a novel that still allows rolling emotion behind every line is remarkable. * Herald *A slim, masterfully written tale. * Newsweek *Müller achieves something beautiful. She has wrested poetry from one woman's desire to remain human in an inhuman system. * Newsday *A taut and brilliant book. * Chicago Tribune *Müller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams. * San Francisco Chronicle *
£9.49
Granta Books Mating
Book SynopsisAn American anthropologist is at a loose end in Botswana. She is ferociously intelligent and wonderfully inquisitive. She is also in love with Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who runs an experimental women-only utopian village in the Kalahari. At times wildly comic but also magnificently cerebral, Mating is a profound exploration of the human condition and a moving love story, circling the question 'what do men and women really want?'Trade ReviewOne of the most hypnotic reading experiences I've ever had... every feminist would be proud to claim this extraordinary novel as her own -- Margaret Forster * Sunday Telegraph *[A] striking success * Guardian *Dizzyingly readable... has that feeling, rare and unforgettable in contemporary fiction, of everything being at stake - ethically, emotionally and imaginatively... The best novel published this year, and doubtless for some to come * Independent *A comedy of manners crackling with ideas: about feminism, commitment, politics, Africa and the West. Rush brilliantly sustains the voice of his central character... and makes the post-colonial city and the new community itself familiar and concrete * Observer *Exhilarating... vigorous and luminous. Few books evoke so eloquently the state of love at its apogee * New York Times *[A] politically astute epic... [with] hypnotic prose... Essential reading -- Max Lui * Independent *An extremely sophisticated dramatic monologue... a serious romance refracted comically through the mind of a startlingly individual narrator... Rush has ingenuity to burn * New Republic *Funny, unflinching, and shockingly honest * New Yorker *The best rendering of erotic politics since D.H. Lawrence... a marvellous novel * New York Review of Books *Thick with meditations on matters scholarly and literary, political and psychological... [The narrator's] introspection and argumentation are infused with a contagious joie de vivre... Delightful [and] compelling * The Millions *In the pyrotechnics that erupt on the page, in its fecundity of ideas, Mating has much in common with the writing of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and John Fowles... A dazzling original * The Philadelphia Inquirer *How can Norman Rush's 1991 Mating rank among the great 20th-century novels? Let me count the ways. With all respect to Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer, no modern male has imagined a female protagonist as vivid and complex as Mating's unnamed lover-anthropologist-adventurer. Few if any white novelists have written so easily about the underrepresented turf of Africa -- Robert ChristgauAn audaciously clever novel with substance as well as flash * Detroit Free Press *A complex and moving love story... breathtaking in its cunningly intertwined intellectual sweep and brio * Chicago Tribune *Witty, raunchy... prodigiously aspiring... wonderfully varied and pungent... a remarkable book * Los Angeles Times Book Review *Even readers who remember the luminous stories in Rush's debut, Whites, may not be prepared for the cleverness, humor, insight into human nature and intellectual acuity demonstrated in this accomplished novel * Publisher's Weekly *Brilliantly written... utterly sui generis... Rush has alerted us to the transfiguring power of passion * Mirabella *A novel of real, original ideas about feminism, love, politics, race and anthropology... This is a story with blood in its veins. And the narrator is the best female character created by a male author I have ever come across * Independent five star review *[It] has a playful humour... The quirkily acquisitive heroine stands out -- Anna Scott * Guardian *
£10.44
Scribe Publications The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida: a novel of
Book SynopsisA bewitching novel set in contemporary Japan about the mysterious suicide of a young woman. Miwako Sumida is dead. Now those closest to her try to piece together the fragments of her life. Ryusei, who always loved Miwako, follows her trail to a remote Japanese village. Chie, her best friend, was the only person to know her true identity — but is now the time to reveal it? Meanwhile, Fumi, Ryusei’s sister, has her own haunting secret. Together, they realise that the young woman they thought they knew had more going on than they could ever have dreamed.Trade Review‘The gap between the private pain we suffer and the public image we project is explored with sensitivity and tenderness.’ -- Claire Allfree * Daily Mail *‘Vivid and intriguing — an elegantly cryptic, poetically plotted Murakami-esque whydunit.’ -- Sharlene Teo, award–winning author of Ponti‘An offbeat, tender exploration of the secrets we keep from others … Goenawan is clearly a talented and creative storyteller … She excels at suspense, keeping the reader guessing with left-field plot developments and forays into magic realism that somehow seem in keeping with realities on the ground.’ -- Sarah Gilmartin * The Irish Times *‘Clarissa Goenawan’s style is effortless and emotionally charged, and it’s particularly heartening to see a trans character depicted in a lead role, written in a real and sympathetic way.’ -- Prudence Wade * Press Association *‘A novel in three voices about the inner turmoil — and beauty — that people keep walled behind flawless surfaces.’ -- Tiffany Tsao, author of The Oddfits and The Majesties‘Dazzling.’ * Foyles Bookstore *‘She has created a Murakami-inspired novel that does away with all of his problems and tells a story far more rounded, pleasing, and sophisticated.’ -- Will Heath * Books & Bao *‘From the first page of Clarissa Goenawan’s The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, we know that the titular Miwako has taken her own life, but we don’t know why. This same question plagues Miwako’s close friends as they grieve her death and search for answers. In this elegant and haunting novel, Goenawan deftly explores the messiness of grief, the pain of lost chances, and the way a life can collapse under the weight of secrets. Miwako and her friends are under my skin, and I’ll be thinking about them for some time.’ -- Kathleen Barber, author of Truth Be Told and Follow Me‘An exquisite tale about the way secrets shape and transform young lives. Behind Goenawan’s crisp, spare prose lies a world of emotional complexity.’ -- Mira T. Lee, award–winning author of Everything Here Is Beautiful‘Written in clear, simple prose, Goenawan’s novel presents the intriguing mystery of Miwako Sumida through the eyes of three characters who try to piece together her puzzle while struggling with their own questions of meaning and identity. This story about youth, friendship, grief, and trauma invites us through secret doors, ready to discover more.’ -- Intan Paramaditha, PEN Award–winning author of Apple and Knife and The Wandering‘Miwako is a powerful, memorable character … The way these characters’ lives intersect makes for a complex and satisfying tale, one that’s sad at the same time as it’s lively and warm.’ -- Rebecca Hussey * Book Riot *‘As three stories interlink, rich plot, description, and dialogue make this fiction seem like reality. While readers may be aware they’re not a part of the novel, through Goenawan’s enthralling writing, they will nonetheless become immersed in her fictional world.’ -- Budi Darma‘Tender and tragic … Goenawan’s luminous prose captures the deep emotions of her characters as they grapple with questions about family history, gender, and sexuality. The tug of Miwako’s strange, troubled spirit will wrench readers from the beginning.’ -- Publishers Weekly‘Goenawan, like any skilled novelist, manages to elegantly reveal both the pain and beauty of unraveling a life after loss. This is only her second novel to date, and she’s already been compared to the wizard of world-building, Haruki Murakami.’ * Lambda Literary *‘[Goenawan] raises an age-old question on the fine line where literature ends and life begins ... [she] has her own distinctive voice, as she sensitively explores traumatic sexual experiences through a woman’s perspective.’ * The Jakarta Post *‘A compelling protagonist ... Like Japanese brush painting, the author’s simple, clear prose captures Miwako’s vulnerability and complexity. Also vividly drawn are Fumi and Chie, each having built their own unusual protective personas that are gradually revealed. An eerie and elegant puzzle.’ * Kirkus Reviews *‘Like Goenawan’s previous Rainbirds, this is more literary fiction than conventional mystery, featuring exceptionally well-drawn characters facing adversity in a narrative written with an elegance and delicacy.’ -- Michele Leber * Booklist *‘Goenawan does an expert job of getting to the core of this university student with a mysterious past, and on how people grapple with the death by suicide of a loved one.’ * Alma *‘This haunting tale of grief and tragedy by the author of Rainbirds might appeal to new adults who remember John Green’s Looking for Alaska. The leisurely narrative uncovers a world of Japanese customs, ghosts, and grief.’ -- Lesa Holstine * Library Journal *‘[A] a complex, interpersonal mystery … [A] tremendous examination of sadness … [A] book with heart about the mysteries of the heart.’ -- Benjamin Welton * New York Journal of Books *‘Goenawan’s prose is transportive in its directness and evocative in its simplicity. In Miwako, she has succeeded in an intricate character study of a perturbed soul … An immersive, haunting tale.’ -- Walter Sim * The Strait Times *‘If her debut novel brings Murakami to mind, her second, with its winsome tone, harkens to early Banana Yoshimoto. However, with her blend of mystery, magic and social issues — in this case, sexual abuse, transgender awareness and suicide — Goenawan is developing her own distinct brand.’ -- Suzanne Kamata * The Japan Times *‘A quietly powerful meditation on the destructive power of secrets, as well as the power of truth to heal even beyond death.’ -- Christina Ladd * The Nerd Daily *‘[A] subtly fantastical story, driven by themes of love, loss, and grief. It toes the line between YA and literary fiction, and it does so effortlessly … [A] three-dimensional story that moves seamlessly from the distant past to the recent past to the present, painting a colourful image of Miwako Sumida that grows in detail as the story gains momentum. Despite not having been written by a Japanese novelist, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida strongly and elegantly echoes the style and tone of manga like Erased and Orange, and most vividly the novels of Haruki Murakami … There are mysteries that tease at you and lies you’ll be told, all in service of a complex, intense story that ebbs and flows so beautifully. It’s a wild ride, and a delightfully satisfying one.’ * Books & Bao *‘This novel is both familiar and unusual. It is written in English by an Indonesian-born Singaporean author, but summons the atmospheres of Japanese fictions (both written and cinematic) … Clarissa Goenawan is an emerging talent … Compassionate and compelling.’ -- Alison Huber * Readings *‘Powerful and compelling.’ * Reading, Writing and Riesling *‘Very absorbing and incredibly well written … Highly recommended and I’ll be looking out for more from this author.’ * Theresa Smith Writes *‘A novel that examines a tragedy from three sides … Ultimately very readable and enjoyable.’ -- Emily Paull * The AU Review *‘What a beautiful, heartbreaking book … the language is reminiscent of Japanese books The Travelling Cat Chronicles (Hiro Arikawa) and If Cats Disappeared from the World (Genki Kawamura). In these stories, as in Goenawan’s, beautiful language and scenes are used as backdrops for a gentle uncovering of what it really means to be human.’ -- Kaylia Payne * Lip Magazine *‘This is a bittersweet tale of abuse and identity, of the potentially destructive nature of secrets and of the value of having people around who can understand and help process painful or traumatic events.’ * Pile by the Bed *‘This is a deep-cut examination of what happens to a life left behind.’ * Keeping Up with the Penguins *‘This is Murakami without the male gaze – a feminist Murakami, perhaps … An engrossing tale clearly influenced by Japanese women writers such as Risa Wataya and Banana Yoshimoto, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is about the crushing weight of secrets and how the long arm of history returns to haunt a person. In this novel, young women straitjacketed by the standards of mainstream society demand: give us a closer look.’ -- Cher Tan * The Saturday Paper *‘Quietly quirky in the manner of Haruki Murakami, including shades of magic realism, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida focuses on the subtle intricacies of social interactions and sexuality, particularly in Japanese culture at the time … This is a lingering fable about learning to accept yourself, even in the wake of grief.’ -- Doug Wallen * Big Issue *‘The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is a vibrant and at time surreal exploration of lost love, death, trauma, and friendship in Japan in the 1980s/90s … This novel is beautifully created and provides a mature look into suicide and its impacts on those left behind.’ FOUR STARS -- Akina Hansen * Good Reading *‘Captivating and sometimes heartbreaking … The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is hard to put down and despite its tragedy is a thoroughly enjoyable read.’ -- Vittoria Bon * Gold Coast Bulletin *‘A novel that lingers in the mind thanks to its poetic delivery, layering of ideas and an engrossing tale, all led by vivid characters.’ * Bad Form Magazine *Praise for Rainbirds: ‘A murder mystery and a family drama in one, this book is as beautiful as it is understated. The author presents us with a fascinatingly structured look into Japanese society and a depiction of mourning and grief that is universally recognisable.’ * San Francisco Chronicle *Praise for Rainbirds: ‘A transnational literary tour-de-force. Readers will be carried along by its creepy charm.’ * The Japan Times *Praise for Rainbirds: ‘Clarissa Goenawan spins a dark, encapsulating story that will certainly reel you in completely.’ * Bustle *Praise for Rainbirds: ‘Mysterious and dark.’ * Daily Beast *
£10.44
Canongate Books Our Tragic Universe
Book SynopsisCould a story save your life?If Kelsey Newman's theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever. But who would want that?Certainly not Meg, a bright spark trapped in a hopeless relationship. But if she can work out the connection between a wild beast on Dartmoor, a ship in a bottle, the science of time and a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe, she might just find a way out.Trade ReviewOur Tragic Universe surprised me, and in such a terrific way. It is so addictive, you can't help but fall deeper and deeper under Scarlett Thomas's spell. She's a genius -- Douglas CouplandA delight, not least for the quality of Scarlett Thomas's writing... Full of life and energy. -- Philip PullmanIs it odd to describe a book as kind? The commodity itself seems an increasingly rare thing in an internet-frazzled world, and so how unexpectedly wonderful to read Scarlett Thomas's Our Tragic Universe, a book that brims with a compassion and warmth -- Patrick Ness * * Guardian * *Thomas can discuss quantum physics and philosophy while making you think you're reading a sparkling romantic comedy -- Kate Saunders * * The Times * *Our Tragic Universe is a huge, ambitious experiment, carried out by one of the finest minds of her generation. * * SFX magazine * *Warm and brainy -- Colin Waters * * Sunday Herald * *Thomas is excellent on emotional tangles and meandering plotlines that still manage to mean something. -- Lesley McDowell * * Independent on Sunday * *Thomas' style is engaging and lures us into Meg's world. -- Alastair Mabbott * * Herald * *
£8.54
Bitter Lemon Press The Hand That Feeds You
Book SynopsisThe attempted robbery of the armoured car in the back streets of Montevideo is a miserable failure. A lucky break for the intrepid Ursula Lopez who manages to snatch all the loot, more hindered than helped by her faint-hearted and reluctant companion Diego. Only now, the wannabe robbers are hot on her heels. As is the police. And Ursula's sister. But Ursula turns out to be enormously talented when it comes to criminal undertakings, and given the hilarious ineptitude of those in pursuit, she might just pull it off.She is an irresistible heroine. A murderess with a sense of humour, a lovable criminal with an edge and she is practically invisible to the men who dominate the deeply macho society of Uruguay.Praise for Crocodile Tears:'Fast, slick and acerbically funny: buckle up and enjoy the ride.' — Guardian'Rosende smoothly combines dark humor and farce with moving depictions of the grimmer aspects of life. Elmore Leonard fans will look forward to the sequel.' — Publishers Weekly
£9.49
Canongate Books The Accident
Book SynopsisWhy did the taxi crash on the autobahn in Vienna?Who exactly were Besfort Y and Rovena, the mysterious couple who died after being flung from the back seat?How was Besfort connected to the war in the Balkans? And why was his affair with Rovena clouded in jealousy and mistrust?Who wanted them dead?This is the story of the last forty weeks of their lives - a fever dream where love and obsession collide.Trade ReviewOne of the most important voices in literature today. * * Metro * *His fiction offers invaluable insights into life under tyranny - his historical allegories point both to the grand themes and small details that make up life in a restrictive environment. He is a great writer, by any nation's standards. * * Financial Times * *A master storyteller. -- John CareyOne of the great writers of our time. * * Scotsman * *Ismail Kadare is one of Europe's most consistently interesting and powerful contemporary novelists, a writer whose stark, memorable prose imprints itself on the reader's consciousness. * * Los Angeles Times * *The Accident cannot be put aide, but rickly teases the reader to try to understand more of the meaning of what, exactly, the cab driver glimpsed in his rear-view mirror. * * The Independent * *Ismail Kadare has somtimes been compared with Kafka, and you can see why. * * Scottish Mail on Sunday * *A compelling performance...lean, calm and footsure, Kadare's writing keeps you reading. -- Phil Baker * * The Sunday Times * *harks back to spy mysteries of the Cold War era...Kadare teasingly guides us through the search for an elusive truth...played out against the power struggles of Europe's states. * * The Metro * *one goes to him precisely for that quality of indeterminacy, which he uses to advance a very singular vision of the intractable murkiness of human affairs. * * The Guardian * *compelling * * The Guardian * *a deliberately mystifying book [with] a continental seriousness about it, a Milan Kundera-like quality about its very un-English mixture of sex and political history. * * the Sunday Times * *compulsive and unnerving...a provocative exploration of the sinister underside of human relations. -- Mary Fitzgerald * * The Observer * *In John Hodgson's translation, Kadare's prose retains its elusive elegance -- Jane Shilling * * The Sunday Telegraph * *There are books which seem less the second-time round; Kadare's seem more...one can relish his mastery of tone and the tireless probing intelligence of narrative. -- Allan Massie * * The Scotsman * *Beautifully told in sparce, simple prose. * * Scottish Review of Books * *Toys with the reader's mind in something of the same way Hoxha once played with Kadare and his fellow citizens. * * Herald * *
£9.49
Simon & Schuster Ltd In Her Shoes
Book SynopsisRose Feller is thirty years old, a high-powered attorney, with a secret passion for romance novels, an exercise regime she's going to start next week, and dreams of a man who will slide off her glasses, gaze into her eyes, and tell her that she's beautiful. Meet Rose's sister Maggie. Twenty-eight years old, drop-dead gorgeous and only occasionally employed, Maggie is a backing singer in a band called. She dreams of fame and fortune -- and of getting her dowdy big sister to stick to a skin-care regime. These two women with nothing in common but a childhood tragedy, shared DNA, and the same size feet, are about to learn that their family is more different than they ever imagined, and that they're more alike than they'd ever believe. Funny and poignant, richly detailed and wrenchingly real, In He Shoeswill speak to anyone who's endured the bonds of sisterhood, and to everyone who's dreamed of trying something else on for size.
£6.99
Peninsula Press Ltd We are Made of Diamond Stuff
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize Polar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reeboks come to life. Nothing is normal in the house of Mother Normal. In Isabel Waidner’s second novel, we follow an unnamed narrator who looks like Eleven from Stranger Things, but is in fact a 36-year-old migrant working for minimum wage in a run-down hotel on the Isle of Wight. Along with their best friend, Shae, the narrator faces Ukip activists, shapeshifting creatures, and despotic bosses while trying to hold down their job and preparing for their Life in the UK test. This is fiction that extends the avant-garde tradition beyond the upper-class experience that it usually chronicles – making it over as an ally of working-class queer experience. Set against a backdrop of austerity and decline, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is an irreverent, boundary-erasing piece of work that celebrates the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.Trade Review'Daringly experimental, this is the cutting edge.' - The Guardian; 'A novel that reads like an act of sabotage, of resistance, written as a song-scream against our nullifying need to belong. It is charged with undeniable life, like some explosive projectile aimed at all our insidious narratives (nationalism, exclusionary culture, corporatism, conservatism and so much more).' - Guy Gunaratne, author of In Our Mad and Furious City
£9.49
Darf Publishers Ltd The Little House
Book Synopsis
£10.44
Peninsula Press Ltd The Passenger Seat
Book SynopsisA mesmerising and unsettling novel from a powerful new voice
£10.44
Granta Books The Essential Tales Of Chekhov
Book SynopsisIn this extraordinary collection of twenty tales, Richard Ford, a master short-story writer in his own right, has selected his personal favourites from among more than two hundred of Chekhov's tales and novellas. Included are the familiar masterpieces 'The Kiss', 'The Darling' and 'The Lady with the Dog' as well as several brilliant lesser-known tales such as 'A Blunder', 'Hush!' and 'Champagne'. These stories, written between 1886 and 1899, are drawn from Chekhov's most prolific years as a short-story writer. Introduced by Richard Ford's perceptive observations on 'Why We Like Chekhov', The Essential Tales of Chekhov is an indespensable anthology.
£10.44
Wrecking Ball Press Doom 94
Book Synopsis
£999.99
FUM D'ESTAMPA PRESS The Calf
Book SynopsisOn violence, crime, guilt and atonement.We meet our narrator in an underground office where he sharpens pencils, shreds paper, makes coffee for the other employees and thinks over and over about a late night that he has been trying to forget for a long time. In between the meaningless work, he manages to scratch down some names and phrases, and conjures up a dream from 1980s Hadeland. In this saga, Hadeland is a shadow home where spooks, ghosts, angels and robot-like creatures are just as natural as animals and flesh and blood humans.But what happened that late summer night? What is it that the narrator has tried to forget? And who is this Calf, who was killed to death? Our narrator takes readers in circles through different events, times and places; a whirlwind in which the calf and other characters are like prisoners in a tornado from Dante's Inferno.The Calf is a peasant story, a western novel, a dream quatrain, an adventure, science fiction and a black comedy about violence, crime, guilt and atonement.
£13.29
Persephone Books Ltd Doreen
Book Synopsis
£16.00
Pushkin Press Sixty-Nine
Book SynopsisMurakami's 69, a side-splittingly funny coming-of-age novel set in the Japan of the sixties In a small, inconsequential city in Japan, all that matters to 17-year-old Kensuke Yazaki and his friends is girls, rock music and, to a much lesser extent, school. Told at high speed and with irresistible humour by Kensuke himself, this is the story of their 1969, as they engage in heated conversations about Marxism, Rimbaud, Godard, the Beatles and the Stones, set up a barricade in their school, organise a rock festival and map out a highly successful strategy in girl-winning. This is a young Japan entirely turned towards the West, pervaded by Western music, where the girls have nicknames pulled from famous British films, but still locked in a fight with the rigid post-war conservatism of the older generation. Translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy and published by Pushkin Press 'A light, rollicking, sometimes hilarious, but never sentimental picture of late-sixties Japan.' Library Journal 'A great deal of fun, and Murakami ... is a find.' Kirkus Reviews 'The hero is a thoroughly engaging smartass.' Los Angeles Times A superb and very funny bluffer, and one sympathizes with him all the way. Atlantic Monthly 'A cross between The Catcher and the Rye and The Strawberry Statement.' Review of Contemporary Fiction Born in 1952 in Nagasaki prefecture, Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. His novels include Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, Audition, In the Miso Soup and From the Fatherland, with Love. Murakami is also a screenwriter and a director; his films include Tokyo Decadence, Audition and Because of You.Table of ContentsBorn in 1952 in Nagasaki prefecture, Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. His novels include Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, Audition, In the Miso Soup and From the Fatherland, with Love. Murakami is also a screenwriter and a director; his films include Tokyo Decadence, Audition and Because of You.
£9.49
Hobeck Books Limited Bodies in the Water
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Persephone Books Ltd Guard Your Daughters
Book Synopsis
£16.00
UEA Publishing Project Out of Earth
Book SynopsisThis remarkable Brazilian novel has been garlanded with multiple awards and accolades since its initial publication, as Desesterro: the prestigious Sesc Prize for Literature, the Machado de Assis award and the Jabuti award. The story follows four generations of female characters as they navigate the hardships of life in the parched landscape of the Brazilian sertao. Male figures are peripheral, but are also revealed as the origin of much of the suffering in the novel, generating for the women a kind of exile not only in relation to the land but to their sense of self. This is a ground-breaking feminist work, a bracing modernist fable, of sorts, formally reminiscent of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.
£13.49
Tippermuir Books Limited Salvage
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Sandstone Press Ltd Seaweed Rising
Book SynopsisBeneath the sea, over millennia, sentient beings await our final mistakes: soon they will make their move. Manfred, an amateur seaweed collector, is convinced that algae are taking over the human race. Haunted by his past, Manfred falls in love with Nora, who has her own ideas about seaweeds and her own troubled history. From a Cornish fishing village to the Spanish coast, up to the blinding glacial landscape of the Arctic, human society falls under the microscope in Rob Magnuson Smith’s genre-bending existential drama Seaweed Rising.Trade Review‘Wonderfully strange. At once a moving love story and an ecological reverie of Ballardian intensity.’‘Funny and grim and like nothing you have read before. Effortlessly original.’'Truly weird and wonderful, sad and eerie.'
£16.19
Gwasg y Bwthyn Cyf Gwibdaith Elliw
Book SynopsisElliw is a young girl who feels marginalised from society. She uses a wheelchair following an accident, is looking for love and is trying to come to terms with her disability. This is a novel about creativity and imagination. It is full of enchanting concepts: travel, colour and home. Ian Richards's first novel is perfect for young people and discussion groups.
£11.97
Orenda Books The Moose Paradox: The outrageously funny, tense
Book SynopsisInsurance mathematician Henri has his life under control, when a man from the past appears and a shady trio take over the adventure park’s equipment supply company … Things are messier than ever in the absurdly funny, heart-stoppingly tense second instalment in Antti Tuomainen’s bestselling series… ‘In these uncertain times, what better hero than an actuary?' Chris Brookmyre ‘One of those rare writers who manages to deftly balance intrigue, noir and a deliciously ironic sense of humour … a delight’ Vaseem Khan ‘What a book! Antti has managed to put the fun into funerals and take it out of fun fairs in a gripping nail-biter … a thrilling and hilarious read’ Liz Nugent**Soon to be a major motion picture starring Steve Carell** _______________________________ Insurance mathematician Henri Koskinen has finally restored order both to his life and to YouMeFun, the adventure park he now owns, when a man from the past appears – and turns everything upside down again. More problems arise when the park’s equipment supplier is taken over by a shady trio, with confusing demands. Why won’t Toy of Finland Ltd sell the new Moose Chute to Henri when he needs it as the park’s main attraction? Meanwhile, Henri’s relationship with artist Laura has reached breaking point, and, in order to survive this new chaotic world, he must push every calculation to its limits, before it’s too late… Absurdly funny, heart-stoppingly poignant and full of nail-biting suspense, The Moose Paradox is the second instalment in the critically acclaimed, pitch-perfect Rabbit Factor Trilogy and things are messier than ever… ________________________________ ‘Finnish crime maestro Antti Tuomainen is unique in the Scandi-crime genre, infusing his crime narratives with the darkest humour … [his] often hilarious, chaotic narrative never vitiates the novel’s nicely tuned tension’ Financial Times ‘Enter hitmen, serendipity, offbeat comedy and the reappearance of literally the last person Henri expects to see … unlike anything else out there’ The Times ‘A thriller with black comedy worthy of Nabokov’ Telegraph Book of the YearPraise for The Rabbit Factor Trilogy**Shortlisted for the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger** **Shortlisted for the Last Laugh Award** ‘The antic novels of Antti Tuomainen prove that comedy is not lost in translation … Tuomainen, like Carl Hiaasen before him, has the knack of combining slapstick with genuine emotion’ The Times 'The funniest writer in Europe, and one of the very finest … original and brilliant story-telling' Helen FitzGerald ‘British readers might think they know what to expect from Nordic noir: a tortured detective, a bleak setting, a brutal crime that shakes a small community. Finnish crime novelist Tuomainen turns all of this on its head … The ear of a giant plastic rabbit becomes a key weapon. It only gets darker and funnier’ Guardian ‘Dark, gripping and hilarious … Tuomainen is the Carl Hiaasen of the fjords' Martyn Waites ‘A triumph, a joyous, feel-good antidote to troubled times' Kevin Wignall ‘Finland's greatest export’ M.J. Arlidge 'You don’t expect to laugh when you’re reading about terrible crimes, but that’s what you’ll do when you pick up one of Tuomainen’s decidedly quirky thrillers' New York Times ‘Tuomainen is the funniest writer in Europe’ The Times ‘Right up there with the best’ Times Literary Supplement ‘Tuomainen continues to carve out his own niche in the chilly tundras of northern’ Daily Expres
£15.29
Charco Press Resistance
Book SynopsisMy brother is adopted, but I can’t say and don’t want to say that my brother is adopted. If I say this, if I speak these words that I have long taken care to silence, I reduce my brother to a single categorical condition, a single essential attribute...A young couple, involved in the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina, must flee the country. The brutality and terror of the regime is closing in around them. Friends are being ‘disappeared’. Their names are on a list. Time is running out. When they leave, they take with them their infant son, adopted after years of trying for a child without success. They build a new life in Brazil and things change radically. The family grows as the couple have two more children: a son and a daughter.Resistance unfolds as an intimate portrayal of the formation of a family under extraordinary circumstances, told from the point of view of the youngest child. It’s an examination of identity, of family bonds, of the different forms that exile can take, of what it means to belong to a place, to a family, to your own past.Already winner of the Jabuti Award for Book of the Year 2016 (Brazil), the José Saramago Literary Prize 2017 (Portugal) and the Anna Seghers Prize 2018 (Germany), Resistance demonstrates remarkable courage and skill by one of Brazil’s rising literary stars.Trade ReviewInternational Dublin Literature Prize (Longlist)English PEN (Award)José Saramago Literary Prize (Winner)Jabuti Award for Best Foreign Edition (Winner)Oceanos Prize for Literature in Portuguese (Winner)Jabuti Award for Book of the Year (Winner)Anna Seghers Prize (Winner)"Fuks’s skill lies in his quiet exploration of how exclusion — willed or imposed — shapes experience within families." —New York Times"This small book carries a big punch...Fuks is a young writer to watch." —The Guardian"Fuks’ prose is rythmic and patterned." —The Times Literary Supplement"Eloquent, unsettling and deeply philosophical." —The Financial Times"Fuk’s work, while challenging in form, comes together in a powerful way. This is a thoughtful novel about identity and exile." —Publishers Weekly"This elegant, essayistic novel, the first translated into English by this Brazilian writer, is a family drama with the dramatic parts deliberately quieted.... Fuks impressively inhabits the near despair that comes with the fragmentation of family and country." —Kirkus"Resistance is an urgent and profound novel, a meditation on family, home and dislocation. Fuks focuses on a single family living in Brazil, years after fleeing Argentina. One of the best novels I've read concerning the generation after Brazil's military regime. Fuks' writing is sharp and humane, intimate and lyrical. A stunning work." —Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore"A brilliant achievement." —Le Monde**********Praise for Julián FuksPart of The New York Times' The Decameron Project: New Fiction."Fiction to look out for in 2021." —The Observer"...a thoughtful, intimate exploration of how people literally and figuratively occupy their own stories and those of others." —Publishers Weekly"Poignant, thought-provoking and engaging." —The Scotsman"Wholly mesmerising." —Irish Times"Best books of 2021" —The Financial Times"This is one beautiful book."" —Mia Couto"A slender yet striking novel." —Hopscotch Translation"Occupation asks a lot of its readers, but it gives in equal measure; and when you do come up for air, you look around you with a renewed and invigorated sense of the space you occupy in your own life. Superb." —Lunate"A quiet masterpiece." —Asymptote"In Fuks’ prose occupation and resistance walk hand-in-hand." —Full Stop**********
£11.69
Fairlight Books Voting Day
Book SynopsisIn February 1959, Switzerland held a referendum on women's suffrage. The men voted 'no'. In this powerful novella, Clare O'Dea explores that day through the eyes of four very different Swiss women. Vreni is a busy farmer's wife, longing for a break from family life. Her grown-up daughter Margrit is carving out an independent life in Bern, but finds herself trapped in an alarming situation. Esther, a cleaner, is desperate to recover her son who has been taken into care. Beatrice, a hospital administrator, has been throwing herself into the 'yes' campaign. The four women's paths intersect on a day that will leave its mark on all their lives.Trade Review'An uplifting story of hope and solidarity, as well as a vivid, fascinating snapshot of a recent (almost unbelievably recent!) moment in Swiss history. I devoured it in one sitting' —Jonathan Coe; 'Rich and impactful; clever exploration of the slow pace of social progress' —The Irish Times; 'O'Dea's storytelling is delicate, tender and insightful. The lives of four Swiss women in the 1950s are opened up to us with care and beauty. A work of fine historical fiction not to be missed' —Anne Griffin, author of 'When All is Said'; 'a fascinating piece of history that packs a punch' —Books Ireland Magazine; 'Through deft storytelling skill and narrative imagination, Clare O'Dea's novella shows how a particular moment in history was experienced through the eyes of real women. Subtly and ingeniously, Voting Day points to the many small and big ways in which womens' struggle for equality still prevails' —Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, author of 'The Apple Tart of Hope' and 'All The Money In The World'; 'Clare O'Dea's gripping novel is a valuable testament to a moment in history. In a critical yet caring way, the author movingly portrays the fate of four disenfranchised women who are nevertheless striving to take control of their lives' —Barbara Traber, Swiss author and translator; 'One critical day in the imagined lives of four women might initially seem to us to have taken place several generations ago, at a time when women were literally second-class citizens, but their emotions and humanity resonate to this day with unchanged relevance. A lot has changed for women; little has changed. Clare O'Dea has brilliantly captured this dichotomy in her compelling depiction of a so-called bygone era' —Alison Anderson, author of 'The Summer Guest'; 'O'Dea writes of the experiences of her characters with great empathy and compassion as well as with impeccable historical accuracy' —Historical Novel Society; 'Each tale is beautifully told by first time author, Clare O'Dea, who skilfully depicts the character of each woman and spins the connections between them into a compelling, coherent narrative' —Mechanics Institute Review
£7.59
Diogenes Verlag AG,Switzerland Der Besuch Der Alten Dame
Book Synopsis
£10.74
