Fiction: literary and general non-genre
Graywolf Press Beast
Book SynopsisThe stunning new novel from the prizewinning author of The WakeBeast plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man alone on an empty moor in the west of England. What he has left behind we don't yet know. What he faces is an existential battle with himself, the elements, and something he begins to see in the margins of his vision: some creature that is tracking him, the pursuit of which will become an obsession.This short, shocking, and exhilarating novel is a vivid exploration of isolation, courage, and the search for truth that continues the story set one thousand years earlier in Paul Kingsnorth's bravura debut novel, The Wake. It extends that book's promise and confirms Kingsnorth as one of our most daring and rewarding contemporary writers.
£13.60
Graywolf Press So Much Blue
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£14.45
Graywolf Press Across the China Sea
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£13.60
Graywolf Press The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five
Book SynopsisA dark-hued, hybrid novel by a writer who "delivers our culture back to us, made entirely new" (A. M. Homes)In The Complete Ballet, John Haskell choreographs an intricate and irresistible pas de deux in which fiction and criticism come together to create a new kind of story. Fueled by the dramatic retelling of five romantic ballets, and interwoven with a contemporary story about a man whose daunting gambling debt pushes him to the edge of his own abyss, it is both a pulpy entertainment and a meditation on the physicality-and psychology-of dance.The unnamed narrator finds himself inexorably drawn back to the pre-cell phone world of Technicolor Los Angeles, to a time when the tragedies of his life were about to collide. Working as a part-time masseur in Hollywood, he attends an underground poker game with his friend Cosmo, a strip-club entrepreneur. What happens there hurtles the narrator down the road and into the room where the novel's violent and surreal showdown leaves him a different person.As the narrator revisits his past, he simultaneously inhabits and reconstructs the mythic stories of ballet, assessing along the way the lives and obsessions of Nijinsky and Balanchine, Pavlova and Fonteyn, Joseph Cornell and the story's presiding spirit, the film director John Cassavetes. This compulsively readable fiction is ultimately a profound and haunting consideration of the nature of art and identity.
£13.60
Graywolf Press Tomb Song
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£13.60
Graywolf Press Encircling 2: Origins
Book SynopsisEncircling 2 continues Carl Frode Tiller's poised and effective Rashomon-style exploration of multiple psyches (Kirkus Reviews)Book two of The Encircling Trilogy continues piecing together the fractured identity of David, the absent central figure who has lost his memory. Three very different friends write letters about his childhood on the backwater island of Otterøya. Ole, a farmer struggling to right his floundering marriage, recalls days in the woods when an act of pretending went very wrong. Tom Roger, a rough-edged outsider slipping into domestic violence, shares a cruder side of David as he crows about their exploits selling stolen motorcycles and spreads gossip about who David's father might be. But it is Paula, a former midwife now consigned to a nursing home, who has the most explosive secret of all, one that threatens to undo everything we know about David.With a carefully scored polyphony of voices and an unwavering attention to domestic life, Carl Frode Tiller shows how deeply identity is influenced by our friendships. The Encircling Trilogy is an innovative portrayal of one man's life that is both starkly honest and unnervingly true.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Waiting for Tomorrow
Book SynopsisA powerful examination of the artistic impulse, cultural identity, and family bondsAnita is waiting for Adam to be released from prison. They met twenty years ago at a New Year?s Eve party in Paris, a city where they both felt out of place?he as a recent arrival from the provinces, and she as an immigrant from the island of Mauritius. They quickly fell in love, married, and moved to a village in southwestern France, to live on the shores of the Atlantic with their little girl, Laura.In order to earn a living, Adam has left behind his love of painting to become an architect, and Anita has turned her desire to write into a job freelancing for a local newspaper. Over time, the monotony of daily life begins to erode the bonds of their marriage. The arrival of Adèle, an undocumented immigrant from Mauritius whom they hire to care for Laura, sparks artistic inspiration for both Adam and Anita, as well as a renewed energy in their relationship. But this harmony proves to be short-lived, brought down by their separate transgressions of Adèle?s privacy and a subsequently tragic turn of events.With the careful observation, vivid description, and emotional resonance that are the hallmarks of her previous novel, The Last Brother, in Waiting for Tomorrow Nathacha Appanah investigates the life of the artist, the question of cultural differences within a marriage, and the creation and the destruction of a family.
£13.60
Graywolf Press A Lucky Man: Stories
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£20.80
Graywolf Press Mirror, Shoulder, Signal
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£13.60
Graywolf Press Nevada Days
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£14.40
Graywolf Press,U.S. This Mournable Body
Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZEA searing novel about the obstacles facing women in Zimbabwe, by one of the country's most notable authorsAnxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival. As a last resort, Tambudzai takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents' impoverished homestead. It is this homecoming, in Dangarembga's tense and psychologically charged novel, that culminates in an act of betrayal, revealing just how toxic the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be.
£12.34
Graywolf Press She Would Be King
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£20.80
Graywolf Press Children of God
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£13.60
Graywolf Press Trump Sky Alpha
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£13.60
Graywolf Press The Silk Road
Book SynopsisA spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literatureThe Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there-paths on which they still seem to be traveling.The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis's sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls-a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.
£18.00
Graywolf Press Labrador
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£11.39
Graywolf Press The Gulf
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£11.39
Graywolf Press Lanny
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£17.99
Graywolf Press A Lucky Man: Stories
Book SynopsisFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTIONIn the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J?Ouvert can?t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.Jamel Brinkley?s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class?where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Out Stealing Horses
Book SynopsisA bestseller and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, now in paperback from Graywolf Press for the first timeWe were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and oneof the first days of July.Trond''s friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning was different. What began as a joy ride on "borrowed" horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that dayan incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys.Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.
£14.40
Graywolf Press The Wind That Lays Waste
Book SynopsisA taut, lyrical portrait of four people thrown together on a single day in rural ArgentinaThe Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is evangelizing across the Argentinian countryside with Leni, his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God or fate leads them to the workshop and home of an aging mechanic called Gringo Brauer and a young boy named Tapioca.As a long day passes, curiosity and intrigue transform into an unexpected intimacy between four people: one man who believes deeply in God, morality, and his own righteousness, and another whose life experiences have only entrenched his moral relativism and mild apathy; a quietly earnest and idealistic mechanic's assistant, and a restless, skeptical preacher's daughter. As tensions between these characters ebb and flow, beliefs are questioned and allegiances are tested, until finally the growing storm breaks over the plains.Selva Almada's exquisitely crafted debut, with its limpid and confident prose, is profound and poetic, a tactile experience of the mountain, the sun, the squat trees, the broken cars, the sweat-stained shirts, and the destroyed lives. The Wind That Lays Waste is a philosophical, beautiful, and powerfully distinctive novel that marks the arrival in English of an author whose talent and poise are undeniable.
£12.75
Graywolf Press Machine
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£11.39
North Atlantic Books,U.S. Microcosmic God: Volume II: The Complete Stories
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£25.60
Feminist Press at The City University of New York Return to Lesbos
Book SynopsisThis treasure from the golden age of lesbian pulp fiction picks up where Stranger on Lesbos left off. Deserted by her butch lover, Frances struggles to re-integrate into conventional married life. But no amount of resolve can keep her away from a new lover, the boyish Erika who lures her back into the melodrama of lesbian life.Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; Laura; The Man Who Loved His Wife; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Return to Lesbos; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Stella Dallas; Women''s Barracks.
£9.99
Feminist Press at The City University of New York The Shipwrecked: Contemporary Stories by Women
Book SynopsisA collection of short stories by Iranian women writers that capture the fear, defiance, and enduring struggle of life under an oppressive regime.The 1979 Iranian Revolution was an event that shocked the world. After thousands of years of Persian monarchy, the Iranian people seized power and instituted a strict secular Islamic regime. The revolution sent the despised Shah into exile, put the Ayatollah Khomeini into power, and resulted in the Iran Hostage Crisis.In all the upheaval, little thought was given to the women who, even after helping install the new regime, would have to face a new kind of oppression in their homes and in the public square.Here, the voices of those women are heard. Evoking the enormous isolation of daily existence, and the persistence of a people living under a repressive regime, these literary gems—many by prize-winning authors—reward us with an inside view of a turbulent and closed society.
£13.29
Arte Publico Press The Moths and Other Stories / Las Palomillas de
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£16.65
Theatre Communications Group Inc.,U.S. The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One
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£17.99
Thunder's Mouth Press Vamp: A Vivid Girls Book
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£18.84
Signature Books Dancing Naked: A Novel Volume 1
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£10.00
Rowman & Littlefield Honorable Mention
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£8.96
Dalkey Archive Press To an Early Grave
Book SynopsisWhen Leslie Braverman passes away at the early age of 41, four of his closest friends are reunited on an odyssey through the streets of Brooklyn in a beat-up Volkswagen searching for the funeral parlor. In a series of fits, starts and wrong-turns, the comedic banter that suffuses the journey of these four Jewish proponents of New Criticism and little-magazine writing is quietly transformed into a quest for the intellectual, emotional and sentimental aura of the past.The basis for the 1968 movie "Bye Bye Braverman," "To An Early Grave" is a testament to the exuberant inventiveness of Wallace Markfield's writing.
£11.07
Dalkey Archive Press Mountain R
Book SynopsisIn an unnamed country, the President of the Republican Council, wanting to "do something big," strikes upon the idea of building a 1,500-meter high mountain as an inspirational monument to national greatness. Construction of the mountain will reduce unemployment, attract hordes of tourists, and the idea can even be exported for sale to other countries. Mountain R relates the rise and fall of this insane project through the eyes of those involved over several decades: the President whose double-talk sets the plan in motion, a worker who, years later, tells his daughter about the disastrous consequences of the never-completed mountain, and an author commissioned to write a novel about the project. An incisive satire about the dangers of half-witted government officials who use political rhetoric to manipulate the patriotism of their constituents, Mountain R is a humorous yet disturbing allegory quite appropriate to our times.
£9.49
Dalkey Archive Press The Family Interrupted
Book SynopsisWhen the poet Luis Cernuda flees Spain in February of 1938, he has no idea that he will never again set foot on his native land. In exile in England, his former lover finds him a disheartening job that only intensifies his feelings of bitterness and despair: caring for 3,800 refugee children who have also fled to England after the city of Bilbao fell to Franco’s army. Seventy years later, a young Mexican filmmaker living in New York receives a mysterious email that throws his life into complete disarray and forever links him to the famous Spanish poet. The Family Interrupted (the title of Cernuda’s only play, which had gone missing for fifty years until Octavio Paz found it in a shoe box in his mother’s house) is, as Jorge Volpi once said, “A beautiful example of two decanting narratives constructed with the precision and accuracy of a watchmaker. From the opening lines, the characters’ destiny seems—almost—preordained.”Trade ReviewWhen the poet Luis Cernuda flees Spain in February of 1938, he has no idea that he will never again set foot on his native land. In exile in England, his former lover finds him a disheartening job that only intensifies his feelings of bitterness and despair: caring for 3,800 refugee children who have also fled to England after the city of Bilbao fell to Franco’s army. Seventy years later, a young Mexican filmmaker living in New York receives a mysterious email that throws his life into complete disarray and forever links him to the famous Spanish poet. The Family Interrupted (the title of Cernuda’s only play, which had gone missing for fifty years until Octavio Paz found it in a shoe box in his mother’s house) is, as Jorge Volpi once said, “A beautiful example of two decanting narratives constructed with the precision and accuracy of a watchmaker. From the opening lines, the characters’ destiny seems—almost—preordained.”"...a magnificent and heartfelt novel." -Library Journal, Starred Review"Eloy Urroz’s The Family Interrupted, translated from Spanish by Ezra Fitz, ties together the life of distinguished Spanish poet Luis Cernuda in England, where he’s fled during Spain’s Civil War, with the struggles of a young Mexican filmmaker dealing with a provocative family situation and questions of God in contemporary New York. Yes, a novel of ideas, but the ideas are beautifully stitched into a heartfelt story." -Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
£11.99
Workman Publishing Facing the Music
Book SynopsisFacing the Music, Larry Brown’s first book, was originally published in 1988 to wide critical acclaim. As the St. Petersburg Times review pointed out, the central theme of these ten stories “is the ageless collision of man with woman, woman with man--with the frequent introduction of that other familiar couple, drinking and violence. Most often ugly, love is nevertheless graceful, however desperate the situation.”There’s some glare from the brutally bright light Larry Brown shines on his subjects. This is the work of a writer unafraid to gaze directly at characters challenged by crisis and pathology. But for readers who are willing to look, unblinkingly, along with the writer, there are unusual rewards.
£12.74
Algonquin Books Joe
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£17.09
Algonquin Books Saving the World
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£12.56
Algonquin Books Gossip of the Starlings
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£15.29
Workman Publishing Remind Me Again What Happened
Book Synopsis“There is a smudge where my memory is supposed to be.” Claire wakes in a hospital room in the Florida Keys. She has no idea how she got there or why. The loss of so many memories is paralyzing. Some things she can piece together by looking at old photos saved by her husband, Charlie, and her best friend, Rachel, and by combing through boxes of letters and casual jottings. But she senses a mystery at the center of all these fragments of her past, a feeling that something is not complete. Is Charlie still her husband? Is Rachel still her friend? Told from alternating points of view that pull the reader into the minds of the three characters, the story unfolds as the smudge that covers Claire’s memory is gradually, steadily wiped away, until finally she can understand the why and the how of her life. And then maybe she and Charlie and Rachel can move forward, but with their lives forever changed. In Remind Me Again What Happened, debut novelist Joanna Luloff has written a moving and beautifully nuanced story of transience, the ebb and flow of time, and how relationships shift and are reconfigured by each day, hour, and minute.
£19.80
Algonquin Books Ferris Beach
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£13.25
Algonquin Books How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
£12.30
Algonquin Books Secret Son
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£14.41
Workman Publishing Blind Your Ponies
Book SynopsisHope is hard to come by in the hard-luck town of Willow Creek. Sam Pickett and five young men are about to change that.Sam Pickett never expected to settle in this dried-up shell of a town on the western edge of the world. He's come here to hide from the violence and madness that have shattered his life, but what he finds is what he least expects. There's a spirit that endures in Willow Creek, Montana. It seems that every inhabitant of this forgotten outpost has a story, a reason for taking a detour to this place--or a reason for staying.As the coach of the hapless high school basketball team (zero wins, ninety-three losses), Sam can't help but be moved by the bravery he witnesses in the everyday lives of people--including his own young players--bearing their sorrows and broken dreams. How do they carry on, believing in a future that seems to be based on the flimsiest of promises? Drawing on the strength of the boys on the team, sharing the hope they display despite insurmountable odds, Sam finally begins to see a future worth living.Author Stanley Gordon West has filled the town of Willow Creek with characters so vividly cast that they become real as relatives, and their stories--so full of humor and passion, loss and determination--illuminate a path into the human heart.
£13.29
Interlink Books The Daily Assortment of Astonishing Things and
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£14.41
Interlink Publishing Group, Inc The American Quarter
Book SynopsisA love letter to a city of his childhood, Jabbour Douaihy’s The American Quarter is set in a small neighborhood in Tripoli, the ancient port on the northern coast of Lebanon. Unfolding at the height of the US-led invasion of Iraq, it revolves around the radicalization of an ordinary youth named Ismail. But Ismail’s story is part of a larger portrait of those nearest to him: the young disabled brother he looks out for; his father Bilal, a massacre survivor; Intisar, his spirited, indulgent mother, a maid like her mother before her in the wealthy, powerful Azzam household; Abdelkarim, the Azzam family’s only son, addicted to poetry and opera, and pining for his lost Polish ballerina?all sharply depicted by Douaihy with irony and affection. As well, Ismail’s fate is entwined with the disappointments and meager prospects of those around him in the deteriorating American Quarter, and others forced to crisscross the surrounding conflict-scarred lands. Somehow Ismail’s reckoning with his assigned mission comes to reflect our own struggles—for redemption, for faith in life in the face of destructive forces that can erase in an instant what is dear to us. A classic tale for our time, in a lucid translation by Paula Haydar, The American Quarter is a compassionate work of great beauty. Paying homage to the persistent presence of a beloved old city and her people, it bolsters us with a gifted writer’s long view of the threats to trust and tolerance we now face.
£11.39
Interlink Books The Goddess of Mtwara and Other Stories: The
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£14.41
Interlink Publishing Group, Inc The Weight of Paradise
Book SynopsisWhile making a documentary film about the reconstruction of downtown Beirut, Maya Amer stumbles upon a battered leather suitcase that will change her life forever. Inside it she finds letters, photographs, a diary, and an envelope labeled: Letters from Istanbul. The Weight of Paradise is both the story of Maya and her discovery, and also the story of the owner of these papers, Noura Abu Sawwan, a journalist who fled Syria just before the Lebanese civil war to find greater freedom of expression. A multi-voiced, multi-genre narration, it interweaves the stories of these two women and the people who surround them within the fabric of Beirut in the civil war and its immediate aftermath. A love story as well as a story of women’s liberation and political freedom, the novel is also the tale of a city and country torn apart by repression, occupation, and war.
£11.69
Interlink Publishing Group, Inc Unholyland: The Trilogy
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£17.09
Interlink Books Just Another Jihadi Jane
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£14.25
