Fiction / Literature / Comics / Graphic novels: special features

Book SynopsisLily-May has always been fascinated by hares, But it's not just their behaviour and looks she likes; she loves the old stories and legends her grandad tells her about the hares being shapeshifters. A determined Lily-May forms a plan, going through their secret tunnel into the magical wild alone, without Johnny or Ruairi. She is going to find out the truth about the hares once and for all. But has her curiosity put her in grave danger?A story filled with adventure, Irish wildlife and heritage.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis'The Sick List operates on the far side of literature.' John Schad In this novel, an unnamed academic in an unnamed contemporary university, relates his obsession with his tutor, Gordon. He pores over the increasingly bizarre mis-readings in Gordon’s annotations in a strange selection of stolen library books. Is Gordon unraveling a mystery? Or is his own mind unraveling? Meanwhile, an epidemic of catatonia breaks out; academics are found slumped and unconscious at their desks. Is reading itself the cause of this sickness? Is the only escape to return to illiteracy?Witty, moving, and beautifully written, The Sick List plays with the dividing line between deploring and exemplifying what it most despises. Inspired by the work of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, it considers how the minds of educated people are moulded by both the breadth of literary culture and the narrowness of academic institutions. ‘The Sick List is about menace, about a menace (Gordon), and is written in the voice of a menace. It reads like one of the pen-portraits of surreal ultra-violence in Bernhard's Gargoyles, where education turns out to be the most deceitful panacea of all.' Katharine Craik

Read more less

Book SynopsisOutsiders often expect Muslim women to be timid, conservative, or submissive, the reality is different. While some of these authors express a quiet piety and explore poignant situations, others use black humour and biting satire, or play with possibilities. Still others shade into the territory of a Muslim Fifty Shades of Grey, creating grey areas where the mainstream media sees only black and white. The stories also reflect on gender differences, lesbian desire,and many other subjects.Table of ContentsForeword;Introduction;The Cat That Came in with the Dark;Love Letter;Ghazal;Her Trials; Boneland;Tears and Tantrums;Waiting for the Bus;Marriage of Convenience; Rearranged;Peter Pochmann Goes to Dinner;Moments in Time;Frida's Breakfast;A Simple Nature;Proper and Perfect?; Acid Reflux;Heartbeat

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisYoung Leonard Bush buries his lost leg and saves his whole East Tennessee town in this winsome and miracle-making novel.When twelve-year-old Leonard Bush loses his leg in a freak accident, he decides to give his leg a proper burial in the hilltop cemetery of his East Tennessee town. This event somehow sets off a chain of miraculous and catastrophic events—upending the lives of Leonard’s rigidly God-fearing mother, June; his deeply conflicted father, Emmett; and his best friend, Azalea, and her mother, Rose, who is also the town prostitute. While the local Baptist minister passes judgment on events and promises dire consequences, the people of this small community on the banks of Big Sugar move together toward awakening.Susan Gilmore’s love of storytelling flows naturally from her Tennessee roots. She’s the daughter of a revival preacher’s son, brought up on the land and streams that populate this novel that is, as Appalachian novelist Lee Smith says, a “homespun Pilgrim’s Progress.”

Read more less

Book SynopsisA letter hinting at an impending murder and dismemberment is delivered to Shiroshi's door, and he and Seiji set out to investigate. They find themselves venturing to a remote island dominated by a towering Baroque mansion, where all manner of surprises await them including a beautiful living doll and a young boy who calls himself Shiroshi's brother!

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).Trade Review“Printed for the first time in the reversible format Laymon always wanted, Long Division shines brighter than ever.” —Esquire "Originally published in 2013 and reissued here in a newly revised edition, this debut novel by the author of the memoir Heavy is a time-traveling metafictional romp set in Mississippi that probes fame, creativity and the toll of racism." —New York Times "New and Noteworty" “Laymon writes with humor and clarity about what it means to come of age, to be black in the south, to survive a natural disaster, to become an online celebrity, to love for ever.... a triumphant piece of metafiction.” —The Guardian "A story of bone-deep love, enduring racism, a missing girl, the Holy Ghost, loss, sexuality, family (chosen and blood), sacrifice, hope, horror, tenderness, a talking cat, staggering grief, and ridiculous amounts of humor.” —Los Angeles Review of Books "A must-read. Long Division centers on City Coldson, a 14-year-old whose viral outburst on national television earns him a one-way ticket to stay with his grandmother by the sea. It’s not supposed to be fun and games, but when City begins to read a mysterious, anonymously published book about a time traveler who shares his name, he finds himself pulled unexpectedly into a temporal mystery." —Bustle "Kiese Laymon is a singular voice in American literature." —Chicago Tribune “Heavy memoirist Kiese Laymon returns, this time with a fiercely creative novel combining time travel with institutionalized racism. The resulting saga winds from the 1980s to the 1960s and beyond, weaving a fractured but fascinating path through Black America." —Elle “The reissue of Kiese Laymon’s Long Division echoes a familiar Black church precept of doing your first works over. In this new iteration of his 2013 debut novel, Laymon separates the story into two books, or testaments…[Long Division] forth the open-ended question: To what length would you go to save your family and yourself, even if it meant the destruction of another?” —Chapter 16 "Originally published in 2013 and reissued here in a newly revised edition, this debut novel by the author of the memoir “Heavy” is a time-traveling metafictional romp set in Mississippi that probes fame, creativity and the toll of racism." —New York Times "New and Noteworty" "A revised version of Laymon’s elliptical, time-folding work of metafiction about Southern racism... is effectively two novels, both potent yet often funny character studies. In style and structure, Laymon’s novel is an inheritor to Black postmodern literature of the 1960s and '70s—Toni Morrison most famously but also Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, and William Melvin Kelley. A sui generis.” —Kirkus "Don't miss Kiese Laymon's Long Division. One Mississippi town with two engaging stories in two very different decades. The sharp humor and deep humanity make this debut novel unforgettable." —Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC "Funny, astute and searching.... The author's satirical instincts are excellent." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "With Long Division, Laymon gives us a story that embodies the ellipsis, the idea of an understood but unspoken beginning and ending. Narratives very rarely end; they go through edits and revisions. Characters are added and erased. For a book that begins with a grammar and language competition, Long Division fittingly ends with a statement about language, and that statement is that language, like history, never stops moving forward." —Los Angeles Review of Books "A little fantasy, a little mystery and a lot hilarious." —Atlanta Journal-Constitution "In a multilayered, allusion-packed, time-traveling plot set in Mississippi, Long Division takes us, nesting-doll-style, from 2013 to 1985, 1964, and back, engaging complex questions of race, violence, gender, sexuality, and our relationship to history. More than anything, Laymon shows with surprising lucidity how American racialized inequality is persistent but mutable, that the past is not the present, but isn’t, either, entirely past." —The Boston Review "Kiese Laymon is an amazing, courageous and brave novelist and essayist.... Laymon fiercely tackles issues of prejudice, adolescence and love with a swagger and confidence all his own. You rarely find novels this honest and engaging. Read this book." —Michigan Quarterly Review "Laymon’s voice is unique, a rarity in an era during which fiction tends all too often to chase trends.... At times touching, at times poignant, Laymon more than once strikes a beautiful chord in the midst of what often feels gritty and intentionally provocative. Those touching insights make Long Division worth the effort, and readers who stick with the story (stories, actually) will find themselves thinking about City and the people in his life long after they close the book." —Chicago Book Review "Long Division is a serious book about race and love with a thread of humor running through it, emerging largely from Laymon's wordplay and the cultural gaps that exist between characters from the past, present and future. With roots in Southern and African American literature, Long Division is an historical novel that touches on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and a work of magical realism in the tradtion of Haruki Murakami." —Contemporary Literature "A novel within a novel—hilarious, moving and occasionally dizzying.... Laymon cleverly interweaves his narrative threads and connects characters in surprising and seemingly impossible ways. Laymon moves us dazzlingly ... from 1964 to 1985 to 2013 and incorporates themes of prejudice, confusion and love rooted in an emphatically post-Katrina world." —Kirkus Reviews "Laymon’s debut novel is an ambitious mix of contemporary southern gothic with Murakamiesque magical realism ... the book elegantly showcases Laymon’s command of voice and storytelling skill in a tale that is at once dreamlike and concrete, personal and political." —Booklist "[One of] our best books of the year so far ... Layman’s debut novel is bursting with colloquial language from three generations of Mississippi African Americans, mixed with gut-piercing truths about a long racial divide that persists to this day." —School Library Journal "Smart and funny and sharp ... I loved it." —Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing "[An] ambitious novel ... it is the most exciting book I’ve read all year. There’s nothing like it, both in terms of the scope of what the book tackles and the writing’s Afro Surrealist energy." —Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Hunger “Smart, exciting and energetic ... the language romps and roars along through some truly wonderful comic scenes and yet the book doesn’t hesitate to comment seriously on questions that matter to human beings everywhere, not just in rural Mississippi.” —Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine and Slapboxing with Jesus "Long Division finally gave me what I’ve wanted to see in contemporary southern literature. For years I’ve complained about no recent accounts of black southerners in American Literature. It goes down in southern rap – which we’ll get to in the following paragraphs – but in literary studies it’s always been the old guard: Hurston, Ellison, Wright, Gaines, and Alice Walker (I swear, if I read “Everyday Use” in one more class I’d quit life). Long Division basically told me 'sit down and shut the hell up. Here it is. Here’s what you wanted.'” —Regina Bradley, author of Outkasted Conversations "As if anything could be beyond what Laymon has done for race, temporality, geography, and the South—as well as for the real and transhistorical black southerner—there is also what Long Division does for questions of love, death, and dying. Across cities/Cities, there is the looming and encompassing quality of love that bends sexuality and familial boundaries." —Zandria Robinson, author of This Ain't Chicago and Chocolate Cities "Long Division is one of those books that I picked up and just couldn’t stop reading ... powerful, a classic American novel." —Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America and We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation “Laymon is a brilliant young writer...this is a book that sings in the heart but challenges readers to take careful consideration of the power of memory. Like the best of Hurston, Ellison, or Bambara, Laymon’s craft flows on frequencies that both honor and extend the traditions those writers established.” —William Henry Lewis, author of I Got Somebody in Staunton “The racial/ethical awareness is as complex as Coetzee’s, and Laymon is just as good a writer. Laymon takes some real risks. I love the interplay of spirituality and sexuality. Nothing sounds forced, pandering or trendy. City, the husky citizen of the imagination, feels totally singular and totally representative. That’s tough to pull off.” —Tim Strode, author of Ethics of Exile

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisA HONEYMOON TO REMEMBERFinally wed to her beloved, Philia and Prince Osvalt embark on their honeymoon, traveling to historical ruins around Parnacorta. To her delight, Philia turns up some ancient research that gives her new ideas for the creation of magical devices! But all is not well in paradise, as the newlyweds find signs of a break-in in what should have been a protected site. Following the clues left by the intruder, they track them down, only to find…a merchant from a neighboring kingdom? What does this man want? And could the dangerous bargain he offers be worth the risk?

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first time Akiteru met his friend?s little sister, Iroha, she was soft-spoken, with a diligent air about her. So when he heard she was joining a gang?one led by none other than Otoi?he began to suspect there was more to Iroha than met the eye. When he intervened, things only got more complicated. But as a result, Akiteru formed bonds with unlikely friends for years to come. It?s finally time to unravel the secrets of the Alliance?s past! How did Akiteru come to form the 05th Floor Alliance, and why did Iroha decide to make him the victim of her teasing?

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn overflowing, mesmeric masterpiece about greed from one of the most remarkable authors on the Spanish scene (The Guardian)Trade Review"Chirbes imbues the characters with passion and intellect...what emerges is a strong sense of late 20th-century Spanish culture and politics." -- Publishers Weekly"A man’s death stirs thoughts among his family and friends, who are also connected by their experience of Spain’s economic surge through the early aughts. A challenging excursion from one of Europe’s most distinctive voices." -- Kirkus, (Starred Review)"Utterly convincing in its psychological details, but also memorable for the beauty of its writing and rhythms." -- Colm Tóibín"Rafael Chirbes is a master of the kind of Spanish literature that shines most brightly in lyrical descriptive passages and powerful metaphors." -- Mara Faye Lethem - The New York Times"The works of the late Spanish novelist Rafael Chirbes offer a rebuke to what we might call lifestyle literature. Two of his final novels, Cremation and On the Edge, both published in translation by New Directions, reclaim a decayed form of modernism to castigate the late aughts’ feast of mammon." -- Dustin Illingworth - The Baffler"Chirbes' novel is a quite powerful book of testimonies and experiences, an indictment of post-Franco Spain that has barreled more or less blindly ahead, damn to many of the consequences." -- Complete Review

Read more less