Narrative theme: coming of age
Little Brown and Company Acts of Desperation
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£57.74
Little Brown and Company Acts of Desperation
Book Synopsis
£30.00
Mulholland Nothing More Dangerous
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£75.00
Mulholland Nothing More Dangerous
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£26.25
Little Brown and Company Burn It All Down
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£30.00
Grand Central Publishing Imaginary Friend
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£44.99
Hachette Audio The Expectations
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£55.24
Esplanade Books Swallowed
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£15.26
Exile Editions Cracker Jacks for Misfits
Book SynopsisCracker Jacks for Misfits is the Millenial story of four people who find themselves caught in the crosshairs of modern-day chaos as they discover independence, strength, and the power to love.In a series of interconnected short stories, Christine Ottoni tells the tale of a highly sensitive caregiver, Naomi, and her relationship with her reclusive, artistic mother, Joanne.From a whirlwind romance with a manic bartender named Marce, to an intense friendship with an ineffectual alcoholic named Jake, Naomi's search for intimacy and home is marked by urban claustrophobia and loneliness. The characters of Cracker Jacks for Misfits are hungry for human connection. They look for it online, in the unfamiliar bedrooms of Toronto, and in hushed conversations with strangers. Their stories are real – so real that we can all identify with their struggle. A portrait of millennial discontent and overconnectedness, Cracker Jacks for Misfits is about the moment when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. These stories are about the strange, intimate worlds we share with others, in dive bars, on road trips, and on the curb outside house parties. Ottoni presents a distinctive look at the struggle of a generation, and asks if we can every truly realise ourselves through our ability or inability to break free.This work of contemporary insight illuminates what is at the core of today's society: how important it is to understand and respect the sensibilities, goodness, strengths and frailties of those who we call friends, family, and the other. Cracker Jacks for Misfits is a moving and engaging narrative of a young person who finds their independence, strength, and power to love.
£15.26
Arsenal Pulp Press Niagara Motel
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£15.26
Coach House Books The Crash Palace
Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE RELIT 2022 NOVEL AWARDA joy ride set on a crash course with the past.Audrey Cole has always loved to drive. Anytime, anywhere, any car: a questionable rustbucket, a family sedan, the SUV she was paid to drive around the oil fields. From the second she learned to drive, she’s always found a way to hit the road.Years ago, when she abandoned her oil field job, she found herself chauffeuring around the Lever Men, a B-list band relegated to playing empty dive bars in far-flung towns. That’s how she found herself at the Crash Palace, an isolated lodge outside the big city where people pay to party in the wilderness.And now, one night, while her young daughter is asleep at home, Audrey is struck by that old urge and finds herself testing the doors of parked cars in her neighbourhood. Before she knows it, she’s headed north in the dead of winter to the now abandoned Crash Palace in a stolen car, unable to stop herself from confronting her pastThe Crash Palace is a funny, moving, and surprising novel by the author of the Amazon First Novel Award–nominated The Milk Chicken Bomb. Audrey is unlike any character you’ve met before, and you'll love being along for the ride.Trade Review"Wedderburn’s engaging tale will hot-wire readers’ brains, making Audrey’s wanderlust palpable and contagious." – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"Wedderburn’s novel The Milk Chicken Bomb, received a nod for the Amazon First Novel Award and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin literary award; this second novel — featuring a memorable character named Audrey Cole who goes on a road trip to The Crash Palace, where people pay to party in the wilderness — promises to be just as quirky." – Toronto Star“Wedderburn’s prose has an alluringly musical style [...] Wedderburn leaves it up to us to devise our stories and figure out our own answers, adding to the book’s overall charm and mystique.” – Quill & Quire"The Crash Palace reads like a greatest hits album of Alberta in the 2000s." – Bruce Cinnamon, Alberta Views
£12.34
Coach House Books Neighbourhood Watch
Book SynopsisThe lives of three families intersect in the hallways of an apartment block in a Montreal neighborhood. Mélissa, Roxane, and Kevin have never had it easy. As their parents face their own struggles – with addiction, unemployment, and abuse – they must learn to fend for themselves. Though their lives converge at school, on the street, at the corner store, or when they can hear each other through their apartments’ thin walls, they each feel deeply alone. Neighbourhood Watch tells their coming-of-age stories with a cinematic ease, moving between despair and the unalterable hope of childhood. With her characteristic poetic flair and generosity, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, author of the acclaimed Suzanne, has painted, in brief strokes, an unforgettable and moving portrait of a fictional apartment block in Montreal. This translation of her 2010 debut novel is presented with an afterword interview with a woman who, as a child, was the inspiration behind the character of Roxane. ‘This is prose to lose yourself in. Never complicated, it’s gentle like a love song, comforting and enveloping like a black-and-white film, full of tones and textures. These sentences can destroy us. Not for their simplicity, but for the powerful beauty within the simplicity.’ —Peter McCambridge, ‘Best Translated Book Award: Why This Book Should Win,’ on SuzanneTrade Review“You’ll recognize in this novel scenes from The Ring. The idea for this book was born long before.… After the film, she wanted to pursue their stories, without the heaviness of film.… The narration borrows the point of view and the crude and sometimes awkward language of the characters.” —La Presse"Barbeau-Lavalette brings a filmmaker’s eye to each scene, framing every vignette with both a startling beauty and a heartbreaking realism. That the book features a new interview with the young woman who was the model for Roxanne only adds to its intimate verisimilitude. The result is a powerful, unforgettable read." - Toronto Star“Barbeau-Lavalette takes on a naive and charming tone without a trace of miserabilism.” —Voir Montréal
£11.39
Fernwood Publishing Co Ltd Chocolate Cherry Chai
Book SynopsisYoung, free-spirited Maya Mubeen leaves behind the pressures of family, marriage and tradition for a life of experience and adventure - proving to herself, and her mother, that she is anything but a typical Indian girl. After diving with sharks in the Philippines and a sordid breakup amidst the bustling nightlife of Tokyo, Maya's sense of who she is - and where home is - starts to falter.An ancient chai-making ritual holds the key to Maya's past and present, unlocking the secret lives of her mother, Nina, who lived through Idi Amin's rule in Uganda, her grandmother, Nargis, forced into marriage at thirteen, her great-grandmother, Sukaina, an underground radical socialist who fled an abusive husband, and lastly, her great-great grandmother, Zainab, who left behind a luxurious life in India.Traversing the globe and historical eras, Taslim Burkowicz's debut Chocolate Cherry Chai binds together themes of familial pressures, the immigrant experience, motherhood, love and loss into a poetic narrative.
£16.16
Coffee House Press Stephen Florida
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£12.99
Milkweed Editions A Small Boat at the Bottom of the Sea
Book SynopsisWhen twelve-year-old Donovan Sanger is sent to spend the summer with his Uncle Bix—an ex-con—and his Aunt Hattie, who is dying from lung cancer, he does not know what to expect. But at least he’ll get away from his twin sisters, Holly and Heather, “The Two H’s,” who once painted his toes while he slept. Before a week goes by, Donovan is recruited to help Bix retrieve the motor from a sunken boat, given a flattop short as a golf green, and learns that his uncle’s criminal past might be something he has not entirely left behind. A perfect reading adventure—hailed as “moving and believable” (New York Times)—A Small Boat at the Bottom of the Sea is a rich exploration of the courage it takes to attain redemption, and the power of strong relationships to help people look beyond the bad choices others make and see the good inside them.
£7.38
Milkweed Editions A Small Boat at the Bottom of the Sea
Book SynopsisFrom swimming to the bottom of the ocean to reclaim a sunken boat, to standing up to bullies, to asking questions that might have painful answers, twelve year-old Donovan Sanger has some capabilities that the grown-ups around don't. This is why his dad has asked Donovan to go spend the summer with an Aunt and Uncle he barely knows. Aunt Hattie has become very ill with lung cancer and she and Uncle Bix need "a little moral support," as Donovan’s dad puts it. Uncle Bix is a mechanical genius who just a couple of years ago was released from jail for his role in a robbery. Before a week goes by, Donovan is sent underwater in a wetsuit so small he can barely breathe, is given a very short haircut in his sleep by Uncle Bix, who says it will "give him some strength," and learns that his uncle’s criminal past might be something he has not entirely left behind. As the summer progresses, Donovan helps brings a boat up from the bottom of Puget Sound and care for his Aunt, all the while trying to discover just what Uncle Bix is doing at secret meetings with his ex-convict friends.
£12.34
Milkweed Editions Slant
Book SynopsisLauren, a Korean American adoptee, is best friends with the prettiest girl in school. Julie has an endless amount of confidence. Lauren doesn’t. It’s not that she wants to look like everyone else in her suburban Connecticut school—she’d just be happy if Sean, the cutest boy in her class, noticed her. And she could do without the names, too. Like “Slant.” When Sean slips one day and calls her by the taunt, she knows she has to take matters into her own hands. Using her life savings, Lauren decides to undergo a special eye surgery that will deepen the crease of her eyelid so she just blends in. After she convinces her father to agree, Lauren learns a secret about her dead mother and finds herself faced with a dilemma: should she get the operation that might make her more confident and well-liked, or can she find that confidence within? Sensitive and beautifully written, Laura E. Williams’s novel offers a powerful lesson to young readers whose self-esteem depends too much on how they look.
£7.38
Milkweed Editions Discovering Pig Magic
Book SynopsisMattie, Ariel, and Nicki are fast friends facing the uncertainty of being thirteen. Mattie’s kitschy pig collection and agoraphobic mother might completely derail her social life. Ariel’s attempts to follow in Rachael Ray’s culinary footsteps have landed her in hot water. And Nicki is carrying a secret that threatens to cut her off from her best friends. After finding a book of spells, the three girls perform a ritual that will grant each the object of her desire. This requires that they each bury something special: for Ariel, a tiny antique spoon; for Nicki, a thumb-sized leather mother-and-child doll; and for Mattie, a small ceramic pig with real gold inlays. When the magic starts to take effect, the girls’ longed-for wishes carry unintended, and unwelcome, consequences. Several disasters later, the friends fear that their ritual is working against them. Can they break the spell before their problems spiral out of control? Wonderfully funny and absorbing, Discovering Pig Magic captures the everyday lives of three quirky, engaging girls, and shows that some wishes may be better left unfulfilled.
£12.34
Milkweed Editions Discovering Pig Magic
Book SynopsisDiscovering Pig Magic follows the exploits of Mattie (or Miss M, or just M) and her friends Ariel and Nicki as they attempt to overcome the problems that plague their 13-year-old lives. After finding a book of spells, the three girls perform a ritual that will grant each the object of her desire. This requires that they each bury a special object. Ariel buries a tiny antique spoon; Nicki puts in a thumb-sized leather mother-and-child doll; and Miss M contributes a small ceramic pig with real gold inlays. When the magic starts to take effect, the girls' longed-for wishes carry unintended, and unwelcome, consequences. Breaking the spell before something really bad happens becomes crucial, but doing so may be too much even for these resourceful friends. Julie Crabtree's wonderfully funny novel captures the everyday lives of three quirky, engaging girls, and shows that some wishes may be better left unfulfilled.Trade ReviewDiscovering Pig Magic is about secrets and power and love and fear, and about defying other people's expectations to become the person you want to grow up to be. Both comic and serious, this promising debut appeals to lovers of magic as its engaging trio of characters learns to sort faith from fake.” Julie Schumacher, author of The Book of One Hundred Truths
£7.52
Milkweed Editions Border Crossing
Book SynopsisThe mixed-race son of apple pickers, Manz lives with his hard-drinking mother and her truck-driver boyfriend in the hardscrabble world of dusty Rockhill, Texas. Forced to take a summer job rebuilding fence of a cattle ranch, Manz works alongside his friend Jed and meets a girl named Vanessa -- but even among his friends, Manz suffers from an uncontrollable paranoia. As the summer wears on, Manz becomes convinced that "Operation Wetback," a brutal postwar relocation program, is being put back into effect. As the voices in his head grow louder and more insistent, Manz struggles to negotiate the difficulties of adolescence, the perils of an oppressed environment, and the terror of losing his grip on reality.
£8.39
Milkweed Editions The Hole in the Wall
Book SynopsisEleven-year-old Sebby has found the perfect escape from his crummy house and bickering family: The Hole in the Wall. It's a pristine, beautiful glen in the midst of a devastated mining area behind Sebby's home. But not long after he finds it his world starts falling apart: his family's chickens disappear, colors start jumping off the wall and coming to life, and after sneaking a taste of raw cookie dough he finds himself with the mother of all stomachaches. When Sebby sets out to solve these mysteries, he and his twin sister, Barbie, get caught in a wild chase through the tunnels and caverns around The Hole in the Wall -- all leading them to the mining activities of one Stanley Odum, the hometown astrophysicist who's buying up all the land behind Sebby's home. Exactly what is Mr. Odum mining in his secret facility, and does it have anything to do with the mystery of the lost chickens and Sebby's stomachache? The answers to these questions go much further than the twins expect.Trade Review"Seb Daniels is growing up in a despoiled landscape going haywire in a specifically 21st century way. Lisa Rowe Fraustino is masterful in this tale of surreal survival." --Richard Peck, winner of the Newbery Medal for A Year Down Yonder
£12.34
Milkweed Editions Calli
Book SynopsisFifteen-year-old Calli has just about everything she could want in life--two loving moms, a good-looking boyfriend, and a best friend who has always been there for support. An only child, Calli is excited when her parents announce that they want to be foster parents. Unfortunately, being a foster sister to Cherish is not at all what Calli expected. First Cherish steals Calli's boyfriend, then begins to pit Calli's moms against one another, and she even steals Calli's iPod. Tired of being pushed around and determined to get even, Calli steals one of Cherish's necklaces. But this plan for revenge goes horribly awry, and Cherish ends up in juvenile detention. Isolating herself from her moms, her boyfriend, and even her best friend, Calli wrestles with her guilt and tries to figure out a way to undo the damage she's caused. When her moms are asked to take on another foster child, Calli sees an opportunity to make amends for her past mistakes. Funny, moving, and emotionally rich, Calli is a portrait of an endearing young woman caught between adolescence and adulthood, striving to do the right thing even when all of her options seem wrong.
£8.05
Atria Books Macho!
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£14.44
The New York Review of Books, Inc Young Once
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£13.56
Other Press LLC Quicksand: A Novel
Book SynopsisNOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIESAn incisive courtroom thriller and a drama that raises questions about the nature of love, the disastrous side effects of guilt, and the function of justice. A mass shooting has taken place at a prep school in Stockholm’s wealthiest suburb. Eighteen-year-old Maja Norberg is charged for her involvement in the massacre that left her boyfriend and her best friend dead. She has spent nine months in jail awaiting trial. Now the time has come for her to enter the courtroom. How did Maja—popular, privileged, and a top student—become a cold-blooded killer in the eyes of the public? What did Maja do? Or is it what she failed to do that brought her here? Malin Persson Giolito has written a perceptive portrayal of a teenage girl and a blistering indictment of a society that is coming apart. A work of great literary sensibility, Quicksand touches on wealth, class, immigration, and the games children play among themselves when parents are no longer attuned to their struggles.
£15.29
Soft Skull Press The Taqwacores
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£13.29
Soft Skull Press Exquisite Mariposa: A Novel
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£14.39
Trinity University Press,U.S. The Duchess of Angus
Book SynopsisWritten in the 1950s and discovered by family members years after her death, Margaret Brown Kilik’s shocking coming-of-age novel of the emotional and sexual brutality of young women’s lives in wartime San Antonio deserves a place on the shelf alongside classic novels like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding. The Duchess of Angus reworks Kilik’s unusual personal history (her mother spent the 1930's running flophouse hotels all over the United States, leaving Margaret to be brought up by a host of relatives) into a riveting portrait of a young woman navigating a conflicted and rapidly changing world, one in which sex promises both freedom from convention and violent subjection to men’s will. Strikingly modern in its depiction of protagonist Jane Davis and her gorgeous, unreadable friend Wade Howell, The Duchess of Anguscovers some of the same emotional territory as novels like Emma Cline’s The Girls and Robyn Wasserman’s Girls on Fire. Includes an introduction by Jenny Davidson and contextual essays by Laura Hernández-Ehrisma and Char Miller.Trade Review“Utterly absorbing as both a character study and as a transmission from a lost era.” — David Liss, author of The Devil’s Company "A time capsule back to 1940’s San Antonio, Texas. Jane Davis is earnest, confused, and wonderfully headstrong as she confronts a changing, inhospitable world…Her story still resonates." — Marcy Dermansky, author of The Red Car "Witty, sharp, and surprising. An electric switch that illuminates the intense friendship between two young women and their vibrant, complicated 1940s San Antonio." — Chelsey Johnson, author of Stray City “Intense, witty, humorous, brutally honest, and full of life…An intriguing and provocative novel from a newly discovered literary voice.” — Xiaolu Guo, author of Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
£13.49
Turner Publishing Company Our Daily Bread
Book SynopsisFrom renowned playwright Jackie Alexander comes a captivating, masterfully told coming-of-age novel of a young man struggling through his haunting past to discover and save himself. Stigmatized at birth due to his interracial parentage and reared in a household poisoned by domestic abuse, Kevin Matthews is orphaned at age ten after losing his mother to a violent attack at the hands of his father, who is jailed for the crime. Raised by his paternal grandfather, a Baptist Minister who instills values of the church as a base for recovery, Kevin is content with life in rural Louisiana during the 1970s until disturbing news surfaces regarding his mother's attack—news that sheds doubt on his father's guilt, and leads Kevin to relive painful memories. As Kevin grows up, the emotional scars of his childhood cast dark clouds over his relationships with women, and his life begins to spiral out of control. Faced with losing all that he loves, Kevin is forced to confront the man who holds the key to his salvation, his father. Our Daily Bread is a rich and compelling coming-of-age story of a young boy whose journey takes us from the bayous of Louisiana to the big city lights of New York and Paris. Examining family, race, religion, and the lingering effects of domestic abuse, Our Daily Bread questions what defines one's legacy: the surroundings we are born into, or the choices we make thereafter.Trade Review“Engaging in its lyricism and piercingly honest . . . Alexander’s voice is distinctive, fluid, and captivating. His keen sense and talent for dialogue; his narrative style, simple but profound; and his humor make Our Daily Bread compelling and irresistible.” —Mohammed Naseehu Ali, author of The Prophet of Zongo Street “Alexander’s characters stay with you long after reading the last page of Our Daily Bread, so much so that you miss them and find yourself wondering how they’re doing in life. With dialogue so skillfully constructed that conversations feel as if they are being eavesdropped on rather than read, this story becomes a part of you.” —Jill Sorensen, founder of Knock-Out Abuse
£11.39
Red Hen Press Pigs
Book Synopsis*Featured on TODAY with Hoda and Jenna, as recommended by Read With Jenna book club author Megha Majumdar* *STARRED BOOKLIST REVIEW* Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them. Written in exquisitely wrought prose, Pigs asks questions about community, environmental responsibility, and the possibility of innocence.Trade Review"In the popular imagination, pigs simply exist to consume and to be consumed. We revile them because they are seen as gluttonous animals, indiscriminate in their pursuit for satiation, and because they are dirty, wallowing happily in their own filth. Johanna Stoberock’s novel Pigs uses these stereotypes—the rapacious, prosaic nature of these beasts—to amplify the grotesque impulse of want and greed inherent in both animal and man." —The Rumpus"Pigs reads like a parable or a Greek tragedy… Pithy, earthy language conveys complex truths… Devastating and hopeful, the book champions reform from the inside out." —Mari Carlson, Foreword Reviews"Johanna Stoberock's second novel is a grotesque and luminous thriller with a big, swashbuckling allegory at its core, and Stoberock's own magic trick is to populate the island with characters sufficiently rich to elevate the novel far beyond parable or admonition. It's a beautiful book that I can't wait to reread." —Ted Scheinman, Pacific Standard"A lyrical, enthralling, and dark-inflected allegory, equal parts Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and Lord of the Flies." —Jonathan Lethem, author of A Gambler’s Anatomy and The Feral Detective"Powerful, metaphorical, as fantastical as it is true, Johanna Stoberock’s Pigs is a masterpiece. Stoberock scrutinizes mankind’s failure to tend to our planet, our children, and our fellow man, and the result is a terrifying, tremendous book, its darkness lit in unpredictable ways by campfires of compassion and hope. What a wise, searing novel for the twenty-first century." —Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra and The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac"Pigs looks unflinchingly at some of the scariest parts of our world—a changing climate, an ocean full of garbage, and us, the fragile animals. Yet within this, there is tremendous beauty and grace—Johanna Stoberock has written a kind of love song to survival, to life itself." —Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty"This is the writing of a woman who considers the breaking and the growth of beings. I am always struck with her ability to describe uncomfortable beauty. She explores unquestioned roles and rules, the pain we stifle and the pain we commit, and the process of change and release and giving as sacrifice." — Augusta Sparks Farnum"A superbly crafted and thoroughly reader absorbing novel by an author with a genuine flair for originality..." —Midwest Book Review"In the popular imagination, pigs simply exist to consume and to be consumed. We revile them because they are seen as gluttonous animals, indiscriminate in their pursuit for satiation, and because they are dirty, wallowing happily in their own filth. Johanna Stoberock’s novel Pigs uses these stereotypes—the rapacious, prosaic nature of these beasts—to amplify the grotesque impulse of want and greed inherent in both animal and man." —The Rumpus
£12.34
Red Hen Press Scissors, Paper, Stone
Book SynopsisWhat is considered a family, and who gets to define it? In 1964, despite the racial tension occurring in a post–WWII America, Catherine and Jonathan adopt a baby girl from Korea. This unconventional choice brings disapproval from Catherine’s family, which creates an even closer bond between her and her daughter. Narrated in alternating chapters by Catherine, her adopted daughter Min, and Min’s best friend Laura, Scissors, Paper, Stone spans twenty years of love, loss, and the complex reality of female relationships. By 1985 Catherine is living a risk-free life on her own accord, Laura is dating her way through college, and Min is a massage therapist who has come out as a lesbian and is learning to embrace her Korean heritage. After Min and Laura take a summer road trip together, the shifts in their friendship force all three women to examine the assumptions they’ve been living by and to make choices about the roles they want to play in each other’s lives.Trade Review"A compelling family drama resonant with feminist and queer issues, Martha K. Davis’s Scissors, Paper, Stone neatly captures the grit of intimacy as relationships expand and contract...Davis sustains a beautiful tension between the women. Despite all that distances them, they’re in each other’s lives for good or ill. Like the children’s game of the title, they come together, face off, and drift apart, though at heart they’re a set, compelled to find the parts that complete it in each other, even if their connections are attended by confrontation." --Foreword Reviews -- Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers * LITERARY / LGBT FICTION *"The story is told in the alternating voices of Catherine, Min, and Min’s longtime best friend, Laura, and covers 21 years, from 1964 to '85. Set in the predominantly white San Francisco suburb in which the family lives, it addresses numerous additional topics—Min’s coming out as a lesbian, her parents’ divorce, the creation of dozens of LGBTQ institutions that developed to challenge homophobia, and the difficulties that all young people face as they attempt to navigate long-term relationships. Min’s sexuality—some scenes are pretty graphic—and the tensions that arise between her and Catherine combine to make the novel an intense and compelling read. A terrific bildungsroman featuring three women who are by turns fascinating and bewildering but ultimately worth championing."--Kirkus Reviews"Davis’s debut novel, Scissors, Paper, Stone, delivers intergenerational, women-centered narratives that illustrate how close personal connections can be realized in wonderfully idiosyncratic ways. Each of these stories is told in first-person, giving readers intimate access to the outward and inward experiences of three women. Catherine’s, Min’s, and Laura’s narratives are told in graceful, though not overly flowery, prose. These characters are dynamic; their spoken and inner dialogues are believable; and their worlds are simultaneously distinct and relatable. The sentence-level writing in the book makes it an enjoyable read, but it’s the overarching themes that make the novel especially compelling. The subject I find most pressing is how each storyline ruptures the construct of kinship. Catherine’s story troubles the idea that familial bonds necessarily be tethered by biological connection. Laura’s story illustrates an element of curation in family-building. And Min’s story demonstrates how tribes can be organized around desire, making way for a refreshing kind of queer kinship." -- -- JESS TRAVERS * Realizing Queer Kinship *“With Scissors, Paper, Stone, Martha K. Davis has given us an ambitious coming of (lesbian) age story that is a movingly honest inquiry into the messy, yet still beautiful, transmogrification of what it means to be a family in a post–WWII America ruptured by racism, homophobia, . . . and the generational divide. The character of Cathy, the idealistic and unsuspecting . . . single mother of an adopted Korean child, is one for the ages: a vessel for all the good intentions and fumbling contradictions of her time.”—Celeste Gainey, author of the GAFFER, final judge for the 2016 Quill Award “Martha K. Davis writes with rare insight and compassion about the evolving American family and the struggle to belong. Scissors, Paper, Stone is a wise and affecting novel.”—Hilma Wolitzer, author of The Doctor's Daughter and An Available Man
£12.34
Red Hen Press Like Wings, Your Hands
Book SynopsisKalina, born in Bulgaria and now living in Boston, has always been a spiritual seeker. Her fourteen-year-old son, Marko, who has spina bifida and is partially paralyzed, shares her curiosity about larger metaphysical questions, but also has his own unique perspective on life: Marko perceives numbers as having colors, shapes, and textures—and they’re linked to emotions: embarrassment, for example, is fourteen; satisfaction is sixty-seven. Kalina is determined to respect her son’s dignity and privacy as he embarks on the new terrain of adolescence, complicated as it is by his continued physical dependence on her care. She has other issues to wrestle with as well, including coming to understand her own life choices and her strained relationship with her father. Meanwhile, Marko, already expert at deep meditation, discovers a technique that allows him to experience a sense of boundlessness and also gain surprising insights into himself, his mother, and the grandfather he’s never met. Both a philosophical novel and a coming-of-age story, Like Wings, Your Hands explores a mother-son relationship in the context of disability and interdependence, while also raising questions about the nature of time and space and the limitless capacities of the human mind.Trade Review"In her frank, clear prose, Earley moves through multiple places and characters with startling ease, building a world at once honest and graceful." — Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master, a New York Times Notable book "Urgent, essential, and previously untold, Like Wings, Your Hands offers readers a voice and perspective glaringly absent in the history of literature. Although that fact alone should be sufficient to make Elizabeth Earley’s novel required reading, readers will ultimately keep turning the pages for the intimacy and innovation of this passionately necessary book." — Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men and Every Kind of Wanting "Elizabeth Earley has written a stunningly original novel—one that breaks ground as it breaks silences, one that thrums with insight and compassion and devastating beauty. Entering Like Wings, Your Hands feels like entering the dream box constructed by one of its characters—it catapults us through space and time, zooming us in to the cellular level and blasting us out to the stars. I love this book with 100% of my heart." — Gayle Brandeis, author of The Book of Dead Birds, a Bellwether Prize recipient "A helixing of the various incapacities of our bodies, Like Wings, Your Hands embraces the courage of yearning and the hopeful escape of dreams. Elizabeth Earley is bold and real and unapologetically political and all the things every writer strives for—and profound, absolutely profound." — Lily Hoang, author of Changing, a PEN Open Books Award recipient "Like Wings, Your Hands takes us into a world that exists all around us, yet few of us even see. It’s a place of raw and heartbreaking human experience, and Elizabeth Earley has revealed its unique language: elemental, luminous, and beautiful." — Peter Nichols, author of The Rocks
£12.34
Red Hen Press Sugar, Smoke, Song
Book SynopsisSugar, Smoke, Song is a collection of ten linked stories set in the Bronx, California, India, and Brazil. Following the secrets and passions of young women, these stories and their narrators cross genres and rules to arrive at unforeseen lives. A subway rider remembers enacting the gods with her estranged twin, a concert usher discovers her tango-dancing boyfriend’s lover, and a literacy worker confesses the gambles she and others have lost through the bluesy singers she admires. Told through semi-experimental play with nonlinear plots, plural narrators, and hybrid prose, these stories embody the experiences of Asian American women carrying histories both unseen and cyclically lived.Trade Review"The fire and guts of this material made a helix with the poetics and heart of the story. I was left breathless several times. This writer is on the cusp of inventing a signature language meant for telling this particular story." —Lidia Yuknavitch, Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize judge 2018"This novel is a gorgeous thunder swirl of dance and music, failure and friendship. I love how the places—India, New York, San Francisco, and beyond—press out through the narrative alongside Hindu, American, and family mythologies. I love the rhythms in it, the scatter and the necessity." —Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland"Each story contains a fully realized world, often revealed in elliptical pieces, and the collection coheres beautifully. This is a stunner."—Publishers Weekly"Her stories wear the garb of long prose poems evoking autofiction which collapses high and low. Her prose stays clear of the deceptively simple gimmickry and also avoids verbosity. Her writing instead educes Toni Morrison at times, perhaps even Toomer’s Cane, and black radical poetry, from modernism to experimental, and though Rajbanshi’s prose is often rooted in realism, she subverts it by her signature manipulation of syntax and register." —Moazzam Sheikh, The Nonconformist Magazine"Sensuous and surprising, Sugar, Smoke, Song presents variations on a theme of Assamese American women's identities, including hardship with a dash of hope." — Suzanne Kamata, Foreword Reviews"Sensuous and surprising, Sugar, Smoke, Song presents variations on a theme of Assamese American women's identities, including hardship with a dash of hope." —Suzanne Kamata, Foreword Reviews
£12.34
Red Hen Press The Falls of the Wyona
Book SynopsisIn The Falls of the Wyona by David Brendan Hopes, four friends growing up on the banks of a wild Appalachian river just after WWII discover, almost at the same time, the dangerous, alluring Falls and the perils of their own maturing hearts. Seen through the eyes of his best friend Arden, football hero Vince falls in love with the new kid, Glen. They have no context for their feelings, and the next few years of high school become a tense, though sometimes funny, artifice of concealment. The winner of Red Hen’s Quill Prize, The Falls of the Wyona is the first of three achieved (and several more projected) novels by this author imbued with the magical atmosphere of Appalachian culture.Trade Review"From its first lines, The Falls of the Wyona deftly, surely immerses the reader in its turbulent, inevitable flow. David Hopes has created a work of not only excellent writing, but excellent reading, combining the exacting narrative of a Jack London or M. Scott Momaday with lines of lyric, almost maternal gentleness, lines that make one close one's eyes and dream of better times ahead." —Ryka Aoki, author of He Mele a Hilo"Beautifully written." —Reviews by Amos Lassen"Dave Hopes grants us entry into the wondrous, highly charged world of young male friendship once upon a time. The setting is lovely and nostalgic. I wanted to know all about it, and I even wished I could live there. But there is trouble underneath, and there are things that just cannot happen. Until they do. A pitch-perfect exploration of the terrors and pleasures of American adolescence." —David Pratt, author of Wallaçonia and Bob the Book
£11.39
Red Hen Press Trash Mountain
Book SynopsisBen Shippers doesn’t have much use for school, friends, or pretty much anyone except his smartass siser, but he does harbor a secret passion: Trash Mountain, the central feature of the noxious landfill next to his house, the fumes from which have made his sister ill. After a botched attempt to destroy Trash Mountain with a homemade firebomb, Ben begins a years-long infiltration operation that leads him to drop out of school to work alongside homeless trash-pickers, and then, eventually, intern at the very place he meant to destroy. Ben’s boss there, a charismatic would-be titan of sanitation, shows Ben the intricate moralities of the trash industry, forcing him to choose between monetary stability and his environmental principles. With dark humor, Trash Mountain reflects on life in small southern cities in decline and an adolescent’s search for fundamental values without responsible adults to lead the way.Trade Review"The novel has an episodic feel, as Ben encounters an array of fellow students, potential employers, and local luminaries. Throughout, Bazzle chronicles the ways in which Ben’s early idealism erodes under more complex concerns. The novel’s tone is occasionally uneven: Bazzle’s observations on questions of race and class feel rooted in a social realism tradition, while other characters, like a long-winded local businessman and his father, a contentious figure nicknamed “Donkey Dan,” seem imported from a more broadly satirical work. Bazzle’s novel explores the compromises one makes in life even as it blends the gritty and the extravagant along the way."--Kirkus Reviews“From Mark Twain to George Saunders, Bradley Bazzle's Trash Mountain joins a long tradition of dark humor, wild inventiveness, and social satire in American letters. By turns hilarious, colorful, and strange, this affecting debut novel revels in the absurd but never strays far from the deeply felt humanity of its characters.”—Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza “In Trash Mountain, Bradley Bazzle has created a perfect protagonist in Ben Shippers: peculiar yet endearing, curiouser than a cat, and ready to take on the (trashy) challenges his young life throws at him. The novel is funny and engaging, and Bradley's concise and vivid prose guides us masterfully to its insightful conclusion. What a fine debut!”—Samrat Upadhyay, author of Arresting God in Kathmandu"Trash Mountain is gripping, with a finely drawn young protagonist, Ben, and a gigantic dump next door to his home. He and his friends call it Trash Mountain, and it is the central character in this book, a multifaceted character that encompasses and compresses all the strands of modern life . . . So, sure, the dump is a veritable mountain of a metaphor for modern life, and even though the whole proposition sounds distasteful, you’ll want to keep on reading and living along with Ben as he tries to figure things out and wreak revenge on the man who owns Bi-Cities and enriches himself by trashing the lives of all who are impacted by Trash Mountain." —Pete McCommons, Flagpole Magazine
£12.34
The Library of America Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems (LOA
Book SynopsisComplete in one volume for the first time, the joyous, jazz-saturated fiction of one of our foremost African American writers, including the four-novel Scooter sequenceOne of the leading cultural critics of his generation, Albert Murray was also the author of an extraordinary quartet of semi-autobiographical novels, vivid impressionistic portraits of black life in the Deep South in the 1920s and ''30s and in prewar New York City. Train Whistle Guitar (1974) introduces Murray''s recurring narrator and protagonist, Scooter, a "Southern jackrabbit raised in a briarpatch" too nimble ever to receive a scratch. Scooter''s education in books, music, and the blue-steel bent-note blues-ballad realities of American life continues in The Spyglass Tree (1991), Murray''s "Portrait of the Artist as a Tuskegee Undergraduate." The Seven League Boots (1996) follows Scooter as he becomes a bass player in a touring band not unlike Duke Ellington''s, and The Magic Keys (2005), in which Scooter at last finds his true vocation as a writer in Greenwich Village, is an elegaic reverie on an artist''s life. Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin round out the volume with a selection of Murray''s remarkable poems, including 11 unpublished pieces from his notebooks, and two rare examples of his work as a short story writer.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
£38.25
The Library of America Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore
Book SynopsisA deluxe, single volume collection of the award-winning author?s beloved trilogy of coming-of-age stories set in the Western Shore, where young people struggle against racism, prejudice, and slavery and must learn to live with their mysterious and magical gifts
£26.25
Kensington Publishing Corporation Beneath a Thousand Apple Trees
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£11.40
University of New Orleans Press Continental Divide
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£16.11
£15.54
Europa Editions The Story of a New Name (HBO Tie-In Edition):
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£12.99
Europa Editions Beautiful
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£15.30
Europa Editions The Garden of Monsters
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£16.20
Europa Editions Reeling
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£14.45
Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press Ocean State
Book SynopsisWhen I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl.For the Oliviera family - mum Carol, daughters Angel and Marie - autumn 2009 in the once-prosperous beach town of Ashaway, Rhode Island is the worst of times. Money is tight, Carol can't stay away from unsuitable men, Angel's world is shattered when she learns her long-time boyfriend Myles has been cheating on her with classmate Birdy, and Marie is left to fend for herself. As Angel and Birdy, both consumed by the intensity of their feelings for Myles, careen towards a collision both tragic and inevitable, the loyalties of Carol and Marie will be tested in ways they could never have foreseen.Stewart O'Nan's expert hand has crafted a crushing and propulsive novel about sisters, mothers and daughters, and the desperate ecstasies of love and the terrible things we do for it. Both swoony and haunting, Ocean State is a masterful work by one of the great storytellers of everyday American life.Trade ReviewA mesmerising human drama, beautifully observed and compellingly written. The central murder story reminded me of the sublime crime writing of Ruth Rendell, and the insight into the characters' lives is reminiscent of the best of Anne Tyler. In other words, there's so much about this novel that's remarkable, and I urge you to read it -- B. P. Walter, author of THE DINNER GUESTKeeps the reader glued...it's in the excavation of this extraordinary "whydunnit", rather than whodunnit, that O'Nan reveals the mess of inequality and lack of opportunity in contemporary America. * Sunday Independent *O'Nan is an enticing writer, a master of the illuminatingly mundane moments... O'Nan is subverting the thriller, borrowing its momentum to propel this bracing, chilling novel * New York Times *Beautifully rendered and heartbreaking...a Shakespearean tragedy told in spare, poetic, insightful prose * Publishers Weekly *Stewart O'Nan's haunting and fleet Ocean State tunnels deeply into the heady, hard lives of the vivid young women at its centre. Half-broken and full of longing, these women move us deeply. As the story hurtles toward an act of violence that feels both impossible and inexorable, we find ourselves wanting to stop and protect all of them. -- Megan AbbottStewart O'Nan is out to break your heart in the most beautiful way. He is writing with his full power unleashed. This book is a classic. -- Luis Alberto UrreaOne of Stewart O'Nan's many gifts is a keen and unflinching eye lit with an abiding compassion for his characters, all of which is on display in his mesmerizing new novel, Ocean State. Set in the forgotten streets of post-industrial, blue collar Rhode Island, this timely and gritty tale takes us deeply into the lives of girls and women who must navigate the kind of loss that can either break or strengthen the ties that bind us all. Ocean State is a gem glittering in the darkness. -- Andre Dubus IIIWhat O'Nan has done perhaps better than anybody else the past ten years is deliver the complexity, heartbreak and human drama of everyday people living everyday lives. -- Jonathan Evison
£8.54
Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press The Far Field
Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE 2019 JCB PRIZE FOR LITERATURESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN LITERATUREAn elegant, epic debut novel that follows one young woman's search for a lost figure from her childhood, a journey that takes her from Southern India to Kashmir and to the brink of a devastating political and personal reckoning.In the wake of her mother's death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt and the limits of compassion.Cosmo's one of the best books by BAME writers to get excited about in 2019Longlisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Trade ReviewA courageous, insightful and and affecting debut novel - and the winner of the prestigious JCB Prize for Indian literature - which places a naive upper-class woman from southern India in the midst of far messier realities in Kashmir. Along the way, the story challenges Indian taboos ranging from sex to politics. * The Economist Books of the Year *Vijay's mastery of traditional narrative skills wouldn't be out of place in a classic 19th century novel...The Far Field is an impressive performance. It will be fascinating to see what Vijay does next. * Sunday Times *a powerful meditation on the chaos of good intentions...a masterful piece of fiction. -- Nikesh Shukla * Observer *The Far Field is an irresistible blend of moral subtlety and intellectual precision. Ingeniously conceived and elegantly written, it is a first novel of startling accomplishment. -- Pankaj MishraFor the vast majority of us, who hear of the troubles in Kashmir only as a faint strain in the general din of world tragedies, The Far Field offers something essential: a chance to glimpse the lives of distant people captured in prose gorgeous enough to make them indelible - and honest enough to make them real. * Washington Post *Shalini's quest to understand her mother's life makes for a remarkable story, and Vijay is likely to be a talent to watch. * Financial Times *Vijay probes grand themes - tribalism, despotism, betrayal, death, resurrection - in exquisite but unflowery prose, and with sincere sentiment but little sentimentality. * New Yorker *Vijay's descriptions of the mountains, the people and their everyday lives are beautiful, and that makes the hidden ugliness all the more disturbing; this is a seriously impressive debut. * The Times *Consuming... Vijay's command of storytelling is so supple that it's easy to discount the stealth with which she constructs her tale. * New York Times Book Review *Stunning....Vijay's remarkable debut novel is an engrossing narrative of individual angst played out against political turmoil. * Publishers Weekly *...deals with big questions - Indian politics, class, history and sexuality - through beautiful prose. * Huffington Post UK *Vijay intertwines her story's threads with dazzling skill. Dense, layered, impossible to pin - or put - down, her first novel is an engrossing tale of love and grief, politics and morality. Combining up-close character studies with finely plotted drama, this is a triumphant, transporting debut. * Booklist, *STARRED REVIEW* *Vivid...[THE FAR FIELD explores] complicated themes of parental fealty, identity, and religious schism...a striking debut. * Kirkus *I had to remind myself while reading The Far Field that this is the work of a debut novelist, and not a mid-career book by a master writer... Such is the power of Vijay's writing that I finished the book feeling like I'd lived it. Only the very best novels are experienced, as opposed to merely read, and this is one of those rare and brilliant novels. -- Ben FountainI am in awe of Madhuri Vijay. With poised and measured grace, The Far Field tells a story as immediate and urgent as life beyond the page. I will think of these characters - tender and complex, mysterious and flawed, remarkably real to me - for years to come, as though I have lived alongside them -- Anna NoyesThe Far Field is remarkable, a novel at once politically timely and morally timeless. Madhuri Vijay traces the fault lines of history, love, and obligation running through a fractured family and country. Few novels generate enough power to transform their characters, fewer still their readers. The Far Field does both. -- Anthony MarraAn impressive debut. -- Layla Haidrani * Cosmopolitan *
£8.54
Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press Sweet Sunday
Book SynopsisA tumultuous novel about America's loss of innocence in the late Sixties.Turner Raines is Mr Heartbreak. Everybody leaves him. They walk out, they run away... they die. When his oldest friend Mel Kissing dies with an ice pick through his skull, Raines picks up the thread and sets out to ask 'who?' and 'why?'But this is America in 1969 and one death is just a drop in the ocean. The USA is about to land a man on the moon and the Vietnam War is ripping the country to pieces, setting sons against fathers, fathers against sons. The Woodstock festival is in full swing and Norman Mailer is standing as candidate for Mayor of New York.Against this backdrop, Raines' questions take him back to the childhood home he left in Texas, back to the battered remains of his youth... and as his memory unravels, America unravels with it.Trade ReviewA sprawling heartbreaker of a novel. * Literary Review *More than enough verve and wit to ensure happy page-turning wakefulness. * The Sunday Times *A terrific job... excellent at catching the mood of that hot summer of 1969 when the Vietnam War had divided families. * Observer *Sets the pulse racing and the jaded responses tingling. * Irish Times *Atmospheric... absorbingly intelligent. * Financial Times *
£8.54
The Story Plant The Weight of Ashes
Book SynopsisAfter a car accident claims his older brother''s life, Mark Murphy''s world is turned upside down. The silence of their shared bedroom, the memories of Mitch''s guidance, and his mother''s drunken spiral are constant reminders of the cost of his absence. But Mark isn''t ready to grieve. He isn''t ready to accept that his brother is truly gone. Despite the insistence of the adults in his life that he accept Mitch''s death, Mark is undeterred. They don''t know what he knows. They don''t know the story of the Witch on Spook Hill.Aided by his loyal band of misfit friends, Mark''s plan to carry Mitch''s ashes to the witch is complicated by the pursuit of the town sheriff and the cousin responsible for his brother''s death. With no time to regroup, Mark and his friends must navigate the dangerous path to Spook Hill before the sun sets, so that Mitch can be resurrected in exchange for the life of the one who took it.
£18.00
