Urban communities / city life Books
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Reading List
Book SynopsisA BEST OF SUMMER READ ACCORDING TO NEWSWEEK, PARADE MAGAZINE, NBC NEWS, LITHUB, AND POPSUGAR!The most heartfelt read of the summer...a surprising delight of a novel.--ShondalandAn unforgettable and heartwarming debut about how a chance encounter with a list of library books helps forge an unlikely friendship between two very different people in a London suburb.Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life in Wembley, in West London after losing his beloved wife. He shops every Wednesday, goes to Temple, and worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading while he spends his evenings watching nature documentaries.Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library for the summer when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a list of novels that she’s never heard of before. Intrigued, and a litt
£16.99
Harper Perennial Yes Daddy
Book SynopsisA gut-churning, heart-wrenching, blockbuster of a first novel . . . Parks-Ramage is an extraordinary new talent and Yes, Daddy is truly something special. —Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead ThingsA propulsive, scorching modern gothic, Yes, Daddy follows an ambitious young man who is lured by an older, successful playwright into a dizzying world of wealth and an idyllic Hamptons home where things take a nightmarish turn.Jonah Keller moved to New York City with dreams of becoming a successful playwright, but, for the time being, lives in a rundown sublet in Bushwick, working extra hours at a restaurant only to barely make rent. When he stumbles upon a photo of Richard Shriver—the glamorous Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and quite possibly the stepping stone to the fame he craves—Jonah orchestrates their meeting. The two begin a hungry, passionate affair.When summer arrives, Richa
£16.19
Random House USA Inc Evicted
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£13.09
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Bloater
Book SynopsisA rediscovered literary classic, The Bloater is a rollicking hothouse novel where love and repulsion are two paths to the same abyssTrade Review"Uncommonly good." -- The Guardian"Writing like this?—?a bit of Rhys, a bit of Knut Hamsun, a bit of Wyndham Lewis, a bit of Muriel Spark, overlaying the everlasting Shakespeare/Austen/?Brontë/George Eliot marriage drama?—?is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf. It catches like nothing else the smogs, the rodentine genes, the murky post-War grays, the lurking sexual violence of London, between Hangover Square and Carnaby Street." -- Michael Hofmann - Poetry"The Bloater delights us by its wit, relish, and new-minted metaphors." -- Daily Telegraph"Redolent of Swinging-Sixties London, Tonks’s brilliant sex comedy reveals sobering depths beneath its flashing surface... the revival of this beguiling 1967 novel restores a truly original voice to the shelves; a must." -- David Wright - Library Journal"Passion and revulsion, tenderness and cruelty, worldly sophistication and schoolgirl naiveté—outside of the classic will-they-won’t-they set-up of an unlikely romantic pairing, it’s Tonks’s embrace of oppositional forces that provides the source of the novel’s tension, as well as its levity…The joy of reading The Bloater is in the vitality of Tonks’s sentences, which are teeming with sensory particulars and surprising, delightful connections…its republication seems a small miracle." -- Madelaine Lucas - Astra Magazine"It is about flirtation as a method of self-organization, and a crush as a method of self-torture. All of The Bloater, however—every single sentence—is funny." -- Audrey Wollen - The New Yorker
£12.34
North Point Press Suburban Nation
Book SynopsisWelcome to the Suburban NationPlunge into the pivotal exploration of America''s car-centric suburban phenomenon that has shaped the landscape of the North American continent over the last century. Suburban Nation stands as a prominent voice advocating change in suburban sprawl and the over-reliance on personal vehicles.Suburban Nation is the brainchild of the founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who are leading the charge towards traditional urban planning practices.But this is no simple exposé of post-war planning failures. Instead, Suburban Nation presents a compelling rebuttal to the ''sprawl and crawl'' of residential development and transportation design that has marked America''s suburban spaces. This inspiring narrative delves into the multi-faceted aspects of urban design, public transit accessibility, traffic, and sprawl, invoking a collective rethink of how we liv
£22.50
Picador Walkable City
Book SynopsisTENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITIONWINNER OF THE GREEN PRIZE FOR SUSTAINABLE LITERATUREUpdated with 100+ pages of new material and a foreword by Janette Sadik-KhanThe bestselling urban planning book of the past decade, translated into seven languages, Walkable City has changed the conversation on community design across America and beyond. It is reissued here with an extensive update, including eight new chapters covering housing equity, COVID, Uber, autonomous vehicles, urban forests, and more.Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability.Making downtown into a walkable, viable community is the essential fix for the typical American city; it is eminently achievable and its benefits are manifold. Walkable Citybursting with sharp observations and key insights into how urban change happenslays out a practical, necessary, and inspiring
£17.00
St Martin's Press Cult Classic
Book SynopsisHilariously insightful and delightfully suspenseful, Cult Classic is an original: a masterfully crafted tale of love, memory, morality, and mind control, as well as a fresh foray into the philosophy of romance. A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK of 2022 at Glamour, W, Nylon, Fortune, Literary Hub, The Millions, and more!One night in New York City's Chinatown, a woman is at a reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into an ex-boyfriend. And then another. And . . . another. Nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past. What would normally pass for coincidence becomes something far stranger. The recently engaged Lola must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship but with the fact that both her best friend and her former boss, a magazine editor turned mystical guru, might have
£15.30
Random House USA Inc Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure
Book Synopsis“A comprehensive, entertaining, and compelling argument for how rebuilding social infrastructure can help heal divisions in our society and move us forward.”—Jon StewartNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • “Engaging.”—Mayor Pete Buttigieg, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn’t seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together and find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done?In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Interweaving his own research with examples from around the globe, Klinenberg shows how “social infrastructure” is helping to solve some of our most pressing societal challenges. Richly reported and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People offers a blueprint for bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides.LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION“Just brilliant!”—Roman Mars, 99% Invisible“The aim of this sweeping work is to popularize the notion of ‘social infrastructure''—the ‘physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact''. . . . Here, drawing on research in urban planning, behavioral economics, and environmental psychology, as well as on his own fieldwork from around the world, [Eric Klinenberg] posits that a community’s resilience correlates strongly with the robustness of its social infrastructure. The numerous case studies add up to a plea for more investment in the spaces and institutions (parks, libraries, childcare centers) that foster mutual support in civic life.”—The New Yorker“Palaces for the People—the title is taken from the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s description of the hundreds of libraries he funded—is essentially a calm, lucid exposition of a centuries-old idea, which is really a furious call to action.”—New Statesman“Clear-eyed . . . fascinating.”—Psychology Today
£16.00
Penguin Putnam Inc Triumph of the City
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£15.20
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Real Mrs. Tobias
Book Synopsis“Sally Koslow channels Nora Ephron in this lively tale of obligation versus desire and the politics of family power. Deftly written with equal parts intelligence, pathos, and humor, The Real Mrs. Tobias is a pure pleasure to read.”—Therese Anne Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of It All Comes Down to ThisA sharply funny and big-hearted multi-generational story about the deeply complicated relationships between mothers- and daughters-in-law, told through three women who marry into the same family, a treat for fans of The Nest and Fleischmann Is in Trouble. It’s 2015 in New York City, and three women all known as Mrs. Tobias—Veronika, the matriarch, her daughter-in-law Mel, and Mel’s daughter-in-law Birdie—are trying to navigate personal difficulties, some of which are with one another.Veronika and Mel, despi
£999.99
Back Bay Books Didnt Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to
Book SynopsisWinner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award In this “dangerously hilarious” novel (Los Angeles Times), a trans woman reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men’s prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend—from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods. Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary. In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New Yor
£999.99
Mariner Books Three Rooms
Book SynopsisA piercing howl of a novel about one young woman’s endless quest for an apartment of her own and the aspirations and challenges faced by the millennial generation as it finds its footing in the world, from a shockingly talented debut author “A woman must have money and a room of her own.” So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of One’s Own, but in this scrupulously observed, gorgeously wrought, debut novel, Jo Hamya pushes that adage powerfully into the twenty-first century, to a generation of people living in rented rooms. What a woman needs now is an apartment of her own, the ultimate mark of financial stability, unattainable for many. Set over the course of one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she moves from a rented room at Oxford, where she’s working as a research assistant; to a stranger’s sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she’s been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach. As politics shift to nationalism, the streets fill with protestors, and news drip-feeds into her phone, she struggles to live a meaningful life on her own terms, unsure if she’ll ever be able to afford to do so.
£15.29
Harper Perennial And Still We Rise
Book SynopsisBestselling author of The Killing Season and veteran Los Angeles Times reporter Miles Corwin spent a school year with twelve high school seniors -- South-Central kids who qualified for a gifted program because of their exceptional IQs and test scores. Sitting alongside them in classrooms where bullets were known to rip through windows, Corwin chronicled their amazing odyssey as they faced the greatest challenges of their academic lives. And Still We Rise is an unforgettable story of transcending obstacles that would dash the hopes of any but the most exceptional spirits.
£999.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Mutual Friend
Book SynopsisThis is a rare thing: an original, intelligent novel that?s not just a perfect summer beach read, but one that deserves serious awards consideration as well. Put down your phone and pick it up… A major accomplishment.??Kirkus (starred)From the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother, a hilarious and thought-provoking debut novel set in New York City, following an unforgettable cast of characters as they navigate life, love, loss, ambition, and spirituality?without ever looking up from their phones. It?s the summer of 2015, and Alice Quick needs to get to work. She?s twenty-eight years old, grieving her mother, barely scraping by as a nanny, and freshly kicked out of her apartment. If she can just get her act together and sign up for the MCAT, she can start chasing her dream of becoming a doctor . . . but in the Age of Distraction, the distractions are so distracting. There?s her tech millionaire brother?s religious awakening. His picture-perfect wife?s emotional breakdown. Her chaotic new roommate?s thirst for adventure. And, of course, there?s the biggest distraction of all: Love. From within the story of one summer in one woman?s life, a tapestry of characters is unearthed, tied to one another by threads both seen and unseen. Filled with all the warmth, humor, and heart that gained How I Met Your Mother its cult following, The Mutual Friend captures in sparkling detail the chaos of contemporary life, a life lived simultaneously in two different worlds?the physical one and the one behind our screens?and reveals how connected we all truly are.
£999.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation My Search for Warren Harding
Book SynopsisAn exhilarating, brutal, comedic masterpiece-an American classic that will leave you so giddy you'll go and kick sand in somebody's face (The Houston Post)Trade Review"A riotous debut: The Aspern Papers performed by the Brothers Marx." -- Time
£999.99
Picador USA To Walk Alone in the Crowd
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2020 Medici Prize for Foreign NovelFrom the award-winning author of the Man Booker Prize finalist Like a Fading Shadow, Antonio Muñoz Molina presents a flâneur-novel tracing the path of a nameless wanderer as he walks the length of Manhattan, and his mind.De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman . . . walkers and city dwellers all, collagists and chroniclers, picking the detritus of their eras off the filthy streets and assembling it into something new, shocking, and beautiful. In To Walk Alone in the Crowd, Antonio Muñoz Molina emulates these classic inspirations, following their peregrinations and telling their stories in a book that is part memoir, part novel, part chronicle of urban wandering.A skilled collagist himself, Muñoz Molina here assembles overheard conversations, subway ads, commercials blazing away on public screens, snatches from books hurriedly packed into bags or shoved
£18.00
Holt McDougal A Very Nice Girl
Book SynopsisSelected for Malala's Book ClubImogen Crimp's enjoyable debut novel... is an all-too-real reminder of what it is to be a woman in your 20s... - The New York TimesTender, devastating, witty. And deeply true. Sweetbitter meets Normal People.-Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and BlissA bitingly honest, darkly funny debut about ambition, sex, power, and love, Imogen Crimp's A Very Nice Girl cracks open the timeless questions of what it is to be young, what it is to want to be wanted, and what it is to find your calling but lose your way to it.Anna doesn't fit in. Not with her wealthy classmates at the selective London Conservatory where she unexpectedly wins a place after university, not with the family she left behind, and definitely not with Max, a man she meets in the bar where she sings for cash. He's everything she's not-rich, tailored to precision, impossible to read-and before long An
£16.19
Atria Books House of Outrageous Fortune Fifteen Central Park
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£18.99
Forever The Book of Second Chances
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£14.39
Basic Books The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are
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£15.19
Catapult Gentrifier: A Memoir
Book SynopsisTaking on the thorny ethics of owning and selling property as a white woman in a majority Black city and a majority Bangladeshi neighborhood with both intelligence and humor, this memoir brings a new perspective to a Detroit that finds itself perpetually on the brink of revitalization.In 2016, a Detroit arts organization grants writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house?a room of her own, à la Virginia Woolf?in Detroit?s majority-Bangladeshi ?Banglatown.? Accompanied by her cats, Moore moves to the bungalow in her new city where she gardens, befriends the neighborhood youth, and grows to intimately understand civic collapse and community solidarity. When the troubled history of her prize house comes to light, Moore finds her life destabilized by the aftershocks of the housing crisis and governmental corruption.This is also a memoir of art, gender, work, and survival. Moore writes into the gaps of Woolf?s declaration that ?a woman must have money and a room of one?s own if she is to write?; what if this woman were queer and living with chronic illness, as Moore is, or a South Asian immigrant, like Moore?s neighbors? And what if her primary coping mechanism was jokes?Part investigation, part comedy of a vexing city, and part love letter to girlhood, Gentrifier examines capitalism, property ownership, and whiteness, asking if we can ever really win when violence and profit are inextricably linked with victory.
£999.99
Entangled: Amara Follow Me Darkly
Book SynopsisShe?s a take-charge woman. But he?s a master of control.Skye Manning knows what she wants. Her job as assistant and photographer for a major social media influencer isn?t perfect, but it?s a rung on the ladder to bigger and better things. She?s confident she?ll one day take feature photos for National Geographic.Self-made billionaire Braden Black didn?t get where he is by taking no for an answer. When a chance encounter with the refreshingly innocent and beautiful Skye piques his interest in more ways than one, he?s determined to make her submit.Dating a billionaire soon has Skye in the middle of a Cinderella story?until the clock strikes midnight and Braden reveals his dark side. Heat sizzles between them, and Skye finds herself falling hard.But Braden Black is no Prince Charming, and his dark desires are far from his only secret.Start this amazing series off with Darkly, Follow Me Darkly told from the hero''s point of view, or spice up your reading with Braden''s story any time while enjoying the Follow Me series.Darkly (Book #1 in the hero''s POV) can be read and enjoyed in any order!Reading order of Follow Me trilogy:Book #1: Follow Me DarklyBook #2: Follow Me UnderBook #3: Follow Me Always
£999.99
