Search results for ""Granta Books""

From an exciting new voice in Irish fiction, a powerful novel set on an Irish clifftop - a story about duty, despair and the chance encounters upon which fate turns

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From the Women's Prize Shortlisted-author of Weather, an electrifying, funny and wise account of a couple falling out of one another's orbit. 'It is the kind of book that you will be quoting over and over to friends who don't quite understand, until they give in and read it too' John Self, Guardian They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation. They used to be young, brave, and giddy with hopes for their future. They got married, had a child, and skated through all the small calamities of family life. But then, slowly, quietly something changes. As the years rush by, fears creep in and doubts accumulate until finally their life as they know it cracks apart and they find themselves forced to reassess what they have lost, what is left, and what they want now. Dept. of Speculation navigates the jagged edges of a modern marriage to tell a story that is darkly funny, surprising and wise. 'Funny, and moving, and true... It tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1897' Michael Cunningham

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From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo, a novel that moves between Japan past and present to tell a time-bending story about desire and destiny.

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A bestseller in Germany, Walter Kempowski's autobiographical novel is a sensorial coming of age story during the years of World War II and a chilling exploration of how one family adjusted to life under the Nazis Growing up in Rostock, in the north of Germany, Walter has a comfortable upbringing: quiet and content, he spends his days scheming with school friends and resisting the torment of his older siblings. But, as the country rolls toward war, the attitudes of his teachers, peers and family begin to slide, and it isn't long before the roar of falling bombs, charged silences and mounting intolerance begin to puncture Walter's carefree youth. Following the Kempowski family from the months before the outbreak of war through to the fall of Berlin, An Ordinary Youth is the fascinating story of an ordinary childhood in extraordinary times. Here, Walter's academic struggle sits alongside his father's conscription; his brother's love of jazz burgeons amid the destruction of the barrages. And all the while, the horrors of Nazism loom in the peripheries - communicated in furtive looks or hushed conversations - running alongside the Kempowski family's daily rituals and occasional scandals. A bestseller in Germany on publication, An Ordinary Youth is all the more unnerving for the warmth, humour and empathy with which Kempowski imbues his hometown. Written with a sensorial immediacy, it is a meticulous chronicle of daily life in 1930s Germany, and a discomfiting exploration of the many forms that complicity can take.

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With an introduction by Siri Hustvedt Friday 30 October 1936. I do not wish, for reasons I cannot now develop, to analyse that extraordinary summer. It will be more helpful & healthy for me to write scenes; to take up my pen & describe actual events: good practice too for my stumbling & doubting pen. Can I still 'write'? That is the question, you see. And now I will try to prove if the gift is dead, or dormant. The concluding volume of Virginia Woolf's diary covers the last five years of her life, ending four days before she committed suicide at the age of 59. These final years were overshadowed by the untimely death of her nephew Julian Bell in the Spanish Civil War, and her own intermittent mental fragility. As another World War began to seem inevitable, writing itself often felt like a battle. Nevertheless, this period saw the publication of her novel The Years, the polemical essay Three Guineas, the biography of her friend Roger Fry, and the writing of Between the Acts. This volume stands as a monument to Woolf's life and the enduring friendships of the Bloomsbury group. This Granta edition of Volume 5 contains the unexpurgated text for the first time.

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With an introduction by Virginia Nicholson Saturday 2 February 1918. The first walk we've had for ever so long. Damp, mild vaporous day. Funeral bells tolling as we went out, & marriage as we came in. The streets lined with people waiting their meat. Aeroplanes droning invisible. Our usual evening, alone happily, knee deep in papers. This diary begins in January 1915. Virginia Woolf was about to publish her first novel, The Voyage Out. By the end of 1919 she had published many essays and reviews, as well as a second novel, Night and Day. Her diary was the counterpoint to that public writing: here she could record details of daily life, think about friends and reading, writing and her state of mind. This diary offers a unique insight into the life and mind of one of Britain's most influential writers, and the circle she was part of which came to be known as Bloomsbury. This new Granta edition includes Woolf's 'Asheham Diary' for the first time.

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For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker have poked and prodded at biographical convention, gesturing towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. Here, Malcolm turns her gimlet eye on her own life, examining twelve family photographs to construct a memoir from camera-caught moments, each of which pose questions of their own. She begins with the picture of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague at the age of five in 1939. From there we follow her to the Czech enclave of Yorkville in Manhattan, where her father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, and her mother, an attorney from a bourgeois family, traded their bohemian, Dada-inflected lives for the ambitions of middle-class America. From her early, fitful loves to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escaped the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Malcolm delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led her to become a character in her own drama. Displaying the sharp wit and astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume develops into a memoir like no other.

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In New Mexico, she is a young mother. Stuck in a marriage that's deteriorating, unable to shake the feeling that her house and belongings are trapping her, she is increasingly drawn to reflect on who she was before: when she worked as an editor in New York, rarely in her own apartment, always seeking new places to call home. As she folds time, seeking to inhabit her past, she begins to encounter ghosts. Time and again, a solitary man appears - Gilberto Owen - a lesser known poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and an obsession of her youth. He is living on the edge of Harlem's social scene at the beginning of the Great Depression, anticipating death, and tracing spectral visions of his own - among them, a young woman, travelling alone, on the subway. Valeria Luiselli's daring debut, Faces in the Crowd is a meditation on time, hauntings, and the elusive, transitory identities we assume.

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'Minor's acute, elliptical observations and silky prose are a delight to read, as the misunderstandings, machinations and mysteries of past and present knit together, fall apart, and re-establish themselves in an uneven, bright weave in Caroline Wright's distinctive, unforced translation' - Irish Times From a rising star on the European literary scene: a sharp-eyed, witty novel of budding desires, persistent ghosts and frayed family ties Over the decades since their parents died, siblings Sidsel, Ea and Niels have drifted apart, retreating in order to protect their most vulnerable parts. But single mother Sidsel's last-minute work trip to London, site of past transgressions, and Ea's chance visit to a San Francisco clairvoyant - seeking contact with their late mother - force the trio to reckon with their shared history and complicated inheritance.

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Bombarded by pink ribbons and platitudes following a breast cancer diagnosis, Ehrenreich was shocked to find that her anger was seen as unhealthy and dangerous by health professionals and other professionals. From health to academia, the economy to Iraq, Ehrenreich exposes a trail of denial, delusion, and bad faith, and reveals the often disastrous consequences of putting on 'a happy face'. Rigorous, insightful and also incredibly funny, Smile or Die is a sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking.

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Following a turbulent upbringing, a history of addiction and a committal to an asylum, the teachings of Malcolm X changed Hakim Jamal's life. He became an eloquent, rousing spokesperson for the Nation of Islam movement, moved to London, began a relationship with Gale Benson - the daughter of a British MP - and published a book about Malcolm X, with Diana Athill. Before long, however, he began behaving erratically again, and believed himself to be God. Raw and unflinching, Make Believe is a memoir of friendship, love, mania and injustice. A witness to his struggles, Athill reflects on her relationship with Hakim with characteristic empathy and candour, whilst charting the events that led to Gale's - and not long after, Hakim's - murder.

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A charming, vibrant diary of Diana Athill's holiday to Florence in the late 1940s. In August 1947, Diana Athill travelled to Florence by the Golden Arrow train for a two-week holiday with her good friend Pen. In this playful diary of that trip, Athill recorded her observations and adventures - eating with (and paid for by) the hopeful men they meet on their travels, admiring architectural sights, sampling delicious pastries, eking out their budget and getting into scrapes. Written with an arresting immediacy and infused with an exhilarating joie de vivre, A Florence Diary is a bright, colourful evocation of a time long lost, and a vibrant portrait of a city that will be deliciously familiar to any contemporary traveller.

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First heard on BBC Radio 4. Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage. As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Stillicide is a moving story of love and loss and the will to survive, and a powerful glimpse of the tangible future.

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'Endearing... enlightening... an affecting and suspenseful portrait of contemporary Bangkok' Literary Review 'Emma Larkin richly and vividly brings her characters to life... a captivating tour de force' Alaa Al Aswany An overlooked patch of jungle behind a Bangkok city slum resonates with the hopes, dreams and fears of the local community. Those who are drawn to the plot of land - among them a homeless revolutionary, an ambitious property developer, and a lonely expat housewife - believe they can find opportunity or redemption there. But the slum-dwelling spirits who guard its secrets have other plans. With a rich cast of characters that spans Bangkok's multi-layered society, Comrade Aeon's Field Guide to Bangkok is a masterful, captivating debut, and a vivid portrayal of a forgetful city awakening to its past.

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Part memoir, part medical investigation, this is a compelling account of surviving a freak accident, and a fascinating exploration of the science of trauma and recovery

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A pair of girls, Lethe and Lois, navigates the perimeters of a segregated city, armed with canisters of killing gas. Another child, Lessen, is at the centre of a bizarre cultural ritual that could be the subject of a Goya painting. Centring on the garish festivals of an allegorical nation, The Divers' Game moves through worlds in which kindness is no longer meaningful. A scathing indictment of the inequalities of Western society, it makes visible the violence that has threaded its way into every aspect of our lives, and the radical empathy we need to combat it.

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WINNER OF THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY 2020 A startlingly radical and surreal poetic journey, RENDANG takes the reader from West Sumatra to Planet Mongo via Gray's Inn Road, alighting on Indonesian artefacts, gentrification, and citizenry. RENDANG is an urgent comment on what it means to be a person now, a dissection of and love letter to the histories, places, and things that make us. Through adept and complex language play, a ludic voice, and a masterful command of form, Will Harris creates a poetry that charts the ambivalences, difficulties, and voices of our contemporary landscape.

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Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle over that foundational power. Women, people of colour and non-straight people are telling other versions, and white men in particular are fighting to preserve their own centrality. In this outstanding collection of essays by one of the most prescient and insightful commentators today, Solnit appraises the voices that are emerging, why they matter and the obstacles they face in making themselves heard.

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A blackly comic epic - a voyage through small-town America, and through the interior life of its most neurotic mailman. Albert Lippincott is a thirty-year veteran of the Nestor, New York, Post Office - a letter carrier extraordinaire, aggressively cheerful, obsessively efficient. But Albert has a few things to hide. His unfortunate habit, for instance, of reading other people's mail; his abortive university career, complete with a crackpot theory, a nervous breakdown and a thwarted attempt to bite out his professor's eye; a disastrous marriage, grotesquely self-absorbed parents and a sexually ambiguous entanglement with his melodramatic sister. And then there's his attempt to reform the postal system of Kazakhstan and his complicated relationship with his cats. And now his supervisors are on to his letter-opening compulsion, there's a throbbing pain under his left arm and he is finding it increasingly difficult to contain his emotions. Things are closing in on Albert, and he is forced to confront, once and for all, his life's failures. Albert Lippincott is a brilliant creation: flawed, damaged, but fiercely perceptive, and desperate to make meaning out of the mess of existence. He, and Lennon, hold us captive with a wild narrative voice fuelled by desperation and touched by madness.

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'What a wonderful, strange, terrifying, brilliant novel this is' Kamila Shamsie AS THE WORLD BURNS, ONLY A DREAMER CAN SAVE IT... New York, 2000. The United Nations has just planted its flag on Mars, and a Green Party senator is about to become the first female president of the United States. At a party in the almost-Utopian world, Kate and Ben fall in love. London, 1593. Kate wakes as Emilia, mistress to a nobleman and friend to a lowly court poet called Will. Afflicted by apocalyptic premonitions, she sets out to save the world. Each decision she makes as Emilia will change Kate's life with Ben forever. 'Bewitchingly complex... Astonishing' Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent 'An electrifying novel of love, creativity and madness... Playful, tender and heart breaking' Guardian 'Elegiac and genuinely, unbelievably moving... By the time I got to the end of it, I wanted to go back and read the beginning... You've got to read this book' Helen Lewis, BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review

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'The funniest book I've read in a long time: its deadpan, dry humour and its accumulation of absurdities will leave you rolling on your floor with laughter' The Times She thought she was a lover of the great classics of Russian literature - until she met the superfans... Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer's strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted - absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! - to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed is comic, humane, charming, poignant and full of an infectious love for literature. 'Dazzlingly good... Very bookish, very clever and very funny... A preposterously engaging volume' Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph 'The highest compliment you can pay such a book is that it sends you back to the original authors refreshed. I can go one higher - I found myself simply wanting to read more from Elif Batuman' Evening Standard 'An intoxicating mix of travel memoir, autobiography, literary criticism and philosophy... Charming and hilarious' Daily Telegraph

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING In this penetrating exploration of contemporary Russia, Joshua Yaffa meets a variety of Russians - from politicians and entrepreneurs to artists and historians - who have built their careers and constructed their identities in the shadow of the Putin system. Torn between their own ambitions and the omnipresent demands of the state, each has found that compromise is essential for survival and success. Between Two Fires is an intimate and probing portrait of a nation much discussed but little understood, and an urgent lesson about the nature of modern authoritarianism.

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'Profoundly powerful not only in observations and stories, but in how courageously and carefully it speaks to our present moment' Madeleine Thien, Guardian Over three years, journalist and novelist Ben Ehrenreich travelled to the West Bank's largest cities and smallest villages, and stayed with the Palestinian families who live there. Here, he weaves together the stories of these women, men and children: the extremes to which they are pushed, the daily absurdities and tragedies they face, and the strategies they construct to survive. What follows is a testimony, a provocation, and an unflinching act of witness. 'I am gripped... Ehrenreich lived with many of those he writes about, and so his story is wonderfully intimate... I feel more like I'm involved in a pacey novel than struggling to swallow yet more unpalatable truths' Observer 'The myriad ordeals suffered by the Palestinian people during the last eighty years are minutely reported here. It's a chronicle of their daily lives. Read it! It recognises and respects hope' John Berger 'Capture[s] events unfolding on the West Bank with sympathy and restraint' Colm Tóibín, Irish Times

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR IN FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, SPECTATOR 'You simply cannot understand China without reading Barbara Demick on Tibet' Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition In 1950, China claimed sovereignty over Tibet, leading to decades of unrest and resistance. Barbara Demick chronicles the Tibetan tragedy from Ngaba, a defiant town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. From the stories of Ngaba's last princess and those who experienced the struggle sessions of Mao's revolution to the experiences of today's monks and townsfolk suffering repression under China's rule, Demick paints a riveting portrait of Tibet past and present as it fights for its identity against one of the most powerful countries in the world.

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Certain states are hard to shake, or so Catherine Lacey's characters find in these twelve tales of love, loss and longing. A grieving wife gives away the shirts her husband has left behind. A flirtatious widow takes a honeymooning couple to see her husband's grave. A businessman working for a shadowy organization known as 'The Company', checks-in to a room in a strange and remarkable hotel.

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This Living and Immortal Thing inhabits a world of medicine, research, cancer and death. Its disillusioned and often darkly funny narrator is an Irish oncologist, who is searching for a scientific breakthrough in the lab of a New York hospital while struggling with his failing marriage and his growing alienation within the city's urban spaces. Tending to the health of his laboratory mice, he finds comfort in work that is measurable, results that are quantifiable. But life is every bit as persistent as the illness he studies. As he starts a new treatment on his mice, he meets a beautiful but elusive Russian translator at the hospital, his estranged wife gets in touch and his supervisor pressures him to push ahead professionally. And always there is the pull of family, of the place he considers home. Shot through with Duffy's haunting, beautiful descriptions of the science underlying cancer, which starkly illustrate the paradox of an illness with a persistent and deadly life force at its heart, This Living and Immortal Thing shows how the cruelty of the disease is a price we pay for the joy and complexity of being in the world.

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The short story is a barometer for the state and shape of literature. New American Stories presents the boldest, most innovative and most resonant fiction coming out of the American literary scene. Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea, has here curated an anthology that gives the lay of the literary land. From established masters of the form like Don DeLillo and Lydia Davis to neoteric trailblazers such as Rebecca Curtis and Rachel B. Glaser, this collection sees Marcus trying to 'prove that the distinctions we erect between styles and approaches to fiction can be essentially meaningless'. The result is a must-read, must-own volume for readers of literary fiction.

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Daphne suffers from a rare medical condition; her body shuts down when she feels strong emotions. As a result she has built strong walls between herself and the world, avoiding passion, anger, disappointment and surprise. But when she meets Ollie, who seems to see through her armour, who seems to want to know the real Daphne, her carefully built defences begin to crumble. In this gripping and tender modern myth, Will Boast explores the unexamined assumptions we make about our bodies and our relationships through the prism of a soulful contemporary love story.

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On the 2nd of August 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town. He has survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and the harrowing slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany. Now he has to learn to live with his memories. In this intelligent and deeply moving book, Göran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood in order to tell his father's story. It is also the story of the chasm that soon opens between the world of the child, suffused with the optimism, progress and collective oblivion of post-war Sweden, and the world of the father, haunted by the long shadows of the past.

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As a boy growing up in 1970s Johannesburg Mark Gevisser would play 'Dispatcher', a game that involved sitting in his father's parked car (or in the study) and sending imaginary couriers on routes across the city, mapped out from Holmden's Register of Johannesburg. As the imaginary fleet made its way across the troubled city and its tightly bound geographies, so too did the young dispatcher begin to figure out his own place in the world. At the centre of Lost and Found in Johannesburg is the account of a young boy who is obsessed with maps and books, and other boys. Mark Gevisser's account of growing up as the gay son of Jewish immigrants, in a society deeply affected - on a daily basis - by apartheid and its legacy, provides a uniquely layered understanding of place and history. It explores a young man's maturation into a fully engaged and self-aware citizen, first of his city, then of his country and the world beyond. This is a story of memory, identity and an intensely personal relationship with the City of Gold. It is also the story of a violent home invasion and its aftermath, and of a man's determination to reclaim his home town.

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The risks of global warming are real, and potentially vast. The difficulty of doing without fossil fuels is daunting, and possibly insurmountable. So there is an urgent need for new thinking on climate change. To meet that need, a small but increasingly influential group of scientists is exploring proposals for planned human intervention in the climate system. A stratospheric veil against the sun; the cultivation of photosynthetic plankton; a fleet of unmanned ships seeding clouds: these are the radical technologies of climate geoengineering. It is chilling to think of such power, and such scope for misadventure or malice, in humans hands. And yet we are now at the point where we have no choice but to take them very seriously indeed. The Planet Remade explores the science, history and politics behind these strategies. It looks at who might want to see geoengineering put to use - and why others would be dead set against it. In the last two centuries, changes to the planet - to the clouds and soils, to the winds and the seas, to the great cycles of nitrogen and carbon - have been far more profound than most of us realize. Appreciating the scale of that change compels us to rethink not just our responses to global warming, but our relationship to nature. With sensitivity, insight and expert science, Oliver Morton unpicks the moral implications of climate change, our fear that people have become a force of nature, and what it might mean to try and use that force for good. The Planet Remade is about imagining a world where people take care instead of taking control.

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Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable life in Manhattan, her home, her career and her loving husband. As the people she has left behind scramble to figure out what has happened to her, Elyria embarks on a hitchhiker's odyssey, testing fate by travelling in the cars of overly kind women and deeply strange men, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks. As she journeys from Wellington to Picton, Takaka, Kaikoura and onwards she asks herself, what is it that I am missing? How can a person be missing? Full of mordant humour and uncanny insights, Nobody Is Ever Missing is a startling tale of love, loss, and the dangers encountered in the search for self-knowledge. It is a novel which goes far beyond the story of a physical journey and asks what it means to be human, to be a woman, and to be at the mercy of forces beyond one's own control.

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In this provocative novel Mark Blacklock portrays the true and complex history of John Humble, aka Wearside Jack, the Ripper Hoaxer, a timewaster and criminal, sympathetic and revolting, the man hidden by a wall of words, a fiction-spinner worthy of textual analysis. In this remarkable work, John Humble leads the reader into an allusive, elusive labyrinth of interpretations, simultaneously hoodwinking and revealing. I'm Jack is a riveting novel about truth, lies, prison and shame. It is also a profound and furious love letter to Sunderland. It is a puzzle, a hoax, a multi-voice portrait and a virtuoso assemblage of textual elements. I'm Jack announces the arrival of a radically talented and innovative novelist.

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Take three strangers who all want something more. The Polish shift worker struggling to get a foothold in the new country; a fisherman who needs to make good on a promise to his best friend; and the middle man, determined to make up for lost time and take a little of what he deserves. When a chance comes along, each man must weigh the risk - and then keep his nerve as events take on their own unstoppable momentum. Tightly plotted and sharply observed, this is a gripping story of desperation and duty, and the brutal struggle to progress.

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Gustavo 'Highway' Sánchez is a man with a mission: he is planning to replace every last one of his unsightly teeth. He has a few skills that might help him on his way: he can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums, he can interpret Chinese fortune cookies, he can stand an egg upright on a table, and he can float on his back. And, of course, he is the world's best auction caller - although other people might not realise this, because he is, by nature, very discreet. Studying auctioneering under Grandmaster Oklahoma and the famous country singer Leroy Van Dyke, Highway travels the world, amassing his collection of 'Collectibles' and perfecting his own specialty: the allegoric auction. In his quest for a perfect set of pearly whites, he finds unusual ways to raise the funds, culminating in the sale of the jewels of his collection: the teeth of the 'notorious infamous' - Plato, Petrarch, Chesterton, Virginia Woolf et al. Written with elegance, wit and exhilarating boldness, Valeria Luiselli takes us on an idiosyncratic and hugely enjoyable journey that offers an insightful meditation on value, worth and creation, and the points at which they overlap.

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For four centuries, Logavina Street was a quiet residential road in a city known for its ethnic tolerance and cosmopolitan charm. Muslims, Christians, Serbs and Croats lived easily together, sharing an identity as Bosnians. Then the war tore their lives apart. Often without heat, water, food or electricity, they evaded daily sniper fire and witnessed horrific deaths. Neighbours and friends turned into deadly enemies. In this intimate eyewitness account, Barbara Demick weaves together the stories of ten families from Logavina Street, brilliantly illuminating one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century, and describes how, twenty years later, they are coping with the war's consequences. .

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August is an average twelve year old - he likes dogs and fishing, and doesn't even mind early morning chores on his family's farm. When his parents' marriage falls apart and he has to start over in a new town, he tries hard to be an average teen - playing football and doing his homework - but he struggles to form friendships, and when a shocking act of violence pushes him off course once more, he flees to rural Montana. There, as he throws himself into work on a ranch, he comes to learn that even the smallest of communities have secrets and even the most broken of families have a bond. Beautifully written and unfolding against an epic American landscape, August is a compelling, authentic and poignant story of the joys and traumas that irrevocably shape us all.

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NAMED AS ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE'S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2023 An unnerving, compelling and utterly contemporary debut novel about one woman's metamorphosis into an online phenomenon, from a Sunday Times Short Story Award-shortlisted writer She is noticed by Elliot as he trains in in the gym. He sees her dedication to building her body and taking up space, and he is drawn to her strength. She is observed by her mother, as she grows from a taciturn, tremulous child into a determined and distant woman, who severs all familial ties. She is watched by her former colleague Susie, who offers her sanctuary and support as she leaves her partner and rebuilds her life, transforming her body and reinventing herself online. Each of these three witnesses desires closeness. Each is left with only the husk of the person they thought they knew, before she became someone else: a woman on a singular and solitary path with the power to inspire and to influence her followers, for good and ill. Chrysalis a story about solitude and selfhood, and about the blurred line between self-care and narcissism. It is about controlling the body and the mind, about the place of the individual within society and what it means when someone chooses to leave society behind. It is a strikingly contemporary story about the search for answers and those we trust to give them to us.

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It was a massive, yet little-known landmark in modern history: in 1923, after a long war over the future of the Ottoman world, nearly 2 million citizens of Turkey or Greece were moved across the Aegean, expelled from their homes because they were of the 'wrong' religion. Orthodox Christians were deported from Turkey to Greece, Muslims from Greece to Turkey. At the time, world statesmen hailed the transfer as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies where a single culture prevailed. But how did the people who crossed the Aegean feel about this exercise in ethnic engineering? Bruce Clark's fascinating account of these turbulent events draws on new archival research in Greece and Turkey and interviews with some of the surviving refugees, allowing them to speak for themselves for the first time.

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'The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man' C. G. Jung Jung was the original anti-psychiatrist, who believed that the real patient was not the suffering individual, but a sick and ailing Western civilization. He was not interested in developing a narrow therapy that would help fit the individual into an untransformed society. His true aim, in all of his work, was a therapy of the West. David Tacey introduces the reader to Jung's unique style and approach, which is at once scientific and prophetic. Through a series of close readings of Jung's works, he explores the radical themes at the core of Jung's psychology, and interprets for us the dynamic vision of the whole self that inspires and motivates his work. Extracts are taken from Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and from his collected works, including Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Civilization in Transition.

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Ziauddin Sardar, one of the foremost Muslim intellectuals in Britain, learned the Koran at his mother's knee in Pakistan. As a young student in London he set out to grasp the meaning of his religion, and, hopefully, to find 'paradise', his quest leading him throughout the Muslim world, from Iran to China to Turkey. Along the way he accepts that he may never reach paradise - but it's the journey that's important. At a time when the view of Islam in the West is so often distorted and simplistic, Desperately Seeking Paradise - self-mocking, frank and passionate - is essential reading.

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Edward Said experienced both British and American imperialism as the old Arab order crumbled in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This account of his early life reveals how it influenced his books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Edward Said was born in Jerusalem and brought up in Cairo, spending every summer in the Lebanese mountain village of Dhour el Shweir, until he was 'banished' to America in 1951. This work is a mixture of emotional archaeology and memory, exploring an essentially irrecoverable past. As ill health sets him thinking about endings, Edward Said returns to his beginnings in this personal memoir of his ferociously demanding 'Victorian' father and his adored, inspiring, yet ambivalent mother.

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Martha Gellhorn was one of the twentieth century's greatest war correspondents. The Face of War is a selection of her reports, on the conflicts in Spain, Finland, China and World War II, with later reports on Vietnam, Israel and Central America.

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On February 21st 2012, five members of an obscure feminist post-punk collective called Pussy Riot staged a performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Dressed in their trademark brightly coloured dresses and balaclavas, the women performed their song 'Punk Prayer - Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!' in front of the altar. The performance lasted only 40 seconds but it resulted in two-year prison sentences for three of the performers - and has turned Pussy Riot into one of the most well-known and important protest movements of the last five years. This necessary and timely book is an account of the Pussy Riot protest, the ensuing global support movement, and the tangled and controversial trial of the band members. It explores the status of dissent in Russia, the roots of the group and their adoption - or appropriation - by wider collectives, feminist groups and music icons. Masha Gessen has unique access to the band and those closest to them. Her unrivalled understanding of the Russian protest movement makes her the ideal writer to document and explain the rage, the beauty and the phenomenon that is Pussy Riot.

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Is being an artist a radical form of entrepreneurship or a vocational calling like the priesthood? Is it an extension of philosophy or an offshoot of entertainment? In three richly interlinked but distinct 'acts' - Politics, Kinship and Craft - Sarah Thornton compares and contrasts answers to the simple but profound question: what is an artist? 33 Artists in 3 Acts draws on hundreds of personal encounters with the world's most important artists, to ask what it means to be making artworks in different parts of the world today. With Thornton as expert guide and trusted insider, we have unprecedented access to the lives of the artists, from late-night Skype chats with Ai Weiwei to taxi rides with Maurizio Cattelan on the way to and from the show that announces his death. We join Thornton as she rummages through artists' studios, homes and solo shows, inquiring about everything from their bank accounts to their bedrooms. The result is a series of cinematic experiences, which juxtapose artists in thought-provoking ways, and build up narratives that end with epiphanies. 33 Artists in 3 Acts is a generational touchstone, a powerful triptych and gripping anti-monograph about truth, integrity, credibility and recognition. Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary art, this masterful act of storytelling will also delight any reader seeking to understand creative lives.

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District Attorney Varga is shot dead while picking a sprig of jasmine. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Is this string of murders an individual vendetta or a more sinister plot? The charming Inspector Rogas is determined to find out. The pursuit of truth and justice are Rogas's vocation, but his work is frustrated by a system which defies his understanding. He needs a key, a way in, a map, and he is sure that his chief suspect Cres can provide it... The book, written in 1971, uncannily prefigures the Red Brigade's subsequent killing of magistrates and the Catholic-Communist pact of the late 1970s in Italy. Developed under Sciascia's hand in the spirit of a parody, Equal Danger has come to be regarded as a wide-ranging political thriller, one of the masterpieces of the genre.

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A classic of Twentieth-Century American literature from one of America's greatest writers. 'Intense, vicious, and beautiful... Denis Johnson is an exquisite writer' Mary Gaitskill Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. It is a record of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young, unnamed man, reeling from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, his mind at once clouded and made brilliantly lucid by drugs. In the course of his adventures he meets others who seem as alienated and confused as he; sinners, misfits, the lost, the damned, the desperate and the forgotten. Out of their bleak, seemingly random lives, Denis Johnson creates modern-day parables of a harsh and devastating beauty. 'Writing of a ferocious intensity... No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked "insensitivity" in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction' New York Times 'The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humour like Denis Johnson's' Jonathan Franzen

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Swansong 1945 chronicles four significant days in the last three weeks of WWII: 20 April, Hitler's last birthday; 25 April, when American and Soviet troops first met at the Elbe; 30 April, the day Hitler committed suicide; and 8 May, the day of the German surrender. Side by side in these pages, we encounter the voices of civilians fleeing on foot to the west, British and American POWs dreaming of home, concentration camp survivors, loyal soldiers from both sides of the conflict and national leaders including Churchill, Hitler and Mussolini. A monumental account of survival, suffering, hope and despair, Swansong 1945 brings vividly to life a conflict whose repercussions are felt today.

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