Search results for ""Granta Books""
Granta Books The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood
'The Tongue Set Free is so beautifully written. It begins wtih an extraordinary image, Canetti's earliest memory. He comes out of a room. A man makes him stick out his tongue; if he talks he will cut it off. Years later Canetti realises that this was his nursemaid's lover, frightening him into silence about their rendezvous. The idea of speaking as the entry into forbidden grown-up life dominates this book. When he is seven his father dies. He is propelled from childhood into adulthood, from his father to his mother, through language. In an extraordinary, cruel episode his mother forces him to learn perfect adult German in three months, to replace her husband as quickly as possible. His tongue is set free: he has won his mother, against brothers , against all lovers. It is the most intense Oedipal relationhsip I have ever seen described and Canetti describes it brilliantly. But it's all extraordinary, and all masterfully written. There are wonderful descriptions of Canetti's first oriental, medieval home in pre-World War l Bulgaria: of his later homes in Manchester, in Vienna, in Switzerland. There are unforgettable portraits. The values of Auto da Fe are given a human history and a human face' New Statesman
£12.35
Granta Books Tintin And The Secret Of Literature
Hergé's Tintin cartoon adventures have been translated into more than fifty languages and read by tens of millions of children aged, as their publishers like to say, 'from 7 to 77'. Arguing that their characters are as strong and their plots as complex as any dreamt up by the great novelists, Tom McCarthy asks a simple question: is Tintin literature? McCarthy takes a cue from Tintin himself, who spends much of his time tracking down illicit radio signals, entering crypts and decoding puzzles and suggests that we too need to 'tune in' and decode if we want to capture what's going on in Hergé's work. What emerges is a remarkable story of hushed-up royal descent in both Herge's work and his own family history. McCarthy shows how the themes this story generates - expulsion from home, violation of the sacred, the host-guest relationship turned sour and anxieties around questions of forgery and fakeness - are the same that have fuelled and troubled writers from the classical era to the present day. His startling conclusion is that Tintin's ultimate 'secret' is that of literature itself. Appearing on the eve of the release of a major Steven Spielberg Tintin film, Tintin and the Secret of Literature should be avidly devoured by not only Tintin lovers but also by anyone with an interest in literature, philosophy or art.
£9.66
Granta Books The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs
Beyond the affluent centre of Paris and other French cities, in the deprived banlieues, a war is going on. This is the French Intifada, a guerrilla war between the French state and the former subjects of its Empire, for whom the mantra of 'liberty, equality, fraternity' conceals a bitter history of domination, oppression, and brutality. This war began in the early 1800s, with Napoleon's lust for martial adventure, strategic power and imperial preeminence, and led to the armed colonization of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and decades of bloody conflict, all in the name of 'civilization'. Here, against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Andrew Hussey walks the front lines of this war - from the Gare du Nord in Paris to the souks of Marrakesh and the mosques of Tangier - to tell the strange and complex story of the relationship between secular, republican France and the Muslim world of North Africa. The result is a completely new portrait of an old nation. Combining a fascinating and compulsively readable mix of history, politics and literature with Hussey's years of personal experience travelling across the Arab World, The French Intifada reveals the role played by the countries of the Maghreb in shaping French history, and explores the challenge being mounted by today's dispossessed heirs to the colonial project: a challenge that is angrily and violently staking a claim on France's future.
£12.35
Granta Books Remind Me Who I Am, Again
At the beginning of the 1990s, Linda Grant's mother, Rose, was diagnosed with Dementia. In Remind Me Who I Am, Again Linda Grant tells the story of Rose's illness and tries to reconstruct the history of their Jewish immigrant family, stalking them from Russia and Poland to New York and London. Writing with humour and great tenderness, Grant explores profound questions about memory, autonomy and identity, and asks if we can ever really know our parents.
£9.66
Granta Books Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill
Diana Athill, born in 1917, made her reputation as a writer with the candour of her memoirs; through her commitment, in her words, 'to understand, to be aware, to touch the truth'. In a celebration of her life and writing, Life Class brings together four of her best-loved memoirs in one volume, spanning her very English childhood, her life and loves during the Second World War, her publishing career at André Deutsch, and her reflections on old age. Introduced by Ian Jack, Diana Athill's selected memoirs are a remarkable testament to an unusual and fully lived life.
£12.35
Granta Books People From My Neighbourhood
'The interlinking short stories in this collection are fairy tales in the best Brothers Grimm tradition: naïf, magical and frequently veering into the macabre' Financial Times From the best-selling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo, here is a collection of darkly playful Japanese micro-fiction. In Kawakami's super short 'palm of the hand' stories the world is never quite as it should be: a small child lives under a sheet near his neighbour's house for thirty years; an apartment block leaves its visitors with strange afflictions, from fast-growing beards to an ability to channel the voices of the dead; an old man has two shadows, one docile, the other rebellious; two girls named Yoko are locked in a bitter rivalry to the death. Small but mighty, you'll find strange delight in spending time with the people in this neighbourhood. 'Offers a delicious combination of intrigue, magic and comedy, like an unusual but satisfying snack. Kawakami continues to show off her prowess as a sharp-witted writer with a keen eye for the unexplored mysteries of humanity' Japan Times
£10.34
Granta Books A Just Defiance: The Bombmakers, the Insurgents and a Legendary Treason Trial
1987, Pretoria. Four young black men have just been arrested for a horrific string of political murders. There's no doubt that they're guilty of everything they're accused of - and more. But in a society riven by brutal repression and racial tensions, are they assassins or freedom fighters? Peter Harris is the lawyer called upon to defend them and, as he constructs his case to save them from the death penalty, he comes to understand the violence they encountered growing up in the townships and the chain of events that led them to join the ANC, undergo training at Zuma's camps in Angola, and return to their homeland to execute some of the apartheid regime's most notorious figures. Harris intercuts the story of their trial with flashbacks to the squad's operations and a deadly counterplot to reveal a campaign carried out with ruthless efficiency.
£10.34
Granta Books The Tea Lords
Born into wealth and privilege, Rudolf Kerkhoven is destined to follow his father's footsteps into the Dutch colonies, with its uncleared jungle foothills and potential for riches. When he arrives in Java he is immediately smitten by the landscape and the life, and over the seasons, Rudolf's dedication and diligence gradually transform the land into a productive estate for tea, coffee and quinine. When he meets the independent-minded Jenny and their two sons are born, Rudolf is happier than he thought possible. But for Jenny, the damp austerity of their home, her fertility, her father's secret, and the native spirits of the land grow to overshadow their marriage and the life they've strived for together. Lusciously atmospheric and masterfully drawn, this is an unforgettable story of aspiration, determination, rivalry and romance on a tropical plantation.
£10.34
Granta Books Mirrors: Stories Of Almost Everyone
In Mirrors, Galeano smashes aside the narrative of conventional history and arranges the shards into a new pattern, to reveal the past in radically altered form. From the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century cityscapes, we glimpse fragments in the lives of those who have been overlooked by traditional histories: the artists, the servants, the gods and the visionaries, the black slaves who built the White House, and the women who were bartered for dynastic ends
£12.35
Granta Books I Was Told There'd Be Cake
From getting locked out of her flat twice on the same day and being fired for baking a giant cookie in the shape of her boss's head, to playing bridesmaid for a friend she'd long forgotten, Sloane Crosley can do no right, despite the best of intentions. With sharp, original and irresistible storytelling that confounds expectations at every turn, Crosley recounts her victories and catastrophes, finding uproarious comedy and genuine insights in the most unpredictable places.
£10.34
Granta Books Julia: The Sunday Times Bestseller
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER "a fascinating reflection on totalitarianism as refracted through Orwell's times and our own" The Guardian London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It's 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother, Julia is a model citizen - cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics. She knows how to survive in a world of constant surveillance, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink, child spies and the black markets of the prole neighbourhoods. She's very good at staying alive. But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department - a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith, she comes to realise that she's losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world. Seventy-five years after Orwell finished writing his iconic novel, Sandra Newman has tackled the world of Big Brother in a truly convincing way, offering a dramatically different, feminist narrative that is true to and stands alongside the original. For the millions of readers who have been brought up with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, here, finally, is a provocative, vital and utterly satisfying companion novel.
£16.40
Granta Books Splinters
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage - an exploration of motherhood, art and new love.
£15.05
Granta Books All Before Me
An intimate, personal exploration of the emotional and restorative power of the Lake District landscape and its poets.
£15.05
Granta Books Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage America
Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. Leaving her home, she took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity? exposing the darker side of American prosperity and the true cost of the American dream.
£11.01
Granta Books The End Of Alice
THE END OF ALICE treads the wafer-thin line between the evil and the everyday, following the correspondence of two paedophiles. One, the narrator, is a child-killer, serving his twenty-third year in prison. The other, his seemingly sweet admirer, is a nineteen-year-old woman, intent on seducing a young neighbourhood boy. Teetering on the knife's edge between the American Dream and the American Nightmare, THE END OF ALICE unpicks the darkness of inconceivable desire, and the destruction and horror left in its wake.
£10.34
Granta Books Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination
'The most exhilarating history of mountaineering ... a riveting read' Jeremy Paxman 'A truly inspiring read' Sir Ranulph Fiennes 'It simply fizzes with insights into the sublime madness of mountaineering' Roger Deakin Once we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride. In this ground-breaking, classic work, Robert Macfarlane takes us up into the mountains: to experience their shattering beauty, the fear and risk of adventure, and to explore the strange impulses that have for centuries lead us to the world's highest places. WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD
£11.01
Granta Books The Mezzanine
The Mezzanine is the story of one man's lunch hour. Pondering life's littlest questions - why does one shoelace always wear out before the other? Whatever happened to the paper drinking straw - our narrator interrogates the inner-workings of corporate living as he traipses his way down escalators to the first floor and through the mundaneness of office life. Mixing humour with the existentialism that surrounds all our working lives, The Mezzanine is a classic work of modern American literature.
£10.34
Granta Books The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Those who feel doomed to be fat would be well advised to digest every word of Taubes's cogently argued, agenda-shifting book. It could be a life-changer for some' Book of the Week, Observer A revelatory expose of the bad science behind conventional weight loss advice, arguing for low-carb high-fat diets, from the bestselling author of The Case Against Sugar. While government and nutritional organisations spout the failed mantra of calorie reduction, doctors treating diabetes and obesity are experiencing extraordinary results among patients cutting out carbs. This diet has the essential benefit of allowing you to lose weight without ever feeling hungry. World authority Gary Taubes analyses the bad science behind our nutritional dogma. He shows that weight gain is driven by genetic, hormonal factors - and not overeating or 'gluttony' as is commonly the underlying suggestion - citing compelling evidence that people with the propensity to fatten easily can be helped best by a low carbohydrate high fat diet. This groundbreaking read offers hope to anyone wishing to prevent or reverse diabetes or obesity - as well as anyone wanting to eat more healthily - and will fundamentally change our habits around food forever. 'Gary Taubes deserves a national science medal for helping to raise the critical question of why the food we eat is killing us ... offers new hope to people suffering from obesity.' Kevin Schulman, M.D., Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
£10.34
Granta Books Orwell's Roses
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 'I loved this book... An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times' Margaret Atwood 'Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening' George Orwell In 1936 Orwell planted roses at his cottage in Hertfordshire. Over eighty years later Rebecca Solnit encounters them, and is inspired to explore a different side to the great writer and activist to the one we know so well. Following his journey from the coal mines of England to taking up arms in the Spanish Civil War, and his explosive critiques of Stalin and authoritarianism, here Solnit finds a more hopeful Orwell. And in her dialogue with the author and his fascination with nature, she makes unexpected connections with the colonial legacy of the flower garden, discovers photographer Tina Modotti's extraordinary roses, and reveals Stalin's strange obsession with growing lemons in impossibly cold conditions. A fresh reading of a towering figure of the twentieth century, Orwell's Roses finds solace and solutions for the political and environmental challenges we face today, and is a remarkable reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance. 'Luminous...It is efflorescent, a study that seeds and blooms, propagates thoughts, and tends to historical associations' New Statesman 'A genuinely extraordinary mind, whose curiosity, intelligence and willingness to learn seem unbounded' Irish Times
£11.01
Granta Books Rules for Visiting
'Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward' May is at a crossroads. Although her career as a gardener for the university is flourishing, the rest of her life has narrowed to a parched routine. Her father is elderly, her brother estranged, and she keeps her neighbours at arm's length. The missing element, she realises, might be friendship. As May sets off on a journey to visit four neglected friends one-by-one, she holds herself (and them) to humorously high standards, while at home she begins to confront the pain of her past and imagine for herself a different kind of future. May's quest becomes an exploration of the power, and perhaps limits, of modern friendship.
£9.66
Granta Books All The Devils Are Here
Twenty years ago, in a series of mysterious, incandescent writings, David Seabrook told of the places he knew best: the declining resort towns of the Kent coast. The pieces were no advert for the local tourist board. Here, the ghosts of murderers and mad artists crawl the streets. Septuagenarian rent boys recall the good old days and Carry On stars go to seed. Clandestine fascist networks emerge. And all the time, there is Seabrook himself - desperate perhaps, and in danger. Dark, strange and immediate, this is a classic work of sui generis British literature. There are devils here, and the reader will remember them.
£11.01
Granta Books Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Teach Us about Ourselves
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLLER In this groundbreaking and entertaining book, primatologist Frans de Waal draws on his renowned studies of the social and emotional lives of chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates, and personal encounters with many other species, to illuminate new ideas and findings about animal emotions. Opening with the moving farewell between Mama, a dying chimpanzee matriarch, and her human friend - the video of which has been watched by millions online - Mama's Last Hug illustrates how profoundly we have underestimated animals' emotional experiences. De Waal's radical proposal is that emotions are like organs: humans haven't a single organ that other animals don't have, and the same can be said of our emotions.
£11.01
Granta Books Certainty
In present-day Vancouver, Gail Lim, a producer of radio documentaries, is haunted by the mysterious events in her father's childhood in war-torn Asia, and using her skills as a journalist is driven to unravel the mystery of his past. As a boy, Matthew Lim hid in the jungle fringe near Leila Road in Japanese-occupied Sandakan, North Borneo, with Ani, a girl whose friendship shapes the rest of his life. Together they barely survive the terrifying events of the war, which shatters their families and ultimately splits them apart - until years later, they meet again, only to endure another separation. At once sweeping and intimate, Certainty crosses continents, cultures and time to explore the legacies of loss, the dislocations of war and the redemptive qualities of love.
£9.66
Granta Books Go, Went, Gone
'Vital... [Erpenbeck] is asking a compelling and timely question' Sally Rooney, Irish Times Richard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas. Recently retired, he steps into the streets of his city, Berlin, and discovers a new community. A tent city has grown up on Oranienplatz, established by African asylum seekers. Hesitantly getting to know the people there, Richard finds his life changing, as he begins to question his own sense of belonging in a city that once divided its citizens into them and us. At once a passionate contribution to the debate on race, and a beautifully written examination of an ageing man's quest for meaning, Go, Went, Gone showcases one of the great contemporary European novelists at the height of her powers. 'Profound, beautiful and deeply affecting... [An] extraordinary novel, bearing unflinching testament to history as it unfolds' Neel Mukherjee, New Statesman 'One of Europe's most highly regarded writers... Erpenbeck's most significant work to date' Financial Times
£10.34
Granta Books Violets
An astonishing debut novel of motherhood and loss in the dying days of the Second World War 'Moving, graceful... Violets has a compelling, quiet power all the way to its exquisitely affecting end' Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy and The End We Start From 'Stunning and original... Written in pristine prose, it reminded me of the possibilities of language' Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory A young woman, Violet, lies in a hospital bed in the closing days of World War Two. Her pregnancy is over and she is no longer able to conceive. With her husband deployed in Burma and her friends caught up in transitory love affairs, she must find a way to put herself back together. In a small, watchful town in the Welsh valleys, another Violet contemplates the fate she shares with her unborn child. Unwed, an overseas posting offers a temporary way out. Plunged into the heat and disorder of Naples, her body begins to reveal the responsibility it carries even as she is drawn into the burnished circle of a charismatic new friend, Maggie. Between these two Violets, sung into being like a babe in a nursery rhyme: a son. As their lives begin to intertwine, a spellbinding story of women's courage emerges, suffused with power, lyricism and beauty, from an exhilarating new voice in British fiction. 'Beautiful, inventive and deeply moving' Liz Berry 'A novel of taut symmetry and dissonance... Alex Hyde's prose is rhythmically acute and emotionally layered. This is a subtle and daring book' Margo Jefferson
£16.09
Granta Books The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination
In an old wooden sloop, Philip Marsden plots a course north from his home in Cornwall. He is sailing for the Summer Isles, a small archipelago near the top of Scotland that holds for him a deep and personal significance. On the way, he must navigate the west coast of Ireland and the Inner Hebrides. Through the people he meets and the tales he uncovers, Marsden builds up a haunting picture of these shores - of imaginary islands and the Celtic otherworld, of the ageless draw of the west, of the life of the sea and perennial loss - and the redemptive power of the imagination. The Summer Isles is an unforgettable account of the search for actual places, invented places, and those places in between that shape the lives of individuals and entire nations.
£10.34
Granta Books Undreamed Shores: Five Women Who Sought Out the World
The inspiring story of five women who set out to explore the furthest reaches of the globe and redefine scholarship At the dawn of the twentieth century, Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco set out to explore the furthest reaches of the globe. Resisting pernicious sexism and misogyny, they were among the first women to study at university and went on to chart now-vanished worlds, seeking new freedoms in in the wastelands of Siberia, the uncharted interior of New Guinea, on Easter Island, and in the villages of the Nile. Yet upon their return to England, they found only loss, madness and regret waiting for them. An extraordinary insight into women's suffrage at the turn of the century and a revelatory study of Britain's colonial legacy, Undreamed Shores is an extraordinary portrait of a pioneering quintet whose struggles helped usher in a brighter dawn.
£10.34
Granta Books Violets
An astonishing debut novel of motherhood and loss in the dying days of the Second World War 'Moving, graceful... Violets has a compelling, quiet power all the way to its exquisitely affecting end' Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy and The End We Start From 'Stunning and original... Written in pristine prose, it reminded me of the possibilities of language' Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory A young woman, Violet, lies in a hospital bed in the closing days of World War Two. Her pregnancy is over and she is no longer able to conceive. With her husband deployed in Burma and her friends caught up in transitory love affairs, she must find a way to put herself back together. In a small, watchful town in the Welsh valleys, another Violet contemplates the fate she shares with her unborn child. Unwed, an overseas posting offers a temporary way out. Plunged into the heat and disorder of Naples, her body begins to reveal the responsibility it carries even as she is drawn into the burnished circle of a charismatic new friend, Maggie. Between these two Violets, sung into being like a babe in a nursery rhyme: a son. As their lives begin to intertwine, a spellbinding story of women's courage emerges, suffused with power, lyricism and beauty, from an exhilarating new voice in British fiction. 'Beautiful, inventive and deeply moving' Liz Berry 'A novel of taut symmetry and dissonance... Alex Hyde's prose is rhythmically acute and emotionally layered. This is a subtle and daring book' Margo Jefferson
£9.66
Granta Books A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder
From an award-winning author comes a tale of a notorious double-murder, for readers of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, or Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary. In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the apartment of Ireland's Attorney General nearly brought down the government. The case remains one of the most shocking in Ireland's history. Mark O'Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent years this haunting has become mutual. When O'Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man living out his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk. As the two men circle one another, O'Connell is pushed into a confrontation with his own narrative: what does it mean to write about a murderer?
£15.05
Granta Books The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe between the Wars
'A hugely significant and wonderfully haunting collection' William Boyd In the 1920s and 1930s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, living in hotels and writing about the towns through which he passed and the people he encountered. Collected in one volume, his experiences in Italy, Germany, Russia, Albania and Ukraine form a series of tender vignettes that capture life in the inter-war years. Evocative, curious and sharply observed, these literary postcards document a continent clinging to tradition while on the brink of further upheaval.
£10.34
Granta Books Though the Bodies Fall
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. Micheál Burns lives alone in his family's bungalow at the end of Kerry Head in Ireland. It is a picturesque place, but the cliffs have a darker side to them: for generations they have been a suicide black spot. Micheál's mother saw the saving of these lost souls - these visitors - as her spiritual duty, and now, in the wreckage of his life, Micheál finds himself continuing her work. When his sisters tell him that they want to sell the land, he must choose between his siblings and the visitors, a future or a past.
£12.35
Granta Books (Uk) Sex
£17.64
Rowman & Littlefield Falling Sky: The Science And History Of Meteorites And Why We Should Learn To Love Them
Did an enormous collision in the Asteroid Belt, orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, bombard Earth with meteorites 470 million years ago? Astonishing new research suggests it did, and a revolutionary theory is emerging that this bombardment resulted in the single greatest increase in biological diversity on the planet since the origin of life. Introducing these discoveries to the general public for the first time, Ted Nield challenges the view that meteorites are bad news. Tracing the history of meteorites from the first recorded strike to the videos made routinely today, he reveals the fascinating ways in which meteorites have transformed from omens of doom to a stepping stone to Mars in twenty-first-century space exploration. The Falling Sky will shatter everything you thought you knew about one of the most terrifying forces in the universe.
£22.08
Granta Books The Wizard Of The Nile: The Hunt For Joseph Kony
Somewhere in the jungles of Uganda, there hides a fugitive rebel leader: he is said to take his orders directly from the spirit world and, together with his ragged army of brutalized child soldiers, he has left a bloody trail of devastation across his country. Joseph Kony is now an internationally wanted criminal, and yet nobody really knows who he is or what he is fighting for. Intrigued by the myths, Matthew Green heads off into a war zone, meeting the victims, the peacemakers and the regional powerbrokers as he tracks down the man himself. The Wizard of the Nile is the first book to peel back the layers of mysticism and murky politics surrounding Kony, to shine a searching light onto this forgotten conflict, and to tell the gripping human story behind an inhumane war and a humanitarian crisis.
£10.03
Granta Books The Wandering Jews
This is the first English translation of Joseph Roth's portrayal of the Jews of Eastern Europe: their poverty, their towns and trades, their feast days and the mysticism of their rabbis. Roth was conscious that this was a community living under the threat of extermination.
£12.16
Granta Books Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War
The tropical island of Sri Lanka is a paradise for tourists, but in 2009 it became a hell for its Tamil minority, as decades of civil war between the Tamil Tiger guerrillas and the government reached its bloody climax. Caught in the crossfire were hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, doctors, farmers, fishermen, nuns and other civilians. And the government ensured through a strict media blackout that the world was unaware of their suffering. Now, a UN enquiry has called for war-crimes investigations. Those crimes are recounted here to the wider world for the first time in sobering, shattering detail.
£14.31
Granta Books The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World
By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig, born to an affluent Jewish family in Vienna, had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies became instant bestsellers, and his cultural patronage, his generosity, and his literary connections, were legendary. In 1934, following Hitler's rise to power, Zweig left Vienna for England, then New York, and, finally, Petrópolis, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. With the destruction of the cultural milieu of pre-Nazi Europe, Zweig's life in exile became increasingly isolated. In 1942 he and his wife, Lotte Altmann, were found dead. They had committed suicide, just after Zweig had completed his famous autobiography, The World of Yesterday. The Impossible Exile tells the mesmerizing and tragic story of Zweig's extraordinary rise and fall, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the alienation of the refugees forced into exile. Zweig embodied and witnessed the end of an era: the great Central European civilization of Vienna and Berlin.
£10.74
Granta Books It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations Of Modern Science
The exact sciences have an immense weight and influence in our culture. At the heart of their effectiveness lies the mathematical equation. The difficult form of the great equations - particularly those of modern physics - has often acted as an obstacle to any understanding and they have come to embody the mystery and terror of modern science. This volume brings together well-known scientists, historians and writers about science as each seeks to unpack an equation and explain how it was arrived at, what it can do and what remains to be understood about it. The contributors include Roger Penrose, John Maynard Smith, Arthur Miller, Steven Weinberg and Oliver Morton.
£10.74
Granta Books Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City
A fast-paced journey around Karachi in the company of those who know the city inside out - from an electrifying new voice in narrative non-fiction. Karachi. Pakistan's largest city is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force, a place in which it pays to have friends in the right places and to avoid making deadly enemies. It is a society where lavish wealth and absolute poverty live side by side, and where the lines between idealism and corruption can quickly blur. It takes an insider to know where is safe, who to trust, and what makes Karachi tick, and in this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother's birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites. Among them is Safdar the ambulance driver, who knows the city's streets and shortcuts intimately and will stop at nothing to help his fellow citizens. There is Parveen, the activist whose outspoken views on injustice corruption repeatedly lead her towards danger. And there is Zille, the hardened journalist whose commitment to getting the best scoops puts him at increasing risk. As their individual experiences unfold, so Shackle tells the bigger story of Karachi over the past decade: a period in which the Taliban arrive in Pakistan, adding to the daily perils for its residents and pushing their city into the international spotlight. Writing with intimate local knowledge and a global perspective, Shackle paints a nuanced and vivid portrait of one of the most complex, most compelling cities in the world.
£14.31
Granta Books Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
What lies behind the human attraction to violence? Why do we glorify war, seeing it as an almost sacred undertaking? Barbara Ehrenreich is known for the originality and clarity of her thinking, and in Blood Rites she proposes a radical new theory about our attitudes to bloodshed. From the trenches of Verdun to today's front lines, Ehrenreich traces the history of warfare back to our prehistoric ancestors' terrifying experiences of being hunted by other carnivores. Written with wit, tenacity and intellectual flair, this is vintage Ehrenreich, and an account that will transform our understanding of human conflict.
£10.74
Granta Books How To Read Lacan
'The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire' Jacques Lacan. Is psychoanalysis dead or are we to read frequent attacks on its theoretical 'mistakes' and clinical 'frauds' as a proof of its vitality? Slavoj Zizek's passionate defence of Lacan reasserts the ethical urgency of psychoanalysis. Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented access to 'normal' sexual enjoyment. Today, however, we are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction 'Enjoy!' Lacan reminds us that psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy. Since for Lacan psychoanalysis itself is a procedure of reading, each chapter uses a passage from Lacan as a tool to interpret another text from philosophy, art or popular ideology, applying his ideas to Hegel and Hitchcock, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.
£11.45
Granta Books Killing Dragons: The Conquest Of The Alps
Full of eccentric characters, Killing Dragons is the story of the first British mountaineers to tackle the Alpine summits of Switzerland during the late eighteenth century. Originally the explorers of this area were poorly equipped, wearing ordinary shoes and no protective clothing. The British arrived intent on reaching every Alpine summit, and 'mountaineering' was born. The title refers to the mythical creatures said to inhabit these peaks: 'Here be dragons,' said the old maps ...
£12.88
Granta Books Sicilian Uncles
The expression 'Sicilian uncle' has the same sense in Italian as 'Dutch uncle' does in English, but with sinister overtones of betrayal and inconstancy. The four novellas in Sicilian Uncles, originally published in 1958, are political thrillers of a kind - the first fruits of Sciascia's maturity. In these stories, illusions about ideology and history are lost in mirth, suffering and abandoned innocence. Each novella has its historical moment: the Allied invasion of Sicily, the Spanish Civil War, the death of Stalin, the 'events' of 1848. These occasions and their consequences are registered in the lives of Sciascia's wonderfully drawn characters. Each has voice, wit and a private history which opens out onto the wider circumstances of his time.
£10.03
Granta Books No Art: Poems
This book brings together for the first time Ben Lerner's three acclaimed volumes of poetry, along with a handful of newer poems, to present a decade-long exploration of the relationship between form and meaning, between private experience and public expression. No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.
£18.01
Granta Books The Black Lake
Amid the lush abundance of Java's landscape, two boys spend their days exploring the vast lakes and teeming forests. But as time passes the boys come to realize that their shared sense of adventure cannot bridge the gulf between their backgrounds, for one is the son of a Dutch plantation owner, and the other the son of a servant. Inevitably, as they grow up, they grow estranged and it is not until years later that they meet again. It will be an explosive and emblematic meeting that marks them even more deeply than their childhood friendship did.
£10.74
Granta Books The End of Nightwork
"Rapturous, disruptive and quietly, complexly devastating" Eley Williams "This is a time-tumbling, unexpected and arresting novel of apocalypse, upheaval and familial love" Seán Hewitt Pol suffers from a very rare hormonal disorder that ages him erratically: when he was thirteen, his body aged ten years overnight, and now in his early thirties, he still has the outward appearance of a twenty-three-year-old. But with his condition dormant, Pol and his wife Caroline manage to live an ordinary life in London. They're happy enough, even if having a young child has put something of a strain on their marriage. That and Pol's obsessive interest in the writings of an obscure seventeenth-century Puritan prophet, Bartholomew Playfere, and his premonitions of ecological disaster and the end of the world. But while Pol is failing to complete his research on Playfere, he encounters a radical new movement that argues that all economic and political events are part of an aeon-long struggle between the old and the young - that the 'hoarist' habit of violence, their need to conquer, has also affected how they treat the planet. The leader of this popular movement predicts an imminent inter-generational conflict - father against son, mother against daughter - that echoes Playfere's own prophecies. Against this increasingly fraught backdrop, Pol's dormant condition threatens to resurface - putting both the safety and happiness of his family at risk.
£16.09
Granta Books Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
A provocative history of race, empire and myth, told through the stories of men who have been worshipped as gods - from Columbus to Prince Philip Spanning the globe and five centuries, Accidental Gods introduces us to a new pantheon: of man-gods, deified politicians and imperialists, militants, mystics and explorers. From the conquistadors setting foot in the New World to Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, elevated by a National Geographic article from emperor to messiah for the Rastafari faith, to the unlikely officers hailed as gods during the British Raj, this endlessly curious and revelatory account chronicles an impulse towards deification that persists even in a secular age, as show of defiance or assertion of power. In her bravura final part, Subin traces the colonial desire for divinity through to the creation of 'race' and the white power movement today, and argues that it is time we rid ourselves of the white gods among us.
£17.89
Princeton University Press The Planet Remade How Geoengineering Could Change the World
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2015.
£19.59
