LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 On March 3rd, 1947, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson's life will take four simultaneous paths. Four Fergusons will go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Loves and friendships and passions contrast. Each version of Ferguson's story rushes across the fractured terrain of mid-twentieth century America, in this sweeping story of birthright and possibility, of love and the fullness of life itself.
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will. 'Plain' orphan Jane Eyre is not expected to amount to much. A pleasant existence as a governess is all she is supposed to hope for - but Jane desperately wants more. And an appointment at the gothic mansion of Thornfield offers her more than she could ever dream of - including a chance at real love. But when tragedy strikes, she will have to use all her bravery, spirit and resolve to overcome her supposed fate, and forge her own destiny. This classic novel challenges conventions of desire, family, class and just how much of our identity we are willing to give up for those we love.
Molloy is Samuel Beckett's best-known novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s which included the companion novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable . The narrative of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a parallel tale of the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent in search of him, whose own deterioration during the quest joins in with the catalogue of Molloy's woes. Molloy brings a world into existence with finicking certainties, at the tip of whoever is holding the pencil, and trades larger uncertainties with the reader. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining. Edited by Shane Weller
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. It''s just an ordinary farm - until the animals revolt. They get rid of the irresponsible farmer. Two young pigs assume command. The other animals are sure that life is improving, but as systems are replaced and half-truths are retold, a new hierarchy emerges . . . Orwell''s tale of propaganda, power and greed has never felt more pertinent. With an exciting new cover and inside illustrations by superstar Chris Mould.
Secs, sans cavalier, les mots Et leur galop infatigable Quand Depuis le fond de l'étang, les étoiles Régissent une vie.
« Ariel, génie de l'air de La Tempête, de Shakespeare, est aussi le nom du cheval blanc que montait à l'aube dans le Devon, en Angleterre, l'un des plus extraordinaires poètes du XXe siècle, Sylvia Plath, aux derniers mois de sa courte vie.
Ariel, borne décisive marquant un "avant" et un "après", parole intense jusqu'à la rage parfois, question de vie ou de mort.
Ariel, jusqu'au bout, l'extrémité du dernier souffle. » Valérie Rouzeau.
A contemporary novel which tells the story of Marco Stanley Fogg - orphan, child of the 1960s - spanning three generations. The narrative moves from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, from Manhattan to the landscape of the American West.
Lies, rumours and guilt snowball, causing the parents, Joanna and Alistair, to slowly turn against each other. Finally Joanna starts thinking the unthinkable: could the truth be even more terrible than she suspected? And what will it take to make things right?
The explosion at the start of this book ends the life of its hero, Benjamin Sachs, and brings two FBI agents to the home of one of Sachs's oldest friends, the writer Peter Aaron. What follows is Aaron's story, an investigation of another man's life. By the author of "Moon Palace".
The story of Walt, an irrepressible orphan from the Mid-West. Under the tutelage of the mesmerising Master Yehudi, Walt is taken back to the mysterious house on the plains to prepare not only for the ability to fly, but also for the stardom that will accompany it.
Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film. When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller lists, then remained there for over a year and sold millions of copies. Banana Yoshimoto was hailed as a young writer of great talent and great passion whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of modern literature, and has been described as 'the voice of young Japan' by the Independent on Sunday .
Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible opens in New York City in the spring of 1967 when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story, as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island in a story of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, authorship and identity to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers.
From award-winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time. Felix Love has never been in love - and, yes, he''s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it''s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What''s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he''s one marginalisation too many - Black, queer and transgender - to ever get his own happily-ever-after. When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages - after publicly posting Felix''s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned - Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn''t count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi-love triangle . . . But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself. Felix Ever After is an honest and layered story about identity, falling in love, and recognising the love you deserve. ''Definitely not a book to be missed.'' Buzzfeed ''This book is a gift, from start to finish.'' Becky Albertalli, bestselling author of Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda ''An intricate love story for the ages.'' CNN Underscored ''A firecracker of a book . Teens need this one.'' Casey McQuiston, bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue ''Bold, empathetic coming-of-age story.'' The Bookseller ''Perfectly balances hardship, hope and happiness.'' Nic Stone, bestselling author of Dear Martin ''An essential purchase.'' SLJ (starred review) ''B oldly empathic, hopeful, and full of love.'' Publisher''s Weekly ''Beautiful.'' justin a. reynolds, author of Opposite of Always ''An unforgettable story.'' ALA Booklist (starred review) ''S mart and engaging.'' Horn Book Magazine
Taking a big-picture view of the post-punk period, this book recreates a time of tremendous urgency and idealism in pop music. It presents many anecdotes and insights, and features the likes of Joy Division, The Fall, Pere Ubu, PiL and Talking Heads. It is of interest to fans of post-punk music.
Karim lives with his Mum and Dad in a suburb of south London and dreams of making his escape to the bright lights of the big city. But his father is no ordinary Dad, he is 'the buddha of suburbia', a strange and compelling figure whose powers of meditation hold a circle of would-be mystics spellbound with the fascinations of the East.
Paul Auster's Sunset Park is set in the sprawling flatlands of Florida, where twenty-eight-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York seven years ago. What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father - a confrontation he has been avoiding for years. Set against the backdrop of the devastating global recession, and pulsing with the energy of Auster's previous novel Invisible , Sunset Park is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness - not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.
''Exquisite.'' Damon Galgut ''Masterly.'' The Times ''Miraculous.'' Herald ''Astonishing.'' Colm Toibin ''Stunning.'' Sunday Independent ''Absolutely beautiful.'' Douglas Stuart A Book of the Year in The Times and The New Statesman It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church. ''A genuine once-in-a-generation writer.'' The Times ''[A] snowglobe of a story that fits a whole bustling, striving, yearning world into 114 finely wrought pages.'' Sunday Times ''Powerful and affecting and very timely . . . deeply moving.'' Hilary Mantel ''Stunning . . . A haunting, hopeful masterpiece.'' Sinead Gleeson ''Remarkable . . . Truly exquisite.'' Daily Telegraph ''A restrained and intensely moral book, full of hope and love.'' Observer ''Marvellous - exact and icy and loving all at once.'' Sarah Moss
Edited by J. C. C. Mays Murphy , Samuel Beckett's first novel, was published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London, realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from life, in search of stupor. Murphy's lovestruck fiancee Celia tries with tragic pathos to draw him back, but her attempts are doomed to failure. Murphy's friends and familiars are simulacra of Murphy, fragmented and incomplete. But Beckett's achievement lies in the brilliantly original language used to communicate this vision of isolation and misunderstanding. The combination of particularity and absurdity gives Murphy's world its painful definition, but the sheer comic energy of Beckett's prose releases characters and readers alike into exuberance.
Ageless, sexless, deathless and timeless, Pilgrim has inhabited endless lives and times. On April 15, 1912, he fails to commit suicide, his heart starting again five hours after he is found hanging from a tree. Admitted to a clinic in Zurich, he begins a battle of wills with Carl Jung.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 ''A classic, but with contemporary urgency thumping through it.'' Claire-Louise Bennett , author of Pond From the acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships. A woman invites a famed artist to the remote coastal landscape where she lives. Drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision may penetrate the mystery at the centre of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence soon twists the patterns of her secluded household. ''The most singular book . . . A psychodrama that is both timeless and up-to-the minute . . . Truly one of a kind.'' Justine Jordan, Guardian ''A novel of deep insight and scarring honesty.'' Martin Chilton, Independent ''Re-sets the dial yet again.'' Claire Harman, Evening Standard ''Extraordinary . . . fearless.'' Alex Clark, The Spectator ''Glittering brilliance.'' Jon Day, Financial Times
'A clear frontrunner to be the year's most extraordinary novel . . . Not since The Remains of the Day has Ishiguro written about wasted lives with such finely gauged forlornness.' Sunday Times In one of the most acclaimed and original novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.
'An oblique and elegiac meditation on mortality and lost innocence ... What Ishiguro has done so artfully in these pages is not only assemble a chilling jigsaw puzzle, but also create a distinct fictional world.' New York Times 'A page-turner and a heartbreaker, a tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish.' Tim
*WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2020* *LONGLISTED FOR THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE* AS SEEN ON BBC''S BETWEEN THE COVERS ONE OF STYLIST ''S BEST NEW BOOKS FOR 2020 '' A beautiful book. I adored it.'' RICHARD OSMAN ''Full of wit and soul.'' TRACY CHEVALIER ''Unforgettable'' MARLON JAMES ''It made me ugly cry'' JESSIE BURTON ''Glorious'' RACHEL JOYCE ''Spellbinding'' ANDRe ACIMAN Meet the Ramdin-Chetan family: forged through loneliness, broken by secrets, saved by love. Irrepressible Betty Ramdin, her shy son Solo and their marvellous lodger, Mr Chetan, form an unconventional household. Happy in their differences, they build a home together. Home: the place keeping these three safe from an increasingly dangerous world - until the night when a glass of rum, a heart to heart and a terrible truth explodes the family unit, driving them apart. Brave and brilliant, steeped in affection, Love After Love offers hope to anyone who has loved and lost and has yet to find their way back.
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .
A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.
In the wake of her family's collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions - personal, moral, artistic, and practical - as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life. Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed novel Outline , and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility and the mystery of change. '[ Transit ] confirms that one of the most fascinating projects in contemporary fiction is unfolding in Rachel Cusk's trilogy.' Adam Foulds
The year is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the nursery, Elizabeth's beloved sister Jane and her husband Bingley live nearby and the orderly world of Pemberley seems unassailable.
