SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEY''S WOMEN''S PRIZE FOR FICTION
''A delicious, important novel'' The Times
''Alert, alive and gripping'' Independent
''Some novels tell a great story and others make you change the way you look at the world. Americanah does both.'' Guardian
As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. Ifemelu-beautiful, self-assured-departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze-the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor-had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.
Thirteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion-for their homeland and for each other-they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.
Fearless, gripping, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story of love and expectation set in today''s globalized world.
We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.
This is the story of the Berglunds, their son Joey, their daughter Jessica and their friend Richard Katz. It is about how we use and abuse our freedom; about the beginning and ending of love; teenage lust; the unexpectedness of adult life; why we compete with our friends; how we betray those closest to us; and why things almost never work out as they `should''. It is a story about the human heart, and what it leads us to do to ourselves and each other.
Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, the surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer's blockbuster Southern Reach Trilogy.
When the Southern Reach Trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestsellers list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.
And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast-before Area X was called Area X-had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?
Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.
'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974.'
Etouffée par la boue : voilà comment aurait du finir la petite « Mudgirl », si un couple de Quakers ne l'avait pas sauvée in extremis des griffes de sa mère démente. Pendant des années, ses parents adoptifs la protègeront des conséquences de son ignoble passé. Adulte, devenue présidente d'une université de renom, elle doit retourner sur les lieux de son enfance. Confrontée à ses origines et à des angoisses professionnelles qui la rongent de manière imprévisible, elle sombre peu à peu dans la folie.
Blue Sisters tells the story of three exceptional - and exceptionally different - sisters as they return to their family home in New York from their respective lives in Paris, London and LA in the wake of the death of their beloved fourth sister. As they are reunited whilst attempting to cope with this terrible loss, they must navigate addiction, grief and ambition and learn what it takes to fall in love with life again.
The definitive cult, post-modern novel - a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism. When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man''s wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash - a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity. First published in 1973 ''Crash'' remains one of the most shocking novels of the second half of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenburg.
A wildly funny, hallucinogenic and stylish novel following a young woman on a quest for friendship, love and selfhood in San Francisco''s seedy underground
A blazing novel following a young woman on a hallucinogenic quest for love and selfhood in San Francisco''s seedy underground.
Baby is a dancer at a strip club and other than that she''s feeling a little lost. It seems that only Dino, her sweet, cross-dressing, drug-dealing ex-boyfriend can keep her afloat. So, when Dino disappears without so much as a kiss goodbye, she plunges headfirst into San Francisco''s shady erotic underground to find him.
Baby searches through dive bars and old haunts, at the club and at the sex dungeon where she has a part-time dominatrix gig. She encounters clients like Simon, a recluse paying her for increasingly bizarre ''favours'' and a philosophizing suicide fetishist named ''Nobody'', as well as coworkers like Emeline, the balletic new hire who seems to want to steal Baby''s whole identity, starting with her underwear.
But soon Baby starts to find cryptic notes hidden in her bag and slipped into her locker at the club. The clock is ticking: will Baby manage to put together the pieces and find the only man she''s ever loved? Or might her past catch up with her first?
Manically smart, brutally funny and deeply sexy, Soft Core is a book about desire, fantasy, and true love - like no other.
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer''s moving and addictive masterpiece of European identity, nostalgia and the end of an era.
''A masterpiece: grandiose style, brilliant and rich. It will defy the ages'' Trouw (The Netherlands) ''The love of my life lives in my past. That is, despite the alliteration, a terrible sentence to write. I do not want to come to the conclusion that, as it is the case for the hotel where I am staying and the continent after which it is named, the best time is behind me and that I have little more to expect from the future than to live on my past.'' A writer takes residence in the illustrious but decaying Grand Hotel Europa, to think about where things went wrong with Clio, with whom he fell in love in Genoa and moved to Venice. He reconstructs a compelling story of love in times of mass tourism, about their trips to Malta, Palmaria, Portovenere and the Cinque Terre and their thrilling search for the last painting of Caravaggio. Meanwhile, he becomes fascinated by the mysteries of Grand Hotel Europe and gets more and more involved with the memorable characters who inhabit it, and who seem to come from a more elegant time. All the while, globalisation seems to be grabbing hold even on this place frozen in time.
Grand Hotel Europa is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer''s masterly novel on the old continent, where so much history resides that there is no place left for a future and where the most realistic future perspectives are offered in the form of exploiting the past in the shape of tourism.
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE A GUARDIAN NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 From the award-winning author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and Even the Dogs. Reservoir 13 tells the story of many lives haunted by one family''s loss. Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must. As the seasons unfold there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together or break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. Bats hang in the eaves of the church and herons stand sentry in the river; fieldfares flock in the hawthorn trees and badgers and foxes prowl deep in the woods - mating and fighting, hunting and dying. An extraordinary novel of cumulative power and grace, Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a stranger''s tragedy refuse to subside.
A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR The dark, dangerous, funny and uplifting new novel from the author of Annihilation, the inspiration for the major motion picture directed by Alex Garland. ''Am I a person?'' Borne asks Rachel, in extremis. ''Yes, you are a person,'' Rachel tells him. ''But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.'' A ruined city of the future lives in fear of a despotic, gigantic flying bear, driven mad by the tortures inflicted on him by the Company, a mysterious biotech firm. A scavenger, Rachel, finds a creature entangled in his fur. She names it Borne. At first, Borne looks like nothing at all- a green lump that might be a discard from the Company. But he reminds Rachel of her homeland, an island nation long lost to rising seas, and she prevents her lover, Wick, from rendering down Borne as raw genetic material for the special kind of drugs he sells. But nothing is quite the way it seems: not the past, not the present, not the future. If Wick is hiding secrets, so is Rachel-and Borne most of all. What Rachel finds hidden deep within the Company will change everything and everyone. There, lost and forgotten things have lingered and grown. What they have grown into is mighty indeed.
''I COULDN''T PUT IT DOWN'' SHON FAYE
''A MASTERPIECE. THIS SEARING TALE OF LOVE, SEX AND CLASS WILL RESONATE FOR GENERATIONS TO COME'' OWEN JONES
''Electric and intimate'' Guardian
''Impossibly, ineffably beautiful'' Russell T Davies
''Intoxicating'' Irish Times
This city stops for no-one. Not the half-naked boozers, stoners, and cruisers, the hen parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried fags. It''s June 2019 in London and everyone has converged on the parks, beer gardens and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive.
Everyone but Maggie. She''s 30, pregnant and broke. Faced with moving back to the town she fought to escape, she''s wondering if having a baby with boyfriend Ed will be the last spontaneous act of her life. Ed, meanwhile, is trying to run from his past with Maggie''s best friend Phil and harbouring secret dreams of his own.
Phil hates his office job and is living for the weekend, while falling for his housemate, Keith. But there''s a problem: Keith has a boyfriend and there might not be room for three people in the relationship. Then there''s Rosaleen, Phil''s mother, who''s tired of feeling like a side character in her own life. She''s just been diagnosed with cancer and is travelling to London to tell Phil, if she can ever get hold of him.
As Saturday night approaches, all their lives are set to change forever. It''s the hottest summer on record and the weekend is about to begin...
What readers are saying...
''I''ve had a week long book hangover. Read it!''
''A book I will carry with me in my heart''
''The best book I''ve read in recent years''
''My life got just a bit richer from having read this book''
''I absolutely loved it, every word''
A haunting tale of an Africa and an adolescence undergoing tremendous changes from the talented bestseller and award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Fifteen-year-old Kambili''s world is circumscribed by the high walls of her family compound and the frangipani trees she can see from her bedroom window. Her wealthy Catholic father, although generous and well-respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Her life is lived under his shadow and regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer. She lives in fear of his violence and the words in her textbooks begin to turn to blood in front of her eyes. When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili''s father, involved in mysterious ways with the unfolding political crisis, sends Kambili and her brother away to their aunt''s. The house is noisy and full of laughter. Here she discovers love and a life -dangerous and heathen -beyond the confines of her father''s authority. The visit will lift the silence from her world and, in time, reveal a terrible, bruising secret at the heart of her family life.
This first novel is about the promise of freedom; about the blurred lines between the old gods and the new; between childhood and adulthood; between love and hatred. An extraordinary debut, ''Purple Hibiscus'' is a compelling novel which captures both a country and an adolescence at a time of tremendous change.
Competition: Americanah;Purple Hibiscus;Half Of A Yellow Sun;We Should All be Feminists;Things Fall Apart;Girl, Woman, Other;The Girl With the Louding Voice;A Spell of Good Things; An American Marriage; Intermezzo;Black Cake;The Vanishing Half. Chinua Achebe;Bernadine Evaristo;Ayobami Adebayo;Abi Dare;Tayari Jones
In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters - beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys - commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year.
As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family''s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death.
Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humour and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. ''The Virgin Suicides'' was adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola.
A young girl's disappearance rocks a community and a family, in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice and the atrocities of war, from literary legend Joyce Carol Oates.
Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and Pen Faulkner prize. Made into an Oscar-winning film, 'The Hours' is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf.
Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, taken from her beloved Bloomsbury and watched by her husband Leonard, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel.
In the brooding heat of 1940s Los Angeles, a young wife and mother yearns to escape the claustrophobia of suburban domesticity and read her precious copy of 'Mrs Dalloway'.
And in New York in the 1990s, Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment and goes shopping for flowers for the party she is giving in honour of her life-long friend Richard, an award-winning poet whose mind and body are being ravaged by AIDS.
Michael Cunningham's exquisite and deeply moving novel is a meditation on artistic behaviour, failure, love and madness. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, Cunningham's elegant, haunting prose explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure''s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.
In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.
Doerr''s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.
Now a major TV series
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
The first book in Hilary Mantel's award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, with a new cover design to celebrate the publication of the much anticipated The Mirror and the Light
From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel.
'Every bit as good as they said it was' Observer
'Terrific' Margaret Atwood
'As soon as I opened this book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop' The Times
In Wolf Hall, one of our very best writers brings the opulent, brutal world of the Tudors to bloody, glittering life. It is the backdrop to the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell: lowborn boy, charmer, bully, master of deadly intrigue, and , finally, most powerful of Henry VIII's coutiers.
'Dizzyingly, dazzlingly good' Daily Mail
'Terrifying. It is a world of marvels. But it is also a world of horrors, where screams are commonplace. A feast' Daily Telegraph
The new novel from the Women''s Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Power, The Future is a white-knuckle tour de force and dazzling exploration of the world we have made and where we are going.
The Future - as the richest people on the planet have discovered - is where the money is.
The Future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers.
The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons.
The Future is a handful of friends-the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet-famous survivalist-hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization.
The Future is what you see if you don''t look behind you.
The Future is the only reason to do anything, the only object of desire.
The Future is here.
Joan Didion's hugely influential collection of essays which defines, for many, the America which rose from the ashes of the Sixties.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.
In this now legendary journey into the hinterland of the American psyche, Didion searches for stories as the Sixties implode. She waits for Jim Morrison to show up, visits the Black Panthers in prison, parties with Janis Joplin and buys dresses with Charles Manson's girls. She and her reader emerge, cauterized, from this devastating tour of that age of self discovery into the harsh light of the morning after.
Twelve early pieces never before collected that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of Joan Didion.
Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon, and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas, and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart.
Here are subjects Didion has long written about - the press, politics, California robber baronsac, women, the act of writing, and her own self-doubt. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive and, in new light, stunningly prescient.
A previously unpublished work from one of America''s most iconic writers, Joan Didion.
In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had ''a rough few years.'' She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.
For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood-misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe-and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, ''what it''s been worth.'' The analysis would continue for more than a decade.
Didion''s journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedently intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers-questioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.
