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.
''A page-turner ... nothing less than magical'' Observer ''An extraordinary slice of suburban noir'' Daily Mail From one of America''s most renowned storytellers comes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a background of child abductions in the affluent suburbs of Detroit.
In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together, with tragic consequences. There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit. As Babysitter continues his rampage of killings, these individuals intersect with one another in startling and unexpected ways.
Suspenseful, brilliantly orchestrated and engrossing, Babysitter is a starkly narrated exploration of the riskiness of pursuing alternate lives, calling into question how far we are willing to go to protect those whom we cherish most. In its scathing indictment of corrupt politics, unexamined racism, and the enabling of sexual predation in America, Babysitter is a thrilling work of contemporary fiction.
''Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going, as far as I''m concerned'' Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl ''Joyce Carol Oates is a writer who always takes your breath away'' Mail on Sunday ''A writer of extraordinary strengths'' Guardian
SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM, STARRING ANA DE ARMAS, ADRIEN BRODY, BOBBY CANNAVALE AND JULIANNE NICHOLSON, DIRECTED BY ANDREW DOMINIK ''A torrentially imaginative, compulsively readable tour de force'' Sunday Telegraph ''A fabulous reinvention of the life of a fabulous reinvention, and a cracking page-turner to boot'' Evening Standard Blonde is a mesmerising novel about the most enduring and evocative cultural icon of the 20th century: the woman who became Marilyn Monroe. A fragile and gifted young woman, Norma Jeane Baker makes and remakes her identity: she is the orphan whose mother is declared mad; the woman who changes her name to be an actress; the fated celebrity, lover and muse. Told in her voice, Blonde shows a culture hypnotised by its own myths, and the devastating effects it had on Hollywood''s greatest star.
''This masterpiece about Marilyn Monroe''s life is audacious, gripping and clever'' Rose Tremain ''If you haven''t read Joyce Carol Oates before, start here, and now'' Independent
Set in a historical moment of moral crisis, Crossroads is the stunning foundation of a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigate the political and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years ''His best novel yet ... A Middlemarch -like triumph'' Telegraph ''Crossroads is the spiritual successor to The Corrections . . .It is a testament to Franzen''s authorial habits of empathy, his curiosity about the lives of others, his efforts in a land of cliche to add twists to easy assumptions, that you are likely to find yourself caring about how things turn out for each of the Hildebrandts equally '' Observer It''s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless - unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem''s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who''s been selling drugs to seventh-graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.
Jonathan Franzen''s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and their keen-eyed take on the complexities of contemporary America. Now, for the first time, in Crossroads , Franzen explores the history of a generation. With characteristic humour and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that feels no less immediate.
A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a historical moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen''s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.
''A mellow, marzipan-hued ''70s-era heartbreaker . Crossroads is warmer than anything [Franzen has] yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect'' New York Times
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.
'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.
For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends , an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple''s impulsive marriage.
''A tender, devastatingand funny exploration of love and friendship and the yearning for self-evisceration. Coco Mellors is an elegant and exciting new voice'' PANDORA SYKES, author of How Do We Know We''re Doing It Right New York is slipping from Cleo''s grasp. Sure, she''s at a different party every other night, but she barely knows anyone. Her student visa is running out, and she doesn''t even have money for cigarettes. But then she meets Frank. Twenty years older, Frank''s life is full of all the success and excess that Cleo''s lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a green card. She offers him a life imbued with beauty and art-and, hopefully, a reason to cut back on his drinking. He is everything she needs right now. Cleo and Frank run head-first into a romance that neither of them can quite keep up with. It reshapes their lives and the lives of those around them, whether that''s Cleo''s best friend struggling to embrace his gender identity in the wake of her marriage, or Frank''s financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates after being cut off. Ultimately, this chance meeting between two strangers outside of a New Year''s Eve party changes everything, for better or worse. Cleopatra and Frankenstein is an astounding and painfully relatable debut novel about the spontaneous decisions that shape our entire lives and those imperfect relationships born of unexpectedly perfect evenings.
Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of America''s most respected literary figures. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including 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.
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.
''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...
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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.
A publishing event ten years in the making-a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists-the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until - betrayed and brokenhearted - she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka''s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka''s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America - but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.
In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie''s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.
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.
Pre-order the spectacular and heartbreaking new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See .
Cloud Cuckoo Land follows three storylines: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of theformidablecity wallduring the 1453 siege of Constantinople;teenage idealist Seymour andgentleoctogenarian Zeno, in anattack on a public library in present day Idaho;and Konstance, on aninterstellar shipbound for a distant exoplanet, decades from now. A single copy of anancient text - the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land - provides solace, mystery and the most profound human connection to these five unforgettable characters. Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See , Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour and Konstance are dreamers and misfits,struggling to surviveand finding resourcefulnessand hopein the midst ofperil.
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
