"A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in Arkansas in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty, racism, abuse, and violence--both from outside the family, and also, devastatingly, from within. After years on the road, searching in vain for a better life, the Carpenters return to their hometown of Breathed, Ohio, in northern Appalachia. There, they move into a sprawling wreck of a farmhouse that local legend says is cursed. The townsfolk decide the Carpenters are cursed, too: "My mother gave birth to eight of us," Betty tells us in her frank, wry voice. "More than one of us would die for no good reason in the prizewinning years of youth. Some blamed God for taking too few. Others accused the devil of leaving too many." But Betty is resilient. Her father's inventive stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and even in the face of tragedy and death, her creativity is irrepressible. Against overwhelming odds, she may be the first member of her family to break the cycle of abuse and trauma--and escape.
B>From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s./b>br>br>"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..."br>br>To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver''s Row don''t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it''s still home.br>br>Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger and bigger all the time.br>br>See, cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace at the furniture store, Ray doesn''t see the need to ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who also doesn''t ask questions. br>br>Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa -- the "Waldorf of Harlem" -- and volunteers Ray''s services as the fence. The heist doesn''t go as planned; they rarely do, after all. Now Ray has to cater to a new clientele, one made up of shady cops on the take, vicious minions of the local crime lord, and numerous other Harlem lowlifes.br>br>Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he starts to see the truth about who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?br>br>Harlem Shuffle is driven by an ingeniously intricate plot that plays out in a beautifully recreated Harlem of the early 1960s. It''s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.br>br>But mostly, it''s a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.
From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father''s death, he''s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the second of a two-volume masterpiece: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.
A literary puzzle about money, power, and intimacy, TRUST is a novel that challenges the myths shrouding wealth, and the fictions that often pass for history. Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth-all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds , a successful 1938 novel that all of New York seems to have read. But it isn''t the only version of this story of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz''s TRUST brilliantly puts this narrative into conversation with other accounts-and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. Provocative and propulsive, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the reality-warping gravitational pull of capital and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
From one of America's most renowned storytellers comes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a backdrop of child murders in the affluent suburbs of Detroit.
Baumgartner''s life has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna. But now Anna is gone, and Baumgartner is embarking on his seventies whilst trying to live with her absence.
Rich with compassion, wit and Auster''s keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient episodes of ordinary life, Baumgartner is a tender late masterpiece of the ache of memory. It asks: why do we find such meaning in certain moments, and forget others?
An unforgettable historical debut set in Second World War Brussels: exploring love, resistance and courage in all their forms
1939. Art student Charlotte Sauvin and her father wake up in their apartment at 33 Place Brugmann to discover that their closest neighbours and friends - the Raphael family on the fourth floor, and Russian seamstress Masha on the fifth - have vanished overnight without a word.
While the Raphaels and Masha are flung on their own adventures across the continent - from occupied Paris to Blitz London, where they reinvent themselves as refugees, nurses, soldiers, heroes - Charlotte and the rest of her neighbours at Place Brugmann have their own choices to make in a city cast under the deep shadow of occupation.
Over the course of the war, every member of this accidental community will discover that they are not the person they believed themselves to be. And when tested, each will confront the truth about what, and who, matters to them the most.
Uplifting, sweeping and full of unforgettable characters, 33 Place Brugmann is a novel about beauty, family, friendship and home: and how the courage to resist can be found in the most surprising places.
A remarkable historical novel by the bestselling author of Fates and Furies Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie''s vision be bulwark enough? Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality and religious ecstasy in a mesmerising portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith and a woman that history moves both through and around.
We'd like to introduce you to Elizabeth Finch. We invite you to take her course in Culture and Civilisation. She will change the way you see the world. 'The task of the present is to correct our understanding of the past. And that task becomes the more ur
Set in a historical moment of moral crisis, "Crossroads" - the first instalment of the trilogy A Key to All Mythologies - is the stunning foundation of a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigate the political, intell
Juan Gay lies dying in a room in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert. There, a young man cares for him - someone whom Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since.
As the end approaches, the two trade stories - resurrecting lost loves, mothers and fathers - and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of sexuality, pathology and oppression. And, through their conversations, another story is told: that of the radical queer anthropologist Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served.
Blending fact with fiction, and drawing on oral histories and historical records, screenplay, testimony and image, Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure - on the ways in which stories sustain histories.
A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.
On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones--those who are lost--will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.
Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop's new owner to find it ransacked, the shop's most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.
Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana's father and the stolen choice--by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds.
But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own--and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.
"Ms. Haigh is an expertly nuanced storyteller long overdue for major attention. Her work is gripping, real, and totally immersive, akin to that of writers as different as Richard Price, Richard Ford, and Richard Russo."--Janet Maslin, New York Times The highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh--"a gifted chronicler of the human condition" ( Washington Post Book World )--is a tense, riveting story about the disparate lives that intersect at a woman''s clinic For almost a decade, Claudia has counseled patients at Mercy Street, a clinic in the heart of the city. The work is consuming, the unending dramas of women in crisis. For its patients, Mercy Street offers more than health care; for many, it is a second chance. But outside the clinic, the reality is different. Anonymous threats are frequent. A small, determined group of anti-abortion demonstrators appears each morning at its door. As the protests intensify, fear creeps into Claudia''s days, a humming anxiety she manages with frequent visits to Timmy, an affable pot dealer in the midst of his own existential crisis. At Timmy''s, she encounters a random assortment of customers, including Anthony, a lost soul who spends most of his life online, chatting with the mysterious Excelsior11--the screenname of Victor Prine, an anti-abortion crusader who has set his sights on Mercy Street and is ready to risk it all to protect the unborn. Mercy Street is a novel for right now, a story of the polarized American present. Jennifer Haigh, "an expert natural storyteller with a keen sense of her characters'' humanity" ( New York Times ), has written a groundbreaking novel, a fearless examination of one of the most divisive issues of our time.
''Absolution is one of the finest contemporary novels I''ve read. It is a moral masterpiece.''
ANN PATCHETT
''Damning and dazzling, this is the story of a Vietnam we never got in history class''
OPRAH DAILY
''A masterful American writer''
MAIL ON SUNDAY
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
1963. Saigon. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney working for US Navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. The two women form a wary alliance as they struggle to balance the pressure to be respectable wives for their ambitious husbands, with their own dubious impulses to "do good" for the people of Vietnam.
Sixty years later, Charlene''s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam veteran, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, discovering how their lives as women on the periphery - of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands'' convictions - have been shaped and burdened by the unintended consequences of America''s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.
Exploring the disaster of the Vietnam War through the lives built by American wives in 1960s Saigon, this is a virtuosic novel about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice and the quest for absolution in a broken world.>
@00000400@@00000327@The spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS, 'one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of this, or any country' (@00000373@Independent@00000155@).@00000133@@00000163@@00000400@Utopia Avenue are the strangest British band you've never heard of. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folksinger Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief and blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and draughty ballrooms to @00000373@Top of the Pops @00000155@and the cusp of chart success, to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968. @00000163@@00000400@David Mitchell's new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don't; of fame's Faustian pact and stardom's wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us? Utopia means 'nowhere' but could a shinier world be within grasp, if only we had a map?@00000163@
A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning authorOn a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart.
The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society. How far will she go to save her family? And what - or who - is she willing to leave behind? Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.
The *new* novel from the internationally bestselling author of Normal People . ''The literary phenomenon of the decade.'' - Guardian ''The best novel published this year.'' - The Times ''Quite astonishing.'' - Independent ''The most enjoyable novel of the year.'' - Daily Telegraph ''A spellbinding twenty-first-century love story.'' - TLS ***PRE-ORDER NOW*** Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he''d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Kevin is 30-something, happily committed to ''going nowhere'', growing illegal weed in an overpriced basement in Vancouver with his highly strung but brilliant hydroponics-expert girlfriend, Amber.
One day, seemingly out of the blue, Amber announces that she will appear on a reality show called MarsNowT. The show is a Survivor-meets-Star Trek amalgam where Amber will compete for one of two seats on the first human-led mission to Mars. If she wins, Amber will stay on Mars forever, because the technology to come home doesn''t exist yet. Is it a suicide mission or a bold new frontier for the future of humanity? It''s definitely ruining Kevin''s buzz and forcing him to confront some deeply uncomfortable truths about himself and his relationship with Amber.
Girlfriend on Mars is the story of love unravelling in the era of Instagram influencers and ''alternative facts''-a world where the so-called truth is dictated by Facebook ads, and ''reality TV'' is as scripted as any politician''s speech. It''s also a funny, satirical indictment of our pursuit of fame, wealth, growth, and entertainment during the climate crisis.
What''s the harm in a pseudonym? New York Times bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn''t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American--in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R. F. Kuang in the vein of White Ivy and The Other Black Girl. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena''s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn''t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena''s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena''s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I. So what if June edits Athena''s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn''t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That''s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree. But June can''t get away from Athena''s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June''s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang''s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
An essential companion to the inspirational classic The Alchemist, filled with timeless stories of reflection and rediscovery.
From one of the greatest writers of our age comes a collection of stories and parables unlocking the mysteries of the human condition. Gathered from Paulo Coelho''s daily column of the same name, Maktub, meaning ''it is written,'' invites seekers on a journey of faith, self-reflection, and transformation. As Paulo Coelho explains, ''Maktub is not a book of advice-but an exchange of experiences.''
Each story offers an illuminated path to see life and the lives of our fellow people around the world in new ways, allowing us to tap into universal truths about our collective and individual humanity. As Coelho writes, ''a man who seeks only the light, while shirking his responsibilities, will never find illumination. And one who keep his eyes fixed upon the sun . . . ends up blind.'' In these wise tales akin to Zen koans and other mysteries of the universe, there are talking snakes, old women climbing mountains, disciples querying their masters, Buddha in dialogue, mysterious hermits, and many saints.
Following the path of his previous internationally bestselling works, this thoughtful collection of short, inspirational pieces, introduced in a foreword by the author and illustrated with black-and-white line art throughout, will engage seekers of all ages and backgrounds.
James is an enthralling and ferociously funny novel that leaves an indelible mark, forcing us to see Mark Twain''s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a wholly new and transformative light. From the shadows of Huck Finn''s mischievous spirit, Jim emerges to reclaim his voice, defying the conventions that have consigned him to the margins. Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize for his novel The Trees, Professor Percival Everett is one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime.
1861, The Mississippi River. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter for ever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson''s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, toward the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.
With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he cannot protect and the constant lie he must live. Together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all . . .
