After 13 years, Mohamedou Ould Slahi is still being held without trial by the US at Guantanamo. His disturbing account of rendition, torture and systematic abuse has finally been declassified. Upsetting and important.
>> Read the manuscript and hear celebrities read from the diary.
A soldier returning home to western Scotland from the war in Afghanistan bears the vast impact of his experiences, which brings to light his grandmother's hitherto secret past.
"Like its two main characters, this impressive novel has a double life, moving with imaginative daring between war and art, photography and fiction, and memory and secrets." - Hermione Lee, Guardian
"A lean yet rich story built of small and crucial moments in memories and reality across three generations. It's remarkable how much human territory O’Hagan explores and illuminates with a restrained style that also helps drive the novel along." - Kirkus Reviews
>> "Afghanistan is our Vietnam." >> Read an extract here.
McLean's aims and methods as Land Purchase Commissioner and as Native Secretary, and his inability to disentangle his personal interests from his professional responsibilities, made him an catalyst for the Anglo-Maori Wars. Why did he act the way he did?
A woman suffering from a mysterious illness accepts a challenge from her grandfather: to take the key to the house where he grew up - in the Turkish city of Smyrna - and try to open the door. As she embarks on this pilgrimage, she begins to write of her progress. This writing soon becomes an exploration of her family's legacy of displacement, from Turkey to Brazil to Portugal and back to Brazil, and an attempt to understand her place in it.
"Levy’s writing is a joy. Her prose is rich, filled with a sense of the vividness and generosity of an author’s available inspirations: the clamour of the senses, the restless truths of the body, the turns and consolations and perils of thought, the wonders of both beauty and ugliness and the meaning and architecture of words themselves." - A.L. Kennedy
When Eula Biss became a mother, she stepped into a new world of fear: fear of the government, the medical establishment, the contents of her child's air, food, mattress and vaccines. In this bold, fascinating book, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity, and its implications for the individual and the social body. Weaving her personal experiences with an exploration of classical and contemporary literature, Biss considers what vaccines, and the debate around them, mean for her own child, her immediate community and the wider world. Interesting.
"Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust, wonderfully strange but still familiar and real. Get in Trouble is filled with pocket universes, each tale containing so much more than its length might suggest and crackling with the unexpected: the most marvelous kind of trouble to get in." - Erin Morgenstern (author of The Night Circus)
>> Interview in The New York Times.
Sullivan Moss is useless. Once a charming underachiever, he's now such a loser that he can't even commit suicide properly. After a life of regrets, Sully wants to do one useful thing: he wants to donate a kidney to a stranger. But, as he scrambles over the hurdles to become a donor, he almost accidentally forges a new life for himself.
Yang Fei is late for his own cremation and so wanders the afterworld, pondering how he lost his life and what he lost with it. Yu Hua has a lot to say about life in modern China, and a great deal of humour and whimsy too.
12-year-old Bobby is assembling an archive on his dead mother. After a beating from his abusive father, his friend's mother helps him to run away by stealing a mobile library van and driving him towards Scotland and freedom. The books that fill the van provide other avenues of escape and discovery. A madcap adventure for bibliophiles.
A powerful curiosity is the hallmark of new kind of Indian writing: important questions about the country's past and present have found their expression in different forms of non-fiction story-telling that twenty years ago tended to be the preserve of writers from the west. Biography, memoir, narrative history, reportage, the travel account: all these forms now have their interesting and original practitioners in India. In this Granta issue they tackle questions ranging from rape in village India to scandal in Mumbai clubs. And there is room, of course, for the best of India's fiction.
Irene works in the library of a secret society founded to preserve the literary texts of alternate worlds. When she is sent to obtain a copy of Grimms' fairy tales, she finds the volume missing and other desperados on its trail.
"It’s a breath of fresh air to discover a fantastical world that defies easy provenance and brings something new to the genre.With a satisfyingly complex plot, The Invisible Library is a book in which to wallow." - Guardian
"Out of the corner of my eye, I catch something moving by the barn. When I look, it disappears. Wait, There it is again, at the cornfield. Some movement, some thing. Mom and I have been on the run for years. Every time he catches up with us, we move to a new place and start over. But this place is different."
"Painful and powerful in equal measure - as it should be. An extraordinary literary achievement." - Michael Morpurgo
In 2000, Belgrade rock kid Srdja Popovic found himself one of the unexpected leaders of the student movement Otpor! that overthrew dictator Slobodan Milosevic and established democracy in Serbia - all by avoiding violence and opting for something far more powerful: a sense of humour. In this inspiring and entertaining guide for would-be activists, he tells his story and those of other 'ordinary revolutionaries' who have created real social change using non-violent techniques. Whether rice pudding qualifies as non-violent is a moot point, though.
After surviving World War II by escaping the Nazi occupation, the author's grandparents, Anna and Armand, bought an old stone house in a remote, picturesque village in the south of France. Five years later, Anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand, taking the typewriter and their children. The two never saw or spoke to each other again. To discover the roots of this embittered and entrenched silence, the author put her other plans on hold and moved to the old stone house, now a crumbling ruin, where she immersed herself in letters and archival materials, and slowly teasing stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents. Along the way she finds a new life for herself.
Swapping deadlines for feeding times, traffic jams for homemade cheese, Murphy transplanted her husband and children from the US to a small farm near Whangarei. In this hilarious account of rural life, she exposes the dirty truth behind the agrarian dream: farming is really a world of slaughter, maggots and menopausal hens.
Toss your screens away and gather round to sing old favourites and new from this lovely book! Where do you like to sing?
"The best book I've seen for years. Maybe the most useful book I've ever read." - Jools Holland
Using actual case studies, Doidge shows how the discoveries outlined in his previous book, The Brain That Changes Itself, have effected transformations in multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and dementia.
A man and his eight-year-old daughter blow up a dam in Queensland and, in a stolen boat, ride the released waters down what used to be the Darling River, encountering "the vast hoard of mirrors and horrors that is country life".
"Vibrantly witty and scathing in its social analysis." - Sydney Morning Herald
"This peek inside the sick brain, by a foremost neurologist, helps readers truly appreciate how calamities like brain tumours, stroke, Parkinson's, seizures and other diseases affect us. His stories are sometimes painful, sometimes heart-warming, but invariably tremendously illuminating." - Elizabeth Loftus
"Medical writing at its best." - V.M. Ramachandran
Rebecca Harrington leaves no cabbage soup unstirred in her wickedly funny, wildly absurd quest to diet like the stars. Elizabeth Taylor mixed cottage cheese and sour cream; Madonna subsisted on 'sea vegetables' and Marilyn Monroe drank raw eggs whipped with warm milk. Where there is a Hollywood starlet offering nutritional advice, there is a diet Rebecca Harrington is willing to try. Facing a harrowing mix of fainting spells, pimples and salmonella, Harrington tracks down illegal haggis to imitate Pippa Middleton, paces her apartment until the wee hours drinking ten Diet Cokes a la Karl Lagerfeld, and attempts something forbiddingly known as the 'Salt Water Flush' to channel her inner Beyonce.
Alina Chase has spent her entire life in confinement. With the science of soul-printing now a reality, she is 'protected' for her own safety - and the safety of others - because her soul has done terrible things ...or so she's told. When Alina finally breaks out of prison, helped by a group of people with unclear motives, she begins to uncover clues left by her past life that only she can decipher. And she may not be as innocent as she once believed. Can Alina change her future, or is she fated to repeat her past and face the consequences?
An urgent novel casting a family forward through a century of projected ecological and social instability. How will we cope?
From its publication in 1973, this ground-breaking and hugely influential work has defined debates on women's oppression and consciousness, and on the connections between socialism and feminism. Examining feminist consciousness from various vantage points - social, sexual, cultural and economic - Sheila Rowbotham identifies the social conditions under which it developed, showing how the roles women take on within the capitalist economy have shaped ideas about family and sexuality.
We can better understand why whales live as they do by seeking to understand their land-lubbing ancestors.
"Bryan Stevenson is America's young Nelson Mandela, a brilliant lawyer fighting with courage and conviction to guarantee justice for all." - Desmond Tutu
'I want to tell you that he's coming home...and it's going to be like it was before he went away, before everything broke apart.' Nella waits for the swallows by the creek each spring. It's a secret vigil she's followed ever since her father left. This year she's going to take him with her ...but can we ever return to the way things were? A YA novel about love and the things you can and can't change.
What is a literature? How do literatures of different countries interact with each other? In this ground-breaking study, Alexander Beecroft develops a new way of thinking about world literature. Drawing on a series of examples and case studies, the book ranges from ancient epic to contemporary fiction. Beecroft identifies a series of literary ecologies, from small-scale societies to the planet as a whole, within which literary texts are produced and circulated. An Ecology of World Literature places in dialogue scholarship on ancient and modern, western and non-western texts, producing new and unexpected demands for literary study.
Although family values are frequently lamented for being in decline, our society continues to be structured around the nuclear family. This book (first published in 1982 but still challenging today) dissects the network of household, kinship and sexual relations that constitute the family form in advanced capitalist societies, and explores the personal and social needs that the family promises to meet but more often denies, and proposes moral and political practices that go beyond the family to more egalitarian caring alternatives.
What is it about The West (the west of anywhere)? Tim Winton, Shaun Tan and others cast their eyes and push their pens into Western Australia.
The second issue of this Nelson journal of cultural criticism, art criticism, political criticism and some other sorts of criticism, is available FREE from the shop (and from several other places).
Contributions from Danny Knox, Mic Dover, Fiona Johnstone, John Roughan, Elli Yates, and Gabriel Adams and Nicholas Haig.
