An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever travelled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light.
"This book is the best I’ve read so far this year and one of the best that I’ve ever read. Even when I wasn’t actually reading I was with these characters. It’s thoroughly engrossing, shattering, epic in every sense, and beyond what I thought literature could do." - Holly
An indispensable collection of Lye's own writing about art, about his art, and about his life, sharply assembled by his biographer, Roger Horrocks.
>> Tusalava, Lye's first film (from 1929!).
What is beauty? How can humans achieve and communicate transcendent experience? Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian master of the extended sentence, who has just been awarded the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, builds a multifaceted, highly polished jewel of a fiction, conjuring moments of clarity from history and mythology, from ancient Japan to Renaissance Italy. The pellucidity of the writing sits like a crust over Kransznahorkai's savage pessimism. Ottilie Mulzet won the 2014 Best Translated Book of the Year Award for this book.
Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy - the loss of everyone she loved and being exiled to Siberia by her father. In 1967 Svetlana shocked the world by defecting to the United States, leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father's regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty.
Name: Lynch, Andrew; a.k.a. 'Mr Bolsover.' Career: civil servant, librarian, columnist, local councillor, revolutionary. Recreations: shooting squirrels, skinning rabbits, cooking with rats. Address: present whereabouts unknown; last sighted in South Downs woodland close to the A275. Professional Interests: cataloguing systems, hermits, badger welfare, troglodytes, revolutionary politics. From the calm of Uckfield library to the demands of high office, a life on the run and a final confrontation with the authorities, this is an epic tale of a modern misfit and a political biography like no other.
"A minor masterpiece of the deadpan. A very, very funny book. Genuinely original and written with understated intelligence." - Sunday Telegraph
Has your memory ever let you down, or, worse, deceived you? Cecilia Ruiz has made a beautiful, wistful book about this.
>> Watch these memory gaps.
Robin Hyde came across Starkie while reporting in Mt Eden Gaol in the 1930s and immediately knew she had to write his 'queer true terrible story'. The result was greeted by John A. Lee, war veteran, author and politician, as 'the most important New Zealand war book yet published'. Hyde took the raw horrors, respites and reversals of Starkie's experiences and composed a work of literature much greater than a mere documentary of war. She portrays a man looting a dead man's money-belt and filching beer from the Tommies; attempting to shoot a sergeant in a haze of absinthe, yet carrying his wounded captain back across No Man's Land; a man recommended for the V.C. and honoured for his bravery - but also subject to nine courts martial. In its psychological acuity and emotional depth. A new edition of this important book.
A beautiful piece of intimate nature-writing, chronicling a year's births, lives and deaths in and around a farm field. Winner of the 2015 Thwaites Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing.
>> An extract.
Is this the Great Welsh Novel? A boy and his friends witness a side to their Welsh village life that they had no idea existed, and their innocence is exchanged for the shocking reality of the adult world.
Every day, all around the world, women are reinventing what it means to be female in cultures where power, privilege or basic freedoms are all too often equated with being male. Here, Criado-Perez introduces us to some of these pioneering women. We meet the first woman to cross the Antarctic alone; we meet a female fighter pilot in Afghanistan; we meet a climate change activist who scaled new heights; we meet a Chilean revolutionary turned politician; we meet the Russian punks who rocked out against Putin; and we meet the Iranian journalist who dared to uncover her hair.
>> Why this fear of autonomous female speech and action?
The new book from the co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. also evokes the charm and eccentricity of a small town peopled with extraordinary characters, the small mill town of Macedonia, West Virginia in the 1930s.
Neuroscientists, behaviouralist psychologists and evolutionary biologists suggest that ethical pro-social behaviour could arise from genetics rather than external systems of law, philosophy or religion.
What is the role of whanau and hapu, household and marae, kaumatua and siblings, work and play in learning?
"An acutely observed and insightful portrait of contemporary urban life. Audacious, funny and shrewdly telling - written with tremendous confidence and brio." - William Boyd
"A wise, big-hearted novel. I was utterly caught up in Day's four interweaving lives." - Esther Freud
An thoroughly nasty Hairy Maclary spoof (why has it taken so long?). This really puts the dog into doggerel.
Notions such as the "missing link" demonstrate a fairly unscientific popular misunderstanding of the mechanisms of evolution. This book sets out to provide a corrective.
For Archimedes, clarity struck while he was taking a bath. For Gustav Mahler, it came as the blades of his oars touched the water. And for Albert Einstein, it emerged while he was talking to a friend. Some great ideas happen suddenly (and some develop slowly). Why?
Everything from how to stock your cupboard to how to use what you have in that cupboard to make food that not only tastes good but is good for you (and the planet).
Ceaselessly curious and courageous, Alexandre Yersin, once Pasteur's protege, stands, in this compelling reimagining of his life, a lone genius,against a backdrop of world wars, pandemics, colonialism, progress and decadence.
Use the prompts to draw a portrait of yourself through the objects that have been and are important to you.
While you are waiting for the final book in the 'Neopolitan Quartet' (due in September - pre-order now!), why not read some of Ferrante's back list? All are finely drawn dissections of human relationships. We also currently have stock of The Days of Abandonment and Troubling Love.
"Ferrante's gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral." - New Yorker
"This superb and scary Italian writer has blown the lid off tempestuous parent-child relations." - Seattle Times
How does politics condition philosophy? How can philosophy sharpen and direct political engagement? What emerging forces of emancipation will reinvigorate democracy?
"Dennison captures both Vita's irresistible charm and her selfishness. Like his subject, he is a natural storyteller, and his impeccable scholarship never weighs down his lively narrative." - Independent
The fascinating science behind the mysteries of animal migration: how geese imprint true visual landscape memory over impossible distances; how the subtlest of scent trails are used by many creatures, from fish to insects to amphibians, to pinpoint their home; and how the tiniest of songbirds are equipped for solar and magnetic orienteering over vast distances.
What if everything you read in the Bible were true? How should we deal with angels? How can God change? A new and improved edition of Knausgaard's strange first novel, published before his rise to international prominence with his ongoing 'My Struggle' series.
Lynn Barber, by her own admission, has always suffered from a compelling sense of nosiness. An exceptionally inquisitive child she constantly questioned everyone she knew about imitate details of their lives. This talent for nosiness, coupled with her unusual lack of the very English fear of social embarrassment, turned out to be the perfect qualification for a celebrity interviewer.
What unfinished business do you have with your daughter or with your mother?
Nineteen nail-biting, intense and intricately plotted crime stories from one of the UK's greatest psychological thriller writers, this diverse collection demonstrates the scope of Val McDermid's imagination and her powers as a storyteller.
In 1730, 45 million litres of gin were distilled in London and sold from 7,000 dram shops - that's 63 litres for every citizen.
This lavishly illustrated book uses artefacts, both virtuoso and unassuming, to give insight into the cultural and political life of early modern Japan.
A collection of local author Adrienne Frater's stories, most previously broadcast on National Radio or published in the School Journal. Each is prefaced with an explanation of the story's origin and the path it has taken to the reader or listener.
100 years ago, Albert Einstein presented his masterwork to the Prussian Academy of Sciences - a theory of gravity, matter, space and time: the General Theory of Relativity. Einstein himself said it was 'the most valuable theory of my life', and 'of incomparable beauty'. It describes the evolution of the Universe, black holes, the behaviour of orbiting neutron stars, gravitational lensing, and why clocks run slower on the surface of the Earth than in space. It even suggests the possibility of time travel.
Roll up your mental sleeves and get to work on the inner and outer workings of the universe.
Another fine example of historical distaff fiction, this time about the wife of Ulysses S. Grant and her relationship with her namesake slave, from the author of Mrs Lincoln's Dressmaker.
They're here! Some of the pegs upon which modern literature is hung are now available in this lovely series. Come and pile them up or click through to browse!
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