Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee $49.99
Appearing fifty-five years after To Kill a Kockingbird, this companion book sees Scout returning to Maycomb as an adult and confronting Atticus's resistance to racial integration.
"A harder, more ruthless novel that Mockingbird, it will evoke much discussion." - Stella
>> We would like to offer our customers a chance to buy both a copy of the new book (a lovely hardback) and a copy of the lovely new hardback edition of the first book (replicating the wrapper design of the first edition) for $75 (a $10 saving for a very special pair of books). Just let us know.
Between 2010 and 2014 Lynn Jenner made several related emotional and intellectual investigations. Lost and Gone Away is the record of these: a hybrid text of nonfiction, prose poems and poetry. The book traverses the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake; samples and sifts through the lost and recovered detritus of the ancient world; radiates its attention out from that epicentre of loss, the Point Last Seen, from which all searches begin; and quietly, devastatingly, explores how one might think and write about the Holocaust, from far away.
A novel of one woman's attempt to outrun the destiny that is predicted for her, moving from a remote New Zealand commune in the waning days of 1970s free-love experimentation to the heady music scene of 1980s London. Can she define her own happiness, even if it takes her in unanticipated directions?
"In every sense, Bianca Zander is a fantastic writer." - Curtis Sittenfield
"I really enjoyed this fascinating portrayal of commune living in New Zealand in the 70's and 80's and how the best of intentions don't always have the desired outcome. It's a story of relationships, parenting and ideologies. It also explores how a prediction can shape how a life is lived. It's a great read, the characters are brilliantly portrayed and the themes fascinating." - Sarah
When Philip Marsden moved to a remote, creekside farmhouse in Cornwall, the intensity of his response took him aback. It led him to wonder why we react so strongly to certain places, and set him off on a journey on foot westwards to Land's End through one of the most myth-rich regions of Europe. From the Neolithic ritual landscape of Bodmin Moor to the Arthurian traditions at Tintagel, from the mysterious china-clay region to the granite tors and tombs of the far south-west, Marsden assembles a chronology of attitude to place.
"A superb work which should be read everywhere, describing in beautiful prose the opulence of our natural and human fabric." - Independent
In this provocative novel Blacklock portrays the true and complex history of John Humble, a.k.a. Wearside Jack, the Ripper Hoaxer, a timewaster and criminal, sympathetic and revolting, the man hidden by a wall of words, a fiction-spinner worthy of textual analysis, who leads the reader into an allusive, elusive labyrinth of interpretations, simultaneously hoodwinking and revealing.
"Intelligent and disturbing." - Guardian
In constant conversation with du Murier's Rebecca, this novel tells of an aspiring young curator is offered a plumb position at the Nauk, Cape Cod's most cutting-edge art gallery. The wealthy, enigmatic founder who offered her the job fails to mention that Alena, the previous curator, died two years ago. Quickly, she finds herself in over her head. The Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past - a past obsessively preserved by the museum's staff - and the newcomer's every move mires and entangles her more deeply.
"Luminous and sure-footed. The triumph of Pastan's story is that it manages to be more than a companion piece to du Maurier's. Alena proves itself an intriguing and substantial novel on its own merits, while still offering the kind of gothic plunge we remember and crave from our younger years." - The Washington Post
Beginning with the return to Venice of an old and sick man determined to confront his past, and accompanied by his daughter who is escaping hers, The Antipodeans spans three generations of a New Zealand family and their interaction with three families of Northern Italy. This strong novel marks the return to literary prominence of the author of Foreskin's Lament.
>> The author talks about his book.
>> "Give a brief history of your eyesight." (interview)
An attractive new reference for children, introducing 20 native trees.
A deeply touching synthesis of individual and collective memories. A deeply personal graphic novel, Altarriba's account of what led his father to commit suicide at the age of ninety is a detective novel of sorts, one that traces his father's life from an impoverished childhood in Aragon, to service with Franco's army in the Civil war, escape to join the anarchist FAI, exile in France when the Republicans are defeated, to return to Spain in 1949 and the stultifying existence to which Republican sympathisers were consigned under Francoism.
"Tremendously sad, subtly drawn." - Guardian
In the summer of 1990 - two weeks before his GCSE results, which turned out to be the best in his school - Cathy Rentzenbrink's brother Matty was knocked down by a car on the way home from a night out, suffering serious head injuries. He was left in a permanent vegetative state. For the next eight years, Cathy and her parents took care of Matty - they built an extension onto the village pub where they lived and worked; they talked to him, fed him, bathed him, held him. Most of all, they loved him. But there came a point at which it seemed the best thing they could do for Matty - and for themselves - was let him go. With unflinching honesty and raw emotional power, Cathy describes the unimaginable pain of losing her brother and the decision that changed her family's lives forever. As she delves into the past and reclaims memories that have lain buried for many years, Cathy reconnects with the bright, funny, adoring brother she lost and is finally able to see the end of his life as it really was - a last act of love. A remarkable book.
The story of the twentieth century is traced through the various possible lives (and deaths) of one woman.
Winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
We also have a couple of copies left of the beautiful hardback edition.
"Erpenbeck's writing is astoundingly evocative and nuanced, balancing vast emotional weights on delicate, precisely placed observations. Such good writing, distilling the incomprehensibly large in the affectingly small, is a pleasure to read." - Thomas
A vibrant portrait of a Parsi family taking its place in colonial India on the brink of the 20th Century, from one of Pakistan's best-loved novelists.
"Excellent. Wilson makes a passionate, partisan case that tennis should be treated differently from all other sports. In fact tennis shouldn't be treated like a sport at all, but should instead be seen as a kind of burlesque gymnastic seduction, a business of passion and, above all, of love." - Guardian
"Hers is a sporting history unlike any I've read - one that, in its sophistication and thoughtfulness, shows up the hollowness of most other accounts." - William Skidelsky, Observer
W. H. Hudson was brought up on the pampas, where he learnt from gauchos about frontier life. After moving to London in 1874, Hudson lived in extreme poverty. Like his friend Joseph Conrad, Hudson was an exile, adapting to England. He never returned to Argentina. Wilson unravels Hudson's English dream, his natural history rambles, and his work to protect birds. He remains both a complex witness to his homeland before mass immigration and to his England of the mind, before the urban sprawl.
Illness, violence, sentimentality, hurt, confession. What are the deep unfaceable motors of our culture? How do we look sidelong at the tings we most fear? How do we always fail to confront out vulnerabilities: pain, bodies, limitations, failure to connect and to commit?
" It’s hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice." - The New York Times
When machines learn to speak, who decides what it means to be human? She cannot run. She cannot walk. She cannot even blink. As her batteries run down for the final time, all she can do is speak. Will you listen? Speak is the story of artificial intelligence and of those who loved it, hated it and created it. From Alan Turing's conviction in the 1950s to a Silicon Valley Wunderkind imprisoned in 2040 for creating illegally lifelike dolls, from a pilgrim girl writing her diary to a traumatised young girl exchanging messages with a software program, all these lives have shaped and changed a single artificial intelligence - MARY3.
"The rarest of finds: a novel that doesn't remind me of any other book I've ever read. A complex, nuanced, and beautifully written meditation on language, immortality, the nature of memory, the ethical problems of artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human." - Emily St. John Mandel
"Speak reads like a hybrid of David Mitchell and Margaret Atwood. Louisa Hall has written a brilliant novel." - Philipp Meyer
David Hugsar has lost his memory so his psychiatrist places an advertisement in a newspaper inviting friends and relatives to share their memories of him. The resulting letters, reminiscences, and scenes offer an encircling narrative that reveals more about the intersecting young lives in a small Norwegian backwater than about David himself, the enigma at the heart of the novel. Adolescent sexuality, boredom, filial guilt, violence and love; the frustrations of life in a small-town rock band; drugs and cigarettes all find their place in these chronicles of Norwegian provincial life, exploring masculinity in crisis.
Just two hours' drive west of London, a secret way of life that has been operating for centuries is clinging to a fragile existence. This is the world of the last English poachers - men who have lived off the land, taking game and wildlife from the big country estates, risking the wrath of gamekeepers in order to feed their families and make a modest livelihood. Poachers have lived cheek by jowl with landowners throughout the history of the British class system. Their customs, hunting skills and knowledge of animals is comparable to that of indigenous communities in pre-industrial societies, yet the poacher has been vilified, ridiculed and, in olden times, even put to death. Bob and BrianTovey are poachers of the old stripe: a father and son of 75 and 50 years old respectively, who are continuing their ancestors' traditions, reluctant to surrender the old ways of sourcing food from nature.
Alison Pick was born in the 1970s and raised in a loving, supportive family, but as a teenager she made a discovery that changed her understanding of who she was for ever. She learned that her Pick grandparents, who had escaped from Czechoslovakia during WWII, were Jewish, and that most of this side of the family had died in concentration camps.
"A beautifully woven story of family, partnership, love and reconciliation, not just with one's past but with oneself." - A.M. Homes
When he was 42 and editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, Robert McCrum woke up paralysed on his left side. He spent months as an invalid lying on his back and over a year recovering his function. In this book he describes the transforming effects of being shunted the short sudden distance to disability, the reassessment of his life that resulted from time in the ‘antechamber of death’, and the deepening of his relationships with those who cared for and about him. He found the disjunction of the mental and physical aspects of existence profoundly disconcerting, time thereafter flowed differently, and the natural compulsion to look for meaning in life’s occurrences found itself frustrated at a deep level. What carried on had a different texture from what came before.
Imagine an island, a place separated from the mainland by choppy seas. A place of myths and faith, where a Headless Horseman is said to stalk the woods but where the kirk is always full. Imagine a community which held its own against Darwin but which can't hold on to its own. Prepare to meet a pioneering female travel writer, two fatherless boys, and a man who, quite simply, fell from the sky. And, at the centre of it all, the figure who links the past to the present - the irrepressible, unforgettable former Sergeant Punch.
>> Colin MacIntyre has been voted Scotland's Top Creative Talent.
"I hadn't expected the Berlin Wall to be clean and white and smooth. It looked more like the edge of the swimming baths than the edge of the Cold War. On the grass of No-man's Land, fat rabbits ate and strolled about as if they'd never been hunted and nothing could disturb them. This was their land and they ruled it, and there were three parts to Berlin: East, West and Rabbit." What is it like to grow up on the losing side of history?
"It came from the woods. Most strange things do." Five mysterious, spine-tingling stories follow journeys into (and out of?) the eerie abyss. These chilling tales spring from the macabre imagination of acclaimed and award-winning comic creator Emily Carroll. Take a walk in the woods and see what awaits you there...
The seven years between the birth of Keret's son, Lev, during a terrorist attck on Tel Aviv, and the death of his father were good years, but still full of reasons to worry. The Seven Good Years is a tender and entertaining tale of a father bringing up his son in a country beset by wars and alarms.
"Funny, dark and poignant." - Jonathan Safran Foer
"One of the most important writers alive." - Clive James
Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine: these radicals who founded America set their sights on a revolution of the mind. Derided as "infidels" and "atheists" in their own time, they wanted to liberate us not just from one king but from the tyranny of supernatural religion. The ideas that inspired them were neither British nor Christian but largely ancient, pagan, and continental: the fecund universe of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, the potent (but nontranscendent) natural divinity of Spinoza.
A marine engineer who tumbles off a cliff path on a windy night. A burglary where everything taken was returned by the thief. The suicide of a man in love with life. An accident, a mystery, an unexplained tragedy. And nothing at all to connect them. Until, that is, Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, searching for something - anything - to take her mind off the tedious job of evidence-cataloguing she's been assigned to, starts to wonder if all three incidents are not quite what they seem.
"The most startling protagonist in modern crime fiction." - Sunday Times
Our voyage from Earth began generations ago. Now, we approach our destination. A new home. Aurora.
"This apparently simple tale unpacks into a mellow, complex meditation on human stubbornness (for good and ill); on the environmental disaster that is happening all around us; on hope, love and the mystery of consciousness itself. Aurora is a magnificent piece of writing, certainly Robinson’s best novel since his mighty 'Mars trilogy', perhaps his best ever." - Guardian
In the country, there's nothing to do, except: admire. It's the same as being bored, but with your eyes wide open. The story of grumpy city-child Leonard, forced to go for country walks with his greenery-loving mum and dad, is a reminder of what use we may be to the world. What do we know? What can we do? And is any of it of real value?
On 24th November Yasmin and her deaf daughter Ruby arrive in Alaska. Within hours they are driving alone across a frozen wilderness where nothing grows, where no one lives, where tears freeze - and night will last for another fifty-four days. They are looking for Ruby's father. Travelling deeper into a silent land. They still cannot find him. And someone is watching them in the dark...
"This stylish thriller will send shivers down your spine." - Guardian
A health scare precipitated the author to re-examine her life and to get rid of everything in it she didn't really want. She downsized her expectations and upsized her contentment, she built her own small house, gluing her hair to it in the process, and found a new and better way to live.
"Williams creates a portrait of humanity through her own compelling experience. That she has written about home and life with such humour and vulnerability, and in her own unique vernacular, makes her story all the more universal." - Jay Shafer
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