Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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.
It begins with a letter from a woman Frank has never met. A pleading letter. A letter that closed his throat. 'Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.' And that is it all it takes.
Set during a year that begins with France's fall to the Nazis in June 1940 and ends with Germany turning its attention to Russia, this work falls into two parts. The first part is a depiction of a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion; and the second follows the inhabitants of a rural community under occupation.
Karoo is a professional fixer of other people's scripts and, by his own acknowledgement, he ruins them all. Calamity and comedy follows shambolic Saul Karoo as his life breaks down. He is a man prone to luck both good and bad, and when a young woman with a strange connection to his past shows up, the plot of his own life comes into sharp focus.
One hot August day a family drives to a mountain clearing to collect birch wood. Jenny, the mother, is in charge of lopping any small limbs off the logs with a hatchet. Wade, the father, does the stacking. The two daughters, June and May, aged nine and six, drink lemonade, swat away horseflies, bicker, sing snatches of songs as they while away the time.
A novel set in a small town in Ohio, focusing on two girls, Nell and Sula, both black, both poor, who share their dreams until Sula escapes to live a vagrant city life for ten years. When she returns, the bond of their friendship is broken.
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities he is expected to apologize to save his job, but instead he refuses and resigns, retiring to live with his daughter on her remote farm.
Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine, a sophisticated graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian - a black American now living in Paris and Rome. Then there's Son, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous - a young American black of extreme beauty from small-town Florida. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
Selected as a Book of the Year in The Times & Guardian *** As read on Radio 4 *** ''You can''t get around Kate Battista as easily as all that'' Kate Battista is feeling stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she''s always in trouble at work - her pre-school charges adore her, but the adults don''t always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner. Dr Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There''s only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr... When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he''s relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he''s really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men''s touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her round? Anne Tyler''s retelling of The Taming of the Shrew asks whether a thoroughly modern, independent woman like Kate would ever sacrifice herself for a man. The answer is as individual, off-beat and funny as Kate herself. ''I loved Kate and Pyotr and the way they discover the oversized, tender, irreverent relationship that fits them... It is joyful'' Rachel Joyce ''Read her books and she can actually change your view, change how you see the world'' Judy Finigan, Mail on Sunday ''Tyler writes with an apparent effortlessness which conceals great art'' Helen Dunmore, Stylist ''Tyler''s sentences are wholly hers, instantly recognisable and impossible to duplicate'' Hanya Yanigihara, Observer ''A new novel from Tyler is always a treat'' Daily Mail
Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's sole surviving son, and an introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, this edition includes a number of Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son Jack and his first wife, Hadley.
Meet the Rabbitte family, motley bunch of loveable ne'er-do-wells whose everyday purgatory is rich with hangovers, dogshit and dirty dishes. When the older sister announces her pregnancy, the family are forced to rally together and discover the strangeness of intimacy. But the question remains: which friend of the family is the father of Sharon's child?
Begins on the eve of Paula's forty-ninth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne, are still living with her. They're grand kids, but she worries about Leanne. Paula still works as a cleaner, but all the others doing the job now seem to come from Eastern Europe.
One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock hears urgent knocking on his front door. One of his captains is waiting eagerly on the step. He has sold Jonah's ship for what appears to be a mermaid.
As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlours and brothels, everyone wants to see Mr Hancock's marvel. Its arrival spins him out of his ordinary existence and through the doors of high society. At an opulent party, he makes the acquaintance of Angelica Neal, the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on... and a courtesan of great accomplishment. This meeting will steer both their lives onto a dangerous new course, on which they will learn that priceless things come at the greatest cost.
Where will their ambitions lead? And will they be able to escape the destructive power mermaids are said to possess?
In this spell-binding story of curiosity and obsession, Imogen Hermes Gowar has created an unforgettable jewel of a novel, filled to the brim with intelligence, heart and wit.
This book is an attempt to piece together a clear portrait of the band's rise to fame and their abrupt and infamous split. The following oral history is a compilation of interviews, emails, transcripts, and lyrics, all pertaining to the personal and professional lives of the members of the band The Six and singer Daisy Jone.
Jimmy Rabbitte is unemployed and rapidly running out of money. His best friend Bimbo has been made redundant at the company where he has worked for many years. The two old friends are out of luck and out of options. That is, until Bimbo finds a dilapidated 'chipper van' and the pair decide to go into business...
By the bestselling author of The Commitments and The Snapper, The Van is a tender tale of male friendship, swimming in grease and stained with ketchup.
Read Kurt Vonnegut's powerful masterpiece, which is as timely now as when it was first published.
'An extraordinary success. A book to read and reread. He is a true artist' New York Times Book Review Billy Pilgrim - hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier - has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out?
Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.
'The great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.' George Saunders
Mata Hari arrived in Paris penniless, but was soon feted as the most elegant woman in the city. She became a dancer who shocked and delighted audiences and bewitched the citys richest men, until in 1917, Mata Haris lifestyle brought her under suspicion of espionage. Written as a series of letters, THE SPY tells the unforgettable story of a woman who dared to break the conventions of her time.
A Seattle, un assassin tue des Blancs, les scalpe et dépose deux plumes de hibou sur leur corps : terreur sur la ville, tourmente parmi la communauté indienne que ces crimes désignent à la vindicte générale.
Ainsi va naître la légende du " tueur indien ", justicier pour les uns, psychopathe pour les autres... Pendant ce temps, un jeune Indien adopté par un couple de Blancs sombre dans la folie...
Thriller ? Roman noir ? Indian Killer en a toutes les apparences et les qualités. Mais le roman de Sherman Alexie transcende les lois du genre. Livre sombre et fascinant, il met en accusation une société américaine minée par la discrimination et, au-delà, s'interroge sur la condition humaine, l'identité, la haine de l'Autre.
Avec ce mélange percutant de poésie, de colère et d'humour, qui lui est propre, Sherman Alexie signe un roman pessimiste et violent, écrit, comme le fut en son temps Un enfant du pays de Richard Wright, par un écrivain américain appartenant à une minorité, mais dont la voix est universelle.
Young and penniless, Kif Kehlmann, is rung in the middle of the night by notorious con man and corporate criminal, Siegfried Heidl. About to go to trial for defrauding the banks of $700 million, Heidl proposes a deal: $10,000 for Kehlmann to ghostwrite his memoir in six weeks.
Kehlmann accepts but soon begins to fear that he is being corrupted by Heidl. Is he ghostwriting a memoir, or is Heidl is rewriting him? As the deadline draws closer everything that is certain grows uncertain as he begins to wonder: who is Ziggy Heidl - and who is Kif Kehlmann?
