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THE SONG HOUSE Azzopardi, Trezza When Maggie Nix’s ageing hippy mother dies, Maggie decides she needs a job, something that will return her to the world. But the particular world she has in mind is that of her own childhood. She applies for the job of amanuensis to Kenneth Earl, a retired man living alone in his rambling house who wants to engage in a form of recollection of his own. Music has been the most important element in his life, and he intends to write a kind of musical memoir, which will recapture the feelings and ideas that every single one of his four thousand long-playing records aroused in him. As Maggie and Kenneth embark on this great task, they strike up an odd and strangely affectionate relationship. But what Kenneth doesn’t know is that Maggie stayed briefly in his house once before, under very different circumstances. Trezza Azzopardi’s work has been described as ‘scalding’ and ‘thrilling’. In her fourth novel the Booker-shortlisted author gives us another heart-stopping story written in a virtuoso style she has made all her own. Publisher: UK: Picador Schedule: Delivered; Publication: May 2010 |
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THE DEATH OF ELI GOLD Baddiel, David Publisher: UK: HarperCollins Schedule: Publication: May 2010 |
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ROCKS IN THE BELLY Bauer, Jon ROCKS IN THE BELLY follows an unnamed male character through two parallel stories. In the first, he is an eight year-old only child, whose parents are repeatedly fostering boys despite the jealous turmoil it arouses in their son. This jealousy reaches unmanageable proportions when they begin to foster Robert, an older and more amiable child who forms a unique bond with his foster mother. As the bond grows, so too does the son’s struggle, building towards the moment he lashes out irreparably. Although his action is simple and petulant, the ensuing accident leads to repercussions that last for all of their lifetimes. Interspersed with this childhood recollection is our protagonist’s current experience as a twenty-eight year-old, returning home after ten years. With his mother terminally ill and his father dead, he is forced to tend his mother in her illness, and consequently confront his past. He hasn’t moved beyond that one devastating moment in his childhood, except to blame his mother for what he did to Robert; he hates her for it, yet also feels a strong need for her love and approval. But his mother isn’t that same strong woman anymore: now she’s dependent on his kindness and he the dominant force – a power he can’t help but abuse. Written in the first person, this powerful novel builds simultaneously towards Robert’s shocking accident and its aftermath, and the son’s race to find redemption before his mother dies. ROCKS IN THE BELLY explores a child’s capacity for evil as well as good, the anatomy of guilt, hatred and blame, and the effortless destruction we wreak on one another in the simple pursuit of our own happiness. A graphic, visceral but often beautiful and funny novel, ROCKS IN THE BELLY reminds us that, statistically, the most dangerous place for a child is within their family. Publisher: (Not Yet Sold); ANZ: Scribe Schedule: Delivered |
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SOUL MURDER Blake, Daniel Introducing Pittsburgh detective Francesco Patrese: three years on the homicide beat, he is only just beginning to learn how the job can haunt a man. But the Steel City is no place for soul-baring. A noted surgeon is found burnt alive in his apartment; days later, a local bishop meets with the same grisly fate. While the streets of Pittsburgh simmer with unease, Patrese and his partner, veteran detective Beradino, search for links between the two victims. The murders coincide with the controversial release from prison of Mara Slinger – a Hollywood star married to the city’s dashing young mayor, Mara was convicted of killing her three newborn children but the verdict was overturned on appeal. With the city torn between suspicion and sympathy for the tragic actress, the police provide Mara with protection – but as the apparently random killings mount up, can anyone be safe? Can anyone be trusted?
Drawn into a harrowing conflagration of vengeance and betrayal, Patrese must face the spectre of his own past before he can uncover the pattern behind this bizarre spree of increasingly violent attacks. But with racial and religious tensions flaring up across the city in the wake of his investigations, Patrese will have to act fast to track down the killer and contend with evil in all its forms.
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CONTACT Buckley, Jonathan Dominic Pattison's life begins to veer badly off course on a Tuesday morning in May 2008. His prosperous, ordered life is invaded by a young man, Sam Williams, who insists that he is Dominic's son, by someone Dominic had an affair with in the early years of his relationship with the woman who was to become his wife. Williams claims he can prove Dominic's paternity. Dominic's attempts to shrug off Williams, who turns out to be an unstable and sometimes violent man, prove to be futile. And then Williams shows up on the doorstep and offers Dominic's wife some help around the house. CONTACT is an insidiously compelling piece of work, the character of Sam Williams lodging itself in the reader's imagination just as much as in Dominic Pattison's life. Publisher: World English Language: Sort Of Books Schedule: Delivered; Publication: February 2010 |
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THE EMPRESS OF ICE CREAM Capella, Anthony Publisher: UK: Little, Brown Schedule: Publication: August 2010 |
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THE BETRAYAL Dunmore, Helen Summer 1952: the city of Leningrad has known peace for almost eight years – but underlying that peace is a deep and wary unease. Stalin’s Soviet Union is a land of whispers and watchfulness, where nobody can count themselves as safe, and so for Andrei and his wife Anna – survivors of the German siege – the best course of action has always been to blend in and not be noticed. But Andrei is also a doctor, and when a colleague asks him to advise on a young patient who happens to be the son of a high-ranking figure at the Ministry of State Security, Andrei finds himself caught in an impossible game of life and death. Whether he treats the child or not, everything he holds dear will be exposed and endangered by his actions. While her husband agonises over his decision under the impassive gaze of the authorities, Anna will need all her strength and courage to ensure a future for herself and her whole family.
An exquisite and gripping tale of life and love in Stalinist Russia, THE BETRAYAL is also the sequel to Helen Dunmore’s critically acclaimed novel THE SIEGE, which was shortlisted for both the 2001 Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
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THE BRAVE Evans, Nicholas 1959 There’s little love in eight-year-old Tom Bedford’s life – and even less when he is sent away to a brutal English boarding school, bristling with bullies and sadistic staff. The only comfort he gets is from his fantasy world of Cowboys & Indians. But when his sister Diane, a rising star of stage and screen falls in love with one of his idols, the suave TV cowboy Ray Montane, Tom’s life is transformed. They move to Hollywood and all his dreams seem to have come true. Soon, however, the sinister side of Tinseltown will cast its shadow and a shocking act of violence change their lives forever. 2007 What happened all those years ago remains a secret that corrodes Tom’s life and wrecks his marriage. Only when his estranged son is charged with murder do the events resurface, forcing him to confront his demons. As he struggles to save his son’s life, he will learn the true meaning of bravery.
Powerfully written and intensely moving, The Brave explores our quest for love and identity, the fallibility of heroes and of parents and the devastating effects of family secrets.
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TURBULENCE Foden, Giles In the early spring of 1944 a young weather forecaster, Henry Meadows, is summoned by his superior and told he is being posted to Scotland. The big push towards D-Day is underway, and the weather will be a vital factor in the plans of the Allied forces. But why Scotland, when Meadows' colleagues are all working on the south coast with the Americans? Meadows is told he must find and get to know a famous forecaster, Wallace Ryman, who has turned pacifist and will have nothing to do with the war effort. Ryman is known to be in possession of a theory which could have a crucial impact on the forecasting for D-Day, but which he will not impart. Meadows must ingratiate himself with Ryman, must spy on him. Thus begins Giles Foden's ambitious new novel, in which the weather is a great unfolding drama, one which will sweep Meadows up and then hurl him down again. Will he be able to get the information his superior so urgently wants, and make the crucial contribution he dreams of making to the war? The tide of events is about to turn, and suddenly Henry Meadows is at the centre of them.
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LUCKY BREAK Freud, Esther It is their first day at Drama Arts, and the circle of huddled, nervous students is told in no uncertain terms that here, unlike at any other drama school, they will be taught to Act. There will be no performing, no showing off, no prancing around in fancy dress. Here, they will learn to Be. To exist in their own world on the stage. But just around the corner is the real world - an alluring, pitiless place where only eight per cent of actors are working at any given time (and mostly the same eight per cent). It is a world in which each of them, in their most fervent dreams, hopes to flourish and excel. Dan, ambitious and serious, has his sights fixed on Hamlet, and also on fiery, rebellious Jemma, while Nell, weighed down with insecurities, wonders if she will ever be cast as anything other than the maid. She’ll never compete, she knows this, with the multitude of long legged beauties thronging the profession – most notably Charlie, with her flawless complexion and steely confidence, whose effortless ascendance is nothing less than she expects. Shy, slight Hettie is simply looking for a place to belong, drifting from job to job, prepared to do anything, or almost anything, to please.
Over the following decade these young actors will grapple with semi-derelict homes, haphazard tours, illogical auditions, deluxe caravans, unobtainable agents, rocky relationships and red-carpet premieres. This dazzling new novel from Esther Freud uncovers a world of ruthless ambition, uncertain alliances and the tarnished and many-sided holy grail of Success.
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THE WHOLE DAY THROUGH Gale, Patrick When forty-something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days – and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional yardstick by which she has judged every man since. She’s cautious – and he’s married – but they can’t deny that feelings still exist between them. Are they brave enough to take the second chance at the lasting happiness that fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need to do what seems to be the right thing? Taking its structure from the events of a single summer’s day, THE WHOLE DAY THROUGH is a bittersweet love story, shot through with an understanding of mortality, memory and the difficulty of being good. In it, Patrick Gale writes with scrupulous candour about the tests of love: the regrets and the triumphs, and the melancholy of failing.
THE WHOLE DAY THROUGH is vintage Gale, and displays the same combination of wit, tenderness and acute psychological observation as his Richard & Judy bestseller NOTES FROM AN EXHIBITION.
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GENTLEMAN'S RELISH Gale, Patrick Wry and perceptive, GENTLEMAN’S RELISH is a new collection of short stories written by Patrick Gale over the last ten years. The title piece observes the awkward dance of a father around his enigmatic adolescent son. From the macabre story “Cookery”, where one boy’s obsession with cooking and food culminates in a fatal climax, to “Hushed Casket”, where a settled and unremarkable couple suddenly embark on a dramatic erotic journey, the stories are never predictable. Gale demonstrates how simple acts or conversations have the potential to drastically alter the destiny of a relationship, as in “Dreams”, where a simple discussion about dreaming becomes a catalyst for the breakdown of a settled couple’s relationship. “Fourth of July, 1862”, written to celebrate the anniversary of the publication of ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, is a compassionate portrait of Alice’s elder sister, a character neglected by Lewis Carroll but imagined here in poignant detail. In “Freedom”, a rickety caravan is handed down through generations of one family, loaded down with memories and a promise of refuge. Mistaken at a book festival for her more flamboyant namesake in “Petals in a Pool”, a timid writer of English satires finds herself bewildered by a few days lived in another person’s skin. Other stories take on a broad scope of subjects, tracing the loneliness and violence that can seep into ordinary people’s lives. Publisher: UK: HarperCollins Schedule: Publication: October 2009 |
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MY LAST DUCHESS Goodwin, Daisy The evening of Cora Cash's masquerade ball, nothing has been left to chance. Gorgeous, spirited and extravagantly rich, her wardrobe stuffed with Parisian couture, Cora is the closest thing New York society has to a princess. Her mother has devised for her a debut that promises to be the most opulent of the season, indeed of the gilded 1890s. The show-stopper of a ball is but the prelude to a campaign that will see her mother whisk Cora - aboard the family's private yacht - to the culture and sophistication of Europe. Mrs Cash has her heart set on the ultimate prize: a title for her daughter. Rumour has it that in England, impoverished blue-bloods are queuing up for introductions to American heiresses - and seem content to overlook the sometimes lowly origins of their fortunes. Plunged into the heart of the English aristocracy - a fascinating world bristling with arcane rules and pitfalls - Cora finds that she must summon every ounce of wit and courage she possesses. For there are those who feel threatened by her beauty and wealth, who would like nothing better than for Cora to pack her monogrammed luggage and run. But perhaps they have underestimated this particular heiress. A story of the fin de siècle romance between England and America, Daisy Goodwin's debut novel is lavish, hugely charming, deliciously dark and completely unputdownable. Publisher: UK: Headline; US: St Martin's Press Schedule: Publication: April 2010 |
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LIFE TIMES: STORIES 1952 - 2007 Gordimer, Nadine Throughout her career, the internationally renowned South African writer Nadine Gordimer has built a literary reputation with her incisive short stories and her acclaimed novels. Together with her essays, now collected in TELLING TIMES, this highly imaginative and committed body of work won her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. In the opinion of the Nobel Academy, 'Through her magnificent epic writing she has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity.' Gordimer has said that, rather than the coherence suggested by the novel, the experiece of human life is more like ' the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment.'
Now, for the first time, we can see the full range of Gordimer's outstanding achievement as she explores the borderland between private emotions and the forces of the external world, from the 'wonderful talent' (Observer) and 'absolute assurance' (TLS) of her early work to the ironic, passionate and humorous stories that have characterised her later collections. Spanning six decades, the thirty-five stories published here represent the exceptionally entertaining and challenging best of one of the great writers of our time.
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THE RADLEYS Haig, Matt On a leafy street in the quiet village of Bishopthorpe there lives a very ordinary family. Peter Radley is the village doctor, and his wife Helen is part of the local book club. Their children Clara and Rowan may be experiencing all the hormonal anguish of being teenagers…but that’s only a normal part of growing up, and the Radleys are nothing if not normal. Yet when Clara finds herself driven one night to committing a bloodthirsty act of violence, her parents react with resignation rather than horror. After years of keeping the family’s true nature a secret, Peter and Helen must now explain everything to their children: why it is that their skin is so sensitive to sunlight, why they all find garlic so repulsive, and why Clara’s recent decision to go vegan has been so detrimental to her health…Not everything is as it seemed with the Radleys. Unless they seemed like abstaining vampires to you. Reeling from their parents’ revelation, and with the police closing in, Clara and Rowan are stunned by the further discovery that they also have an uncle, a smooth-talking and decidedly active vampire who has been kept away from them all their lives. Now the mysterious Uncle Will may be all that stands between Clara and public exposure. But when he swoops into the village to save the day, he unleashes a host of shadowy secrets that will bring the whole Radley family to the point of self-destruction.
A dark and witty spin on vampire culture, THE RADLEYS is also a sensitive portrait of an unravelling marriage and of a family learning the hard way that blood runs thicker than water...
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ONE FOR SORROW Hartley, Sarah It is 1953, and the small seaside town of Lymerstone is in mourning after a school bus accident claims the lives of an entire class at St. Jude's School. That is, apart from one lucky child, Pete Roberts, the son of the local doctor. Hundreds of miles away a young nun, Sister Rosemary Jones, opens an envelope sent by her older brother Rudy, containing only a newspaper cutting reporting the tragedy. Why does she suddenly feel compelled to leave the Abbey, to be among those who are grieving and to offer comfort to the parents and children left behind? The people of Lymerstone pay equal attention to superstition and to God; they do not hide their jealousy of Dr and Mrs Roberts, the wealthy couple whose rather ordinary son was spared. And when Sister Rosemary arrives, some are wary of the enigmatic stranger while others consider her arrival a blessing, in a place exhausted by the hardship of war. Through the diaries she has kept since childhood, we learn how Sister Rosemary is welcomed to Downyside Farm, home to Will and Jess Trelevyn. Rosemary slips easily into their lives and is drawn to the families coming to terms with their loss. But as the years roll on, the secrets of Sister Rosemary's hidden past begin to overshadow the secure life she has worked so hard to establish. She fights the fears that threaten to overwhelm her, but even so, those who have come to love and trust her will be shattered by unimaginable events she cannot control. Lymerstone makes front page news yet again. This is a dark tale of a childhood interrupted, of hope and of loss. It depicts the inevitable damage of grief and love left unspoken, and - above all - the enduring resilience of human nature. Publisher: Not Yet Sold Schedule: Delivery Feb 2010 |
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MIDNIGHT FUGUE Hill, Reginald It starts with a phone call to Superintendent Dalziel from an old friend asking for help. But where it ends is a very different story. Gina Wolfe has come to Mid-Yorkshire in search of her missing husband, believed dead. Her fiance, Commander Mick Purdy of the Met, thinks Dalziel should be able to take care of the job. What none of them realize is how events set in motion decades ago will come to a violent head on this otherwise ordinary summer's day. A Welsh tabloid journalist senses that the story he's been chasing for years may have finally landed in his lap. A Tory MP's secretary suspects her boss's father has an unsavoury history that could taint his prime ministerial ambitions. The ruthless entrepreneur in question sends two henchmen out to make sure the past stays in the past. But the lethal pair dispatched have some awkward secrets of their own. Four stories, two mismatched detectives trying to figure it all out, and 24 hours in which to do it: Dalziel and Pascoe are about to learn the hard way exactly just how much difference a day makes!
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THE WOODCUTTER Hill, Reginald THE WOODCUTTER is a fast-moving psychological thriller from the award-winning author of the Dalziel and Pascoe series. Wolf Hadda's life has been a fairytale. From humble origins as a Cumbrian woodcutter's son he has risen to become a hugely successful entrepreneur, happily married to the girl of his dreams. But a knock on the door one morning brings all this to an end. Now universally reviled, thrown into prison while protesting his innocence, abandoned by friends and family, Wolf retreats into silence. Seven years later prison psychiatrist Alva Ozigbo makes the breakthrough. Wolf begins to talk, and under her guidance he gets parole, returning to his rundown family home in rural Cumbria. But there is a mysterious period in Wolf's youth when he disappeared from home and was known to his employers as the Woodcutter. And now the Woodcutter is back, looking for the truth -- and with the truth, revenge. Can Alva intervene before his pursuit of vengeance takes him to a place from which he can never come back? Publisher: UK: HarperCollins Schedule: Publication: July 2010 |
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THE WIDOW'S TALE Jackson, Mick A newly-widowed woman has done a runner. She just jumped in her car, abandoned her (very nice) house in north London and kept on driving until she reached the Norfolk coast. Now she’s rented a tiny cottage and holed herself away there, if only to escape the ceaseless sympathy and insincere concern. She’s not quite sure, but thinks she may be having a bit of a breakdown. Or perhaps this sense of dislocation is perfectly normal in the circumstances. All she knows is that she can’t sleep and may be drinking a little more than she ought to. But as her story unfolds we discover that her marriage was far from perfect. That it was, in fact, full of frustration and disappointment, as well as one or two significant secrets, and that by running away to this particular village she might actually be making her own personal pilgrimage. By turns elegiac and highly comical, THE WIDOW'S TALE conjures up this most defiantly unapologetic of narrators as she begins to pick over the wreckage of her life and decide what has real value and what she should leave behind. Publisher: World English Language: Faber Schedule: Delivered; Publication May 2010 |
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THE BILLY PALMER CHRONICLES Johns, Derek THE BILLY PALMER CHRONICLES brings together four short novels which describe the life of their eponymous hero from the age of ten to fifty-one. The first two books, WINTERING and WAKENING, were published separately in 2007 and 2008 to excellent reviews. They are now published in a single volume along with WESTERING and WANTING. In WESTERING, Billy is in his early thirties and living in New York. He has married an American, Alice, who is a theatre set designer, and is himself an editor, first at a literary magazine and then at a book publishing house. WESTERING is above all a portrait of a marriage, one in which Billy and Alice are discovering not only one another, but whether it is possible for two people to pursue careers in the arts and at the same time contemplate starting a family. In WANTING, Billy is middle-aged. Divorced from Alice, and three thousand miles away from both her and his teenage son Michael, he is back in London, and has taken up a career as an antiquarian book dealer. His relationship with Chloe, a cellist in her late twenties, is precarious, and he knows in his heart that it must end before very long. His father is dying, and he must come to terms with the idea of being head of the family. When the daughter of a recently deceased novelist writes to ask whether Billy will handle the archive, he finds himself going back to his beloved Somerset. And in returning to his past, he begins to be aware of the shape of his future. THE BILLY PALMER CHRONICLES is the story of a life, one which begins in the drab 1950s, in the shadow of Glastonbury Tor, and concludes in the London of the Millenium. It is an accidental life, perhaps, but nonetheless one that subtly yet powerfully draws the reader in.
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IF THE DEAD RISE NOT Kerr, Philip Berlin, 1934. The Nazis have been in power for just eighteen months, but already Germany has seen some unpleasant changes. As the city prepares to host the 1936 Olympics, Jews are being expelled from all German sporting organisations. Forced to resign as a homicide detective with Berlin's Criminal Police, Bernie is now house detective at the famous Adlon Hotel. The discovery of two bodies - a businessman and a Jewish boxer - involves Bernie in the lives of two hotel guests. One is a beautiful left-wing journalist intent on persuading America to boycott the Berlin Olympiad; the other is a German-Jewish gangster who plans to use the Olympics to enrich himself and the Chicago mob. As events unfold, Bernie uncovers a vast labour and construction racket designed to take advantage of the huge sums the Nazis are prepared to spend to showcase the new Germany to the world. It is a plot that finds its conclusion twenty years later in pre-revolutionary Cuba, the country to which Bernie flees from Argentina at the end of A QUIET FLAME. Publisher: UK: Quercus US: Penguin; Catalan: RBA; Danish: Modtryk; Dutch: De Boekerij; French: Le Masque; German: Wunderlich; Spanish: RBA Schedule: Published |
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ORCHID BLUE McNamee, Eoin It's January 1961, and the beaten, stabbed and strangled body of nineteen year-old Pearl Gambol is discovered after a dance at Newry Orange Hall. Returning from London to investigate the case, Detective Eddie McCrink soon suspects that there may be people wielding influence over affairs, and that the accused, the enigmatic Robert McGladdery, may struggle to get a fair hearing. Presiding over the case is Lord Justice Curran, a man who nine years previously had found his own family in the news, following the murder of his own nineteen year-old daughter, Patricia. In a spectacular return to the territory of his Booker-longlisted THE BLUE TANGO, Eoin McNamee explores and dissects this notorious murder case, one which led to the last hanging on Northern Irish soil. Publisher: UK: Faber Schedule: Delivered; Publication: November 2010 |
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DUST AND STEEL Mercer, Patrick Thrilling military history set during the Indian Mutiny, perfect for fans of Andy McNab and Bernard Cornwell. As the ship docked in Bombay, the shocking news of the rising by the Indian mutineers and their massacre of women, children and civilians reached Anthony Morgan and his company. Even so, they were hardly prepared for what they now faced in this country, so unknown to them, where they found it hard to understand who was friend or foe among the native troops. Morgan himself has another quest. On discovering that the son he had fathered, his child's mother and her husband, Morgan's old sergeant, are captives up in the hills where the enterprising Rhani of Jansi is building up her forces, he is determined to find a way to rescue them and lead them to safety.
A gripping tale of one of the great challenges to the Victorian Empire, and the difficult dilemmas of a soldier torn between orders and honor.
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ACCORDING TO ARNOLD: A NOVEL OF LOVE AND MUSHROOMS Milton, Giles Meet Arnold Trevellyan - charismatic, exuberant and somewhat strange. His love of mushrooms is matched only by a passion for Flora, his wife of twelve years. One day, while searching for mushrooms, Arnold makes a wondrous discovery that will turn his world upside down. He abandons Flora and heads to the South Pacific, where he finds himself marrying the queen of a remote tropical island. But all is not as it seems in Arnold's idyllic realm. In a series of cassettes sent to his oldest friend, he reveals that he is trapped in an international conspiracy in which mushrooms hold the key to life or death. Funny, tragic and intensely moving, ACCORDING TO ARNOLD is essential reading for all women who think they know their partner - and all men who think the grass is greener elsewhere. Publisher: UK: Macmillan; Finnish: Karisto; French: Buchet Chastel/Noir sur Blanc; Spanish: Le Factoria de Ideas Schedule: Delivered; Publication: May 2010 |
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SKIPPY DIES Murray, Paul Ruprecht Van Doren and his roommate Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster are probably the two biggest losers in Seabrook College for Boys. Ruprecht is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Skippy is on the swimming team, but mostly likes to play Nintendo – that is, until he falls for Lori, the Frisbee-playing Siren from the girls’ school next door. Nobody thinks he has a chance, especially since his rival happens to be Carl, the sinister school drug-dealer. But some losers don’t know when to quit, and while Ruprecht attempts to open a portal into a parallel universe, Skippy, in the name of love, is rapidly heading towards a showdown in the form of a doughnut-eating race that only one person will survive… Hilarious and heartbreaking as a tragic SOUTH PARK, with an educational programme of its own that ranges from mermaids to M-theory to the real meaning of the poems of Robert Frost, SKIPPY DIES captures in painful detail the humiliations and joys of being thirteen in a world that craves youth but can’t stand the young.
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THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF MAF THE DOG, AND HIS FRIEND MARILYN MONROE O’Hagan, Andrew In 1960 Frank Sinatra gave his friend Marilyn Monroe a dog. She called it Mafia Honey. The dog was born in Scotland. He was with Marilyn for the last two years of her life. She took him everywhere and he saw everything. He loved liver, shoes, and the mysteries of art. But mostly he loved his owner. Set in the twilight world of the early 1960s, this joyful literary comedy recounts the last phase in the life of a woman who would come to define the twentieth century. Here we see Marilyn with Frank, Marilyn with Jack, Marilyn recovering from her divorce with Arthur Miller; we see the actress on the set of her last film, and we see her alone and vulnerable, with only her faithful dog for company. Maf is witness, narrator, and philosophical chorus in a novel that embraces high art and popular culture, bedroom comedy, cats who mimic the poetry of William Carlos Williams, talking ladybirds, and famous immigrants. A picaresque adventure quite unlike anything since the great novels of the 18th century, Maf stands squarely (on four legs) alongside the heroic narrators of Swift, Sterne and Fielding. Publisher: UK: Faber; US: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Canadian: McClelland & Stewart; Czech: Kniha Zlin; Finnish: Tammi; French: Bourgois; German: S Fischer; Greek: Polis; Hungarian: Europa; Italian: Fazi Schedule: Delivered; Publication: May 2010 |
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BITTER LEAF Okereke, Chioma Bitterleaf is a richly textured and intricate novel set in Mannobe, a world that is African in nature but never geographically placed. At the heart of the novel is the village itself and its colourful cast of inhabitants: Babylon, a gifted musician who falls under the spell of the beautiful Jericho who has recently returned from the city; Mabel and M'elle Codon, twin sisters whose lives have taken very different paths, Magdalena, daughter of Mabel, who nurses an unrequited love for Babylon and Allegory, the wise old man who adheres to tradition. As lives and relationships change and Mannobe is challenged by encroaching development, the fragile web of dependency holding village life together is gradually revealed. An evocatively imagined debut novel from a promising new writer about love and loss, parental and filial bonds, and everything in between that makes life bittersweet. Publisher: UK: Virago Schedule: Published June 2010 |
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IN THE FLESH O'Riordan, Adam 'Vanishing Points’, a seductive series of snapshots from a family album, opens Adam O’Riordan’s first collection of poems. Negotiating the hidden paths from past to present, from the lost to the living, the poet seeks familiarity in a world of ‘false trails and disappearing acts’, moving through history to enter a modern era where men sit ‘pale as geishas, / by the glow of obsolete / computers’ performing late-night searches for lost lovers. Relatives, friends and other absences are gently coaxed into life, and urgently pressed on the reader as they surface, in the flesh.
Journeys begin with an indelible detail and open into new and astonishing landscapes of the head and the heart. Crossing space as well as time, O’Riordan’s poems move from the domestic interior to the remotest reaches of the cosmos, from ‘the damp walled room’ of a Northern poet to the ‘perforated dark’ of Ursa Major. Striding away from the raucous imaginings of Victorian Manchester, that ‘Queen of the cotton cities’, the collection culminates in a serene sonnet sequence, ‘Home’, a slant look at the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth through their personal possessions, intersected by poems treating recent, sometimes unsettling incidents.
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THE GOOD MAN JESUS AND THE SCOUNDREL CHRIST Pullman, Philip Philip Pullman on his extraordinary retelling of the gospel stories to be published as part of Canongate’s Myth Series:
“By the time the gospels were being written, Paul had already begun to transform the story of Jesus into something altogether new and extraordinary, and some of his version influenced what the gospel writers put in theirs. Paul was a literary and imaginative genius of the first order who has probably had more influence on the history of the world than any other human being, Jesus certainly included.... The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”
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I, KATY SULLIVAN Roberts, Maria Life couldn't be better for Katy Sullivan. OK, The Manchester newspaper she has been working on is closing down (unhappy days), but luckily for 31 year-old Katy she has landed an exciting job on a glossy magazine called IN London (happy days). She is dating Dan, a sex-on-legs, sex-on-the-bed, sex-anywhere news reporter for the BBC, and they're going to relocate to London together and cohabit. Life is looking brilliant. Katy's eleven year-old son Joe is a clever little angel, exhibiting not a hint of those adolescent moods she has heard about. Phew. Mark, Joe's father, who went travelling to Asia four years ago, has kept on travelling and isn't likely to come home. Phew too - that keeps romance simple for Katy, because at least she hasn't got her first love in the picture to complicate things. That is until she discovers Dan's secret. He has been having an affair with a regional weather girl and is about to become a father himself, Any-Day-Now. How could he? Oh what a *ƒqƒ®* !
And so Katy rapidly moves to London with Joe, where they forge friendships with an unusual group of flatmates and their family swells to ten. Then, just as Katy is ready to fall in love again, she bumps into Mark...
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AND THE LAND LAY STILL Robertson, James It is the age of the Bomb, the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher and North Sea Oil. As Nationalism becomes a credible political force in Scotland, a gay photographer, a feminist journalist, a disillusioned war veteran and a guilt-ridden Conservative MP find their private lives entangled with the ideological conflicts of the times. In the shadows linking their stories is Peter Bond, an alcoholic British intelligence officer lured into a clandestine war against extreme nationalism. Through the interweaving lives of the characters in this panoramic novel, a portrait emerges of a country of unfulfilled dreams, personal compromises and hidden agendas. When a nation’s freedom and independence are at stake, how do men and women come to terms with their own shifting identities? Publisher: UK: Hamish Hamilton Schedule: Delivered; Publication: August 2010 |
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DARK WATERS Ross, Jack A young man’s partially dismembered body is fished out of the Everglades. His death is written off by the police as a suicide or drunken prank gone wrong, but scrawled on the palm of his left hand is a telephone number that investigative journalist Deborah Jones knows only too well: it’s hers. Only hours before his death, the victim tried to contact Deborah – but what had he wanted to tell her? Charged by his distraught parents to find out the truth behind their son’s death, Deborah and her partner, Miami Herald editor Sam Goldberg, enter the shadowy world of electronic espionage. They discover that the victim was involved in high-level hacking and had located incriminating pages that had been removed from the government’s official report into the events of 9/11. Convinced that a sinister ring of security service operatives was closing in on him, he disposed of the top-secret missing pages, leaving few clues as to their whereabouts. The pair must track down the documents before they fall into the wrong hands - but Deborah must fend for herself when Sam is left comatose after a brutal attack on them both. Whoever silenced the young hacker now wants Deborah and Sam dead too – but what secret could be worth this kind of deadly cover-up? Undaunted, Deborah sets out to trace the conspiracy back to its source; but as she realises just how high up the trail of corruption goes, the fearless reporter finds herself in very deep and dangerous waters indeed.
DARK WATERS is the gripping new thriller of treason and deceit at the highest level of government from REQUIEM author Jack Ross.
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THE SHAPE OF HER Somerville, Rowan Max and Tine are spending a glorious summer on the Greek island of her childhood holidays. Both are in their mid-twenties and for both, this is their first serious relationship. It ought to be perfect - a secluded house on a stunning cove; rich local food and wine; the cooling water and seductive heat. Yet from the minute they arrive Tine seems tense. Despite their obvious desire for each other, Tine becomes distant, obsessed that the house is being watched. And as Max struggles to make sense of the barriers to their intimacy, he senses shadows lying beneath the tranquil beauty of the island. For every island has a past, every person a secret history… Dark, erotic, and compelling, this is a novel about the borderlands between love and sex; the place where our past becomes our present.
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DANCING BACKWARDS Vickers, Salley Violet Hetherington has taken the rash step of joining a transatlantic cruise ship to New York to visit Edwin, an old friend. As she makes the six day crossing, she relives the traumatic events that led to her losing Edwin's friendship, and abandoning her career as a poet, for the safety of marriage and domesticity. Despite her natural reserve, she meets a rich variety of passengers travelling with her, who affect her understanding of her own past. Most significantly, she meets Dino, the dance host, whose motives in befriending Vi are shady, but who teaches her to ballroom dance - and inadvertently helps her to recover from her past.
Moving between the late sixties and the present day, DANCING BACKWARDS is written with the lightness of touch and psychological insight which characterise Salley Vickers' acclaimed work. This bittersweet novel is subtle, poignant and wonderfully entertaining.
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MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU... Young, Louisa While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country and their survival in the trenches of Belgium, Nadine Waveney and Julia Locke make the best of things at home. Julia and Peter are married, and every day Julia prepares for her husband's return. For Nadine and Riley, however, things are not so certain. They become engaged, and then they too wait for their future, Nadine becoming a nurse to men just like her fiance. But the future has something terrible in store for Riley. MY DEAR I WANT TO TELL YOU... is a First World War novel with a difference, describing the experiences of women left at home as much as that of men in the trenches. The title comes from a standard letter which was provided to soldiers who were wounded and admitted to hospital. Louisa Young has powerfully expressed the heightened emotional intensity that war brings for all who experience it and all who are drawn into it. MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU... is a fascinating and moving story from a gifted writer whose past successes include the BABY LOVE trilogy and the LIONBOY books for children. Publisher: UK: HarperCollins; US: HarperCollins; Canadian: HarperCollins; Dutch: Karakter; German: List; Hebrew: Yedioth; Italian: Garzanti; Polish: Proszynski; Portuguese (Portugal): Civilizacao; Portuguese (Brazil): Globo Schedule: Delivered; Publication: February 2011 |
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A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH Armstrong, Sue Too often caricatured by the media as 'doctors of death', pathologists are medicine's key diagnosticians, on whom life itself often depends. Post mortems are in fact a very small element of what pathologists do. Primarily their job is to identify from specimens sent to the lab from clinics and operating theatres exactly what a patient is suffering from and what treatment he or she is likely to respond to. Pathologists are disease specialists - some are experts in diseases of the tissues, the brain or blood, others in diseases caused by bacteria and viruses; only a small proportion are experts in forensic science. In A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH Sue Armstrong encounters fourteen of the most eminent pathologists in the world, who work in fields as diverse as cancer research, the identification of bones in mass graves, and brain damage in deliberately shaken babies. The resulting book offers a fascinating snapshot of the practical, ethical and philosophical challenges facing contemporary medicine and powerfully conveys the excitement and drama of working at the interface of research science and practical medicine.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH was originally published by Dundee University Press in October 2008 and will be reissued with new material by Canongate in Spring 2010.
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AN EDUCATION Barber, Lynn When the journalist Lynn Barber was 16 she was picked up at a bus-stop by an attractive older man who drew up in his sports car, and from that moment on her life was almost wrecked. A bright, confident girl, on course to go to Oxford, she began a relationship which, incredibly, was encouraged by her conventional, suburban parents and which took her into the louche, semi-criminal world of west London just as the 1960s began. Ruin beckoned, until one day she made an important discovery. 'An Education', the title chapter of this fascinating memoir, was highly praised when first published in Granta magazine. The BBC film version (scripted by Nick Hornby) was premiered at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival. Publisher: UK: Penguin; US: Atlas Books; US Audio: Blackstone Audiobooks; Czech: Mlada Fronta; Danish: Art People; Dutch (serial): Vrij Nederland; Hungarian: Partvonal; Italian (serial): Internazionale; Polish: Bertelsmann Media; Portuguese: Bertrand; Schedule: Published |
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THE RELUCTANT TOMMY: RONALD SKIRTH'S EXTRAORDINARY MEMOIR OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR Barrett, Duncan In the First World War, Ronald Skirth was an ordinary tommy. His experiences were like those of many others: fighting in the trenches under constant bombardment, seeing all his friends die around him, suffering under a cowardly commanding officer, enduring shell shock and finally, somehow, surviving. But Skirth’s story is more extraordinary than that. For on the Flanders battlefield he had a moment of epiphany when he came across the dead body of a teenaged German soldier. The boy was just like him. His corpse was bizarrely untouched, and in his hand was a photo of his girlfriend, who looked just like Skirth’s own sweetheart, Ella. Afterwards Skirth resolved that he would never again help to take a human life. He altered the trajectory of guns so that they fired harmlessly, and embarked on other small acts of sabotage at huge risk to his own life. Under immense pressure from the authorities he suffered breakdowns and attacks of amnesia, but somehow Skirth maintained his campaign of active pacifism, lived out the war, and returned to marry Ella.
Making use of Ronald Skirth’s letters and postcards to Ella, his contemporary journals and the memoir he wrote in his retirement fifty years later, THE RELUCTANT TOMMY is the fascinating story of a man who stuck by his principles in impossible circumstances, and who had the courage to risk being shot as a ‘coward’; an ordinary soldier with a truly remarkable story.
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MELTDOWN ICELAND Boyes, Roger It is a truism that when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold. The subprime mortgage crisis, which began in America in 2007, unleashed a veritable epidemic of financial ill health all over the world. All European countries were affected, and the developing world also felt a chill. However it was Iceland, a tiny volcanic outcrop in the North Atlantic whose population of 300,000 had the highest GDP and counted itself the happiest in the world, which caught the worst cold. It has nearly killed them. For a few short years, the Icelanders deluded themselves that they were rich. Dour Reykjavik became the Capital of Cool. Rock musicians like Damon Albarn bought houses and stakes in pubs. Clubs boomed, the alcohol was expensive and the Krona was strong. All over the world people are trying to understand what caused the economic crisis and are asking themselves who is to blame. In Iceland that question is easily answered and the handful of bankers and politicians responsible have had to hire body guards, hole themselves up in their country houses and stay off the streets for fear of attack. Collaborating with the business editor of Iceland's leading daily newspaper, award-winning writer Roger Boyes tells the inside story of the bankrupting of Iceland and explains how it has ramifications for us all, from the private and public investors who trusted their money in Iceland's banks, to the workers in high street clothes stores whose owners no longer can pay for the shirts on their own backs. Writing with panache and colour, and drawing on interviews with everyone from the prime minister, Sir Phillip Green, the governor of the central bank, Bjork and the local fisherman, MELTDOWN ICELAND is an authoritative and compelling account of the financial destruction of this tiny, icy but vibrant country. Publisher: US and UK: Bloomsbury Schedule: Published |
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THE PLOT: A BIOGRAPHY OF AN ENGLISH ACRE Bunting, Madeleine Madeleine Bunting's father was a sculptor and a deeply conservative man with a passionately romantic attachment to North Yorkshire, and in particular a small plot of the moors. After his death, Bunting wanted to understand this combative parent and his love of his English acre; she also wanted to explore what belonging means in a highly mobile world. She set off on an extraordinary odyssey into the story of this acre of uninhabited, remote moor. Bunting discovered that it had been touched by surprisingly dramatic events over thousands of years. In prehistory the area was home to huge and mysterious Neolithic forts and earthworks; it was the site of one of England’s biggest defeats by the Scots in the Middle Ages; and the austere Cistercian monks who built the extraordinary Byland Abbey nearby owned the acre for 400 years. She traces how the plot was used as a drovers’ road, the path for the thundering hooves of hundreds of cattle who walked over it for centuries; situated on one of England’s most dramatic escarpments, Wordsworth came and admired the view. Today millions of tourists come in his footsteps to contemplate the vast swath of land and sky. This is a landscape shaped by the needs of the sheep who patiently crop the moorland and the grouse slaughtered there every autumn. The farmers struggle to make a living from the land; Bunting’s father left his own mark on the landscape he fell in love with: as a penniless young artist he built a war memorial chapel there in 1957. By learning about the plot, Bunting comes to terms with her father and reaches an understanding of his ideals. THE PLOT is an original, heartfelt and brave book which performs a deft and delicate balancing act between the deeply emotional and the political. By telling the story of one acre, Bunting charts how land has been and is used to produce food, meaning, myth and home. It shows what a contested, layered place England is, and what belonging to a part of it might mean to any one of us. 'A wonderful excavation of what a 'sense of place' might mean' - Robert Macfarlane, author of THE WILD PLACES
'She paints a vivid, poignant picture of a corner of England, precious to her' - Simon Jenkins
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THE WEEKENDERS Chappell, Kate THE WEEKENDERS is a fun, unique guide to gorgeous and unusual weekends away in the UK. In these times of recession, more and more people are eschewing short breaks abroad to explore Britain instead, and Kate’s guide to the best and quirkiest places to stay will capture their imaginations. The book is categorised not by area, but by theme: foodie, romantic, seaside, city, etc., giving the reader a wealth of choice about somewhere new to go that suits not only their interests, but also their budget. As well as listing unusual and characterful hotels that don’t cost the earth, it contains extensive and enthusiastic advice on where to eat, what to do, and how to get there. These breaks offer comfort, style, and the excitement of discovery, right on our own doorsteps. Publisher: (Not yet sold) Schedule: Delivery: Spring 2010 |
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SHAKESPEARE ON STAGE Curry, Julian In this fascinating collection of interviews, Julian Curry talks to the most famous and respected actors of our age about one iconic performance they have given in a Shakespearean role. Patrick Stewart talks about playing Prospero, Kevin Spacey tells Julian about the Old Vic’s 2005 production of Richard II, and Derek Jacobi talks about his Olivier-winning Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Each interview is a wonderfully personal account of the creative process, and conjures up extraordinary productions that would otherwise be lost to us. Perhaps the greatest joy of the book is the glimpses we get of each actor’s personality – including some quite unladylike language from Dame Judi Dench in response to her critics, Ian McKellen musing on Shakespeare as the inventor of rap, and Brian Cox’s blood-thirsty relishing of possibly the most realistic hand amputations in the history of theatre.
Julian Curry is an actor who has worked with many of his interviewees, sometimes in the play they are talking about. He is uniquely placed to create a rapport with his famous subjects.
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WHAT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT ANIMALS Diski, Jenny Jenny Diski has always been fascinated by how we watch ourselves, from the points of view of psychology, sociology and surveillance. She has watched animals and written about them, visiting places where animals are studied (university departments and field studies here and abroad) and spending time with the researchers and the animals. She has also watched in an unofficial way - birds outside her study window, ants on the patio, zoos, safari parks, her cats. She has used these travels and encounters to observe not only the watchers and the watched but also more general human behaviour, and of course herself. WHAT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT ANIMALS is about Jenny Diski's own experience as both a watcher (a teacher in state schools and a 'free school' that she set up in the 70's) and as watched (in childhood, in school, in a psychiatric hospital, and as a writer). Publisher: UK: Virago Schedule: Publication Summer 2010 |
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TELLING TIMES: WRITING AND LIVING, COLLECTED ESSAYS 1954 - 2009 Gordimer, Nadine Nadine Gordimer’s life reflects the true spirit of the writer as literary icon who takes on individual human responsibility for justice. TELLING TIMES collects together for the first time all her non-fiction, spanning more than half a century, through the long fight to overthrow South Africa’s apartheid regime, to her role over the last thirty years in confronting the dangers of threats to freedom of expression, ethnic violence and AIDS. The range of this book is staggering, opening with Gordimer’s first piece in the New Yorker in 1954, in which she traces her emergence as a young writer in a racist country, continuing with her pioneering role in recognising the greatest African and European writers of her generation, to her courageous stance in support of Nelson Mandela and other members of the ANC during their years of imprisonment. TELLING TIMES is both an important document of twentieth-century social and political history, told through the voice of one of its most compelling and clear-sighted writers, and the closest we will ever get to the autobiography of one of our most celebrated literary figures. Publisher: UK: Bloomsbury; US: Norton; Canadian: Penguin Schedule: Delivered; Publication: April 2010 |
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WILFUL BLINDNESS Heffernan, Margaret In the 2006 case of the US Government vs Enron, the presiding judge instructed the jurors to take account the concept of wilful blindness as they reached their verdict about whether the chief executives of the disgraced energy corporation were guilty. It was not enough for the defendants to say that they did not know what was going on; that they had not seen anything. If they failed to observe the corruption which was unfolding before their very eyes, not knowing was no defence. The guilty verdict sent shivers down the spine of the corporate world. In this book, distinguished business woman and writer Margaret Heffernan examines the phenomenon of wilful blindness. Drawing on a wide array of sources from psychological studies and social statistics to interviews with the relevant protagonists she examines what it is about human nature which makes us so prone to willful blindness. Taught from infancy to obey authority, and absorbing the importance of selective vision as a key social skill, people exacerbate their tendency to become institutionalised by joining organisations which are run by like-minded people. She looks at how hard-work and the information overload of the modern workplace add to the problem. And she examines why whistleblowers and Cassandras are so very rare. Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to the family, this engaging and anecdotal book will explain why willful blindness is so dangerous in the globalised, interconnected world in which we live, before suggesting ways in which institutions and individuals can start to combat it. In the tradition of Malcolm Gladwell and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Margaret Heffernan’s thought-provoking book will force open our eyes. Publisher: UK: Simon & Schuster; US: Bloomsbury; Canadian: Doubleday Schedule: Delivery: Spring 2010 |
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RAVENSBRUCK Helm, Sarah On a marshy bit of land which once formed part of Heinrich Himmler’s country estate 50 miles north of Berlin are the remains of Ravensbruck concentration camp. Ravensbruck was a unique institution during the Nazi period - a concentration camp created for and staffed by women. Built to house 6,000 German political female prisoners at the beginning of the Nazi period, 160,000 women of all nationalities eventually passed through its gates. Resistance fighters, intelligence agents, communists and Jews were incarcerated and perished here. Among the anonymous thousands were many notable women – Gemma La Guardia, the sister of New York’s wartime mayor, de Gaulle’s niece, Kafka’s mistress and Odette Churchill. And a range of gory gynaecological experiments were carried out here on women and their foetus’.
The book will be much more than a catalogue of atrocity and depravity, however. At the heart of RAVENSBRUCK will be stories of heroism and survival. The narrative will centre on the experiences of women – from the farmer’s wife to the aristocratic intellectual - who had the resilience and mental and physical strength to withstand the systematic brutalisation and emerge from the camp against all the odds, alive. The book will interweave two narrative strands – that of inmates looking out and outsiders trying to comprehend what was going within – until the liberation of the camp by the Red Army, when the two stories naturally collide.
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SERVING BIPPS Hubbard, Kate 'Bipps' was the name by which James Reid, chief physician to Queen Victoria, referred to his royal mistress in letters to Susan Baring, a maid-of-honour and his wife-to-be. SERVING BIPPS offers portraits of six members of the Queen's Household - a governess, a lady-in-waiting, a maid-of-honour, a private secretary, a chaplain and a doctor - whose years of royal service spanned the entirety of Victoria's long reign (1837-1901). Drawing on private papers, letters and diaries (some published for the first time), Kate Hubbard focuses on the years each of her subjects spent at court and on their individual relationships with the Queen. The latter, while a highly demanding and frequently exasperating mistress, invariably inspired devotion. The six courtiers here, while never less than devoted and keenly aware of the obligations of duty, are notable for remaining capable of clear-eyed assessment of their sovereign, of seeing, as it were, the Bipps within the Victoria.
More broadly the book illuminates the closed world of the Victorian court, in all its stiffness, pettiness and occasional comedy, while casting a beam of light on the Queen herself, sitting squarely at its centre as her household orbits around her.
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BRIEF LIVES Johnson, Paul In the course of a long and successful career as a journalist and author, Paul Johnson has known popes, presidents, prime ministers, painters, poets and playwrights. And then there was the foul-mouthed publican Muriel Belcher, who ran the legendary Colony Club. Harking back to the scandalously anecdotal 17th-century book by John Aubrey on the celebrities of his times, BRIEF LIVES is the distilled essence of Johnson's experience of a variety of people who have contributed to our political, spiritual and cultural life. He advised Margaret Thatcher, counselled Princess Diana, had a drawing of him done by Ernest Hemingway, and enjoyed the company of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter at Buckingham Palace. He has been both an insider and a universal commentator on the individuals who have changed history, formed public taste, or simply lightened our lives by their presence. Publisher: UK: Hutchinson; Czech: Leda Schedule: Publication: June 2010 |
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TO SAVE A PEOPLE Kershaw, Alex TO SAVE A PEOPLE is the inspiring story of how one man made the greatest difference in the face of absolute evil. Raoul Wallenberg, the scion of a wealthy Swedish family, saved more than 100,000 Jewish men, women and children living in Budapest from extermination at the hands of Hitler's most dedicated mass-murderer, Adolf Eichmann. And then, after the war, Wallenberg disappeared, a victim of Soviet paranoia. Based on newly declassified archive material and extensive interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses, this is an epic story, told with Alex Kerhaw's customary verve. Publisher: World Rights: Da Capo Schedule: Delivered; Publication: Autumn 2010 |
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PAKISTAN Khan, Jemima Jemima Goldsmith was just 21 when she married Imram Khan, converted to Islam, began to learn Urdu and moved into his extended family house in Lahore, Pakistan. During the next decade she came to know and love Pakistan, “the land of the Pure”, in all its bewildering complexity and contradictions. In this book she revisits the country she got to know in the 1990’s, undertaking a journey which begins in Lahore, moves north to Peshawar and Islamabad before heading down to Karachi. Along the way she encounters a dazzling array of people – the ordinary, the infamous and the extraordinary - who best illustrate the paradoxes of this country of 165 million people which encompasses more than a dozen languages, several hundred tribes and is very different from the bearded zealots or military men of the stereotype. Pakistan will be an accessible and anecdotal, witty and revealing portrait of a country at the febrile epicentre of world affairs.
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DESPERATE GLORY Kiley, Sam DESPERATE GLORY is Sam Kiley’s account of 16th Air Assault Brigade’s 2008 tour of duty in Helmand Province. He was granted an unparalleled level of access by the Ministry of Defence. For the whole of their tour he lived and worked, without minders or restrictions, with the Brigade as they fought alongside Afghan troops to expel the Taleban from the lawless Helmand Valley, witnessing the struggle of the 8,000 young men and women of the Brigade to stay alive as they endured the most extended and intense phase of the war.
DESPERATE GLORY is a vivid first draft of history, featuring an extensive and varied cast of characters: Major Hugh Benson of the Royal Irish, whose three sons and nephew were fighting alongside him; Mark Carleton-Smith, the dapper ex-Irish Guards officer who was in command of the whole operation; Jodie Kennedy, a “loggie” driver of the Royal Logistics Corps; and Afghan soldiers and locals trying desperately to carry on with their lives in the midst of the conflict.
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WHOOPS! HOW EVERYONE OWES EVERYONE AND NO ONE CAN PAY Lanchester, John After years of unprecedented success when the world was becoming (im)measurably richer, free-market capitalism has suddenly imploded. The reasons why this happened are, for most of us, obscure. Money touches on our deepest emotions, our most intimate fears and hopes, which makes it all the more difficult to accept the reality that in a downturn this sharp, in face of an economic crisis so systemic, we are no longer in control of crucial aspects of our lives.
Writing out of a simple need to understand what just happened, John Lanchester will examine the global economic collapse through each moment of this intensely human drama – from the population of Iceland being told that their banks had simply run out of money to the people of Cleveland, Ohio, finding their homes repossessed and their city now part-owned by Deutsche Bank; from the billionaire who gambled on share-prices and lost on a massive scale to the government economists who based their vital calculations on an inherently flawed mathematical model. A vivid, witty and crystalline account of the otherwise daunting mess that confronts us all, WHOOPS! will trace the ways in which economics, politics and human psychology all converged at this crucial moment, provoking a series of worldwide convulsions that changed the very nature of modern life.
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HOW PAKISTAN WORKS Lieven, Anatol In the past decade Pakistan has emerged as a country of immense importance. Large, heavily populated, strategically placed between Iran, Afghanistan and India, Pakistan has since its creation just over sixty years ago been pulled in several different, irreconcilable directions. In the wake of its development of nuclear weapons, Osama Bin Laden's presence in its unpoliceable border areas and now the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, there is a clear need to understand this remarkable place. The large British Pakistani community, its links to Pakistan, and the attraction of some of its members to Pakistan-based extremist groups, also make Pakistan of vital importance to the United Kingdom. Anatol Lieven worked in Pakistan as a journalist and has visited the country frequently over the years. His new book will be a key work - the necessary background to gaining a serious sense of Pakistan and its place in the world. Far from seeing Pakistan as the chaotic disaster area often portrayed in the media, Lieven instead sees it as a country that does work, albeit with difficulty and under threat. Within limits, and by the standards of its region rather than the West, it is a viable and coherent state.
Combining history and analysis with anecdotes from Anatol Lieven's own extensive travels across the immensely varied landscapes of Pakistan, HOW PAKISTAN WORKS is both highly informative and enjoyable - a book that allows the reader to understand why Pakistan should be so important to us all.
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RUSSIA AGAINST NAPOLEON Lieven, Dominic RUSSIA AGAINST NAPOLEON; The Battle for Europe 1807-1814 is a major new history of Russia's role in the Napoleonic wars, based on years of work in only recently accessible Russian archives. This is history at its most dramatic: a tale of huge-scale campaigns and battles whose outcome hung in the balance until the last moment. But this book is much more than just military history: it is also, for instance, the story of how Russian espionage penetrated the most secret core of Napoleon's regime and contributed significantly to its overthrow. The book is peopled by giants such as Napoleon and Alexander I but also by serfs and ordinary soldiers. The mobilisation of Russian society for war and the immense sufferings of ordinary Russians are among its key themes. The book shows that in many ways the Russian horse was the key hero in the empire's defeat of Napoleon. In this era horses played the role of the tank, aeroplane and lorry on a modern battlefield and of all areas of Russia's war economy it was horses where Russian superiority was greatest and most decisive. This book not just fills a big gap in our knowledge but also puts the Napoleonic wars in a radically new and different global perspective. Publisher: World: Penguin Press; Dutch: Spektrum; Germany: C Bertelsmann;Russian: Rosspen Schedule: Published |
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BEYOND THE HORIZON MacArthur, Ellen In February 2001, when she sailed across the finish line of the Vendee Globe, 24 year-old Ellen MacArthur became the youngest person and fastest woman to circumnavigate the globe and an overnight celebrity. Shortly afterwards she announced an even more ambitious five-year plan. As well as a full programme of competitive sailing in both crewed and solo races, Ellen planned to build a state-of-the-art multi-hulled boat and attempt to break the solo non-stop round the world record. Picking up where her first book, TAKING ON THE WORLD, ends, BEYOND THE HORIZON charts the highs and lows of Ellen’s extraordinary journey. From dismasting in the Jules Verne to capsizing in the Challenge Mondial, Ellen recounts those thrilling years of testing her nerve at sea before breaking the Round the World record in the winter of 2005/2006. Back in the public eye, Ellen becomes a Dame and is awarded the Legion d’Honneur. But with the world record in her pocket, she has ideas beyond sailing. She stops racing for the first time in over a decade and embarks on a period of reflection. Travelling to South Georgia to visit the beautiful Southern Ocean, she comes home with more than the images of breathtaking untouched scenery that she had been expecting. Suddenly seeing life differently, she begins a new journey of discovery much closer to home. She travels along canals in a tiny tented canoe, discovering the underbelly of post-Industrial England, puts down roots for the first time, and comes to realise exactly what her next challenge will be...
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READING THE ROCKS Maddox, Brenda Why are kangaroos found only in Australia? What created the Niagara Falls? Why did horses have to be introduced to the Americas? How were volcanoes created? Why are the rock formations of the Alps so twisted? Did the Biblical Flood really happen? These were the kinds of far-reaching questions that a 19th century club of gentlemen scientists set themselves the task of answering – and their ground-breaking discoveries shaped the way we understand the world today. Based in a gaslit debating chamber by the River Thames, members of the Geological Society would roam the world to gather fossils, bones and rocks as evidence for their theories. With technological advances opening up the possibilities of science to the masses, geology quickly became the most popular and dynamic of the new sciences, and the Society’s findings were delivered to an eager public. But the Geological Society found itself at the centre of an intense debate that rocked society to its core. If a geologist could prove that the world was formed billions of years before human life emerged, then a man could deny the hand of God in creating the world. For some members of the Society, these geological revelations would enable them to develop yet more radical theories – Charles Darwin based his theory of evolution on the geological work done by his mentor Charles Lyell. But for others, including Lyell, the full implications of their work were a profoundly frightening prospect. Although he gave Darwin his public support and recognised his own role as the ‘missing link’ in the younger man’s research, Lyell was nonetheless a reluctant evolutionist who would struggle for the rest of his life to reconcile himself to the damage done to his religious beliefs.
READING THE ROCKS tells the compelling story of Lyell, Darwin, and the other key geologists of the era: men who first learned how to read the layers of rock and mud to tell a new history of the world, and who in doing so precipitated a severe crisis of faith and had as wide an impact as the ideas of Copernicus and Freud.
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LIFE IS SWEET Miss Hope A splendid new book all about Miss Hope, her favourite recipes for old-fashioned confectionery, and a most delicious concoction of sweet stories, historical anecdotes and scandal to make the reader chuckle. Did you know that Montezuma drank 50 cups of hot chocolate a day in order to service his 50 wives? Or that Turkish Delight was invented as a medicine for sore throats? Roam through Miss Hope’s scrapbook and follow her diary as she makes coconut ice to take to the funfair, chocolate fish and chips for a trip to the seaside and hand-rolled champagne truffles to eat in bed. This beautiful book is a little nostalgic, really quite British and quintessentially Hope and Greenwood. Publisher: UK Ebury Schedule: Published |
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WHAT MATTERS IN JANE AUSTEN Mullan, John John Mullan is steeped in Jane Austen. In this book he will ask what makes her the greatest of all novelists, invoking Virginia Woolf's remark that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness. By looking closely at the intriguing minutiae of her fiction, the quirks and intricacies of her stories, he will bring her alive. Publisher: UK: Bloomsbury Schedule: Delivery: Autumn 2012 |
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AN UTTERLY EXASPERATED HISTORY OF MODERN BRITAIN O’Farrell, John Following his hugely popular account of the previous 2000 years, John O’Farrell now comes bang up to date with a hilarious modern history, asking ‘How the hell did we end up here?’
AN UTTERLY EXASPERATED HISTORY OF MODERN BRITAIN informs, elucidates and laughs at all the bizarre events, ridiculous characters and stupid decisions that have shaped Britain’s story since 1945, leaving the twenty-first century reader feeling fantastically smug for having the benefit of hindsight.
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SHIP OF FOOLS O’Toole, Fintan Ireland's economic miracle was for a time the envy of the world. And then it all went horribly wrong. In SHIP OF FOOLS Fintan O'Toole tells the story of the dizzying rise and sickening fall of the so-called 'Celtic Tiger' in a narrative voice that combines satire, controlled indignation and a superb command of Irish realities. Publisher: World Rights: Faber Schedule: Published |
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WITH A WORLD TO LOSE: THE DECLINE OF ENGLISH AND THE RETURN TO BABEL Ostler, Nicholas For most of the last three centuries the world's dominant power has used the English language and the resulting spread of the language has been all-pervasive. In 400 years native English-speakers have spread from a small island on the periphery of Europe to become one of the world's three largest language groups in number, and the one most widely distributed across the world as a whole. More important, the English language has become the preferred international medium for business, science and to a very large extent, entertainment. Scholars such as David Graddol now claim that English is less a lingua franca and more a basic part of global education for business, like maths or computing.
So is the future of English set fair? This is unlikely, Nicholas Ostler suggests in this provocative and fascinating book. Drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the origins of world languages, he argues that a clear lesson of history is that no language - however populous its speakers, confident its culture and advanced its technology - can remain indefinitely the world's lingua franca. Drawing on a great range of languages he analyses the political, commercial and social reasons why languages fall away as inexorably as they rise: English in the long term is even more exposed to creeping neglect and destructive reaction than many of the great linguistic reputations of the past, such as Akkadian and Aramaic, Sogdian and Latin, French and Portuguese. Can English look to its laurels?
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THE NEW MACHIAVELLI: HOW TO WIELD POWER IN MODERN BRITAIN Powell, Jonathan Niccolò Machiavelli is misunderstood, argues Jonathan Powell in his twenty-first-century reworking of the Italian philosopher’s influential masterpiece, THE PRINCE. Taking the lessons Machiavelli derived from his experience as an official in fifteenth-century Florence, Powell shows how these lessons can still apply today, illustrating each of Machiavelli’s maxims with a description of events that occurred during Tony Blair’s time as Prime Minister.
Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff from 1994 to 2007, Jonathan Powell recounts the inside story of that period, drawing on his own unpublished diaries. He tackles the critics of Blair’s ‘sofa government’ and gives a frank account of the intimate details of internal political rows. Among the topics he deals with are the failure to join the Euro or hold a referendum on the European constitution, the struggle with the hauliers' strike and the foot-and-mouth outbreak that postponed the 2001 election, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, relations with Clinton, Bush and Chirac, the banning of fox-hunting, and the triumphs and failures of spin and the scandals and inquiries – ranging from Bernie Ecclestone to the police investigation into ‘cash for peerages’.
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BENJAMIN BRITTEN: A CENTENARY LIFE Powell, Neil Benjamin Britten was born into a family of dentists in Suffolk in November 1913. His musical mother knew that her youngest child was destined for greatness - he was going to be “the fourth B” after Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Ben did not let her down, precociously composing "Quatre Chansons Francaises" while still at prep school, and heading for London and a scholarship at the Royal College of Music after only two years at secondary school. In the 1930s Britten quickly established himself as the leading British composer, befriending and collaborating with a strikingly gifted circle of literary and musical friends including W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Lennox Berkeley and Frank Bridge. Later he met the singer who was to form the centre of his emotional and musical life, Peter Pears. Conscientious objectors, Britten and Pears headed for America before the war began, until intense homesickness, provoked in part by Britten’s reading of George Crabbe’s poem "Peter Grimes", drove him home to East Anglia in 1942 and gave him the inspiration for his finest opera. Together the men established the Aldeburgh Festival and Snape Maltings, which they ran with such flair. This centenary biography of Benjamin Britten will place the composer firmly in the East Anglian landscape which he loved so much. It will also tell the story of an openly gay “marriage”, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal, one which survived every pressure, including Britten’s series of attachments to young boys. Publisher: UK: Hutchinson Schedule: |
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THE MAGNIFICENT SPILSBURY AND THE BRIDES IN THE BATH Robins, Jane Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty have one thing in common. They are spinsters and are desperate to marry. Each woman meets a smooth-talking stranger who promises her a better life. She falls under his spell, and becomes his wife. But marriage soon turns into a terrifying experience. In the dark opening months of the First World War, Britain became engrossed by ‘The Brides in the Bath’ trial. The horror of the killing fields of the Western Front was the backdrop to a murder story whose elements were of a different sort. This was evil of an everyday, insidious kind, played out in lodging houses in seaside towns, in the confines of married life, and brought to a horrendous climax in that most intimate of settings – the bathroom.
The nation turned to a young forensic pathologist, Bernard Spilsbury, to explain how it was that young women were suddenly expiring in their baths. This was the age of science. In fiction, Sherlock Holmes applied a scientific mind to solving crimes. In real-life, would Spilsbury be as infallible as the ‘great detective’?
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MY BODY: JOURNEY INTO FAMILIAR TERRITORIES Ross, Christopher The bestselling author of TUNNEL VISIONS: JOURNEYS OF AN UNDERGROUND PHILOSOPHER and MISHIMA'S SWORD returns to the subject he knows best: himself. In MY BODY, Ross provides a biography of the body at the midpoint of life, performing a tour d'horizon of the universal experience of middle age. Whilst examining and assessing the steady physical decay that the body endures, he investigates how this process might also be one of spiritual growth, for as Wittgenstein noted in his PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, the human body is the best picture we have of the human soul. This book will be a thinking man's aspirational guide to mid-life, a kind of manual for coming to terms with the tragic nature of a body in decline, a work that both accounts for how the body gets to be the way it is and considers the best ways to deal with it.
Interspersed with the story of the human body will be excerpts from Ross's own year-long journal on how he is coping with and addressing his own struggle between bodily decline and the desire to learn from it.
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KOESTLER: THE INDISPENSABLE INTELLECTUAL Scammell, Michael When Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia committed double suicide in 1983, a remarkable chapter in European culture came to an end. Koestler was a paradigm for a generation of mid-twentieth century writers who, having grown up in the shadow of World War One and the Great Depression, were inexorably drawn to the social, political and cultural conflicts caused by the immense upheavals of the time. First a Zionist, then a Communist, then an anti-Zionist and an anti-Communist, a scientist who was fascinated by the paranormal, Koestler was a man of contradictions. But whatever his position or concerns, he was always at the centre of the great ideas and events of his time. And in his writing, whether in novels such as DARKNESS AT NOON and ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE, or in non-fiction books such as THE GOD THAT FAILED, THE ACT OF CREATION and THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE, he was forever exploring the fundamental nature of things. Born in Budapest to Jewish parents, brought up during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, eventually naturalized as a British subject, he was a restless man who moved constantly between Europe, America and the Middle East. Michael Scammell has spent the past twenty years writing what will unquestionably be the definitive biography of a fascinating and enigmatic figure. Publisher: UK: Faber; US: Random House Schedule: Publication: February 2010 |
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CHANGING MY MIND Smith, Zadie Split into five sections – ‘Reading’, ‘Being’, ‘Seeing’, ‘Feeling’ and ‘Remembering’ – CHANGING MY MIND finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays – some published here for the first time – reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing of Obama, Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani or David Foster Wallace, she brings a practitioner’s care to the art of criticism, with a style as sympathetic as it is insightful.
CHANGING MY MIND is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent and funny – a gift to readers and writers both. Within its covers an essay is more than a column of opinions: it’s a space in which to think freely.
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THE EXTRA MILE: A 21ST CENTURY PILGRIMAGE Stanford, Peter Peter Stanford makes a modern-day pilgrimage around some of the most ancient religious sites in Britain, taking the spiritual temperature of an age often described as secular and sceptical. Do the present-day pilgrims he meets en route go simply in search of history, or does their journey have another significance rooted in the unholy times in which we live now? Are their numbers growing as more conventional church-going declines? THE EXTRA MILE is the evocative, often humorous, sometimes challenging story of one individual's pilgrimage in search of faith in Britain today. As he walks between Neolithic stones, ruined abbeys and miracle wells, Stanford explores the links between past and present belief and reflects on the spiritual state we are in. Publisher: UK: Continuum Schedule: Published March 2010 |
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CHURCHILL'S EMPIRE Toye, Richard ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ These notorious words, spoken by Churchill in 1942, encapsulate his image as an imperial die-hard, implacably opposed to colonial freedom - a reputation that, with his campaign against Indian self-government in the 1930s, he had willingly embraced. Earlier, however, he had been known for his pursuit of conciliation after the Boer War, for his denunciation of the ‘frightfulness’ of the Amritsar massacre, and for his role in Irish peacemaking. As a youthful minister at the Colonial Office before World War I, his political opponents had seen him as a Little Englander and a danger to the Empire. In order to understand the shifts in Churchill’s standing, it is necessary to place him in the context of his times. He sprang to fame as a self-made imperial hero, on the back of colourful adventures in India, the Sudan and South Africa, but soon exchanged the army and journalism for the different demands of politics. His attitudes were rife with paradoxes. He was simultaneously an advocate of humane treatment for subject peoples and an unrepentant believer in Anglo-Saxon superiority. Viewing him alongside famous contemporaries such as M.K. Gandhi, J.C. Smuts, and Leo Amery (his schoolfellow and later Cabinet colleague) gives us an insight both into what was conventional about Churchill’s opinions and what about them was unique. This is the first book to provide a comprehensive account of Churchill’s lifelong involvement with the Empire, from his childhood schooldays to his final premiership in the 1950s. Drawing upon a wealth of published and unpublished evidence, from private diaries to African war poetry and the Eagle comic, Churchill’s Empire provides a vivid and dynamic account of a remarkable man and an extraordinary era. Publisher: UK: Macmillan; US: Henry Holt Schedule: Delivered; Publication: February 2010 |
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A LIVING GODDESS Tree, Isabella In this groundbreaking account, Isabella Tree journeys into the mysterious world of virgin worship in the Kathmandu Valley and discovers a tradition that has evolved from a deep-seated belief in the power and supremacy of the Goddess. Originating with the medieval Malla kings, the practice of worshipping a Hindu goddess inside a Buddhist child is integrally bound up with the politics of power and continues to permeate the political struggles of Nepal.
As she weaves together the country’s mythical history with her own journey, Tree encounters living goddesses past and present and explores the intriguing and much-misunderstood world of Buddhist and Hindu tantra. Ever mindful of the haunting repercussions of the past and the uncertainty of the future, a colourful cast of royal astrologers, tantric priests and human rights activists guides her through the turmoil of present-day Nepal, from the royal family massacre in 2001 and the spectacular democratic uprising against the king in 2006, to the dissolution of the monarchy and the Maoist election victory in 2008; while in the heart of Kathmandu the little child goddess continues to preside on her throne, a powerful and influential presence at the epicentre of events.
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ADVENTURES IN THE ORGASMATRON Turner, Christopher This book is as much a history of the sexual revolution as a biography of one of the prime architects of the orgasmatron, the brilliant but deluded Austrian-Jewish inventor Wilhelm Reich. Reich began his career in Austria as a pupil of Freud’s and believed that sexual blockage was the root of physical and psychological illness, all of which could be cured by harnessing the body’s sexual energy inside a box. He pioneered a radical form of psychotherapy - vegetotherapy - which involved physical attacks on naked patients as they lay on the analyst’s couch.
Initially a committed communist, Reich’s political ideas were similarly unorthodox and subject to misinterpretation by the authorities. He believed that the family perpetuated bourgeois values and that its destruction, through the pursuit of free love, was the essential prerequisite to the creation of a communist society. Many dismissed his work as the delusions of a madman and eventually his activities drew the attention of the FBI. He was imprisoned for fraudulent trade in 1957 where he soon after died of a heart attack just before his ideas began to have widespread currency, as the sexual revolution, whose name he had coined, took hold. His school of therapy continues to be practiced to this day and it is still possible to build or buy orgone accumulators – the orgasmatrons of the title.
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RED HEAT: THE COLD WAR IN THE CARIBBEAN von Tunzelmann, Alex RED HEAT is the story of the how the USA and USSR played out Cold War tensions in the puppet theatre of the Caribbean. What neither had bargained on was that the puppets would come to life. Kennedy and Khrushchev might be the most familiar names in the story, but they were being manipulated by the Caribbean leaders. The narrative focuses on four outlaws who sought to establish their own visions of tropical paradise. From the Dominican Republic there is the paranoid dictator Rafael Trujillo, from Cuba the charismatic nationalist Fidel Castro, and, via Argentina, Che Guevara, who has the most famous face in history but whose deeds are hardly known at all. And from Haiti there is the deranged François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, a doctor who became a dictator and a voodoo high priest.
Kennedy became obsessed with stamping out communism and promoting democracy; Khrushchev panicked, and resorted to clumsy displays of swagger and belligerence. The result was decades of tyranny, conspiracy, murder and magic: the spiralling of the trade in illegal drugs, a new era of buccaneering on and off the high seas, and a narrowly evaded war that might have ended human life on earth. The story will also shed light directly on issues such as slavery, the war on drugs, and the situation in Guantanamo Bay.
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WE WERE YOUNG AND AT WAR Wallis, Sarah Take a moment to visit the book's website. WE WERE YOUNG AND AT WAR will for the first time tell the story of the Second World War by weaving together the diaries of teenagers growing up on opposite sides of the conflict. Written without hindsight and with disarming directness, these diaries are a unique, unselfconscious record of one of the most devastating times in history, made by its most vulnerable witnesses and unwilling participants. Yet despite war’s constant presence, the diarists also write about their daily lives, first loves, school pranks - and their attitudes to the adult world. Whether fighting for survival or fighting their enemy, these are all ordinary teenagers, growing up in extraordinary times. Not all survive to see the war’s end.
Using a British and an American teenagers’ accounts as the key narrative threads, WE WERE YOUNG AND AT WAR follows the chronology of the war, interweaving their accounts with the diaries of other children living through the same times in war-torn Europe, and in Japan. What emerges is a picture of hope, suffering, fear, prejudice, love and hate. Throughout it will be a compelling read, with dramatic events narrated in real time by those in the thick of it. Through the voices of these young people and others who are trying to survive in an unpredictable and constantly changing world, an extraordinarily vivid and personal picture of the Second World War emerges, powerfully bringing alive the experiences of growing up in wartime.
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LIVING DOLLS: THE RETURN OF SEXISM Walter, Natasha Empowerment, liberation, choice. Once the watchwords of feminism, these terms have now been co-opted by a society that sells women an airbrushed, highly sexualized and increasingly narrow vision of femininity. While the opportunities available to women may have expanded, the ambitions of many young girls are in reality limited by a culture that asks them to see consumerism and self-decoration as their only proper occupations, and their bodies as their only passport to success. At the same time we are encouraged to believe that the inequality we observe all around us is born of innate biological differences rather than social factors. Drawing on a wealth of research and personal interviews, the author of THE NEW FEMINISM and one of Britain's most incisive cultural commentators gives us a straight-talking, passionate and important book that makes us look afresh at women and girls, at sexism and femininity - today.
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CROW CITY Allan, Alice When "half-caste" Tomoko meets a ghost in Aoyama cemetery, her mission to help him takes her back in time to Tokyo's massive 1923 earthquake. Will she be brave enough to uncover the terrible story of his death? The next big quake is overdue; does history have to repeat itself? Publisher: Schedule: |
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A SEASIDE ADVENTURE: A TUMTUM & NUTMEG ADVENTURE Bearn, Emily Tumtum and Nutmeg are leaving the confines of Nutmouse Hall and voyaging on their most challenging adventure yet, at the seaside! Arthur and Lucy are going to stay with their Uncle, and Nutmeg is determined to keep an eye on the children while they are away. But of course they won't be alone as General Marchmouse decides to join the fun. And soon the General gets his wish as the mice find that their new friend Lord Seamouse needs their help. Together they must set out on an adventure to regain his lost treasure and stop his enemy, Purple Claw, from getting to it first. Publisher: UK: Egmont; UK Audio: BBC Audiobooks; US: Little, Brown Schedule: |
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THE BOY IN THE DRESS Blake, Quentin Dennis lives in a boring house in a boring street in a boring town. But he's about to find out that when you open your mind, life becomes anything but boring! You'll laugh, you'll cry, and once you meet Dennis, he'll live with you forever... Surprising, sharp and hilarious - this first novel for children is everything you would expect from David Walliams, co-writer and star of Little Britain.
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NEW TOWN SOUL Bolger, Dermot “Imagine what it must feel like to be a doll within a doll, to lose your own identity and spend your life in darkness…” Joey thought he’d done all the research on his new classmates before he met Shane and Geraldine. Shane is his new best friend, calm and cool with a personality for every occasion and a strange sense of recklessness about him. But why does Shane make Geraldine so uncomfortable? They’re both hiding something from Joey and the answer can only be found in the old house on Castledawson Avenue… Souls are snatched and gambles taken in this distinctly Irish supernatural novel set in Blackrock, Dublin. Based on the concept of changelings, Bolger’s first young adult novel is a riveting gothic thriller with a romantic subplot. Publisher: World English Language: Island Books Schedule: Publication June 2010 |
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TIME QUAKE Buckley-Archer, Linda When Peter told me that The Tar Man had lost possession of the device to my former master, Lord Luxon, I was afraid. For I knew Lord Luxon’s heart better, I think, than any man alive…Lord Luxon was that most dangerous of creatures, a good man who has turned bad. Kate Dyer and Peter Schock are just beginning to realise the full and terrifying consequences of time-travelling: each excursion that the children take into another century damages the time mantle of the universe, leaving the world vulnerable to devastating time quakes. Trapped once again in 1763 by the Tar Man, the children enlist the help of their loyal friend Gideon to track down both the elusive criminal and the anti-gravity machine that will put an end to time-travelling once and for all. But neither they nor the Tar Man have counted on the devilish ambitions of Lord Luxon. Like any self-respecting eighteenth-century villain with a time-travelling device at his disposal, Lord Luxon knows there is only one place to be: the land of opportunity itself, America. Rallying a troop of the King’s finest Redcoats to his fiendish cause, he is determined to change the outcome of the American Revolution and claim the territory for himself. By radically altering the course of history, his plan will tear the time mantle apart. Kate and Peter must race across time and space to foil Lord Luxon’s wicked scheme if they are to prevent the world from tumbling into chaos and catastrophe.
Roaming from the muddy straw-strewn fairs of 18th Century London to the neon and chrome of New York City, TIME QUAKE is the magnificent concluding part to Linda Buckley-Archer’s captivating Time Quake Trilogy. Teeming with a vividly-drawn cast of fortune-tellers, watermen, fire-eaters and singing dogs, this is an epic adventure about friendship and courage told with glorious vigour.
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MOLLY MOON AND THE MORPHING MYSTERY Byng, Georgia Molly Moon’s parents think their daughter should try living a normal life. They hire a tutor and ban Molly from using her magical powers, but Molly is a time-travelling, mind-reading, time-stopping master hypnotist – even if she doesn’t go looking for adventure, adventure has a way of always finding her. A book written by Molly’s great-great grandfather has fallen into the hands of a swanky casino owner who can only have the wickedest of intentions in mind – for the book divulges the ancient secret of morphing, and whoever can master the ability to morph into the animal or human of their choice will be able to control the entire world in no time at all! Molly, her newfound brother Micky, and her trusty pug Petula find themselves on a hair-raising race against time to track down the book before it’s too late. But once the secret of morphing is out, who – or what – can they trust?
From the jungles of South America to afternoon tea at Buckingham Palace, MORPHING MADNESS is the fifth book in the Molly Moon series, and is crammed full with adventures and surprises!
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HALO Corder, Zizou HALO is the story of a girl in Ancient Greece. We first meet her when she washes up on the shores of the island of Zakynthos, and is taken in by a centaur family. They christen her Halosydne or Halo for short. Halo grows up in her loving centaur family, thinking nothing of the fact that unlike them she is not half-beast. When she is in her early teens she is captured by pirates and taken off to mainland Greece. Managing to escape, she is befriended by a young Spartan soldier, and eventually finds her way to Sparta. The Oracle of Delphi tells her that she was actually born in Athens, and that she must go there to be reunited with her parents. But Sparta and Athens are engaged in what is about to become full-out war. The story of Halo’s travels and adventures, and of her unravelling the mystery of her origins, makes for a wonderfully vivid and exciting novel. Publisher: UK: Puffin; German: Hanser; Hebrew: Yedioth; Swedish: B Wahlstroms Schedule: Delivered; Publication: February 2010 |
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THE RUNAWAY TROLL Haig, Matt Samuel Blink is not having a good year. First, his parents got crushed to death by a log that fell off a timber lorry. Then he moved to Norway to live with his strict Aunt Eda, and nearly lost his life rescuing his sister Martha from the nearby forbidden forest. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s now got to start a new school. A school where he doesn’t speak the language and where none of the other boys want to sit next to him. A school where Cornelia Myklebust, the most spoilt and spiteful know-it-all on the planet, suddenly wants to be best friends with his sister. But then one night he hears a noise from under his bed. A sneeze. He looks under and can’t believe his eyes. It’s a one-eyed troll boy who has run away from the forest. Samuel finds out the troll has escaped because his mother had wanted to send him to the Bettering Tower, a place from where some troll children never return. Although Aunt Eda and Uncle Henrik have made him vow to have nothing more to do with the forest, Samuel agrees to hide him. But hiding a one-eyed troll who stinks of cabbage is no easy task. Especially as Cornelia Myklebust is coming to Martha’s sleepover, trying to find information about the forest for her land-developer father – a man who seems to hate Uncle Henrik for some strange reason. Oh, and that’s not even mentioning the search party of trolls who are coming out of the forest looking for the runaway, a party that includes the evil Betterer, who would just love to get his hands on a real live human child...
Samuel Blink returns for another weird, perilous and wonderful adventure in this sequel to SHADOW FOREST.
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ICE ANGEL Haptie, Charlotte Zack and Clovis’ dad disappeared when they were very young. He used to drive his van, the Ice Angel, down from the family’s mountainside home into Rockscar City, to sell flavoured ices to the better off and dispense free, clean drinking water to its poorer inhabitants. The Silverspring Water Company has a stranglehold on the city’s water supply, so anyone else dispensing water is taking a big risk. But now Clovis gets the Ice Angel back up and running, and Zack uses the family’s secret spring and his dad’s old recipe book to create the most fantastic ices imaginable - crushed vanilla with ginger crystals, coffee and bitter chocolate with frozen crystallized orange spoons, and cherry and cream vanilla bombes. Zack and Clovis begin to make their own illicit night-time deliveries, and in a jazz club and at the radio station they meet people who knew their father and mother in the old days. But then they get first-hand experience of Anselm Silverspring's ruthless power, as he instructs the police to destroy the Ice Angel. Will they be able to outrun the police, and continue their father's work? And is there a link between Anselm’s interest in trolls and their father’s disappearance?
Charlotte Haptie’s Otto books have been sold into seventeen languages. Her gripping new novel wonderfully displays her unique blend of magic, fantasy and adventure.
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CHILDREN OF THE LAMP, BOOK 6: THE FIVE FAKIRS OF FAIZABAD Kerr, P B John and Philippa Gaunt should have known that lunch with their Uncle Nimrod would end in something other than dessert: when you’re a djinn, even simple things like lunch never turn out quite as you might expect. Informed by their uncle that they must perform the traditional djinn rite of taranushi by finding someone who deserves to be granted three wishes, John and Philippa begin scouring the globe for suitable candidates. But Nimrod has also been alerted to a worrying shift in the world’s balance between good and bad luck, with mishap and misfortune steadily on the rise. Could someone (or something) be deliberately affecting the balance of luck, and if so, what could anyone possibly hope to gain from a chronically unlucky world? With the help of an invisible white ape who has an excellent grasp of English, Nimrod and the twins investigate the particularly strange goings-on in Bumby, the unluckiest town in the world, where they learn about the five fakirs of Faizabad: wise and holy men who years ago were entrusted with the five secrets of the universe and were buried alive until the world would need their enlightenment. A mysterious Emir wants their secret knowledge now, and will stop at absolutely nothing to get them. Only John, Philippa and their uncle can track him down and thwart his evil plan.
THE FIVE FAKIRS OF FAIZABAD whizzes the reader from sacred mountaintops to grim prison-ships via a magical rug emporium found deep in the winding streets of Fez. Featuring a magical cast of jinxes, riddling butlers and undead Nazi explorers, this is a rip-roaring tale from the wild imagination of P B Kerr.
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BLOOD NINJA Lake, Nick Ninjas: silent, deadly and impossibly skilled in the art of combat. Peerless assassins and spies, they pose a terrifying threat to the Japanese nobility. Yet no-one has ever seen them by day… For all ninjas are vampires. The source of their strength is also their greatest weakness - ghastly blood-sucking spirits, all but invincible in battle, they are vulnerable to one thing: sunlight. THE DARK MIST OF NIGHT is the first of the Blood Ninja series. It will reveal the long-hidden secrets of ninja society and tell for the first time the astonishing tale of their first great leader – the man who was ninja, samurai and Shogun. It is the story of Taro, a boy from a simple fishing village who is rescued by a ninja when his father is murdered, and who finds himself dragged deep into a bitter conflict between the rival Lords ruling Japan.
What is the connection between Taro and Lord Tokugawa? What could an ancient curse put on the Emperor’s house by an angry spirit possibly have to do with a fisherman’s son? Where will Taro’s love for Lord Oda’s daughter Hana lead them both? What is the Buddha Ball, and why are men and gods alike willing to kill for it? And can a ninja and a peasant ever rule Japan?
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JASPER AND THE GREEN MARVEL Madden, Deirdre Jasper was the bad millionaire in Deirdre Madden's delightful first children's story, SNAKE'S ELBOWS. His disgraceful behaviour in that book earned him a prison sentence. But now he's out of Woodford Jail and looking for trouble once again. Ideally he would like a job such as a sofa tester or a food taster. But all he can see in the local paper is advertisements for jobs which seem to require actual work. He is about to discard the ad for a gardener at Haverford-Snuffly Hall when he learns that there is a story attached to this great house, a story concerning a priceless treasure. And so, despite knowing nothing at all about gardening, he gets the job. He has some help from his pet rats Toe-rag and Scum-bag, but even they can't tell him how to mow a lawn. Well, Jasper isn't interested in grass and flowers, he's interested in the Green Marvel, and he's determined to find it! Publisher: World English Language: Faber Schedule: Delivered; Publication: May 2011 |
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THE RING OF FIVE McNamee, Eoin The first book in a projected trilogy, THE RING OF FIVE is a spy story for young adults. Danny Caulfield is abducted from his family's home and taken to a mysterious place called Wilson's, an academy for young spies. Wilson's trains spies for the struggle against the Minkies, who want to break down the barrier between their world and ours. Through an accident of birth, Danny fits the profile of the lost member of the legendary Ring of Five, a cabal of the greatest spies in history who are now working for the Minkies. Danny is to be trained at Wilson's and then infiltrated into their world. As Danny's schooling in the black arts of spying progresses, he comes to understand what a strange place Wilson's is, rife with secrets and apparent betrayals. Are his teachers and his fellows all that they appear to be? And why do so many accidents seem to happen so perilously close to him? Is someone out to get him? Time is running out, as the Minkies menace the school, and somehow Danny must find answers to the many questions racking his mind. He must also prepare for the greatest adventure of his young life.
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BESWITCHED Saunders, Kate Flora Fox is very unhappy about being sent off to boarding school while her parents are in Italy caring for her ailing grandmother. On the train to Prentice Hall, a weird nightmare makes things much worse. She wakes up to find herself in 1935; trendy, liberated Prentice Hall has turned into St Winifred’s, an extremely old-fashioned girls' school run by the formidable Miss Harbottle, and founded by the magically gifted Miss Beak. Flora’s sudden journey back through time has a secret purpose, somehow linked to her ancient grandmother and ‘the gift’ which Miss Harbottle says she must pursue if she is ever to reclaim her past and future life.
BESWITCHED is a glorious period school story, spiced with time-travel adventure, rich comedy and the supernatural.
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