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IN THE KITCHEN Ali, Monica Told in sparkling and emotive prose, IN THE KITCHEN tells the story of the darkly conflicted Gabe Lightfoot, chef in a London restaurant. Gabe’s kitchen is bedevilled by the shady backgrounds and even shadier employment legality of his workmates. Ali brilliantly captures the sweat and claustrophobia of the kitchen, and exposes the deeply conflicted morals surrounding immigration and multiculturalism with equal skill. The discovery of the body of a Ukrainian kitchen porter in the hotel basement is the point at which Gabe’s life starts to fall apart as he struggles to bridge the chasm between the professional and the personal; his parents’ old-fashioned ideas and modern urban multiculturalism, and his own conflicting desires. IN THE KITCHEN is a masterpiece of storytelling, full of heartbreaking insight and dark humour.
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THE SECRET SCRIPTURE Barry, Sebastian Lost in the darkness of Sligo in the 1930s, a darkness illuminated only by the Saturday night dance in Strandhill, Roseanne works as a waitress in the Cafe Cairo. It is there that she meets her future husband, Tom McNulty. The Blueshirts are marching provocatively, and there is tension in the air. The people of Sligo view events in Hitler’s Germany with a mixture of admiration and fear. Tom’s mother comes between him and Roseanne, and soon she finds herself banished to a tin hut in Strandhill. One day Tom's brother Eneas appears, on the run from the IRA. He seems to share her cloak of madness. In their one night together they conceive a child. When the boy is born, on the storm-racked beach at Strandhill, he is immediately taken away, and Roseanne is condemned to a lunatic asylum. Seventy years later, at the end of her long life, she begins to write her story. Dr Grene, the psychiatrist, takes a particular interest in Roseanne, feeling himself unaccountably drawn to her. In its historical breadth, Sebastian Barry’s new novel is reminiscent of THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS MCNULTY, while at the same time it shares with ANNIE DUNNE a haunting lyricism and beauty. Publisher: UK: Faber US: Viking; Chinese (simplified): People's Literature Publishing House; Croatian: Profil; Czech: Euromedia; Danish: Cicero; Dutch: Querido; Estonian: Varrak; French: Joelle Losfeld; German: Steidl; Greek: Kastaniotis; Hebrew: Achuzat Bayit; Indonesian: Maroon; Italian: Bompiani; Norwegian: Schibsted; Portuguese (Portugal) : Bertrand; Romanian: Univers; Serbian: Mono & Manana; Spanish: Belacqva/Norma Schedule: Published |
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THE GULF BETWEEN US Bedell, Geraldine Set in the sunny expat paradise of Hawar in the Middle East, THE GULF BETWEEN US tells the story of Annie, attractive forty-something mother and widow, and her three sons. At the wedding reception of her eldest, Annie discovers that not only has the reception venue been double-booked alongside a party of a Hollywood film-set, but the film’s star is none other than James Hartley, Annie’s childhood boyfriend in their humbler days in Thornton Heath. In case she needed another bombshell, her second son chooses the occasion to declare his homosexuality. Wedged in the midst of decades-old family prejudices and a society where homosexuality is still illegal, Annie has to juggle cultural difficulties as well as a blossoming re-ignition of her relationship with pin-up James. Will they get back together, or we will she fall for the charms of the apparently disinterested producer Nezar?
Part love story, part family drama; Geraldine Bedell tells her story with wit and insight. This is a powerful novel about culture clash, changing moralities and maturing hopes in a post-9/11 world.
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THE VARIOUS FLAVOURS OF COFFEE Capella, Anthony At the dawn of the twentieth century, young aesthete Robert Wallis finds himself in London, with an insatiable appetite for all of its decadent pleasures, and no money whatsoever. So when the peculiar coffee merchant Samuel Pinker offers him work, the job proves hard to turn down – especially once Robert has caught a glimpse of Pinker's beautiful daughter. Analysing the subtle flavours of Arabicas and Moccas with the witty, thoroughly modern Emily Pinker, Robert finds himself falling in love with both the beans and the woman. But Samuel Pinker has greater plans for Robert in the cause of Commerce. As Robert's debts pile up, he is left with no option but to pursue a quest for his employer: he must seek and cultivate the finest coffee that exists, found only in the depths of Africa. The anything-but-intrepid Robert sets off across the Empire, and the further he moves from home, the more irrevelant London life starts to seem. His memories of Emily Pinker seem insipid next to the exotic concoction that is the African slave girl, Fikre. Robert's love proves as changeable as his outfits: but in Africa the stakes are higher, and he is ill-equipped to deal with the repercussions of slavery and oppression.
COFFEE is the mouth-watering story of a drink, of a journey, and of a man coming to his senses. Filled with a sumptuous love of coffee and a masterful evocation of British life after Queen Victoria's death, COFFEE brings its foppish hero into a world where human beings are bought and sold, and where the price of a cup of coffee may be higher than its drinker can imagine. From the rural tribes of Abyssinia to the struggles of the English suffragettes, Robert embarks on a caffeine-fuelled journey of discovery in a fast-transforming world.
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APHRODITE'S WORKSHOP FOR RELUCTANT LOVERS Cobbold, Marika Rebecca Finch is a highly successful romantic novelist who has fallen out of love with love. When she heads off for a weekend in Paris and doesn’t care that she has absent-mindedly left her boyfriend on the platform at Waterloo, things look bad. But when her god-daughter, struck with pre-wedding jitters, asks Rebecca if marriage is a good idea and she can’t think of a single reason to reply ‘yes’, she realises it’s serious. The ‘High Priestess of Romance’ is having a crisis of faith.
On Mount Olympus, things aren’t any easier. Aphrodite is fretting because divorce is almost as popular as marriage and nobody is taking her seriously any more, and Eros, going through a difficult phase, seems to be carelessly shooting arrows without even a thought for the basic compatibility of his victims. So with even her favourite earthbound acolyte, Rebecca Finch, showing signs of disillusionment, Aphrodite resolves to take drastic action…
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BY CHANCE Corrick, Martin James Watson Bolsover sits on the quay in a seaside town, waiting for the ferry to take him to the island. He looks back over an almost wholly blameless and uneventful life, to his work as a technical writer, to his marriage to Kitty, cut short by her early death. But James Watson Bolsover is not his real name, and his life is not wholly blameless. Bolsover has a secret, and his going to the island to start a new life is a consequence of that secret. Once settled there, he begins to work for a shady publisher of travel guides, and meets his odd and in some cases mad fellow guests at the Alpha Hotel. Among them is Arabella, married to Lennie, who was once a rich and successful businessman but is now wheelchair-bound and brain-damaged. An unexpected attraction flares between Bolsover and Arabella, and then Lennie suddenly dies. BY CHANCE is a beautiful meditation on life, loss and chance by the author of THE NAVIGATION LOG and AFTER BERLIN. It is also a haunting reminder of how a single act may rob our lives of their comfort and ease. Publisher: US: Random House Schedule: Delivered; Publication: October 2008 |
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THE GLASS OF TIME Cox, Michael In September 1876 a 19-year old orphan called Esperanza Gorst is sent to Evenwood, one of the great houses of England, to become the lady’s maid to Emily Duport, 25th Baroness Tansor. Cultivated and captivating, it is clear to all who meet her that Esperanza is more than she seems. Drawing the attention of both of Lady Tansor’s sons, Esperanza is inexorably drawn into the dark and troubled bosom of the Tansor clan. Manipulated from afar by her trusted guardian and tutor, Esperanza gradually comes to understand that she has been sent to Evenwood to uncover the secrets of the past and right some terrible historical wrongs. Along the way she must discover who she herself is and make an agonising choice between following her head or her heart. THE GLASS OF TIME is both a page-turning Victorian mystery and a subtle account of how the actions and obsessions of the past can impose themselves on the present. It may be read as a sequel to the much-acclaimed THE MEANING OF NIGHT, or as a stand-alone novel.
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APOLOGY FOR THE WOMAN WRITING Diski, Jenny Marie de Gournay was eighteen when she first read Michel de Montaigne’s essays. She was overcome, and had to be revived with hellebore. Montaigne made her his ‘adopted daughter’, and later, when he died, de Gournay assumed the role of editor of his work. But she assumed rather more than this as well, and her efforts to ensure that she herself came to be cast in a good light in the essays was to lead to disastrous consequences. In her new novel Jenny Diski describes this passionate and complex relationship between ‘father and daughter’, writer and acolyte, author and reader. In Diski’s hands it becomes a fascinating morality tale, exploring the nature of authorship and originality, their sources and their consequences. Publisher: World English: Virago; Dutch: Atlast; Spanish: Circe; Schedule: Delivered; Publication: November 2008 |
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COUNTING THE STARS Dunmore, Helen In the heat of Rome’s long summer, the poet Catullus and his older married lover, Clodia Metelli, meet in secret. Living at the heart of sophisticated, brittle and brutal Roman society at the time of Pompey, Crassus and Julius Caesar, Catullus is obsessed with Clodia, the Lesbia of his most passionate poems. He is jealous of her husband, of her maid, even of her pet sparrow. And Clodia? Catullus is ‘her dear poet’, but possibly not her only interest… Their Rome is a city of extremes. Tenants are packed into ramshackle apartment blocks while palatial villas house the magnificence of the families who control Rome. Armed street gangs clash in struggles for political power. Slaves are the eyes and ears of everything that goes on, while civilisation and violence are equals, murder is the easy option, and poison the weapon of choice.
Catallus’ relationship with Clodia is one of the most intense, passionate, tormented and candid in history. In love and in hate, their story exposes the beauty and terrors of Roman life in the late Republic.
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SUBMARINE Dunthorne, Joe SUBMARINE is the story of fourteen year-old Oliver Tate, an only child growing up on the south coast of Wales. After accidentally discovering that his father Lloyd is suffering from depression, Oliver sets out to uncover any other secrets that his parents might be hiding. His investigative streak is matched by a potent imagination, and he begins to suspect that his mother Jill is having an affair with a family friend, Graham Whitehead. Under Graham’s tutelage, Jill takes up self-defence, meditation and surfing. Oliver sees these activities as part of Graham’s elaborate seduction ploy, and he sets out to find proof of their infidelity. As Oliver’s detective work comes to resemble stalking, however, he succeeds only in putting more strain on his parents' relationship. At the same time as attempting to save his parents' marriage, Oliver struggles to maintain his first relationship, lose his virginity and make plans for the rest of his life.
Oliver is a boy on the brink of manhood: the story of his fifteenth year combines delusion and insight, worldiness and childish innocence, to heartbreaking and hilarious effect.
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THEIR FINEST HOUR AND A HALF Evans, Lissa It’s 1940, France has fallen, and only a narrow strip of sea lies between Great Britain and invasion. The country’s needs are stark and obvious: allies, food, weapons and a morale-boosting, heart-warming war film, preferably one that will appeal to the American market. So as the phony war becomes the real war and bombs start to fall on London, work begins on ‘An Ordinary Wednesday’, an almost-true tale of bravery and rescue at Dunkirk. And since call-up has stripped the film industry of the brightest and best, it’s the callow, the jaded and the utterly unsuitable who are making up the numbers. There’s Catrin Cole, for instance, whose experience of writing copy for gravy advertisements catapults her into a job as romantic dialogue specialist, and Ambrose Hilliard, third most popular British film-star of 1924, whose agent is utterly failing to get him the roles he deserves, and Arthur Frith, whose peace-time job as a catering manager hasn’t really prepared him for his sudden, unexpected, elevation to Special Military Advisor.
And in a serious world, in a nation under siege, in a city visited nightly by destruction, they must work together to produce a slice of the purest entertainment…
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THE BRAVE Evans, Nicholas The motto of the boarding school to which eight-year-old Tommy Bedford is dispatched is 'Fortune Favours the Brave'. It’s England in 1959 and the school bristles with bullies and sadistic staff. Tommy, a quirky loner, obsessed with Cowboys and Indians, will need all the bravery he can summon – and not simply to cope with school. Everything at home is suddenly turned upside down when he learns that his sister Diane, a glamorous actress, is in fact his mother and that his elderly parents are really his grandparents. When Diane finds fame and falls in love with one of Tommy’s heroes, TV cowboy star Ray Montane, she snatches him from school and whisks him away to live with them in Hollywood. Suddenly all Tommy’s fantasies seem to have come true. With a handsome new president promising a New Frontier, the world seems golden and full of promise. But as the Cold War casts its shadow, the sinister side of Tinseltown starts to show through. When scandal erupts, Diane and Tommy are forced to flee to Montana. There, Tommy learns about the natural world and the cruel truth of how the West was won. He also has to learn at last the true meaning of bravery.
Unmasking the brutal reality behind the macho cowboy myth and how that myth affects the world today, THE BRAVE explores our quest for love and identity, the fallibility both 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, Mark Latchford, 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 Latchford's colleagues are all working on the south coast with the Americans? Latchford 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. Latchford 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 Latchford 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 Mark Latchford is at the centre of them.
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THE TWISTED HEART Gowers, Rebecca When Kit, a literature student who works five times too hard and doesn’t care about the meaning of life, decides on a whim to go to a dance class, all she is really after is to lose herself in the steps. Can Joe, the shadowy figure she meets there, somehow draw her out into the real world? Or will she reject the tumult he represents, and instead retreat into the extremes of her imagination? Because Kit is about to stumble on a darkly absorbing mystery. What is the connection between the young Charles Dickens and the deranged slaughter of a prostitute known as The Countess? THE TWISTED HEART is a hugely enjoyable novel from one of Britain’s finest young writers. It brilliantly combines startling new insights into the macabre side of one of the world’s greatest writers with its own passionate fable exploring the insidious appeal of violence and the true nature of love. Publisher: UK: Canongate Schedule: Delivered; Publication: Spring 2009 |
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THE CLOTHES ON THEIR BACKS Grant, Linda Sandor Kovacs left Budapest after the uprising in 1956, arriving in London penniless and alone. Alone, that is, except for his brother Ervin and his wife, who had fled to England in the late thirties and established themselves as best they could. But Ervin and Sandor never got along, and very soon Sandor spurns his brother's offers of help and goes his own way. Many years later, Ervin's daughter Vivien decides she wants to find out about this uncle she has never known. In the sixties he became notorious, a slum landlord accused of exploiting immigrant tenants, a spiv who consorted with criminals and prostitutes. Who is this man whom her father will not even speak of, let alone speak to? Vivien's curiosity leads to an encounter with Sandor, who is a shadow of his former self, a man who has spent many years in jail and who now has the time and the inclination to look back on his life and his misdeeds. Vivien hides her real identity (or so she thinks), and agrees to become Sandor's amenuensis, transcribing the story of his life. But in doing so she risks the wrath of her father, and indeed her entire family. THE CLOTHES ON THEIR BACKS is a powerful novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of WHEN I LIVED IN MODERN TIMES. It is also an anatomizing of the immigrant experience, and as such is deeply resonant with the concerns of our own society today.
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THE POSSESSION OF MR CAVE Haig, Matt Terence Cave, intellectual, music-lover and owner of Cave Antiques, has experienced more than his share of tragedies. His mother’s suicide and his young wife’s death at the hands of burglars left him to bring up his young twins alone. And now one of them has died in a grotesque accident as a result of bullying. Bryony, the remaining twin, has always been the family’s great hope: a golden teenager, in love with her cello and her pony, clever, sweet and eager to please. Now that she is all Terence has left, he realises that his one duty in life is to keep her safe from the world’s malign forces, whatever that may take. As he starts to follow his grieving daughter’s movements, and enforces a draconian set of rules purely for her own safety, the voices in his head convince him to protect her innocence at any cost.
THE POSSESSION OF MR CAVE is both a nightmare of Gothic proportions and a story of distorted love, with chilling resonance for anyone who has been a parent or a frustrated teenager. In this compulsive novel, the characteristic black humour of THE LAST FAMILY IN ENGLAND and THE DEAD FATHERS CLUB moves even further onto the dark side. Matt Haig lays bare the process by which Terence’s love for Bryony becomes a possessive force that will lead to destruction and, ultimately, murder...
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OUT OF MY SKIN Haskell, John 'Jack', the narrator of John Haskell's new novel, is a magazine writer in Los Angeles. He drifts around the city, interviewing eccentrics and minor celebrities. His Los Angeles is a nether world, with echoes of Chandler and the film Sunset Boulevard. When his editor asks him to do a story on a Steve Martin look-alike, this at first seems like a routine assignment. But as he gets to know Scott, he begins to consider questions about identity and belonging in a city that is itself impersonal and provisional. Scott disappears, and the narrator decides it might be interesting to dye his hair white and start walking in a jaunty, rubbery-legged sort of way. His old friend Alison and his new lover Jane are not sure quite what to make of this change in him, but can't help but be intrigued. As in his acclaimed collection of stories I AM NOT JACKSON POLLOCK, Haskell weaves into this novel speculations as to what real-life actors, including Cary Grant and Charles Laughton, might have felt about their chameleon lives. Haskell once again shows himself to be a master of unease and uncertainty, delving deep under the skin of a man who isn't quite sure who he is. Publisher: US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Schedule: Delivered; Publication: Spring 2009 |
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THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY Hensher, Philip Shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize Beginning amidst the pervasive unease of the Winter of Discontent and ending with the last days of the ailing Conservative government in 1996, THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY is Philip Hensher's epic portrait of an entire era, a novel concerned with the lives of ordinary people and history on the move. Set in Sheffield, it charts the relationship between two families, Malcolm and Katherine Glover and their three children, and their neighbours the Sellers family, newly arrived from London so that Bernie can pursue his job with the Electricity Board. The day the Sellers move in there is a crisis across the road: Malcolm Glover has left home, convinced his wife is having an affair. The consequences of this rupture will spread throughout the lives of both couples and their children, in particular 10-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused taunting of 15-year-old Sandra Sellers, childhood crises that will come to a head twenty years later. In the background, England is changing: from a land of fire and industry to a gleaming landscape of shopfronts and chain restaurants, a shift particularly marked in the North with the miners' strike of 1984, which has a dramatic impact on both families.
Inspired by the expansive scale and webs of relationships of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels, THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY shows Philip Hensher to be one of our greatest chroniclers of English life.
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A CURE FOR ALL DISEASES Hill, Reginald Some say that Andy Dalziel wasn't ready for God, others that God wasn't ready for Dalziel. Either way, despite his recent proximity to a terrorist blast, the Superintendent remains firmly of this world. And while Death may be the cure for all diseases, Dalziel is happy to settle for a few weeks' care under a tender nurse. Convalescing in Sandytown, a quiet seaside resort devoted to healing, Dalziel befriends Charlotte Heywood, a fellow newcomer and psychologist, who is researching the benefits of alternative therapy. With much in common, the two soon find themselves in league when trouble comes to town. Sandytown's principal landowners have grandiose plans for the resort - none of which they can agree on. One of them has to go, and when one of them does, in spectacularly gruesome fashion, DCI Peter Pascoe is called in to investigate - with Dalziel and Charlotte providing unwelcome support. But Pascoe finds dark forces at work in a place where medicine and holistic remedies are no match for the oldest cure of all . . .
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THE ROAR OF THE BUTTERFLIES Hill, Reginald Christian Porphyry, young, glamorous, handsome and impossibly rich, isn’t the kind of man who normally employs Joe Sixsmith. And the Royal Hoo golf course isn’t the kind of place this impoverished private investigator would generally spend his time. But when Christian employs Joe to look into a small matter of alleged cheating, Joe’s knowledge of Luton lowlife comes in unexpectedly useful. As the hot summer wears on, Joe – and his associates, from gorgeously overweight Beryl to the tricksy Detective Superintendent Woodbine – unravel a tangled story of corruption and dodgy dealing with consequences far worse than a dubious birdie at the sixteenth hole. Joe may think he’s out of his element, but when local property mogul King Rat turns out to be involved, it’s suddenly crucial that Joe learn the rules of this game…
The hero of SINGING THE SADNESS and three other novels, Joe, whose creator describes him as ‘a black bald redundant lathe operator from Luton’, returns with his typical humour and serendipity in this new Reginald Hill novel.
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MUSE Irvine, Susan Why would anyone want to be someone else’s muse? August 1991, and an oppressive heatwave in Paris. There’s a coup in the Soviet Union, it’s there every time you turn on the TV, but Naomi Price is more concerned with overseeing her first fashion shoot as a stylist. Day after day she leaves her cheap hotel room that smells of warm meat pies, and goes to the studio where she hopes she can squeeze something more out of commercial fashion pictures. Then one evening in the hotel courtyard someone hands her a small slip of paper. On it is scrawled a message that hints at a life beyond the limits of hers.
In this bold debut novel, Susan Irvine examines the ability of language to construct and influence our desires. As it charts Naomi’s attempts to break out of a delusive existence MUSE proves to be a work of blistering beauty.
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BEARS OF ENGLAND Jackson, Mick There is a stirring in the forest of history and through the mists of time come the bears. Their heavy tread and a distant cry can be heard resounding through the centuries: “Come, bears of England, come …”. Mick Jackson uses these proud, terrifying creatures to weave his strange and unforgettable story. From the Dark Ages come the spirit bears, haunting the villagers at night. Sin-eating bears consume the sins of the recently departed along with the bread and ale left out for them – until they decline the role of assuager of human guilt and oblige the townsfolk to take responsibility for their own actions. Gladiatorial bears in chains draw huge crowds until one decides he’s had enough: how will the people entertain themselves now that the bears have had their sport with them? Highly trained circus bears suddenly revolt and walk the high wire along their escape route. Bears who clean the Victorian sewers trade coins and rare pieces of jewellery fallen into the sewers; men steal from them at their peril. There are rumours of bears living among us, who have deliberately inveigled their way into society to live domestic lives. As each band of bears walk into exile, they head north and into the caves of the Derbyshire Dales and hibernation – until an old voice calls the Bears of England and they emerge into the winter snow, finally escaping into the icy waters of the channel. This is the last the bears see of England – and the last England sees of the bears… Mixing folk tale with fantasy and history with myth, the narrative that unfolds is dark, playful and filled with magical moments, as it marches ever forward towards a strange convergence. The author of THE UNDERGROUND MAN and FIVE BOYS has produced an adult fable with resonances for our own times, about the fear of the unknown and the triumph of strength over evil – with freedom being the ultimate goal. Or perhaps it’s just a delightfully witty and quirky book for those who love reading about bears? It’s for the reader to decide. Publisher: UK: Faber Schedule: Delivered; Publication: Spring 2009 |
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A QUIET FLAME Kerr, Philip On the run from Europe to escape framed charges of war crimes, Bernie Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires in 1950 to join the community of Nazi monsters in search of new identities. Under his new name of Dr Carlos Hausner he is summoned to meet President Peron, who is desperate to find a cure for his wife Eva’s cancer. But he is recognised by Peron’s police chief, Colonel Montalban, as an old Berlin cop celebrated for investigating a series of ritualistic ‘lust’ murders in 1932. A girl’s mutilated body has been found and another girl, Fabienne von Bader, daughter of an eminent banker who bankrolled the Nazis during the war, has disappeared. Montalban employs Bernie to try to find Fabienne, and a possible connection between killings separated by eighteen years.
The investigation becomes extremely dangerous when Bernie offers help to the beautiful Anna Yagubsky, whose uncle and aunt disappeared in Argentina during the war, possibly as part of an extremely secret Jewish extermination programme. Cross-cutting between Berlin in the early 1930s and post-war Argentina, Kerr’s novel brilliantly explores the nightmarish collusion between the old Nazis and the Peronist regime, and also crowns iconoclastic, hard-boiled, cynical-romantic, wise-cracking Bernie as one of the all-time great fictional private eyes. The fourth Gunther novel, THE ONE FROM THE OTHER, was acclaimed by reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Number five is even better.
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THE ANGEL'S CUT Knox, Elizabeth Boomtown Los Angeles, 1929: the movies have burst into song and speech, and aircraft into the skies at speed. Into this world of soundstages and speakeasies comes Xas, stunt flier and wingless angel, with his German passport and his broken heart, determined only to go on living in the air, to go on unimpeded, like a high altitude weather system, full of ice. What does it take to turn a wind?
Will it be Conrad Cole, movie director and aircraft designer, a glory-seeking king of the grand splash who is also a man sinking into his own sovereign darkness. Or will it be Flora McLeod, film editor and maimed former actress, who sees something in Xas that no-one has ever seen before, not even God, who made him, or Lucifer, the general he once followed—Lucifer, who has lost him once but won’t let that be the end of it.
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GLOVER'S MISTAKE Laird, Nick David Pinner is not content. A 35-year-old English teacher in a small private school in Marylebone, he isn't a writer or a boyfriend or a father. He isn't even a very good son. If he's not trawling pornographic websites, he's drinking with friends he doesn't really like or trying to avoid his neighbours. His new flatmate is James Glover, a barman whose life hasn't quite worked out either. And although he's a nice guy - a Christian and a small-town boy from East Anglia - he has certain fixed ideas about things. Into the lives of these two dissatisfied bachelors comes Ruth, a successful American artist who taught David when he was an undergraduate at Goldsmiths. Ruth meets Glover on David's doorstep and although she's 48 and he's 25, a relationship begins. David, as mutual friend, puts himself in the middle of it, and his interest in the couple grows obsessive, and eventually destructive.
GLOVER'S MISTAKE is an exploration into friendship, jealousy and the mind of a modern day Iago.
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IT'S BEGINNING TO HURT Lasdun, James James Lasdun is one of the finest short story writers we have. His new collection features the story 'An Anxious Man', which won the inaugural Prospect/BBC competition in 2006. Other stories include 'Caterpillars', which will be published in Granta's December 2008 issue. Set in Britain, France and America (where Lasdun has lived for many years), these stories are beautifully crafted and carry a powerful charge. Publisher: UK: Jonathan Cape; US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Translation: Irene Skolnick; Media: Christine Glover, APW Schedule: Delivered; Publication: Spring 2009 |
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MOLLY FOX'S BIRTHDAY Madden, Deirdre Molly Fox is an actor. She insists on ‘actor’ rather than ‘actress’. Over the years she has triumphed on stages around the world, notably in Shakespeare. She lives in Dublin, in a charming terraced house. Her best friend, the unnamed narrator of MOLLY FOX'S BIRTHDAY, lives in a flat in London, and sometimes she and Molly swap homes. It is on just such an occasion, which happens to coincide with midsummer and Molly’s birthday, that Molly’s friend finds herself not only in Molly’s house but mistaken for her by visitors. In the course of this long day she reflects on Molly’s career, and on what it means to be an actor and an artist. And she finds that the characters and concerns of Molly’s life intertwine in very unexpected ways with those of her own. In MOLLY FOX'S BIRTHDAY Deirdre Madden has achieved a culmination of the themes she has explored in her earlier work, including the Orange Prize-shortlisted ONE BY ONE IN THE DARKNESS and AUTHENTICITY. The result is a beautifully realised novel, one which will surely bring Madden to a wide readership. Publisher: UK: Faber; Spanish: Lumen Schedule: Published |
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ALL THE COLOURS OF THE TOWN McIlvanney, Liam When Glasgow journalist Gerry Conway receives a phone call promising unsavoury news about Scottish Justice Minister Peter Lyons, his instinct is that this apparent scoop won’t warrant space in The Tribune. But as Conway’s curiosity grows and his leads proliferate, his investigation takes him from Scotland to Belfast. Shocked by the sectarian violence of the past, and by the prejudice and hatred he encounters even now, Conway soon grows obsessed with the story of Lyons and all he represents. And as he digs deeper, he comes to understand firstly that there is indeed a story to be uncovered, and secondly that there are people who want it to remain hidden, and will go to great lengths to ensure that it does. ALL THE COLOURS OF THE TOWN is a compelling novel, vividly written and unfolding in ways that neither Conway nor the reader can foresee. Its scene painting and its taut characterizations and dialogue drive the story along. But this is no exploitative thriller - it is a complex inquiry into themes of loyalty, betrayal and duty.
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UNDER CONTROL McNay, Mark Mark McNay's prize-winning debut FRESH established him as a name to watch for the future. UNDER CONTROL is his even more ambitious and impressive follow-up - an exhilarating drama of desire and deceit.
Charlie and her boyfriend Gary are struggline to keep their lives on track in an imperfect world. When the money runs out or the drugs don't work, love is not always enough. Help is at hand in the form of social worker and guardian angel Nigel, but as best intentions meet compulsive desires, the fates of these three very different people are transformed for good.
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DRIVETIME Meek, James Sounds like easy money: collecting an antique for a rich stranger. Alan Allen, swept into a wild European goose-chase, is about to find out otherwise. DRIVETIME is Meek’s second novel, back in print for the first time in ten years. Like Groundhog Day on European wheels, it is smart, surreal and gloriously funny. Publisher: UK: Canongate Schedule: Publication August 2008 |
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WE ARE NOW BEGINNING OUR DESCENT Meek, James The message was short. 'I want to see you now. I want you to come to me, it doesn’t matter how late it is, and tell me exactly what you want from me.' Like the world around him, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Adam Kellas’s life is showing distinct signs of cracking apart. Against his better judgement, Kellas – divorced, unstable, spurned by his lover and by the world of letters – accepts a war assignment from his newspaper. It is the beginning of a journey which takes him from the mountains of Afghanistan to the elegant dinner tables of north London, the marshlands of the American South and, ultimately, to the darkest realms of the human imagination. Only the memory of the beautiful, elusive Astrid, a fellow reporter in Afghanistan, offers him the possibility of hope.
With all the explosive drama of THE PEOPLE'S ACT OF LOVE, James Meek’s new novel spans continents and cultures. It is a timeless tale of folly and the pursuit of love, set against the incendiary politics of our time
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TO DO AND DIE Mercer, Patrick It’s the spring of 1854 and the British Empire, at the height of her power, prepares to go to war against the Tsar in the Crimea in an uneasy alliance with France and Turkey. Lt Tony Morgan, a young British officer previously untested in battle, is plunged into the blood-letting. From the slaughter at the River Alma, to the disastrous charge of the Light Cavalry Brigade at Balaclava, the abattoir of Inkermann and the grinding siege of Sevastopol, Morgan’s courage, leadership and endurance will face test after brutal test in the Crimea. But it is not just the Russians who threaten to divide and destroy Morgan’s young soldiers. Commanding the 95th’s Regiment’s Grenadier Company is Richard Carmichael, a wealthy, well-connected bully who inevitably ducks the fighting, while ruthlessly using the regiment to advance his own career. Morgan, fearful that his courage will fail him, has to shield his exhausted and over-worked men from the whims of this tyrant, while also earning their respect and loyalty. Adding to Morgan’s turmoil is the feisty figure of Mary Cade. The Catholic chamber maid in his house and his secret mistress, Mary has married Morgan’s batman, Private James Keenan, so she can follow both her husband and her lover to the East. Working as a nurse amid the horrors of the battlefield Mary’s presence has consequences which no one could foresee… Publisher: HarperCollins Schedule: Publication August 2010 |
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IN A DARK WOOD Moring, Marcel At the end of the Second World War, Jakob Noach emerges from the hole in the ground where he has been hiding for the past three years, and cycles madly back to his home town to find that his parents and brother have perished at the hands of the Nazis. Setting himself up as a shoemaker in the Dutch town of Assen, Noach patiently expands his business until he has become the most influential entrepreneur in the city. But however wealthy he becomes, nothing can console him for the loss of his family and the tragedy of history. In June 1980, on the eve of Assen’s annual TT races, a despairing Noach sets off on a journey into the depths of his soul. Guided by a shabby, supernatural pedlar calling himself the ‘Jew of Assen’, he descends into the smoky heart of the town, a man-made hell modelled on Dis, the city in Dante’s Inferno. In a rich and varied explosion of styles, fantasy and philosophical speculations, Marcel Möring leads us on a voyage through the dark heart of the twentieth century, in a vivid exploration of loss and guilt. Publisher: UK: 4th Estate; US: Morrow; Dutch: De Bezige Bij; German: Luchterhand Schedule: Publication: January 2009 |
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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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BITTERLEAF Okereke, Chioma Set in the village of Mannobe, BITTERLEAF leads the reader into a world that is African in nature but never geographically placed; exotic, beguiling, and yet reassuringly familiar. At the heart of the story is Babylon, a local musician and renowned lothario, who applies himself judiciously to both his roles in the village. However, when Jericho Lwembe returns to Mannobe, Babylon is caught under her spell and forced to re-evaluate his life. But his many attempts to lure Jericho are fraught with disaster. Using his music as a salve, he is confused when he discovers his abilities as a guitarist leaving him. Faced with the loss of music, the one thing he defines himself by, Babylon is a man altered. Spoilt by her time in the big city, Jericho returns to Mannobe and finds it - and herself - greatly changed. To make matters worse, she finds herself being pursued by a man with no background or breeding. Her desire to climb the greased steps of the social ladder and to marry a man, Daniel, from a prestigious family, colours her view of her once beloved hometown and its inhabitants. But when she discovers she is pregnant with Daniel’s child, the reality of her situation brings her crashing back down to earth. Engaging the witchdoctor for help, the near tragic result of her attempts to deal with her dilemma is only interrupted by Babylon. As the relationship between the two characters develops and falters, the fragile web of dependency holding village life together is gradually revealed. Publisher: (Not Yet Sold) Schedule: |
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NOVEL ABOUT MY WIFE Perkins, Emily If I could build her again using words, I would: starting at her long, painted feet and working up, meticulously shading in every cell and gap and space for breath until her pulse just couldn't help but kick back into life. Her hip bones, her red knuckles, the soft skin of her thighs, her fine crackle of hair. Tom Stone, skinnyish, fortyish, English, is madly in love with his wife Ann, an Australian in self-imposed exile in London. Pushing forty and expecting their first child, they buy their first, semi-derelict house in Hackney. They believe this is their settled future, despite Tom's stalling career and their spiralling money troubles. But Ann becomes convinced she's being shadowed by a local homeless man whose presence seems like a terrible omen. As her pregnancy progresses she spends hours cleaning and reorganising the house, and sits up all night talking with a new feverish passion. As their child grows, so too does Tom's sense of an impending, nameless threat. Their home appears beset with vermin, smells and strange noises. On the verge of losing the house, Tom makes a decision that he hopes will save their lives.
Dark, sensuous and utterly compelling, NOVEL ABOUT MY WIFE is a taut, chilling novel about the need for escape and the perils of forgetting.
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REQUIEM Ross, Jack Why would a young black journalist risk her life and that of her family for a guilty old white man on Death Row? Deborah Jones, a rookie reporter on the Miami Herald, discovers that William Craig, an 82 year-old Scot languishing on Death Row, was once a Second World War hero. He is in jail for killing a senator's son, Joe O'Neill, who raped his grand-daughter. Her story provokes other victims of O'Neill to come forward. Deborah admires the old man, but her determination to save him from execution has a personal agenda. She too has been the victim of a white date rape. In a race against time, she unearths a conspiracy involving the embittered senator, a right-wing governor who does coke and is a closet homosexual, and the Florida mafia boss - John Richmond, alias Paul Fachetti - who has a strong childhood link to the senator. The Mob is prepared to kill to cover up O'Neill’s sex crimes, even ten years after his death. Deborah herself is the final target, and in the desperate final countdown to secure a stay of execution, she too will have to disregard the law.
MIAMI REQUIEM is the first novel in a planned series featuring Deborah Jones.
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TWO LITTLE BOYS Sarkies, Duncan When Nige runs over a Norwegian backpacker while attempting to save petrol, his life really turns to shit. He chucks the body in a nearby road works and runs to his best mate of fifteen years, Deano. Trouble is, Deano's not really the guy you should turn to in a crisis. This off-kilter tale of male camaraderie is a bizarre debacle from start to thrilling finish. Publisher: UK: John Murray; Australia: Hachette Australia; New Zealand: Penguin New Zealand Schedule: |
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THE END OF SLEEP Somerville, Rowan Cairo: a city of endless corners that crumble away to reveal dust or the promise of gold. Teeming with flies and fables, this urban labyrinth is no place for an Irishman to be led astray . . . Fin is a newspaperman without a newspaper, but he’s on the scent of a story to end all stories. With only a rumpled linen suit to his name, he sets out on the trail of Farouk, the mercurial teller of tales who alone knows what Fin wants to hear but who has just managed to get himself kidnapped. Fuelled by a thousand glasses of mint tea, Fin launches himself into the dusty delirium of Cairo. He may succeed in tracing the succulent kebab which could lead to Farouk; he may find out what really happened to Omar’s daughter; he may even evade the unwelcome attentions of the burly American – but will Fin ever discover the full story of what Skinhead Said found at the end of the tunnel beneath his house?
THE END OF SLEEP is a magical, open-hearted novel about a man desperately seeking a beginning, a middle and an end. It is a tale of comic verve that also offers a humane portrait of a shabbily magnificent city, glowing with the warmth of Egyptian hospitality and tradition.
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CONSOLATION Wilson, James CONSOLATION tells the story of Corley Roper, a famous Edwardian children’s author whose life starts to unravel following the death of his infant daughter. Unable to believe any longer in the sanctuary of his writing, Roper roams the Sussex countryside. A chance encounter one night with Mary Wilson, a woman suffering her own recent bereavement, sets in motion events that will come to shape both their futures. Increasingly estranged from his wife, on his return, Roper sets out with his friend Cyril Jessop - a cataloguer of old country songs and ballads - to track down this mysterious woman, somewhere in Derbyshire. But when they find her, Corley discovers Mary’s life to be both more complicated and more compelling than he at first realised. Haunted by the loss of his child, beset by strange hallucinations, and fearing for his own sanity, his only consolation seems to come from the possibility of helping this woman solve the mysteries of her past. Vividly evoking a fading English landscape, James Wilson’s new novel - part ghost story, part mystery - is at once a journey into bereavement and an inspired exploration of the role of art in the world. Publisher: UK: Faber Schedule: Published |
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VOODOO HISTORIES Aaronovitch, David What 'dark forces' are at work (to quote both the Queen and Dr David Kelly) to make large numbers of educated people believe that their futures are controlled by malign, secret powers?
Conspiracy theories are no longer the province of a fringe minority – they have a strong following, at least to judge by the best-sellers’ lists. VOODOO HISTORIES will examine and question the development of the major theories that have shaped the world. Arguing that historically the consequences of such beliefs are almost always damaging, it will trace how the process of creating scapegoats to explain the sins of a bewildering world has led to social exclusion and hatred.
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THE SETTLER'S COOKBOOK Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin Warmly written and enticingly designed, this mouth-watering memoir from one of Britain's most high-profile and vocal immigrants explores the author's East African Indian roots through the shared experience of cooking. This is an appetizing exploration of the culture of the East African Indians who brought their cookery and quirks to Britain from Uganda and Kenya, their ancestors having transported them from Bombay and Calcutta. In lovely, intimate writing, it fuses the domestic and the social in the vein of Isabel Allende's APHRODITE or Ruth Reichl's TENDER AT THE BONE.
Through the story of Yasmin's family and the food and recipes they've shared together over generations,THE SETTLER'S COOKBOOK traces the history of her people's many journeys. The food she cooks now, in one of the world's most ethnically-diverse cities, combines the traditions and tastes of her family's hybrid culinary heritage. Here you'll discover how shepherd's pie is much enhanced by sprinkling in some chilli, Victoria sponge can be wonderfully enlivened by saffron and lime juice, and the addition of ketchup to a curry can be life-changing...
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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.
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ACCOMPLISHED Barber, Laura What does it mean to feel accomplished in the modern world? In Jane Austen’s day it was clear enough. A graceful proficiency across a range of skills – from sewing and reeling, to riding and letter-writing – was the minimum requirement for a place in society and the prospect of making a good match. There may be fewer occasions for a dazzling display on the harpsichord these days, but the instinct to become a better version of ourselves (or even a different person altogether) is still with us: it is what prods us towards gym membership, makes us regret closing the lid on our childhood piano lessons, inspires end-of-holiday fantasies involving gîte-renovation and bilingual grape-stomping, and has us rooting for the underdog on a talent show.
In ACCOMPLISHED, Laura Barber puts such dreams of self-improvement to the test by giving herself a year to pursue seven different accomplishments. With the help of various experts and fellow enthusiasts, she will attempt to put charcoal to paper and a roast in the oven, as well as untangling her tenses, mixing the perfect cocktail, and discovering whether she really could have been a ballerina, and whether she ever can stand up and sing in public.
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SHAKESPEARE'S LOST KINGDOM Beauclerk, Charles SHAKESPEARE'S LOST KINGDOM is an unorthodox biography of Shakespeare that seeks to create an in-depth, psychologically penetrating portrait of Shakespeare by reconnecting the author to his works, since the writer of fiction cannot help but reveal his or her psychology. Its primary purpose is to deepen the reader's understanding of Shakespeare by freeing the author's voice, and with it his message. Taking the author’s own words as its cue, the book seeks to answer the fundamental - yet taboo - questions: Why did Shakespeare write the works that he did? Where is his voice in the plays? What was his message? What was his relationship with the Queen and Court, and how did he get away with his trenchant political satires of the ruling elite?
Having explored all these questions and built up a portrait of the author as he reveals himself in his own words, Charles Beauclerk offers a solution to the biggest question of all: Who was this man, and why did he conceal his true identity? The answers are as startling as they are illuminating.
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TEENAGE Burgess, Melvin Melvin Burgess' many international bestsellers, including JUNK, DOING IT, and most recently SARA’S FACE, have shocked teachers and parents as much as they have hooked his teenage audience. Now, Melvin has written a hilarious, nostalgic, and slightly shocking memoir of his own teen years, and his odyssey from innocence and awkwardness, through sex, drugs, and rebellion, to the adult discovery that there was only one thing he seriously wanted and was fit to do: become a writer. Publisher: (Not yet sold) Schedule: Delivered |
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MEN OF WAR Crane, David Between the Battle of Navarino in 1827 and the First World War, the Royal Navy did not fight a single fleet engagement. But that is not to say that it didn't see action, in the Greek War of Independence, in the Crimea, on the China station, and in the defence of Great Britain's many colonies around the world. The Victorian navy was for a long time one of adventurers and freebooters, the most colourful example being Frank Abney Hastings, who claimed descent from Charlemagne and who took a similarly belligerent view of the world. MEN OF WAR is the story of the Royal Navy during a time of profound change, leading to the ironclads and the set-piece battles of the 'war to end all wars'. Crane's vivid book ends with Teddy Evans, who had been with Robert Falcon Scott in Antarctica, and who distinguished himself in hand-to-hand fighting on board German destroyers in 1917. MEN OF WAR will be naval history at its finest. Publisher: UK: HarperCollins Schedule: Delivery: Autumn 2008 |
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STEALING WATER Ecott, Tim When Tim Ecott's family uprooted from Northern Ireland in 1977, they thought they were leaving behind their troubled lives, including the physical threat to Tim's father's life posed by the IRA. They hoped to exchange a hum-drum suburban existence of mortgage debts and small-town society for sunshine and servants in an ex-pat African setting. But, just six months after arriving in Johannesburg they were bankrupt, evicted from their home, and had most of their possessions confiscated by the bailiffs. Whilst friends and relatives in Britain imagined that they were living privileged lives, Tim Ecott and his family often went hungry.
Forced to survive on their wits, the family entered a twilight world where their true friends were prostitutes, thieves and renegades. STEALING WATER is about family, and what holds them together; it is the story of how the worst of times can become the most important and valuable period of a person's life.
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SEMI-INVISIBLE MAN: THE LIFE OF NORMAN LEWIS Evans, Julian Norman Lewis was the best not-famous writer of his generation, and a better writer than almost all who were. He was not-famous because of an English prejudice: because critics who judged his works of travel and non-fiction as lower than the yardstick of artistic genius represented by the novel have ignored the truth that over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s, he wrote books that have survived better than all but a handful of novels. A pharmacist’s son from Enfield, Lewis (1908-2003) became unmatched as a witness to his times. His account of south-east Asia before the Vietnam war, A DRAGON APPARENT, remains required reading. VOICES OF THE OLD SEA, a glimpse of pre-tourist Spain, is a classic in the literature of the Mediterranean. His memoir of wartime Naples, NAPLES ’44, is a masterpiece. An expert at penetrating the glorious, and inglorious, surfaces of our planet, as a stylist he was a revolutionary, entirely self-taught. In appearance he was someone you could pass in the street without realising anyone had gone by, yet the self-effacing quality that allowed him to observe unnoticed concealed extraordinary glamour. For more than twenty years he spied for the British government. He raced Bugattis before the war, lived in Ibiza after it, and was a crack shot, flamboyant host, and businessman with mafia connections, leading a life of such self-pleasing freedom that his existence at times was closer to a rock star’s than anyone else’s. Published to mark Norman Lewis’s centenary, Julian Evans’s Semi- Invisible Man is a fascinating personal view of a suburban fugitive and adventurer; a writer of unsurpassed humour, wisdom and compassion for the ridiculous; the Defoe of our times. Simultaneously a biography and a meditation on the art of biography, it is an account that aims to send its readers hurrying to the books of an overlooked master. Publisher: UK: Jonathan Cape/Picador Schedule: Published |
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ALONG CAME DYLAN Foster, Stephen Ollie was just about cured of his basketcase habits: the neurotic lurcher at last appeared to have his paws planted firmly on the ground (well, almost). But did Stephen Foster take a well-earned rest? No. He decided one thing was missing from Ollie’s life, someone who could really understand him, a friend with whom he could have dog-to-dog chats. “If you must get another dog, get a girl,” the experts told Foster. So he got a boy, a pure-bred Saluki lunatic called Dylan. As soon as the new puppy peered through the door, Ollie threw his master a look of contemptuous disbelief that said, “I refuse to have anything whatsoever to do with this. You’re on your own,pal.” The riotously funny ALONG CAME DYLAN takes up where Foster’s bestselling Walking Ollie left off, but instead of one canine conundrum, now he’s got two: Dylan, the outlaw, proves to be virtually untrainable; Ollie, feeling threatened, becomes increasingly antisocial, and Foster is caught in the middle wondering why man’s best friends can’t just be friends. Publisher: World: Short Books; Audio: Bolinda Publishing Schedule: Delivered; Publication: November 2008 |
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FROM WORKING CLASS HERO TO ABSOLUTE DISGRACE Foster, Stephen When Stephen Foster departed for London from his hometown of Stoke, he was wearing an army surplus jacket accessorised with a CND badge, and he took with him a distinct set of attitude problems. It was the late Seventies; the south-east was on the brink of a social and economic boom – think Thatcher,Yuppies,Wham! and Essex Man. These were awful times for working-class heroes like Stephen, those who believed in Arthur Scargill and reviled the Porsche 911.The south was a travesty. He would never fit in – he couldn’t. Three decades later he had turned into the kind of poseur who had a recipe book with instructions for making smoked aubergine purée lying on his ornamental butcher’s block in his nice middle class kitchen. How had this disastrous state of affairs come about? FROM WORKING CLASS HERO TO ABSOLUTE DISGRACE is a rivetingly funny cultural memoir. It will transport you back to one of the great con eras – when we were encouraged to wear blazers with rolled-up sleeves and abandon our roots. Publisher: World rights - Short Books Schedule: Delivered |
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ALADDIN'S LAMP: HOW GREEK SCIENCE CAME TO EUROPE THROUGH THE ISLAMIC WORLD Freely, John In ALADDIN'S LAMP, John Freely brings together his deep knowledge of both science and the Islamic world to tell a fascinating and little-known story. The debt that western science and the western world generally owes to the culture of Islam is astonishing, and an awareness of it very timely now. From the thirteenth century onwards, the crucial knowledge gained by Greek scientists and philosophers was transmitted by a chain of translations through Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, Latin, and finally English and the other European languages. If not for the custodianship of the Islamic world, this knowledge would have been lost forever, a loss which would have had profound implications for the modern world. Peopled with colourful characters, ALADDIN'S LAMP is popular scientific history at its best. Publisher: US: Knopf; Greek: Oceanida Schedule: Publication Spring 2009 |
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THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME Galloway, Janice In the first volume of her memoirs, Janice Galloway brings all the brilliance of her prize-winning fiction to bear on her own memories, vividly revealing how a retiring child found the voice that would make her an outspoken artist. From her earliest years with a boozy, accident-prone father and reluctantly pragmatic mother, her instinct was to observe, not act. She became a watcher - careful, vigilant, helplessly fine-tuned. When her parents’ marriage breaks up, mother and daughter move to an attic above a doctor’s surgery. And when big sister Cora returns home, with her stream of boyfriends, snappy dress sense and matching temper, evasion becomes How Life Is. Galloway’s dazzlingly vivid narrative is rendered with rich textures, dark humour and razor-edged precision - her mother’s weekly washing, sodden on an ice-spangled line; Cora adding layers of make-up for the Ayrshire night life; her own struggle to control the rebellious letters in her first school jotter. Words and music become her joyful secrets while domestic life veers between absurdity and violent dissolution. This is a funny and profoundly revealing book about the dependencies and confusions, and hopes and triumphs of childhood: it is also a book about emergence, as slowly, the beginnings of unsuspected rage push the silent girl towards her voice. Publisher: UK: Granta Schedule: Published |
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MONSTER Hall, Allan On 28 August 1984, Josef Fritzl drugged his teenage duaghter Elisabeth with ether and imprisoned her in a soundproof underground bunker, behind eight locked doors. For twenty-four years, he raped and abused her, never letting her or three of the seven children she bore him out of the dark, windowless cellar. Getting to the heart of one of the most horrific cases of abuse ever recorded, Allan Hall has reconstructed a monstrous personality from new interviews with psychologists, neighbours, colleagues and friends who knew Fritzl, as well as the insight of his own chilling confession.
The picture of Fritzl that emerges, and the lengths he went to in order to conceal his activities and the dark nature of his past in Nazi Austria, is a truly heart-stopping record of a man so cruel he inflicted almost inconceivable suggering on his own children.
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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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A STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY: ELLEN TERRY AND HENRY IRVING Holroyd, Michael Michael Holroyd's book about the encounter of two great theatrical characters is his first major biography since his three-volume study of George Bernard Shaw. It follows Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, the supreme stars of late Victorian and Edwardian theatre and two of the first international celebrities, through their early lives, their relationship, their careers, and their children. Michael Holroyd describes it as ‘the saga of two extraordinary families and two theatrical dynasties, covering over a hundred years… a time of the novel of sensation, a period of risque musical halls and riotous farces, of psychological thrillers and blood-and-thunder melodramas… a book that will reflect all these excesses and could be described as a sensational group biography based on the extravagant tragedies and romantic comedies that spilled over from these places of entertainment into people’s emotional lives… of all my non-fiction books probably the most varied and ambitious.' Publisher: UK: Chatto & Windus Schedule: Publication: September 2008 |
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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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KOSOVO: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW Judah, Tim On February 17th 2008 Kosovo declared its independence, becoming the seventh state to emerge from the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. A tiny country of just two million people, 90% of whom are ethnic Albanians, Kosovo is central—geographically, historically, and politically—to the European Union. Its future, however, remains uncertain. In KOSOVO: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW, Tim Judah provides a straightforward guide to the complicated place that is Kosovo. Judah, who has spent years covering the region, offers succinct, penetrating answers to a wide range of questions: Why is Kosovo important? Who are the Albanians? Who are the Serbs? Why is Kosovo so important to Serbs? What role does Kosovo play in the region and in the world? Judah reveals how things stand at the moment and traces the history and geopolitical dynamics that have led to the drama of independence. The most important of these is the question of the right to self-determination, invoked by the Kosovo Albanians, as opposed to right of territorial integrity invoked by Serbs. For many Serbs, Kosovo’s declaration of independence and subsequent recognition has been little less than traumatic, a savage blow to national pride. Albanians, on the other hand, believe their independence rights an historical wrong: the Serbian conquest (Serbs say “liberation”) of Kosovo in 1912.
For anyone wishing to understand both the history and possible future of Kosovo at this pivotal moment in its history, this book offers a wealth of insight and information in a uniquely accessible format.
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ESCAPE FROM THE DEEP: THE TRUE STORY OF A SUBMARINE CREW'S COURAGE Kershaw, Alex By October 1944 the U S Navy sumarine Tang was legendary - it had sunk more enemy ships, rescued more downed airmen and pulled off more daring surface attacks than any other Allied submarine in the Pacific. And then, on her fifth patrol, tragedy struck - its last torpedo did a 'circular run', coming back and hitting the Tang with enormous force, instantly killing half the crew. The survivors who went down struggled to stay alive in their submerged 'iron coffin' one hundred and eighty feet beneath the surface, while the Japanese dropped deadly depth-charges. As the air ran out, some of them made a daring ascent through the escape hatch. In the end just nine men of the original eighty-seven-man crew managed to survive, including four of the crew who had been blown from the bridge when the faulty torpedo hit. But all nine of them were just beginning a far greater ordeal. After being picked up by a Japanese patrol vessel they were sent to a secret interrogation camp known as 'Torture Farm'. By the time they were finally liberated in August 1945 they were close to death, but had revealed nothing to the Japanese, including the greatest secret of the Second World War. Alex Kershaw's grand narrative is in the best traditions of heroic war stories.
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THE VALLEY OF DEATH Kiley, Sam THE VALLEY OF DEATH will be Sam Kiley’s account of 16th Air Assault Brigade’s 2008 tour of duty in Helmand Province. He leaves for Afghanistan in the first week of May and has been granted an unparalleled and unique level of access by the Ministry of Defence. For the whole of their tour he will live and work, without minders or restrictions, alongside the Brigade as they fight alongside Afghan troops to expel the Taleban from the lawless Helmand Valley. As the snows melt and the ferocious heat and dust of summer sets in, he will watch as the 8,000 young men and women of the Brigade struggle to stay alive as they endure the most extended and intense phase of the war against the Taleban.
THE VALLEY OF DEATH will be a vivid first draft of history. Sam will introduce an extensive and varied cast of characters - Major Hugh Benson of the Royal Irish, whose three sons and nephew are fighting alongside him; Mark Carleton-Smith, the dapper ex-Irish Guards officer who is in command of the whole operation; Jodie Kennedy a “loggie” driver of the Royal Logistics Corps, as well as Afghan soldiers and locals trying desperately to carry on with their lives in the midst of the conflict.
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THE THRIFT BOOK: HOW TO LIVE WELL AND SPEND LESS Knight, India Feeling poor because of recession? Feeling guilty because of global warming? Feeling like you’d quite like to tighten your belt, but aren’t quite ready to embrace DIY macramé handbags? No need to panic. Put down the economy mince and buy this book instead – it’s a blueprint for living beautifully while saving money and easing your conscience. India Knight (no slouch when it comes to extravagance) shows you how even a dedicated consumer and child of the more-is-more 1980s can mend her ways, embrace the New Thrift, and find her life – and bank balance – dramatically improved in the process. She will show you:
• how to make wonderful dinners with very little money Above all, India Knight will show you that saving money and tightening your belt doesn’t have to feel like a penance – it can be both fun and glamorous (and a great deal more satisfying than buying the latest It-bag).
Try it – you have nothing to lose but your overdraft.
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ALL CONSUMING Lawson, Neal Shopping might seem like a harmless enough pleasure, but the facts are terrifying. Although we have grown progressively richer since the end of the second world war, levels of personal debt are sky-rocketing. We juggle credit cards, take out loans, and re-mortgage our overpriced houses to shop and shop and shop. And what are we doing with all this stuff? We throw away ever-growing mountains of rubbish. And even though one in seven of us in the West now owns a second home and the average house size is increasing, one of the fastest growing businesses is storage space. And it’s not just our wardrobes which are getting bigge: obesity is the physical expression of consumption gone crazy, and depression and mental illness increasingly manifests itself through shopping addiction. Shopping has filled our free time and impinged on what was once our free space. It has replaced religion, politics and ideology. In the wake of the most terrible terrorist incident on American soil, politicians informed us that shopping was now a patriotic duty. It has become all consuming. This book will be our wake-up call. Written in an accessible, unsanctimonious style by one of the UK’s most distinguished policy makers and political commentators ALL CONSUMING is designed to generate debate and promote action. And it will offer solutions as well as analyzing the problems of turbo-consumerism.
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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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PARADISE LOST: SMYRNA 1922 Milton, Giles Giles Milton’s latest work of history, PARADISE LOST: SMYRNA 1922 (2008) tells of the terrible destruction of the great Levantine city of Smyrna, the only majority Christian city in the Middle East, and the appalling humanitarian catastrophe that followed.
‘A compelling story…Milton’s considerable achievement is to deliver with characteristic clarity and colour this complex epic narrative.’ -- Jeremy Seal, Sunday Telegraph
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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 will be a little nostalgic, really quite British and quintessentially Hope and Greenwood. Publisher: Ebury Schedule: Forthcoming |
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I BELIEVE IN YESTERDAY Moore, Tim In 1989, Tim Moore moved into the last house in Chiswick with an outside toilet. Intrigued by a subsequent encounter with an elderly former resident, and shamed to confess the phobic haste with which he demolished this facility, he finds himself inspired to travel back to the land before now, experiencing the horny-handed hardships and homespun pleasures enjoyed and endured by Moores gone by. The journey that follows takes him through the world of historical re-enactment, sitting at the bare and grubby feet of retromaniacs who have seen their future in the past, and learning their singular ways. Living on bramble leaves, Johnny cake and porridge, Moore travels from the Iron Age to the Steam Age, sharing straw beds and daft hats with period obsessives driven by socio-historical curiosity, disillusionment with the pampered fecklessness of the modern world, or a simple nostalgia for campfires, flatulence and brutality. As a Roman legionary, Moore is put to the Gaulish sword twelve times a day for the entertainment of the Danish public; as master of a Tudor manor's domestic staff, he works his young charges to heatstroked collapse, and serves up moat-drowned hare to the sneering gentry. He crosses the snake-happy Kentucky wilderness with a Vietnam veteran and his ox-drawn wagon, gets arrested as a Yankee spy in the Louisiana no man's land, and lets a party of taunting French schoolchildren have it with a medieval bazooka. Along the way he meets living historians for whom authenticity means pulling their own teeth out and dyeing outfits in urine, and those who stride back through time with a Nokia and a packet of fags stuffed down their codpiece.
I BELIEVE IN YESTERDAY is an odyssey through 2,000 years of filth and fury, where men were men, the nights were black, the world was your outside toilet and everything tasted faintly of leeks.
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THE LOST ART OF WALKING Nicholson, Geoff Geoff Nicholson turns his eye to the intellectual and cultural history of that most common of activities—walking. This simple, omnipresent activity has inspired numerous subcultures, literary and artistic legacies, sporting events, personal memories, epic journeys, mystical revelations, and scandals. It’s a rich tradition that embraces such novelists as Charles Dickens and Paul Auster, musicians like Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan, and moviemakers from Buster Keaton to Werner Herzog. But it’s also a tradition that includes obsessives and eccentrics, such as the artist Mudman, who coats his body in mud and then walks the city streets; competitive pedestrians such as Captain Barclay, who walked one mile an hour for a thousand successive hours; and gang members who use the hidden language of the “Crip Walk” to spell out messages in the dirt with their scuffing. How we walk, where we walk, why we walk announces who and what we are. Geoff Nicholson is a master chronicler of the hidden subversive twists on a seemingly normal activity. He analyzes the how’s, where’s, and why’s of walking through the ages. He finds people who walk only at night, or naked, or for thousands of miles at a time, in costume, for causes, or for no reason whatsoever. Here, he brings curiosity and genuine insight to a subject that often walks right past us. Publisher: US: Riverhead Schedule: Delivered; Publication: November 2008 |
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THE ATLANTIC OCEAN O’Hagan, Andrew 'I grew up with the decline of Britain and the rise of America. We didn’t know it then, but it would become the period of Greenham Common and The Falklands, the end of heavy British industry and the rise of Blair and the tabloids, the flooding of New Orleans and the eruption of pop cultural imperialism out of the land of the free. From the basing of Trident in British waters and the end of working-class culture as viewed on the pier at Blackpool, we found a new self in our relationship with America up to the time of September 11th, 2001, since when our entanglement has become a populist fury dressed as Democracy.' Through the essays that first made Andrew O’Hagan’s name, this is a collection filled with the writer’s personal story and the power of documentary witness. O’Hagan has sought to extend the scope of what he calls ‘the reported short story’, mirroring his much-lauded work as a prose stylist and creating a bridge to his future fiction. THE ATLANTIC OCEAN will also constitute, for a new generation, a spirited argument for the revival of the essay. Opening with a personal piece examining the journey of Britain and America since the closing of the Thatcher years, it will conclude with a brand new essay telling the story of a British and an American soldier who died in Iraq on the same day in 2006. THE ATLANTIC OCEAN will be a major volume in Andrew O’Hagan’s body of work. Publisher: UK: Faber Schedule: Published |
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WITH A WORLD TO LOSE: THE DECLINE OF ENGLISH AND THE RETURN TO BABEL Ostler, Nicholas WITH A WORLD TO LOSE; The decline of English and the return to Babel By Nicholas Ostler 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 BULB BIBLE Pavord, Anna Publisher: Schedule: |
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AMIS & SON Powell, Neil Kingsley and Martin Amis are among the most successful British novelists of the last fifty years: both are known for their savage wit and their readiness to cause controversy. AMIS & SON: TWO LITERARY GENERATIONS offers the first joint appraisal of this highly unusual literary dynasty. Although both father and son are most celebrated for their comic fiction, their work covers a remarkable range of themes, ideas and influences. This survey shows how industry as well as artistry remains a family trait: apart from literary fiction, their joint output includes poetry, essays and reviews; a James Bond novel; a survey of science fiction; alternative visions of present and future Britain; apocalyptic short stories of nuclear paranoia; and books on grammar, drink, and Space Invaders. And this is without counting Kingsley Amis's letters, one of the richest (and longest) volumes of humorous writing in the English language, and his son's volume of memoirs, EXPERIENCE.
In this witty, opinionated and thoroughly readable critical biography, Neil Powell examines how these two authors were formed by their background and education, how they developed as writers, and how in turn they affected literature and each other. He examines Kingsley Amis's two great creative partnerships – with his friend Philip Larkin and with his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard – and the creative tension between father and son, following Kingsley from jazz-loving iconoclast to Thatcherite Conservative and Martin from his literary precocity to his middle-aged fame.
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THE MAGNIFICENT SPILSBURY AND THE BRIDES IN THE BATH Robins, Jane One day in the summer of 1910 Bessie Constance Mundy, a plain, not very bright young woman, went for a walk in the pretty Georgian streets of Bristol. Still unmarried at twenty-five, Bessie seemed destined for spinsterhood, until a chance encounter changed everything. During her walk Bessie fell into conversation with Henry Williams, a smooth-talking Londoner who dressed like a dandy and soon declared his love for her. It was Bessie’s misfortune that Williams was no Prince Charming, but rather a psychopath embarking on a career as a serial killer. She was to become the first victim of the infamous ‘Brides in the Bath’ murderer. His real name was George Joseph Smith and his trial at the Old Bailey in 1915 was so sensational that it knocked the First World War off the front pages of the popular press.
As Smith roamed the country marrying vulnerable women, and drowning them in their baths, a handsome young doctor named Bernard Spilsbury was in London, working obsessively to establish himself as the country’s leading forensic pathologist. It was his evidence that was to convict Smith, and establish Spilsbury as ‘the real life Sherlock Holmes’ and the father of modern forensics. THE BRIDES IN THE BATH uncovers the story of both men and their strange worlds, weaving together the two narratives in a work of history which is steeped in period atmosphere and reads like a detective novel.
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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, started on January 1st 2006, 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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COSMIC REPORTER: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ARTHUR KOESTLER 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 & Translation: Random House Schedule: Delivered; Publication: Autumn 2009 |
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A JURY OF HER PEERS: AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS FROM ANN BRADSTREET TO ANNIE PROULX Showalter, Elaine In 1977 Elaine Showalter published A LITERATURE OF THEIR OWN, a book about English women novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries which immediately established itself as a classic. A JURY OF HER PEERS will be a counterpart of that book, looking at American women writers over a period of 350 years. From the Puritans to the Feminists and Postmodernists, this book will constitute the definitive account of writing by American women. Publisher: UK: Virago; US: Knopf; (Translation: Elaine Markson Agency) Schedule: Delivered; Publication: Spring 2009 |
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MY NAME IS DAPHNE FAIRFAX Smith, Arthur ‘My name is Arthur Smith, unless there’s anybody here from the Streatham tax office. In which case, I’m Daphne Fairfax.’ This has been Arthur's opening line at hundreds of stand-up comedy performances. In fact, he is neither Daphne nor Arthur. Friends and family know him as Brian. One of the ‘alternative comedians’ who shook up light entertainment in the eighties and nineties, Arthur (and Brian) is also a broadcaster, an opening bat for Grumpy Old Men, a West End playwright (his plays include 'An Evening with Gary Lineker') and a guest on innumerable radio and TV panel shows. In MY NAME IS DAPHNE FAIRFAX he reflects on the nature of comedy and his days as a scruffy kid on the bombsites of Bermondsey, a wild-haired undergraduate, a roadsweeper, an English teacher, a failed rock star, a boozed-up sexual adventurer and an intensive care patient who has been told never to drink again.
Hilarious, scandalous and rude, his memoir incorporates a tender tribute to his parents and a vigorous account of the peculiar business of being alive.
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WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN KEEGAN Smith, Giles Gary Neville's choice of wedding venue, the use of underpants in goal celebrations, whether Lee Sharpe has it in him to go all the way on Celebrity Love Island – Giles Smith has never fought shy of hitting the big issues head on.
Now, in this compilation of his most fearless and forthright public declarations, the award-winning Times sports columnist invites you to chew with him on football’s biggest bullets. Meet the WAG who claims to have ‘heard of’ Kent. Calculate the number of loft conversions you could buy with the money saved from a lifetime of following football. Get a tutorial from Craig Bellamy on how to hit someone with a golf club so that they stay hit. Contemplate Peter Crouch’s future with the Harlem Globetrotters. And ask yourself where David Beckham is these days – how he’s getting on, and why do we never hear about him?
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MAKING AN ELEPHANT Swift, Graham As a novelist, Graham Swift delights in the possibilities of the human voice, imagining his way into the minds and hearts of an extraordinary range of characters. In Making an Elephant, his first ever work of non-fiction, the voice is his own. As generous in its scope as it is acute in its observations, this highly personal book is a singular and open-spirited account of a writer’s life. Swift brings together a richly varied selection of essays, portraits, poetry and interviews, full of insights into his passions and motivations, and wise about the friends, family and other writers who have mattered to him over the years. Kazuo Ishiguro advises on how to choose a guitar, Salman Rushdie arrives for Christmas under guard, and Ted Hughes shares the secrets of a Devon river. There are private moments, too, with long-dead writers, as well as musings on history and memory that readers of Swift’s novels will recognize and love.
A journey through place and time, Making an Elephant is a book of encounters, between a son and his father, between an author and his younger selves, between writer and reader, and between friends. It brims with charm and candour, and tells of alertness to experience and a true engagement with words, in short, with what it means to feel that writing and reading are an essential part of living.
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THE RAVEN KING Tanner, Marcus Matthias Corvinas was the kind of king you usually only find in fairy tales. As a teenaged commoner in fifteenth-century Hungary he found himself thrust onto the throne of a barely unified country just as the Ottoman hordes were preparing to invade. He rose supremely to the challenge, winning decisive battles against the enemy, unifying the nation in victory, and justifying his claim to the throne by adopting modern values.
King Corvinas’ crowning achievement, however, was the creation of a library to house perhaps as many as 5,000 of the greatest works of classical literature and philosophy. Illuminated by the finest artists of the era, his books – with their distinctive black raven colophons in tribute to his family name – were intended to shine the light of classical learning into the darkest recesses of the Hungarian forest, to give the nation great cultural prestige and to draw Hungary inexorably into the European orbit. This is the story of King Corvinas’ great Renaissance library. tracing the fate of some of the most precious and powerful books in history.
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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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THE SCHOOL OF KISSING AND KILLING Wallis, Sarah Dorothy King is a bright eleven-year-old Londoner who is evacuated to the countryside at the start of the Second World War. Passionately missing her parents, she sends regular, wittily illustrated letters home during the war which chart the hopes and fears of the country at large, as well as her personal concerns growing up in the company of strangers. Across the channel, Micheline Bood, a precocious 14-year-old Parisian, confides in her diary her flirtations with ‘delectable' British soldiers and later, dangerously, with occupying German soldiers. The terrors of her life under occupation are nothing compared to those of Miriam Wattenberg, the child of well-to-do Polish Jews, herded into the Warsaw Ghetto soon after the outbreak of war and witness to mass deportations to the death camps. Elsewhere in Europe, children become combatants themselves. Ina Konstantinova is so committed to the defence of the Soviet Union that she runs away from her German-occupied hometown and joins the partisans. Klaus Granzow, a German farmer’s son who struggles to shoot straight, finds himself forced into military service at the age of fifteen in the closing years of the war. Meantime, David Kogan in New York diarises the war’s progress from the safety of his own home, starting with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Maede ShokoIn, a Japanese schoolgirl of David's age, is mobilised to serve her country by comforting kamikaze pilots the night before they are sent on their final mission. Through the voices of these young people, attempting to survive in a changing world, an extraordinarily vivid, personal picture of the Second World War emerges. Despite their different circumstances, their testimonies underline a remarkable commonality of experience. They struggle against the authority of the adults around them, are terrified of losing their loved ones, and suffer the vicissitudes of their changing bodies and volatile emotions. THE SCHOOL OF KISSING AND KILLING brings alive the experience of growing up in wartime as powerfully as Anne Frank’s diary, but with some of the humour of a real Adrian Mole.
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THE PIRATES' TREASUER: A TUMTUM AND NUTMEG ADVENTURE Bearn, Emily The third book in Emily Bearn’s captivating TUMTUM & NUTMEG series is a dramatic island adventure for this lovable couple of mice. When Nutmeg overhears that the children, Arthur and Lucy, are planning to spend the night by the stream at the end of the garden, she is horrified by the hidden dangers of the camping expedition and plans that she and Tumtum should go too. Having stowed away in the children’s rucksack, the Nutmouses set up their very luxurious camp by the river and prepare for a comfortable night. The trouble begins when General Marchmouse turns up, on his way home from a day’s beetle hunting. He spots Arthur’s toy boat by the children’s tent and bounds on board to explore. As the Nutmouses try to coax him off board the boat suddenly soars up into the air – and before they know what has happened Arthur has launched them on the stream.
Shipwrecked on an island the three mice soon discover that they are not alone; the vicious pirate Rats are moored on the opposite shore. In terrible danger, the mice send Arthur and Lucy an SOS in a bottle. The children are their only hope.
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THE GREAT ESCAPE: A TUMTUM & NUTMEG ADVENTURE Bearn, Emily When General Marchmouse is invited to stay at Nutmouse Hall while his wife visits a friend out of town, he soon finds himself rather bored. Nutmeg and Tumtum lead a quiet life, full of afternoon teas and long sits by the fire. So one day the General goes off to explore Rose Cottage. And what does he discover but Arthur’s toy soldiers, train set and model aeroplanes all bundled up in the attic. Though he knows it is silly of him, he cannot resist playing with them day after day - and the children are completely puzzled as to who is making such a mess of their things.
The mystery is solved a few days later when the General is caught red-handed firing his pistol from the dolls’ house window. The children decide to keep the General out of harm's way, taking him to live in the pet gerbils' cage at school. So it is Tumtum and Nutmeg to the rescue again! They hatch a brilliant plan to free the General, involving a dozen young budding ballerina mice from the local ballet school. This delightful follow up to Emily Bearn's first Nutmeg and Tumtum adventure will have young readers enchanted.
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INGO 4: THE CROSSING OF INGO Dunmore, Helen Cold, strong water has got me in its grip. It hates me. It wants to destroy me. It will carry me to the back of the cove and smash me against the cliff . . . Dark despair crawls over my skin. Where is Ingo? Sapphire, Conor and their Mer friends Faro and Elvira are ready to make the Crossing of Ingo - the most dangerous journey young Mer have to face. No human has ever been chosen to make the Crossing, and the future of Air and Ingo depends on their success. But Ervys, his followers and new recruits, the sharks, are determined that Sapphire and Conor must be stopped - dead or alive . . .
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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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ONE SMALL STEP Kerr, P B ‘You don’t really expect me to believe that the President came to your house and asked Scotty to go to the moon with two chimps?’ It’s 1968 and when Scott moves back in with his dad, life takes an unexpected turn. Mom was too busy protesting against the Vietnam War to spend time with him, but Dad, a jet pilot trainer, has time for something even better than Scott had dared to hope. He teaches him to fly. Being illegally in charge of a military aircraft is by far the best thing Scott has ever done. Finding himself in a life-or-death situation after a crash with a goose isn’t so great, but it’s quite some test of his flying skills. The real crunch comes when two NASA representatives knock on the door with a unique request for Scott – and one he can’t refuse. This story was never made public. NASA’s official records don’t mention it once. But what if it’s true? What if Scott’s secret mission took him where no man – or chimpanzee – had gone before?
ONE SMALL STEP is the new adventure novel from PB Kerr, author of the internationally bestselling CHILDREN OF THE LAMP series.
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THE SECRET MINISTRY OF FROST Lake, Nick An albino, half-Inuit and heir to a huge Northern Irish manor, Light has never exactly blended into the crowd. Since her father’s disappearance in the Arctic, she has felt more alone than ever before. Yet as she mourns for the father who was her whole family, Light starts to notice unexpected presences all around her. Surely the crows are behaving rather oddly? What’s that shadow that seems to slip out of the manor walls and walk like a human being? Who’s the tall figure lurking in the woods? And can that possibly be a man with a shark’s head? Suddenly the mysterious world in which her father moved invades young Light’s life with a bang. The Inuit folklore she vaguely knows comes alive all around her; the inscrutable, violent and sometimes horrific beings of the North seem to believe she has a role to play, along with her tattooed butler and their new shark-headed friend. Figures such as Setna, ruler of the sea, draw Light into their age-old intrigues whether she likes it or not. Different forces batter Light from every side, but ever-resourceful (and always ready with a cynical aside), she realises it’s time to take action herself. Soon she’s aboard an icebreaker bound for Nunavut. Yet she scarcely realises the power of those who have chosen her for their enemy – above all, the king of cold and head of an army of floating men, the heartless and terrible Frost.
A fast-paced, action-packed horror adventure novel, THE SECRET MINISTRY OF FROST takes Light to the heart of the uncompromising Arctic. Packed with weird creatures, terrible visions and gripping fight scenes, not to mention a flying walrus, Light’s story explores the instinct for revenge and the growth of friendship in even the harshest of surroundings.
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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 Kerr 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 Cherbs, 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 Cherbs. 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 Cherbs 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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THE FROST CHILD McNamee, Eoin In the concluding part of the NAVIGATOR trilogy, Owen must once again battle the Harsh and confound their efforts to reverse time. With Cati at his side, he sets sail in the Wayfarer in search of his own grandfather, who reversed a terrible ice-storm created by the Harsh in his own time. The evil Johnston is still at large, bent on revenge, and the wonderful characters from THE NAVIGATOR and CITY OF TIME are once again present - Doctor Diamond, Rosie, the Long Woman. Yet amid all these adventures, Owen finally comes to realize that the thing he has been searching for is wisdom itself. Publisher: US: Random House Schedule: Delivered; Publication: Spring 2009 |
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SELINA PENALUNA Page, Jan When Nellie and her twin brother Jack are evacuated from the wartime East End to Cornwall, they find themselves transformed. Nellie becomes studious Ellen, loving her new life of culture, encouraged by her bookish ‘uncle’ and her school for young ladies. But Jack is increasingly wild and discontented, especially after he meets his seductive girlfriend Selina. Ellen resents his increasing separation from her; but much greater divisions are to come, as the violence of war moves into their everyday lives and, taking a boat out with Selina in a dangerous storm, Jack is lost at sea. Many years later, returning with her grand-daughter to the house where she came of age, Ellen looks back on the past and its unanswered questions: whether Uncle Charles’s work for the war effort was more important than he ever admitted; why their close friend Jory abandoned Ellen at the worst time of her life; what lies behind Selina’s claims to be a mermaid; and what happened to Selina and Jack on that dark night in the spring of 1944.
SELINA PENALUNA, a break-out new novel by the well-known screenwriter and children’s author Jan Page, uses the vividly imagined background of Cornwall in a time of war to show the currents that chart a life lived amid secrets.
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THE WRONG SCHOOL 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.
THE WRONG SCHOOL is a glorious period school story, spiced with time-travel adventure, rich comedy and the supernatural.
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