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Inés of My Soul
by Isabel Allende
The vibrant new novel from Isabel Allende takes her back to her homeland of Chile, and tells the story of the first Spanish woman to arrive on its shores with the Conquistadors in the 1500s.
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A Sport and A Pastime
by James Salter
Touring Paris and provincial France in a handsome borrowed car, Philip Dean, Yale dropout, has an affair with a young French woman named Anne-Marie. Their liaison is imagined with candour and sensitivity by an unnamed narrator, whose fantasies become compellingly and hauntingly real.
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The Steep Approach to Garbadale
by Iain Banks
Dark family secrets and a passionate love affair, full of his trademark warmth, humanity and ingenuity, this is Iain Banks' best novel since THE CROW ROAD.
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Terra amata
by J.M.G. Le Clézio
For Chancelade, the world is teeming with beauty, wonder and possibilities. From a small boy playing on the beach, through his adolescence and his first love, to the death of his father and on to the end of his own life, he relishes the most minute details of his physical surroundings, whether a grain of sand, an insect or a blade of grass ,as he journeys on a sensory adventure from cradle to grave. Terra Amata brilliantly explores humankind's place in the universe, the relationship between us and the Earth we inhabit and, ultimately, how to live.
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A CONCISE
CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY
FOR LOVERS
Amy Tan
Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain…
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WOLF HALL (Winner of 2009 Man Booker Prize)
Hilary Mantel
'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant.
Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself.
From one of our finest living writers, 'Wolf Hall' is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion, suffering and courage.
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The blindfold
Siri Hustvedt
Iris Vegan, a graduate student living alone and impoverished in New York, encounters four strong characters who fascinate and in different ways subordinate her: an inscrutable urban recluse who employs her to record the possessions of a murdered woman; a photographer whose eerie portrait of Iris takes on a life of its own; an old woman in hospital who tries to claim a remnant of the ailing Iris; and a professor she has an affair with. An exploration of female identity in an age when the old definitions -- as some man's daughter/wife/mother -- no longer apply fuelled with eroticism and a sense of menace
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The other Hand (shortlisted for the 2008 Costa)
Chris Cleave
We don't want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it so we will just say this: This is the story of two women.
Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice. Two years later, they meet again -- the story starts there...Once you have read it, you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either.
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Small Island
Andrea Levy
In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving, multi-award winning novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a lightness of touch and a generosity of spirit that challenges and uplifts the reader. It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street.
London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but with her husband, Bernard, not back from the war, what else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Gilbert's wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.
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Hunger
Knut Hamsun
"Hunger" is regarded as one of the major modernist novels, anticipating and influencing much fiction that was to follow, from Joyce to Kafka to Camus and Kelman. Set in Oslo, "Hunger" is a compelling journey into the mind of a young writer who is driven by starvation to constantly fluctuating extremes of euphoria and despair. It is a study of the psychological hinterlands - to the very edges of experience - where few writers have the courage to tread.
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DIGGING TO AMERICA
TYLER Anne
Anne Tyler's richest, most deeply searching novel, a story about what it is to be an American, and about Iranian-born Maryam Yazdan, who, after 35 years in this country, must finally come to terms with her "outsiderness. Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by chance at the Baltimore airport, the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam's fully assimilated son and his attractive Iranian wife. Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an adopted infant daughter from Korea. After the instant babies from distant Asia are delivered, Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate: an "arrival party" that from then on is repeated every year as the two families become more and more deeply intertwined. Even Maryam is drawn in, up to a point. When she finds herself being courted by Bitsy Donaldson's recently widowed father, all the values she cherishes, her traditions, her privacy, her otherness, are suddenly threatened.
A luminous novel brimming with subtle, funny, and tender observations that immerse us in the challenges of both sides of the American story.
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She's come undone
Wally Lamb
Dolores Price is the wry and overweight, sensitive and pained, cynical heroine of this novel. The story follows her from four to 40, from her shattered family life through the hellish circles of sexual and food abuse to her gradual recovery and her fight to love again.
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Juliet, Naked
Nick Hornby
In this funny and touching new novel which thoughtfully and sympathetically looks at how lives can be wasted but how they are never beyond redemption. Annie lives in a dull town on England's bleak east coast and is in a relationship with Duncan which mirrors the place; Tucker was once a brilliant songwriter and performer, who's gone into seclusion in rural America - or at least that's what his fans think. Duncan is obsessed with Tucker's work, to the point of derangement, and when Annie dares to go public on her dislike of his latest album, there are quite unexpected, life-changing consequences for all three. Nick Hornby uses this intriguing canvas to explore why it is we so often let the early promise of relationships, ambition and indeed life evaporate. And he comes to some surprisingly optimistic conclusions.
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Legend of a suicide
David Vann
Roy is still young when his father, a failed dentist and hapless fisherman, puts a .44 magnum to his head and commits suicide on the deck of his beloved boat. Throughout his life, Roy returns to that moment, gripped by its memory and the shadow it casts over his small-town boyhood, describing with poignant, mercurial with his parents' woeful marriage and inevitable divorce, their kindnesses and weaknesses, the absurd and comic turning-points of his past. Finally, in "Legend of a Suicide", Roy lays his father's ghost to rest. But not before he exacts a grueling, exhilarating revenge. Revolving around a fatally misconceived adventure deep in the wilderness of Alaska, this is a remarkably tender story of survival and disillusioned love.
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Little children
Tom Perrotta
Tom Perrotta's thirty-something parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed 'The Prom King' by the moms at the playground, and his wife, Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son. And there's Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she's become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband, Richard, who is becoming more and more involved with an internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child.
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Music & Silence
Rose Tremain
In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish Court to join King Christian IV's Royal Orchestra. From the moment when he realises that the musicians have to perform in a freezing cellar underneath the royal apartments, he understands that he's come to a place where the opposing states of light and dark, good and evil are waging war to the death. "Music and Silence" tells a story that is both violent and tender, shocking and consoling.
This is a bold, uncompromising, wildly original book which demonstrates that in the day-to-day business of living, as in a fairy tale, not everything is totally black, nor wholly white.
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An education
Nick Hornby
This title includes the script for major new film "An Education", the story of the bizarre relationship between 1960s teenager Jenny (played by Carey Mulligan) and older man David (Peter Sarsgaard), after she accepts a lift on her way home from music practice one day. Based on "Observer" journalist Lynn Barber's real-life experience as recounted in her book "An Education", the film won the Audience Award for best film at the Sundance Film Festival and tremendous acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival too.
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I see you everywhere
Julian Glass
Louisa and Clem: two sisters who love each other more the further they move apart. Louisa is the elder one, the conscientious student, precise and careful, who yearns for a good marriage, a career, a family. Clem, the archetypal younger sibling, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, and committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her.
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Bright star
John Keats
This book includes an introduction by director Jane Campion. John Keats died in penury and relative obscurity in 1821, aged only 26. He is now seen as one of the greatest English poets and a genius of the Romantic age. This collection, which contains all his most memorable works and a selection of his letters, is a feast for the senses, displaying Keats' gift for gorgeous imagery and sensuous language, his passionate devotion to beauty, as well as some of the most moving love poetry ever written.
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SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS
PESSL Marisha
It had been almost a year since I'd found Hannah dead, and I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself. I was wrong.' "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" is a mesmerizing debut. As teenager Blue van Meer tells her story we are hurled into a dizzying world of murder and butterflies, womanizing and wandering, American McCulture, the Western Canon, political radicalism and juvenile crushisms.
Structured around a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class (with hand-drawn Visual Aids), Blue's wickedly funny yet poignant tale reveals how the imagination finds meaning in the most bewildering times, the ways people of all ages strive for connection, and how the darkest of secrets can set us free.
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UNDER MY SKIN:
VOLUME ONE OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
LESSING Doris
This is the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobigraphy, beginning with her childhood in Africa, taking us through her marriages, the birth of her children, involvement in communist politics, and ending on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel, "The Grass is Singing", in her suitcase. It tells the story of a young woman, uncompromising in every respect, who battles at every turn against her upbringing and environment in Southern Rhodesia, who fights for her individuality and self-determination at any cost.
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SHARPE'S FURY
Bernard Cornwell
This is the long-awaited twenty-first novel in the number one bestselling series featuring Richard Sharpe. In the winter of 1811 the war seemed lost. All Spain has fallen to the French, except for Cadiz which is now the Spanish capital and is under siege.
Wellington and his British army are in Portugal, waiting for spring to spark the war to life again. Richard Sharpe and his company are part of a small expeditionary force sent to break a bridge across the River Guadiana. What begins as a brilliant piece of soldiering turns into disaster, thanks to the brutal savagery of the French Colonel Vandal who is leading his battalion to join the siege of Cadiz.
Sharpe extricates a handful of men from the debacle and is driven south into the threatened city. There, in Cadiz, he discovers more than one enemy. Many Spaniards doubt Britain's motives and believe their future would be brighter if they made peace with the French, and one of them, a baleful priest, secures a powerful weapon to break the British alliance.
"Sharpe's Fury" is based on the real events of the winter of 1811 that led to the extraordinary victory of Barossa, the battle which saw the British capture the first French eagle of the Napoleonic Wars.
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THE WITCH OF PORTOBELLO
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho, one of the world's best loved storytellers, is back with a riveting new novel set in London. This is the story of Athena, or Sherine, to give her the name she was baptised with. Her life is pieced together through a series of recorded interviews with those people who knew her well or hardly at all, parents, colleagues, teachers, friends, acquaintances, her ex-husband.
The novel unravels Athena's mysterious beginnings, via an orphanage in Romania, to a childhood in Beirut. When war breaks out, her adoptive family move with her to London, where a dramatic turn of events occurs! Athena, who has been dubbed "the Witch of Portobello" for her seeming powers of prophecy, disappears dramatically, leaving those who knew her to solve the mystery of her life and abrupt departure. This gripping new novel is filled with the themes Paulo fans know and love: spirituality, relationships, destiny, freedom.
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SLAM
Nick Hornby
There was this time when everything seemed to have come together. And so obviously it was time to go and screw it all up. Sam is sixteen and a skater.
Just so there are no terrible misunderstandings: skating = skateboarding. There's no ice. Life is ticking along nicely for Sam: his mum's got rid of her rubbish boyfriend, he's thinking about college and he's met someone. Alicia. Then a little accident happens. One with big consequences for someone just finding his way in life. Sam can't run (let alone skate) away from this one. He's a boy facing a man's problems and the question is, has he got what it takes to confront them?
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