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The Bastard of Istanbul
by Elif Shafak
A hugely enjoyable family saga set in modern day Istanbul, for fans of Isabel Allende. One day a 19 year old and unmarried girl has an abortion. Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse all the men die by age 41, so it is a house of women. But when Asya's Armenian-American cousin comes to stay, long-hidden family secrets and Turkey's turbulent past begin to emerge.
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CHICAGO
by Alaa Al Aswany
A medley of Egyptian and American lives collides on the campus of the University of Illinois Medical Center in a post-9/11 Chicago, and crises of identity abound. Among the players are an atheistic anti-establishment American professor of the sixties generation, whose relationship with a younger African-American woman becomes a moving target for intolerance; a veiled Ph.D. candidate whose conviction in the code of her traditional upbringing is shaken by her exposure to American society; an emigre who has fervently embraced his new American identity, but who cannot escape his Egyptian roots when faced with the issue of his daughter's "honour"; an Egyptian State Security informant who spouts religious doctrines while hankering after money and power; and a dissident student poet who comes to America with the sole aim of financing his literary aspirations, but whose experience in Chicago turns out to be more than he bargained for.
This tightly plotted page-turner is set far from the downtown Cairo of Al Aswany's "The Yacoubian Building", but is no less unflinching an examination of contemporary Egyptian lives.
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Diary of a Bad Year
by J.M. Coetzee
An utterly compelling and contemporary work of fiction from one of our greatest writers, a Nobel laureate and Booker Prize winner. It addresses the profound unease felt by world.
An eminent Australian writer is invited to contribute to a book entitled "Strong Opinions". For him, troubled by Australia's complicity in the wars in the Middle East, it is a chance to air some urgent concerns: how should a citizen of a modern democracy react to their state's involvement in a war that involves the use of torture
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My favourite wife
by Tony Parsons
A sizzling Shanghai tale of sex, romantic struggles and second wives from the bestselling author of Man and Boy. Hot shot young lawyer Bill Holden and his wife Becca move with their four-year-old daughter to the booming, gold-rush city of Shanghai. It is a place of opportunity and temptation, where fortunes are made and foreign marriages come apart in spectacular fashion. After Becca witnesses a near-tragedy, she returns temporarily to London with Holly, and Bill and JinJin are thrown together. Bill wants to be a better man than the millionaire who keeps JinJin Li as a second wife. Better than any man who cheats.
Beccas is his best friend. But in the end, can he give JinJin anything different, can he give her the love she deserves? And can he love his wife too?
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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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Marley & Me
by John Grogan
The heart-warming and unforgettable story of a family and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life. John and Jenny were young and deeply in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wriggly yellow furball of a puppy and life would never be the same.
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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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PLAYING FOR PIZZA
John GRISHAM
Rick Dockery was the third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. In the AFC Championship game against Denver, to the surprise and dismay of virtually everyone, Rick actually got into the game. With a 17-point lead and just minutes to go, Rick provided what was arguably the worst single performance in the history of the NFL. Overnight, he became a national laughingstock and, of course, was immediately cut by the Browns and shunned by all other teams.
But all Rick knows is football, and he insists that his agent, Arnie, find a team that needs him. Against enormous odds Arnie finally locates just such a team and informs Rick that, miraculously, he can in fact now be a starting quarterback–for the mighty Panthers of Parma, Italy.
Yes, Italians do play American football, to one degree or another, and the Parma Panthers desperately want a former NFL player–any former NFL player-at their helm. So Rick reluctantly agrees to play for the Panthers (at least until a better offer comes along) and heads off to Italy. He knows nothing about Parma, has never been to Europe, and doesn't speak or understand a word of Italian. To say that Italy holds a few surprises for Rick Dockery would be something of an understatement.
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EVERYTHING CHANGES
JONATHAN TROPPER
To all appearances, Zachary King is a man with luck on his side. A steady, well-paying job, a rent-free Manhattan apartment, and Hope, his stunning, blue-blooded fiancee: smart, sexy, and completely out of his league. But as the wedding day looms, Zack finds himself haunted by the memory of his best friend, Rael, killed in a car wreck two years earlier (and by his increasingly complicated feelings for Tamara, the beautiful widow Rael left behind.
Then Norm) Zack's freewheeling, Viagra-popping father - resurfaces after a twenty-year absence, looking to make amends. Norm's overbearing, often outrageous efforts to re-establish ties with his sons infuriate Zack, and yet, despite twenty years of bad blood, he finds something compelling in his father's maniacal determination to transform his own life.
Inspired by Norm, Zack boldly attempts to make some changes of his own, and the results are instantly calamitous. Soon fists are flying, his love life is a shambles, and his once carefully structured existence is spinning hopelessly out of control.
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THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BERTIE
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
"The World According to Bertie" is the fourth in the series and revolves around the many colourful characters that come and go at No. 44 Scotland Street. McCall Smith handles the characters with his customary charm and deftness; the stalwart Tory chartered surveyor, the pushy mother, and, most importantly in this novel, the beleaguered Italian-speaking prodigy, Bertie.
This is classic McCall Smith; clever, witty and entertaining and beautifully illustrated. A chance encounter with Armistead Maupin in San Francisco inspired Alexander McCall Smith to write this series of novels based around the fictional No. 44 Scotland Street in Edinburgh's New Town.
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KANDAHAR COCKNEY: A TALE OF TWO WORLDS
JAMES FERGUSSON
The remarkable and touching story of a singular friendship between the author (an affluent Western correspondent) and his Pashtun interpreter who meet in an Afghan war-zone and resume their friendship when Mir becomes an asylum seeker in London's East End. In the spring of 1997, James Fergusson, a young freelance British correspondent, encounters a local Pashtun interpreter named Mir in rebel-controlled Afghanistan. They soon become firm friends, with Mir an invaluable guide not only to the battle zone, but to the country's complex politics, culture and traditions.
Not long after James's return home, Mir and his family are forced to flee Afghanistan, fearing for their lives. When Mir arrives in London seeking asylum, it is to James that he turns for help. Now their roles reverse: the guided becomes the guide as James introduces Mir to the bewildering customs of the infidel West.
James Fergusson's moving and remarkable portrait of a singular friendship gives a human face to one of the most tangled and emotive issues of our time. Powerfully evoking the no-man's land between the Third and the First Worlds, between Islam and the West, Kandahar Cockney also places a very contemporary story in a greater historical context, showing how surprisingly enduring the legacy of Britain's colonial era really is.
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DEATH OF A MONK
BY ALON HILU
This work is set in Damascus 1840. Aslan Farhi's quiet, sheltered life is turned upside down when his brutish father, a wealthy businessman, decides he should wed. Aslan finds the wedding a painful ordeal, lightened only by the presence of the exotic dancer, Umm-Jihan, by whom he becomes entranced.
Unable to come to terms with his wife, who has moved into the family home, Aslan visits his friend Suleiman the barber who tells him of the Maqha cafe, a place strictly forbidden to Jews, on the border between the Christian and Muslim Quarters. Here in this seedy den of vice Aslan meets Umm-Jihan again. This vision of beauty awakens a dormant desire for women. But all is not as it seems and Aslan is soon deeply upset; confused and at a loss he embarks on ill-advised liaison with another man, with disastrous consequences.
The Damascus of "Death of A Monk" is a rich and vibrant place; lively, sensual and at the same time teeming with fear and hostility. Through the dark alleyways and bustling market places Hilu unfolds a story charged with emotional and sexual conflict.
A powerful literary tour de force from a unique new voice; at times wickedly funny, at others painfully sad, but beautifully told throughout. It is a stunning debut.
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RANT
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
"Rant" is the oral history of one Buster 'Rant' Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, detractors, lovers and relations have their say on the man who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time. Rant is a darkly glittering anti-hero whose recreational drug of choice is rabies, and whose own personal Viagra is the venom of a black widow spider. He soon leaves his half-feral hometown for the big city, where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing.
On designated nights, the Party Crashers chase each other in cars in the hope of a collision, and all the while Rant, the 'superspreader', transmits his lethal disease.
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THE KABUL BEAUTY SCHOOL
BY DEBORAH RODRIGUEZ
In the tradition of "Reading Lolita in Tehran", a look at the lives of women in Afghanistan through the lens of The Kabul Beauty School. Most Westerners now working in Afghanistan spend their time tucked inside the wall of a military compound or embassy. Deborah Rodriguez is one of the very few who lives life smack in the middle of Kabul.
Now, Rodriguez tells the story of the beauty school she founded and the vibrant women who were her students there. When Rodriguez opened the Kabul Beauty School she not only empowered her students with a new sense of autonomy ( in the strictly patriarchal culture, the beauty school proved a small haven) but also made some of the closest friends of her life. Woven through the book are the stories of her students; there is the newlywed who must fake her own virginity, the 12 year-old bride who has been sold into marriage to pay her family's debts, the brilliant former medic who has not left her house for thirty years.
All of these women have a story to tell, and all of them bring their stories to the Kabul Beauty School, where, along with Rodriguez herself, they learn the art of perms, of friendship, and of freedom.
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THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB
Karen Joy Fowler
Six people, five women and a man, meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love..."I was enchanted".
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GOING DUTCH
Katie Pforde
Jo Edwards never planned to live on a barge. She's not even sure she likes boats. But when her husband trades her in for a younger model, she finds her options alarmingly limited.
Dora Hamilton never planned to run out on her own wedding. But as The Big Day approaches, her cold feet show no signs of warming up and accepting Jo's offer of refuge aboard The Three Sisters seems the only alternative. As Jo and Dora embark on reorganising their muddled lives, they realise they both need a practical way to keep themselves afloat.
But, despite their certainty that they've sworn off men for good, they haven't bargained for the persistent intervention of attractive but enigmatic Marcus, and laid-back, charming Tom, who both seem determined to help them whether they like it or not ...
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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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BURNING BRIGHT
Tracy Chevalier
The wonderful new novel from the much loved author of "Girl With a Pearl Earring" and "Falling Angels". Flames and funerals, circus feats and seduction, neighbours and nakedness: Tracy Chevalier's new novel "Burning Bright" sparkles with drama. London 1792.
The Kellaways move from familiar rural Dorset to the tumult of a cramped, unforgiving city. They are leaving behind a terrible loss, a blow that only a completely new life may soften. Against the backdrop of a city jittery over the increasingly bloody French Revolution, a surprising bond forms between Jem, the youngest Kellaway boy, and streetwise Londoner Maggie Butterfield.
Their friendship takes a dramatic turn when they become entangled in the life of their neighbour, the printer, poet and radical, William Blake. He is a guiding spirit as Jem and Maggie navigate the unpredictable, exhilarating passage from innocence to experience. Their journey inspires one of Blake's most entrancing works.
Georgian London is recreated as vividly in Burning Bright as 17th-century Delft was in Tracy Chevalier's bestselling masterpiece, Girl with a Pearl Earring.
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A Walk to Remember
Nicholas SPARKS
The last person Landon thought he would fall for was Jamie Sullivan, daughter of the town's Baptist minister. A quiet girl, Jamie seemed content living in a world apart from the other teens. She took care of her widowed father, rescued hurt animals and volunteered at the local orphanage.
Landon would never have dreamed of asking her out, but a twist of fate threw them together when he found himself without a partner for the school dance. In the months that followed, Landon discovered truths that most people take a lifetime to learn about the joy of giving, the pain of loss and, most of all, the transforming nature of love. Being with Jamie would show him the depths of the human heart and lead him to a decision so stunning it would send him irrevocably on the road to manhood...
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CASE HISTORIES
ATKINSON Kate
Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet (Lost on the left, Found on the right) and the two never seem to balance. His days are full of people clamouring for answers and explanations. Two spinster sisters make a shocking find. A solicitor investigates an old murder. A nurse has lost her niece; a widow, her cats.
Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge, and has a failed marriage to prove it. He is forty-five but feels much, mush older. He is at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they're going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life is brought sharply into focus.
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THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
DESAI Kiran
In the foothills of the Himalayas sits a once grand, now crumbling house - home to three people and a dog. There is the retired judge dreaming of colonial yesterdays; his orphaned granddaughter Sai who has fallen for her clever maths tutor; the cook, whose son Biju writes untruthful letters home from New York City; and Mutt, the judge's beloved dog. Around the house swirls mountain mist, but also the forces of revolution and change.
For a new world is clashing with the old, and the future offers both hope and betrayal ...
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THE GHOST AT THE TABLE
BERNE Suzanne
'Families are toxic... Thanksgiving, New England, and writer Cynthia has been persuaded by elder sister Frances to come and visit for the autumn holiday. Cynthia is reluctant to join in this family reunion because she'd rather not see their long-estranged father. Yet Frances is adamant that they must all meet to clear the air - poisoned ever since their mother died when they were children.
But Cynthia has her own ideas about how to use this family occasion. It's time to lift the lid on some unwelcome home truths about what happened all those years ago. And this time her daddy's feelings are not to be spared.
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THE LADIES OF GRACE ADIEU
CLARKE Suzanna
Faerie is never as far away as you think. Sometimes you find you have crossed an invisible line and must cope, as best you can, with petulant princesses, vengeful owls, ladies who pass their time embroidering terrible fates or with endless paths in deep, dark woods and houses that never appear the same way twice. The heroines and heroes bedevilled by such problems in these fairy tales include a conceited Regency clergyman, an eighteenth-century Jewish doctor and Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as two characters from "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: Strange himself and the Raven King".
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MY LIFE AS EMPEROR
TONG Su
Opening with a child's ascension to the Chinese throne, this novel charts the complexities of courtly life, as a boy of few talents is suddenly thrust into a position of power. The dramatisation of the dark side of nation-building, this is also a deft exploration of the failings of human nature.
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McCarthy's The Road Wins
2007 Fiction Pulitzer
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearting, a cart of scavenged food-and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
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A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS
Khalid Hosseini
Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, who is thirty years her senior. Nearly two decades later, in a climate of growing unrest, tragedy strikes fifteen-year-old Laila, who must leave her home and join Mariam's unhappy household. Laila and Mariam are to find consolation in each other, their friendship to grow as deep as the bond between sisters, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter.
With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs, life a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear, the women's endurance tested beyond their worst imaginings. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. In the end, it is love that triumphs over death and destruction.
"A Thousand Splendid Suns" is an unforgettable portrait of a wounded country and a deeply moving story of family and friendship. It is a beautiful, heart-wrenching story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely bond and an indestructible love.
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NINETEEN MINUTES
PICOULT Jodi
Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens, until a student enters the local high school with an arsenal of guns and starts shooting, changing the lives of everyone inside and out. The daughter of the judge sitting on the case is the state's best witness, but she can't remember what happened in front of her own eyes. Or can she?
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ON CHESIL BEACH
Ian McEwan
It is June 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come...
"On Chesil Beach" is another masterwork from Ian McEwan, a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
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ATONEMENT
Ian McEwan
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever.
Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
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THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK
Alice Munro
On a clear day, you could see "America" from Edinburgh's Castle Rock; or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather, James Laidlaw, when he had drink taken. Then, in 1818, Laidlaw left the parish of "no advantages", of banked Presbyterian emotions and uncanny tales (where, like his more famous cousin James Hogg, he was born and bred) and sailed to the new world with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants, among them the author herself.
They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned on, and fear was commonplace, at least for females ...But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters; a father dies, and a baby vanishes en route from Illinois to Canada; another story hints at incest; childhood is short and hazardous. This is family history where imperfect recollections blur into fiction, where the past shows through the present like the tracks of a glacier on a geological map. First love flowers under an apple tree while lust rears its head in a barn; a restless mother with ideas beyond her station declines painfully; a father farms fox fur and turkeys; a clever girl escapes to college and then into a hasty marriage.
Beneath the ordinary landscape there's a different story - evocative, frightening, sexy, unexpected, gripping. Alice Munro tells it like no other.
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BLACK GIRL, WHITE GIRL
Joyce Carol Oates
A controversial, painfully intimate depiction of race in America by the esteemed author of "We were the Mulvaneys", "Blonde" and "The Falls". Fifteen years after the mysterious death of Minette Swift ( a 19-year-old black girl enrolled as a scholarship student in an exclusive liberal arts college) her former roommate Genna begins an unofficial enquiry into the traumatic event. In reconstructing the girls' tumultuous freshman year at the college, Genna is led also to reconstruct her life as the daughter of a famous "radical-hippie-lawyer" of the 1960s among whose clients were anti-Vietnam war protesters wanted by the FBI.
What follows is a gripping and personal portrayal of "black" and "white" in America in the years of crisis following the end of the Vietnam War, and the ignominious exposure and fall of President Richard Nixon.
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ZOLI
Colum McCann
The novel begins in Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s when Zoli, a young Roma girl, is six years old. The fascist Hlinka guards had driven most of her people out onto the frozen lake and forced them to stay there until the spring, when the ice cracked and everyone drowned, Zoli's parents, brothers and sisters. Now she and her grandfather head off in search of a "company".
Zoli teaches herself to read and write and becomes a singer, a privileged position in a gypsy company as they are viewed as the guardians of gypsy tradition. But Zoli is different because she secretly writes down some of her songs. With the rise of the Nazis, the suppression of the gypsies intensifies.
The war ends when Zoli is 16 and with the spread of socialism, the Roma are suddenly regarded as "comrades" again. Zoli meets Stephen Swann, a man with whom she will have a passionate affair, but who will also betray her. He persuades Zoli to publish some of her work.
Zoli is based very loosely on the true story of the Gypsy poet, Papsuza, who was sentenced to a Life of Pollution by her fellow Roma when a Polish intellectual published her poems. But Colum has turned this into so much more: it's a brilliantly written work that brings the culture and the time to life.
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A SPOT OF BOTHER
Mark Haddon
George Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. "The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely." Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz.
Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased, as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has "strangler's hands". Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues.
And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind. The way these damaged people fall apart (and come together ) as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon's disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.
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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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