Absolution
Patrick Flanery
Atlantic, PB, 9780857892010
In her garden, ensconced in the lush vegetation of the Western Cape, Clare Wald, world-renowned author, mother, critic, takes up her pen and confronts her life. Sam Leroux has returned to South Africa to embark upon a project that will establish his reputation - he is to write Clare's biography. But how honest is she prepared to be? Was she complicit ... More/Buy
The Absolutist
John Boyne
Black Swan, PB, 9780552775403
September 1919:20 year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver some letters to Marian Bancroft. Tristan fought alongside Marian's brother Will during the Great War but in 1917, Will laid down his guns on the battlefield, declared himself a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor, an act which has brought shame and dishonour on the ... More/Buy
Amandine
Marlena de Blasi
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781742377551
Set against the backdrop of Europe as it moves inexorably toward World War II, Amandine follows a young orphan's journey in search of her heritage. The story opens in Krakow in 1931, as a baby girl is conceived out of wedlock. The child's grandmother, a countess, believes she is protecting her daughter when she claims that the baby didn't survive. In ... More/Buy
The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach
Harper Collins, PB, 9780007374458
NOW IN B FORMAT. In The Art of Fielding, we see sport played in its purest form: by young men who know that their four years on the baseball diamond at Westish College, "a little school in the crook of the thumb of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin," are all they have left. Only their preternaturally gifted fielder, Henry Skrimshander, ... More/Buy
Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World
May Festival Project
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408809631
Beirut39 is a Hay Festival project which aims to select and celebrate 39 of the best young Arab writers as a centrepiece of the Beirut World Capital festivities in April 2010. Following the successful launch of Bogoa39, which identified many of the most interesting upcoming Latin American talents, including Wendy Guerra, Junot Diaz (Pulitzer Prize), Santiago Roncagliolo and Juan Gabriel Vasquez ... More/Buy
Black Orchid Deluxe Edition
Neil Gaiman
D C Comics, HB, 9781401233358
Before introducing the modern version of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman wrote this dark tale that reinvented a strange DC Comics super hero in the Vertigo mold. Featuring spectacular art by Gaiman's frequent collaborator, Dave McKean, BLACK ORCHID is now collected in hardcover for the first time. After being viciously murdered, Susan Linden is reborn fully grown as the Black Orchid, a ... More/Buy
The Boy Who Could See Demons
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Piatkus, PB, 9780749953133
'I first met my demon the morning that Mum said Dad had gone.' Alex Broccoli is ten years old, likes onions on toast and can balance on the back legs of his chair for fourteen minutes. His best friend is a 9000-year-old demon called Ruen. When his depressive mother attempts suicide yet again, Alex meets child psychiatrist Anya. Still bearing the ... More/Buy
Briefs Encountered
Julian Clary
Ebury Press, PB, 9780091938840
A haunting story of love and obsession. Noel Coward is the toast of twenties society - a brilliant playwright, composer and entertainer whose bon homie, witty songs and pithy lines hide a secret. Goldenhurst, his house in Kent, provides a refuge. A place where he can be himself. And more importantly where he can be with his lover, Jack, without fear ... More/Buy
Brilliance
Anthony McCarten
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781846881787
Short of money, the inventor Thomas Edison is captivated by the charismatic figure of J.P. Morgan, the 'world's banker'. Accepting Morgan's glittering offer of almost unlimited cash in return for helping the man change the way the world does business, Edison sees himself descend from being the godlike inventor of electric light to being complicit in the invention of the electric ... More/Buy
Bring Up The Bodies
Hilary Mantel
Harper Collins, PB, 9780007353583
'My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he'll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he'll cut off your leg,' says Walter Cromwell in the year 1500. 'But if you don't cut across him he's a very gentleman. And he'll stand anyone a drink.' By 1535 Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son, is far from his humble origins. Chief Minister ... More/Buy
By Nightfall
Michael Cunningham
Harper Collins, PB, 9780007437849
Peter is forty-four, prosperous, childless, the owner of a big New York apartment, a player in the NY contemporary art dealing scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close on twenty years. Their marriage is sound, in the way marriages are. Peter might even describe himself to be happy. But when Mizzy, Rebecca's much younger brother, comes to stay, his ... More/Buy
The Case of the Missing Boyfriend
Nick Alexander
Corvus, PB, 9780857896308
C.C. is nearly forty and everything about her life appears to be wonderful. She's got a high-powered job in advertising, a great flat in Primrose Hill, and a wild bunch of friends to spend her weekends with. So why does she feel so low? The truth is, C.C. would rather be donning wellies on a farm than convincing the world they ... More/Buy
The Chaperone
Laura Moriarty
Michael Joseph, PB, 9780718159504
On a summer's day in 1922 Cora Carlisle boards a train from Wichita, Kansas, to New York City, leaving behind a marriage that's not as perfect as it seems and a past that she buried long ago. She is charged with the care of a stunning young girl with a jet-black fringe and eyes wild and wise beyond her fifteen years. ... More/Buy
Charlotte Street
Danny Wallace
Ebury, PB, 9780091919023
It all starts with a girl ... (because yes, there's always a girl) Jason Priestley (not that one) has just seen her. They shared an incredible, brief, fleeting moment of deep possibility, somewhere halfway down Charlotte Street. And then, just like that, she was gone - accidentally leaving him holding her old-fashioned, disposable camera, chock full of undeveloped photos. And now ... More/Buy
Classical Arabic Stories: An Anthology
Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed)
Columbia University Press, PB, 9780231149235
Salma Khadra Jayyusi's Classical Arabic Stories selects from an impressive corpus, including excerpts from seven seminal works: Ibn Tufail's novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan; Kalila wa Dimna by Ibn al-Muqaffa; The Misers by al-Jahiz; The Brethren of Purity's The Protest of Animals Against Man; Al-Maqamat (The Assemblies) by al-Hamadhani and al-Hariri; Epistle of Forgiveness by al-Ma'arri; and the epic romance, Sayf Bin ... More/Buy
The Collaborator
Mirza Waheed
Penguin, PB, 9780141048581
NOW IN B FORMAT. By the waters running through the valleys of Kashmir, teenage boys come to play cricket, talk about girls, and just be. But a few years later, when they are young men and violence grips the region, they are gone. Only the son of the local headman has stayed. He knows his friends have slipped over the border ... More/Buy
A Death in the Family
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Harvill Secker, PB, 9781846554681
In this utterly remarkable novel Karl Ove Knausgaard writes with painful honesty about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father, and his bewilderment and grief on his father’s death. When he becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for ... More/Buy
Dinner at Rose's Marlena de Blasi
Danielle Hawkins
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781742379395
In the wake of an unfortunate best-friend-and-boyfriend-caught-having-sex-in-a-chair incident, Jo Donnelly flees her civilised city life to take up a temporary job at the physiotherapy clinic in her small home town. Jo is ineptly assisted at work by a receptionist who divides her time between nail care and surfing the internet. Meanwhile, her new flatmate is a joyless couch potato who hogs ... More/Buy
Dirt
David Vann
Text Publishing, PB, 9781921922572
The year is 1985 and 22-year-old Galen lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded old house with a walnut orchard in a suburb of Sacramento. He doesn't know who his father is, his abusive grandfather is dead, and his grandmother, losing her memory, has been shipped off to a nursing home. Galen and his mother survive on old family ... More/Buy
The Dog Who Danced: A Novel
Susan Wilson
St Martins, PB, 9781250011800
If there's been a theme in Justine Meade's life, it's loss. Her mother, her home, even her son. The one bright spot in her loss-filled life, the partner she could always count on, was Mack, her grey and black Sheltie - that is, until she is summoned back to her childhood home after more than twenty years away. Ed and Alice ... More/Buy
The Emperor of Lies
Steve Sem-Sandberg
Faber, PB, 9780571259212
In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman and orphanage director, and the elusive, authoritarian power sustaining the ghetto's very existence. From one of Scandinavia's most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors, The Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of ... More/Buy
The Fever Tree
Jennifer McVeigh
Viking, PB, 9780670920891
1880. South Africa. A country torn apart by greed. Frances Irvine, destitute in the wake by her father's sudden death, is forced to abandon her life of wealth and privilege in London and emigrate to teh Cape. In this remote and inhospitable land, she becomes entangled with two very different men. One driven by ambition, the other by his ideals. Only ... More/Buy
The Forrests
Emily Perkins
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408809235
Dorothy Forrest is immersed in the sensory world around her; she lives in the flickering moment. From the age of seven, when her odd, disenfranchised family moves from New York City to the wide skies of Auckland, to the very end of her life, this is her great gift and possible misfortune. Through the wilderness of a commune, to falling in ... More/Buy
The Girl Who Fell From The Sky
Simon Mawer
Little Brown, PB, 9781408703519
Marian Sutro is an outsider: the daughter of a diplomat, brought up on the shores of Lake Geneva and in England, half French, half British, naive yet too clever for her own good. But when she is recruited from her desk job by SOE to go undercover in wartime France, it seems her hybrid status - and fluent French - will ... More/Buy
Granta 119: Britain
John Freeman
Granta, PB, 9781905881567
Recently, Granta has explored Chicago, Pakistan and the world of Spanish- language letters. In this bold, eclectic issue, the magazine turns back to focus on Britain. In 2012, Britain is a nation in flux, managing difficult socioeconomic realities, contending with new political alliances and negotiating shifting demographics. Yet it is a country that is still perceived as being bound by tradition ... More/Buy
Gulliver's Travels
Martin Rowson
Atlantic, PB, 9781848872820
Jonathan Swift's classic satire about little people, big people, mad scientists and rational horses has not only gripped our imaginations for generations, it is also one of the greatest - yet most compassionate - indictments of humanity ever written. Martin Rowson's caustic and provocative and illustrated updating of the story is both a homage to the original and an entirely up-to-date ... More/Buy
HHhH
Laurent Binet
Harvill Secker, PB, 9781846554803
We are in Prague, in 1942. Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent by London plan to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich - head of the Nazi secret services, 'the hangman of Prague', 'the blond beast', 'the most dangerous man in the Third Reich'. Heydrich works for Hitler's most powerful ... More/Buy
Home
Toni Morrison
Chatto & Windus, HB, 9780701186074
An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His Home - and himself in it - may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need ... More/Buy
Hope: A Tragedy
Sholom Auslander
Picador, HB, 9781447207658
Solomon Kugel wishes for nothing more than to be nowhere, to be in a place with no past, no history, no wars, no genocides. The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: No one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any importance has ever happened, which is exactly why Kugel decided to move his family ... More/Buy
The House on Paradise Street
Sofka Zinovieff
Faber, PB, 9781907595691
When Maud learns that her husband has been killed in a car accident, she is left bereft and bewildered. She has no idea why he was driving on a lonely coastal road outside Athens in the middle of the night. But Nikitas was a man with a complicated history. With the return of his mother, Antigone, to the old family home ... More/Buy
The Hundred-Foot Journey
Richard C Morais
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781742379036
Abbas Haji is the proud owner of a modest family restaurant in Mumbai. But when tragedy strikes, Abbas propels his boisterous family into a picaresque journey across Europe, finally settling in the remote French village of Lumiere, where he establishes an Indian restaurant - Maison Mumbai. Much to the horror of their neighbour, a famous chef named Madame Mallory, the Indian ... More/Buy
I am an Executioner: Love Stories
Rajesh Paramewaran
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408825747
A Bengal tiger wakes up one morning realising he is ravenously in love. A pompous railway supervisor in a remote Indian province bites off more than he can chew when a peculiar new clerk arrives on his doorstep. In another place and in another time, a secret agent who spends her days watching the front door of an unknown quarry discovers ... More/Buy
If You're Reading This, I;m Already Dead
Andrew Nicoll
Quercus, PB, 9780857384935
Otto Witte is an old man. The Allies are raining bombs on his city and, having narrowly escaped death, he has come home to his little caravan to drink what remains of his coffee (dust) and wait for the inevitable. Convinced that he will not see the sunrise, he decides to write the story of his life for the poor soul ... More/Buy
In One Person
John Irving
Doubleday, PB, 9780857520975
A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love - tormented, funny, and affecting - and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a 'sexual suspect,' a ... More/Buy
The Incident
Kenneth Macleod
W&N Fiction, PB, 9780297866954
'Certainly there are ghosts in these towers. For me they are the ghosts of two children. And even now - ten years later and seven hundred miles away - I still wake most nights with the muffled echo of their cries in my ears and the weight of their deaths on my conscience...' Three lives; three turning points. Craig was a ... More/Buy
Konstantin
Tom Bullough
Viking, PB, 9780670920921
It is 1867 and winter in Ryazan, a city on the banks of the Oka River in Central Russia. Konstantin is ten years old. His days are full of dreams of flight - to Moscow, even to the silent stars. But then, one day, he catches cold in the freezing woods near his home and his own world becomes silent. Left ... More/Buy
The Language of Flowers
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Picador, PB, 9781742611242
NOW IN B FORMAT. The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey what words could not, from declarations of admiration to confessions of betrayal. For Victoria Jones, alone after a childhood in foster care, it is her way of expressing a legacy of grief and guilt. Believing she is damaged beyond hope, she trusts nobody, connecting with the world only ... More/Buy
Life! Death! Prizes!
Stephen May
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408819135
Billy's Mum is dead. He knows - because he reads about it in magazines - that people die every day in ways that are more random and tragic and stupid than hers, but for nineteen-year-old Billy and his little brother, Oscar, their mother's death in a bungled street robbery is the most random and tragic and stupid thing that could possibly ... More/Buy
The Light of Amsterdam
David Park
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408825280
Alan, a university art teacher stands watching the grey sky blacken waiting for George Best's funeral cortege to pass. He will go to Amsterdam to see Bob Dylan in concert but also in the aftermath of his divorce, in the hope that the city which once welcomed him as a young man and seemed to promise a better future, will reignite ... More/Buy
Lucky Break
Esther Freud
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408821718
NOW IN B FORMAT. It is their first day at Drama Arts, and the circle of huddled, nervous students are told in no uncertain terms that here, unlike at any other drama school, they will be taught to Act. To Be. To exist in their own world on the stage. But outside is the real world - a pitiless, alluring place ... More/Buy
My Dear I Wanted To Tell You
Louisa Young
Harper Collins, PB, 9780007361441
While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home. Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband's return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when ... More/Buy
No Time Like the Present
Nadine Gordimer
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408831755
Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks - with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality, and an understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul - the inextricable link between personal life and political, communal history. The revelation of this theme in each new work, not only in her homeland South Africa, ... More/Buy
On Canaan's Side
Sebastian Barry
Faber, PB, 9780571226542
NOW IN B FORMAT. 'As they used to say in Ireland, the devil only comes into good things.' Narrated by Lilly Bere, On Canaan's Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Dublin, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life ... More/Buy
Please Look After Mother
Kyung-Sook Shin
Phoenix, PB, 9780753828182
NOW IN B FORMAT. This is the story of So-nyo, a wife and mother, who has lived a life of sacrifice and compromise. In the past she suffered a stroke, leaving her vulnerable and often confused. Now, travelling from the Korean countryside to the Seoul of her grown-up children, So-nyo is separated from her husband when the doors close on a ... More/Buy
The Proof of Love
Catherine Hall
Granta, PB, 9781846273001
By the time the summer holidays begin, Spencer Little is keen to put the events of the past term at Cambridge behind him and a remote village in the Lake District seems to offer the perfect escape. But it's not so easy to remain anonymous in a small community and, after striking up a friendship with ten year old Alice, Spencer ... More/Buy
Pure
Timothy Mo
Turnaround Books, HB, 9781873262795
Timothy Mo's first novel in a decade is set within the battle for secession in the Muslim regions of southern Thailand. Pure covers epic expanses of time and is told through multiple narrators who range from fanatical zealots to decorated Oxbridge dons. In the unlikely and apparently incompatible figures of his principals, local or foreign, disreputable or distinguished, young or old, ... More/Buy
The Red House
Mark Haddon
Jonathan Cape, PB, 9780224096416
After his mother's death, Richard, a newly remarried hospital consultant, decides to build bridges with his estranged sister, inviting Angela and her family for a week in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children, a single family and all of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks. But in ... More/Buy
River of Smoke
Amitav Ghosh
John Murray, PB, 9780719568893
NOW B FORMAT. In September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared - two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the ... More/Buy
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408827000
NOW IN B FORMAT. A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. He's a hard drinker, largely absent, and it isn't often he worries about the family. Esch and her three brothers are stocking up on food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't ... More/Buy
The Server
Tim Parks
Harvill Secker, PB, 9781846555787
A wild child, a self-acclaimed 'bad girl', Beth Marriot is an unusual candidate for the search for inner peace. The Dasgupta Institute runs meditation retreats for those trying to find equanimity in their lives. The course aims to instil a sense of Buddhist detachment from the world. Most students spend ten days learning to let go of their day-to-day concerns, but ... More/Buy
The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt
Granta, PB, 9781847083197
NOW B FORMAT. Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. Across 1000 miles of Oregon desert his assassins, the notorious Eli and Charlie Sisters, ride - fighting, shooting, and drinking their way to Sacramento. But their prey isn't an easy mark, the road is long and bloody, and somewhere along the path Eli begins to question what he does for a ... More/Buy
Skagboys
Irvine Welsh
Jonathan Cape, PB, 9780224087919
Mark Renton seems to have it all: he's the first in his family to go to university, he's young, has a pretty girlfriend and a great social life. But Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his badly handicapped younger brother dies the family ... More/Buy
The Spider King's Daughter
Chibundu Onuzo
Faber, PB, 9780571268894
The Spider King's Daughter is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet set against the backdrop of a changing Lagos, a city torn between tradition and modernity, corruption and truth, love and family loyalty. Seventeen-year-old Abike Johnson is the favourite child of her wealthy father. She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards and ferried everywhere in a huge ... More/Buy
Ten Stories About Smoking
Stuart Evers
Picador, PB, 9780330525169
Distilled, distinctive and a little bit dangerous, a box of love and cigarettes from a bright new voice in fiction. These stories find dignity in quiet lives and beauty in dark corners. They tell of allure, betrayal, nostalgia, solitude, seduction, damage and desire. They are stories of youth mislaid and love lost, and of recovery. They go to the heart of ... More/Buy
The Third Day
Chochana Boukhobza
Maclehose, PB, 9780857050977
A leading Israeli musician and her protege return to Jerusalem for three days to perform with the Philharmonic Orchestra. Both women - one a gifted young cellist, one a Holocaust survivor saved by her extraordinary musical talent - have been in America for some time, are quickly caught up in tangled threads from former lives. Elisheva is reunited with her godson, ... More/Buy
This is Life
Dan Rhodes
Canongate, PB, 9780857862457
This is Life is a missing baby mystery and an enchanted Parisian adventure. Hand in hand with lovable heroine Aurelie Renard, you will see life as you've never seen it before, discover the key to great art, witness the true cost of love, and learn how all these things may be controlled by the in-breath of a cormorant. Chock-full of charming ... More/Buy
Truth Like the Sun
Jim Lynch
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408831786
It is 1962, and the city of Seattle is about to be famous. Roger Morgan, an audacious young promoter, wants to pull off the ultimate coup de theatre: the World's Fair, rising out of the downtown fog to show the whole nation that the future has arrived. In the run-up to the Fair's grand opening, Roger is everywhere at once - ... More/Buy
An Unexpected Guest
Anne Korkeakivi
Harper Collins, PB, 9780732295455
Clare Moorhouse is an American in Paris who has been leading a graceful life abroad. There are pleasures to being married to a high-ranking diplomat, but there are also appearances to be upheld and responsibilities to be executed -- like tonight's unexpected dinner party, one crucial to her husband's career. As Clare navigates the spring-green streets of Paris, shopping for fresh ... More/Buy
Varamo
César Aira
Giramondo Publishing, PB, 9781920882860
Varamo is the story of how, on an ordinary day in 1923, a middle-aged Panamanian public servant is paid his salary in counterfeit notes, and by the next morning has written a great avant-garde poem. Consumed by anxiety about how to dispose of the notes, Varamo ricochets from one encounter to another: with a chauffeur suspected of leading a black uprising ... More/Buy
We the Animals
Justin Torres
Granta, PB, 9781847083951
Three brothers tear their way through childhood-smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from rubbish, hiding when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn - he's Puerto Rican, she's white - barely out of childhood themselves, and their love is a serious, dangerous thing. Life ... More/Buy
The Whores' Asylum
Katy Darby
Michael Joseph, PB, 9781905490806
Oxford, 1887: Even as Victoria celebrates the fiftieth year of her reign, a stone's throw from the calm cloisters and college spires lies Jericho, a maze of seedy streets and ill-lit taverns, haunted by drunkards, thieves and the lowest sort of brazen female as ever lifted her petticoats. When Stephen Chapman, a brilliant young medical student, is persuaded to volunteer at ... More/Buy
Wish You Were Here
Graham Swift
Picador, PB, 9780330535847
NOW IN B FORMAT. On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack ... More/Buy