- Table View
- List View
My Cleaner
by Maggie GeeUgandan Mary Tendo worked for many years in the white middle-class Henman household in London, cleaning for Vanessa and looking after her only child, Justin. More than ten years after Mary has left, Justin - now twenty-two - is too depressed to get out of bed. To his mother's surprise, he asks for Mary. When Mary responds to Vanessa's cry for help and returns from Uganda to look after Justin, the balance of power in the house shifts dramatically. Both women's lives change irrevocably as tensions build towards a climax on a snowbound motorway. 'Beautifully observed, intelligent and moving … a carefully wrapped surprise that gets better and better with the unravelling.' The Scotsman 'A moving, funny, engrossing book.' The Observer 'Gee satirises the liberal conscience of the chattering classes with uncomfortable perception in this hugely enjoyable novel … her portrayal of Britain's new underclass of immigrant workers is presented with her trademark stinging clarity.' Metro 'Maggie Gee is a superb and pitiless analyser of middleclass angst. Elegant, humorous and surprising, this is a classy performance.' The Times 'It's amazing how many details, characters, stories within stories, Maggie Gee's unquenchable exuberance crams into this comparatively short book.' The Spectator An intelligent and satisfying read.' The Sunday Times 'A masterful study in Africa/UK relations which manages to be supremely uncomfortable without being cynical, and clever without being calculating.' Big Issue 'The Flood was chillingly predictive. My Cleaner is a calmer, happier novel. Yet a gnawing tragedy lies in the shadows, all the more poignant for the deftness with which it's brushed aside.' The Independent
The Ghost of Christmas Paws (The No 2 Feline Detective Agency Series)
by Mandy Morton‘WITTY AND SMART. PREPARE TO BE BESOTTED’ M. K. GRAFFIt’s a week before Christmas and Hettie and Tilly set out on a very dangerous case for The No. 2 Feline Detective Agency. Lady Eloise Crabstock-Singe has summoned them to the Cornish coast to solve the mystery of Christmas Paws: a servant cat who haunts the family manor intent on killing off all of the Crabstocks.Should they put their trust in Absalom and Lamorna Tweek? Will Saffron Bunn’s cooking get any better? And will Hettie and Tilly get home safely in time for Christmas dinner?‘ORIGINAL AND INTRIGUING . . . A WORLD WITHOUT PEOPLE WHICH CAT LOVERS WILL ENTER AND ENJOY’ P. D. JAMES
A Lost Lady of Old Years: A Romance
by John BuchanFrancis Birkenshaw cares nothing for the Jacobite cause until a chance encounter with Bonnie Prince Charlie's beautiful secretary leads to dangerous consequences. A tale of adventure and betrayal on the long bloody road to Culloden Moor.
The Harder They Fall: A Novel (Allison & Busby Classics)
by Budd SchulbergHe may be a giant but giants have been licked before. Don’t forget Goliath. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.Eddie Lewis, former student of Princeton and would-be playwright, never expected to make his living writing lies. But that’s precisely what he does to pay his rent: Eddie is a manipulator of headlines, an inventor of hyperbole, all on behalf of his boss Nick Latka and his dealings in the boxing business. Nick’s latest project is the massive Toro Molina, discovered in the Argentine and now being primed for the fight – or at least, for a few elaborate performances. For in the world of 1940s boxing, fixing the game is all too easy. Latka and his team of promoters, punch-drunk ex-fighters and professional gamblers play the unwitting Molina for all they can get. As ‘the Giant of the Andes’ is bled on the ropes by the rapacious criminals of the fighting game, Eddie is forced to examine himself, his principles, and the decline and fall of the ‘manly art’ of boxing.
Deadly Legacy: A sinister and dangerous Scottish mystery (Rose McQuinn #7)
by Alanna KnightRose McQuinn has agreed to help her neighbour, Mrs Lawers, by delivering a family legacy to her only living relative. But Rose’s philanthropic journey takes a turn towards the dangerous when she is attacked on board a train. On returning to Edinburgh she finds that further sinister events have occurred in her absence, sparking off a murder investigation.In her efforts to solve the case, Rose uncovers links with royal history, London’s theatre community, and her own home in Solomon’s Tower. Precariously balancing the murder inquiry alongside her obligations to family and friends, Rose discovers a web of connections which reveal that the past has not completely left the present . . .
Friend or Foe: 1916: Which side are you on?
by Brian GallagherIt’s time to choose: friendship, family or loyalty to the cause. When Emer Davey saves her neighbour Jack Madigan from drowning, it seems that they will be friends forever. But eight months later, they find themselves on opposite sides in a life-or-death struggle, as Dublin is torn apart by the Easter Rising. Emer’s father is an officer in the Irish Volunteers who believes that armed rebellion is the only way to gain independence from Britain. His daughter has inherited his passion and is determined to help the rebels in any way she can. Jack’s dad is a sergeant in the Dublin Metropolitan Police. They share a deep respect for the law and are sure that Home Rule can be achieved through peaceful politics and helping with the war effort. These two young friends find their loyalties challenged as the terrifying reality of war sets in – and the Rising hits closer to home than either could have imagined. 'Beautiful writing' Sunday Independent on Stormclouds
The House of Lyall
by Doris DavidsonMarion Cheyne is young, poor and ambitious. Her humble village roots and poorly paid job offer few opportunities and Marion feels trapped in a dead-end existence. So when an unexpected chance to escape presents itself, Marion grabs it, ignoring the moral implications of her actions, and sets out on a new life far away in Aberdeen. Years later and the struggling servant girl Marion has been transformed into Marianne, wife of the heir to Castle Lyall, and every inch the lady of the glen. More a business arrangement than a love match, Marianne's commitment to her role and to the name of Lyall is total, and as family, friends and world wars come and go, she will stop at nothing to protect her hard-won position. But the many secrets of her past refuse to stay safely buried. Nothing in the small community of the glen can remain hidden forever...
Porridge the Tartan Cat Books 1 to 3: Brawsome Bagpipes, Bash-crash-ding And Kittycat Kidnap (Porridge the Tartan Cat #0)
by Alan DapréAn ebook-exclusive omnibus of books 1, 2 and 3 in the hilarious Porridge the Tartan Cat series. When Porridge was a wee kitten he toppled into a tin of tartan paint -- which is easy to do and not so easy to say. Now he lives with the quirky McFun family
Crater Lake
by Jennifer KillickThe Times Children's Book of the WeekIt could be the mysterious bloodstained man who tries to stop their coach, or the fact no one seems to be around at the brand-new activity centre when Lance and the rest of his class arrive for the Year 6 school trip, but something is definitely not right at Crater Lake! What follows is a fight for survival that sees five pupils band together to save their classmates from an alien fate far worse than death. But whatever happens, they must Never, Ever fall asleep!
Record of a Night Too Brief
by Hiromi KawakamiThe Akutagawa Prize-winning stories from one of the most highly regarded and provocative contemporary Japanese writers'The nightingale sang again. The plates on the table gleamed, and the food, in all its ceaseless variety, breathed, glossy and bright. The night had only just begun.'In these three haunting and lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss and romance.In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters and villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; and an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing.Sensual, yearning, and filled with the tricks of memory and grief, Record of a Night Too Brief is an atmospheric trio of unforgettable tales.Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. Since the publication of God in 1994, she has written numerous novels and collections of short stories, including Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Nakano Thrift Shop. Her most recent novel, Running Water, was published in Japan in 2014 and won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Hiromi Kawakami has previously been awarded the Akutagawa Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages.
The Abbey Court Murder: An Inspector Furnival Mystery (Inspector Furnival Mysteries Ser. #Vol. 1)
by Annie Haynes“A crime of a peculiarly mysterious nature was perpetrated some time last night in a block of flats called Abbey Court.”Lady Judith Carew acted furtively on the night of the Denboroughs’ party. Her secret assignation at 9:30pm was a meeting to which she took a loaded revolver. The Abbey Court apartment building would play host to violent death that very night, under cover of darkness. The killer’s identity remained a mystery, though Lady Carew had a most compelling motive - and her revolver was left in the dead man’s flat…Enter the tenacious Inspector Furnival in the first of his golden age mysteries, first published in 1923. Though there are many clues, there are just as many red herrings and the case takes numerous Christie-esque twists before the murderer can be revealed. This new edition, the first printed in over 80 years, features an introduction from crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.“Annie Haynes does, in The Abbey Court Murder, what all writers of mystery stories aspire to do, and so few carry off successfully… It is a first-rate story… the plot thickens with every page, leading us on to the final climax in a state of unfluctuating interest.” Bookman
Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology
by Walter Goebel Saskia SchabioDebates about the ‘Black Atlantic’ have alerted us to an experience of modernization that diverges from the dominant Western narratives of globalization and technological progress. This outstanding volume expands the concept of the Black Atlantic by reaching beyond the usual African-American focus of the field, presenting fresh perspectives on postcolonial experiences of technology and modernization. A team of renowned contributors come together in this volume in order to: redefine and expand ideas of Black Atlantic challenge unified concepts of modernization from a postcolonial perspective question fashionable concepts of the transnational by returning to the local and the national offer new approaches to cross-cultural mechanisms of exchange explore utopian uses of technology in the postcolonial sphere. Exploring a variety of national, diasporan and transnational counternarratives to Western modernization, Beyond the Black Atlantic makes a valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial, literary and cultural studies.
Who Killed The Mince Spy?: A Food Crime Investigation
by Matthew RedfordTenacious carrot, detective inspector Willie Wortell is back to reveal the deviously delicious mind behind the crime of the festive season in this hugely entertaining, and utterly unconventional, short story. When Mitchell the Mince Spy is horrifically murdered by being over baked in a fan oven, it falls to the Food Related Crime team to investigate this heinous act. Why was Mitchell killed? Who is the mysterious man with a long white beard and why does he carry a syringe? Why is it that the death of a mince spy smells so good? Detective Inspector Willie Wortel, the best food sapiens police officer, once again leads his team into a series of crazy escapades. Supported by his able homo sapiens sergeant Dorothy Knox and his less able fruit officers Oranges and Lemons, they encounter Snow White and the seven dwarf cabbages as well as having a run in with the food sapiens secret service, MI GasMark5. With a thigh slap here, and a thigh slap there, the team know Christmas is coming as the upper classes are acting strangely - why else would there be lords a leaping, ladies dancing and maids a milking? And if that wasn't enough, the Government Minister for the Department of Fisheries, Agriculture and Rural Trade (DAFaRT) has only gone and given the turkeys a vote on whether they are for or against Christmas. Let the madness begin! This short story by Matthew Redford follows his deliciously irreverent debut Addicted To Death (Clink Street Publishing, 2015).
The Road to Oz: Wizard Of Oz Book 5 Special Annotated Edition (Oz #5)
by Frank L. BaumThe Road to Oz takes Dorothy and her friends on an adventure in Oz to a grand party in honour of Ozma's birthday in this spellbinding and classic tale. Dorothy and her faithful Toto are back home in Kansas when they encounter the homeless and hapless Shaggy Man and decide to accompany him on his journey. Soon they encounter a bevy of new friends, including Button-Bright and Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, and are back on their way to the magical land of Oz. Hoping to arrive in time to attend the Ozma's birthday party, the company is soon pitched headlong into a series of unlikely adventures, tackling talking foxes with magical powers and crossing the Deadly Desert. Arriving at the palace, they make the acquaintance of a host of guests from all over Fairyland. Will Dorothy and Toto remain in Oz with their old friend the Wizard, or will she once again return to her native land?
The Anthology of Irish Folk Tales
by VariousCarefully selected stories from the celebrated Folk Tales series have been gathered here for this special volume. Herein lies a treasure trove of tales from a wealth of talented storytellers performing in the country today. From banshees, pookas and changelings to rainbows, fairies and leprechauns, this book celebrates the distinct character of Ireland's different customs, beliefs and dialects, and is a treat for all who enjoy a well-told story.
Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500-1786: Performing America
by Susan CastilloSusan Castillo’s pioneering study examines the extraordinary proliferation of polyphonic or ‘multi-voiced’ texts in the three centuries following the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Taking a selection of plays, printed dialogues, travel narratives and lexicographic studies in English, Spanish and French, the book explores both European and indigenous writers of the early Americas. Paying particular attention to performance and performativity in the texts of the early colonial world, Susan Castillo asks: why vast numbers of polyphonic and performative texts emerged in the Early Americas how these texts enabled explorers, settlers and indigenous groups to come to terms with radical differences in language, behaviour and cultural practices how dialogues, plays and paratheatrical texts were used to impose or resist ideologies and cultural norms how performance and polyphony allowed Europeans and Americans to debate exactly what it meant to be European or American, or in some cases, both. Tracing the dynamic enactment of (often conflictive) encounters between differing local narratives, Castillo presents polyphonic texts as not only singularly useful tools for exploring what initially seemed inexpressible or for conveying controversial ideas, but also as the site where cultural difference is negotiated. Offering unparalleled linguistic and historical range, through the analysis of texts from Spain, France, New Spain, Peru, Brazil, New England and New France, this volume is an important advance in the study of early American literature and the writings of colonial encounter.
Catlantis
by Anna StarobinetsA thrilling, funny story about a heroic cat on a missionBaguette is just a regular house cat. He likes to sit in the window, watch the birds, and eat three square meals a day. But what's a regular house cat to do if he falls in love with a beautiful street cat who has some very strange - and really rather dangerous - demands?Baguette must travel back through the Ocean of Time to the lost island of Catlantis. He must find a way to save the nine lives of all cats before it is too late. And he must outwit the wicked black cat Noir, who is hot on his tail. Only then can he hope to win the paw of Purriana...Anna Starobinets is an acclaimed, award-winning Russian novelist, scriptwriter and journalist. She is best known as a writer of dystopian and metaphysical novels and short stories, and is also a very successful children's author. Catlantis is her first children's book to be translated into English.
An Elegy for Easterly: Faber Stories
by Petina GappahFaber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. The government has cleaned up Harare for the Queen of England's visit. 'The townships are too full of people, they said, gather them up and put them in the places the Queen will not see.' Four waves of people have settled on Easterly Farm since then, living on the margins in homes that will soon be destroyed.Among them is Martha Mupengo. She has lost her wits, and gained a pregnancy. Who could be the baby's father, and what fate awaits mothers and children in this temporary, poverty-stricken town?
The Incredibly Nosey Cat Flap Pony
by Libby LakeThe tiddliest of ponies with wondersome wings was buzzing around examining things. What would you do if a teensy tiny, flying pony busily bustled into your house? This hilarious, heart-warming story shows how being inquisitive can be a good thing!
Dock Leaves
by Hugo WilliamsIn these poems, Hugo Williams's subjects include the stings inflicted by school, family and love-life, and the exquisite (if qualified) solace afforded by their contemplation.
Under the Night
by Alan GlynnIn 1950s Manhattan, the CIA carry out a covert study of psychoactive drugs. When they dose ad man Ned Sweeney with MDT-48, he finds his horizons dramatically expand as he is hurtled through the corridors of the rich and powerful, all the way to the government's nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll.But what of Ned's colleague who was also dosed that night - last seen running half-naked and screaming into the Broadway traffic - and for how long can Ned maintain the extraordinary pace and trajectory of his new life?Over sixty years later, the only fact Ray Sweeney knows about his grandfather's life is that it ended when he jumped out of a hotel window in Manhattan, an event which scarred his family thereafter. But then Ray meets a retired government official, ninety-two-year-old Clay Proctor, who claims he can illuminate not only Ned's life and death, but also the truth behind the mysterious drug. Both a sequel and prequel to Alan Glynn's classic debut, The Dark Fields - which became the hit movie Limitless - Under the Night is an irresistible thriller about the seductive power and dangers of unlocking the potential of the human mind.
Seeing Stars: Poems
by Simon ArmitageSimon Armitage's new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla, Lippincott, Wittmann, Yoshioka, Bambuck, Dr Amsterdam, Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshipers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; the black bear with a dark secret, the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer. Celebrities and nobodies, all come to the ball.I am a sperm whale. I carry up to 2.5 tonnes of an oil-likebalm in my huge, coffin shaped head. I have a brain thesize of a basketball, and on that basis alone am entitled tomy opinions. I am a sperm whale. When I breathe in, the fluid in my head cools to a dense wax and I nosedive into the depths. My song, available on audiocassette and compact disc is a comfort to divorcees, astrologists and those who have 'pitched the quavering canvas tent of their thoughts on the rim of the dark crater'.- from 'The Christening'The storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes, trickster-style, from poem to poem, but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived, crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being 'genuine in his disbelief'.Language is on the loose in these poems, which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.
Venices
by Paul MorandA poetic evocation of the French diplomat's encounters and experiences, filtered through the one constant in his life—Venice.Diplomat, writer and poet, traveller and socialite, friend of Proust, Giraudoux and Malraux, Paul Morand was out of the most original writers of the twentieth century. He was French literature's globe-trotter, and his delightful autobiography is far from being yet another account of a writer's life. Instead it is a poetic evocation of certain scenes among Morand's rich and varied encounters and experience, filtered through the one constant in his life—the one place to which he would always return—Venice.Admired both by Ezra Pound and by Marcel Proust as a pioneer craftsman of Modernist French prose (...) The sheer shapeliness of his prose recalls Hemingway; the urbanity of his self-destructiveness compares with Fitzgerald's; and his camera eye is as lucidly stroboscopic as that of Dos Passos. He is, like Victor Segalen, Blaise Cendrars, Valery Larbaud, and Saint-John Perse, one of the great nomads of 20th-century French literature, racing through the apocalypse with the haste and glamor of an Orient Express. It is a pity we should have had to wait this long to catch up with him. --The New York TimesVenices is balanced by the sharpness of the imagery. He writes in a melancholy vein of the loves, jealousies and regrets he has experienced in Venice ... Exquisitely translated, Venices is a travel memoir of the highest order. -- IAN THOMSON, Sunday Times
Coventry: Essays
by Rachel CuskA GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEARAfter the publication of Outline, Transit and Kudos - in which Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction - this writer of uncommon brilliance returns with a series of essays that offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her life's work. Encompassing memoir and cultural and literary criticism, with pieces on gender, politics and writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Olivia Manning and Natalia Ginzburg, this collection is essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, both startling and rewarding to behold. The result is a cumulative sense of how the frank, deeply intelligent sensibility - so evident in her stories and novels - reverberates in the wider context of Cusk's literary process. Coventry grants its readers a rare opportunity to see a mind at work that will influence literature for time to come.