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Clara: A Novel
by Janice GallowayJanice Galloway's new novel is based on the life of Clara Schumann: celebrated nineteenth-century concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms - who was also the wife of Robert Schumann, the mother of his eight children, and the woman who cared for him through a series of crippling mental illnesses. Clara is a lyrical and vibrant account of two remarkable and highly dramatic musical careers, but primarily it is a novel about timeless, common things: about the inescapable influences of childhood, about creativity and marital life, about communication and silence, about how art is made and how art, in turn, may erode or save the life that nourishes it.
Saville
by David StoreyColin Saville grows up in a mining village in South Yorkshire, against the background of war, of an industrialised countryside, of town and coalmine and village.
A Single Man (FSG Classics)
by Christopher IsherwoodCelebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover, Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation.
Burma Boy
by Biyi BandeleA few months ago fourteen-year-old Ali Banana was apprenticed to a whip-wielding blacksmith in his rural hometown. Now its winter 1944, the war is entering its most crucial stage and Ali is a private in Thunder Brigade. His unit has been given orders to go behind enemy lines and wreak havoc. But the Burmese jungle is a mud-riven, treacherous place, riddled with Japanese snipers, insanity and disease. Burma Boy is a horrific, vividly realised account of the madness, the sacrifice and the dark humour of the Second World War's most vicious battleground. It's also the moving story of a boy trying to live long enough to become a man.
The Natural (FSG Classics)
by Bernard MalamudThis is a book about heroism - of sorts. Roy Hobbs has an immense natural gift for playing baseball. He could become one of the great ones of the game, a player unmatched in his time - a hero. But his first hard-won big chance ends violently, at the hands of a crazy girl, and then it is years before he gets another shot. At last, in a few short seasons, or never, he must achieve the towering reputation that he feels is his right.
Songs Of Enchantment: A Novel (The Famished Road Trilogy #2)
by Ben OkriOne great thought can change the dreams of the world. One great action, lived out all the way to the sea, can change the history of the world. The adventures of Azaro, the spirit child, continue. From the bestselling author of The Famished Road comes this radiant sequel.
Earthly Possessions
by Anne TylerFor thirty-five year old Charlotte Emory, leaving her husband seems to offer the only way out from the mundaneness of every day life's earthly possessions and emotional complications. In the bank, she withdraws enough money to escape a life and a marriage gone sour. But Charlotte is about to escape in a way she never expected, as a young bank robber takes her hostage, and they head south for Florida in a stolen car.OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD‘She’s changed my perception on life’ Anna Chancellor ‘One of my favourite authors ’ Liane Moriarty‘She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan ‘Anne Tyler has no peer’ Anita Shreve‘My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world’ Nick Hornby ‘A masterly author’ Sebastian Faulks ‘Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good’ John Updike‘I love Anne Tyler’ Anita Brookner ‘Her fiction has strength of vision, originality, freshness, unconquerable humour’ Eudora Welty
Celestial Navigation: Discover the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Sunday Times bestselling author
by Anne TylerJeremy is a child-like, painfully shy batchelor who has never left home. He lives on the third floor of his mother's boarding house and spends his days cutting up coloured paper to make mosaic sculptures - until the day his mother dies and the beautiful Mary Tell arrives to turn his world upside down.From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amateur Marriage and Digging to America.OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD‘She’s changed my perception on life’ Anna Chancellor ‘One of my favourite authors ’ Liane Moriarty‘She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan ‘Anne Tyler has no peer’ Anita Shreve‘My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world’ Nick Hornby ‘A masterly author’ Sebastian Faulks ‘Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good’ John Updike‘I love Anne Tyler’ Anita Brookner ‘Her fiction has strength of vision, originality, freshness, unconquerable humour’ Eudora Welty
Morgan's Passing
by Anne TylerMorgan Gower has an outsize hairy beard, an array of peculiar costumes and fantastic headwear, and a serious smoking habit. He likes to pretend to be other people - a jockey, a shipping magnate, a foreign art dealer - and he likes to do this more and more since his massive brood of daughters are all growing up, getting married and finding him embarrassing. Then comes his first dramatic encounter with Emily and Leon Meredith, and the start of an extraordinary obsession.OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD‘She’s changed my perception on life’ Anna Chancellor ‘One of my favourite authors ’ Liane Moriarty‘She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan ‘Anne Tyler has no peer’ Anita Shreve‘My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world’ Nick Hornby ‘A masterly author’ Sebastian Faulks ‘Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good’ John Updike‘I love Anne Tyler’ Anita Brookner ‘Her fiction has strength of vision, originality, freshness, unconquerable humour’ Eudora Welty
Searching For Caleb
by Anne TylerRanging from the ragtime era to small-town America in the seventies, Searching for Caleb is a moving quest for a family's deepest roots - and a haunting story of growing up and breaking away, acceptance and rebellion.OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD‘She’s changed my perception on life’ Anna Chancellor ‘One of my favourite authors ’ Liane Moriarty‘She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan ‘Anne Tyler has no peer’ Anita Shreve‘My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world’ Nick Hornby ‘A masterly author’ Sebastian Faulks ‘Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good’ John Updike‘I love Anne Tyler’ Anita Brookner ‘Her fiction has strength of vision, originality, freshness, unconquerable humour’ Eudora Welty
The Clock Winder
by Anne Tyler'Her brilliance in capturing the ripples on the surface of family life gives her a claim to be the Jane Austen of our age' - Allison Pearson, Daily MailHaving sacked her handyman, newly-widowed Mrs Emerson finds a replacement in Elizabeth, a lanky, awkward girl. The Emersons - there are seven grown-up children - have a reputation for craziness and Elizabeth finds herself drawn into their disorderly lives against her will. But in the end it is hard to tell whether she is a victim of the needy Emersons, or the de facto ruler of the family.OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD‘She’s changed my perception on life’ Anna Chancellor ‘One of my favourite authors ’ Liane Moriarty‘She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan ‘Anne Tyler has no peer’ Anita Shreve‘My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world’ Nick Hornby ‘A masterly author’ Sebastian Faulks ‘Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good’ John Updike‘I love Anne Tyler’ Anita Brookner ‘Her fiction has strength of vision, originality, freshness, unconquerable humour’ Eudora Welty
The Standing Pool
by Adam ThorpeTwo Cambridge academics, the historians Nick and Sarah Mallinson, take a sabbatical with their three small and lively girls in a remote Languedoc farmhouse. But the farmhouse contains its own histories, far darker and murkier than the Mallinsons are used to dealing with. As the illusion of Eden retreats, the couple begin to feel the vulnerability of being among strangers...
Between Each Breath
by Adam ThorpeJack Middleton, once 'England's most promising young composer' now lives comfortably in Hampstead with his wife Milly, an heiress. Jack is no longer young nor has he ever quite fulfilled his remarkable promise. And then he visits Estonia, in search of inspiration, and falls for a young waitress, Kaja. Six childless years on and Jack and Milly's marriage shows the strain, but they battle on better than most - until the past returns with a vengeance...
Save Me The Waltz: A Novel (Virago Modern Classics)
by Zelda Fitzgerald'Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.'One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald's life and work. In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story: the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of an era.
The Beautiful and Damned (The\cambridge Edition Of The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald Ser.)
by F Scott FitzgeraldAnthony Patch and Gloria Gibson are the golden children of the Jazz Age. They marry and embark on a life of glittering parties, lavish expenditure and scandalous revelry. When the money dries up their marriage founders. In this wistful novel Fitzgerald portrays the decline of youthful promise with devastating clarity.
Sons and Lovers (Modern Library)
by D H Lawrence Richard EyreWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD EYREPaul Morel is the focus of his disappointed and fiercely protective mother's life. Their tender, devoted and intense bond comes under strain when Paul falls in love with Miriam Leivers, a local girl his mother disapproves of. The arrival of the provocatively modern Clara Dawes causes further tension and Paul is torn between his individual desires and family allegiances. Set in a Nottinghamshire mining town at the turn of the twentieth century, this is a powerful portrayal of family and love in all its forms.
Tender is the Night (The Penguin English Library)
by F Scott FitzgeraldIt is the French Riviera in the 1920s. Nicole and Dick Diver are a wealthy, elegant, magnetic couple. A coterie of admirers are drawn to them, none more so than the blooming young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. When Rosemary falls for Dick, the Diver's calculated perfection begins to crack. As dark truths emerge, Fitzgerald shows both the disintegration of a marriage and the failure of idealism. Tender is the Night is as sad as it is beautiful.
The Rainbow (Timeless Classics Ser.)
by Rachel Cusk D H LawrenceWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RACHEL CUSKSet between the 1840s and the early years of the twentieth century The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, ancient occupiers of Marsh Farm, Nottinghamshire. Through courting, pregnancy, marriage and defiance Lawrence explores love and the conflicts it brings.
The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Adaptation Of The Novel By F. Scott Fitzgerald (Sparknotes Literature Guide Series)
by F Scott FitzgeraldWITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY GEOFF DYERThe world and his mistress are at Jay Gatsby’s party. But Gatsby stands apart from the crowd, isolated by a secret longing. In between sips of champagne his guests speculate about their mysterious host. Some say he’s a bootlegger. Others swear he was a German spy during the war. They lean in and whisper ‘he killed a man once’. Just where is Gatsby from and what is the obsession that drives him?This edition of The Great Gatsby is the result of a unique collaboration between Tiffany & Co. and Vintage Classics. It is based on designs in the Tiffany &Co. archives from the twenties when F. Scott Fitzgerald’s talent, beauty and notorious lifestyle made him one of best known writers of the Jazz Age.
On Not Being Able To Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World
by Jacqueline RoseIn these powerful essays Jacqueline Rose delves into the questions that keep us awake at night, into issues of privacy and publishing, exposure and shame. Do some women writers - Christina Rossetti, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath - have a special talent for self-revelation? Or are they simply more vulnerable to the invasions of biography? Turning to psychoanalysis, Rose explores its affinity with modernism and asks what it can tell us about the limits of knowledge, both about the most intimate and baffling components of experience and about the furthest, hallucinatory, reaches of the mind. These fine studies move deftly between public, political and private, unconscious worlds. Offering new links between feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and politics, On Not Being Able to Sleep provides a resonant and thought provoking collection for the present day.
Truth and Consequences: Proof
by Alison LurieAlan Mackenzie's bad back is ruining both his and his wife Jane's lives. After years of happy marriage, these two attractive and intelligent people have stopped making love and are starting to resent each other. However, the arrival of a new couple in town - the beautiful and egoistic writer Delia and her cynical husband Henry - heralds a period of dramatic change for the Mackenzies.Truth and Consequences is a comedy about love and its disguises, and identity and change - about the small disasters and sudden attractions that can turn even the most stable relationship upside down.
The Last Resort (Thorndike Americana Ser.)
by Alison LurieJenny has devoted her life to her husband, the naturalist Wilkie Walker. She is as rare a creature as the endangered species he works to preserve. But this year, as winter comes on, Wilkie seems distant and depressed. In desperation Jenny persuades him to visit Key West, but the sun and tropical scenery do nothing to cheer him up. As he grows even stranger, Jenny becomes involved with some exotic local characters - including Gerry, an ex-beatnik poet, and Lee, the dramatically attractive manager of a women-only guest house.
Where You Find It: Stories
by Janice GallowayIn her latest collection of stories, Janice Galloway turns her unflinching gaze on relationships: the struggle to love against the odds, the overpowering yearning to communicate, and the extraordinary epiphanies where the World falls away leaving only the lovers. Love is, of course, where you find it, and it is here in an evening walk across a London bridge, a chip-shop pizza, Derek's mouth, or ham sandwiches cut into hearts. A brilliant observer of human frailty and tenderness, Janice Galloway examines the moments where lives split like a stone, where people are healed or broken by a word or the touch of a hand. Savagely accurate, vivid and unsentimental, these are painstakingly crafted stories: engaging, caustic, funny and terrifyingly true.
Foreign Parts (British Literature Ser.)
by Janice GallowayCassie and Rona. Rona and Cassie. Two women on a driving holiday in Northern France. A caustic, coruscating and deeply funny account of morality, dysfunctional relationships and women abroad, Foreign Parts is that rare hybrid: a strikingly original novel about real life, told with accuracy, compassion and a truly saturnine delight.
It's Beginning To Hurt: Stories
by James LasdunIn sharply evoked settings that range from the wilds of Northern Greece to the beaches of Cape Cod, these intensely dramatic tales chart the metamorphoses of their characters as they fall prey to the gamut of human passions. The lives in them seethe with love, hate, desire, fear, tender corruption and cruel idealism. They rise to unexpected heights of decency, stumble into comic or tragic folly, they throw themselves open to lust, longing, paranoia - but they are always recognisably, illuminatingly, our lives.Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award.