From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a powerful new novel-her first in seven years: a story of love and race centred around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home.
A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR The dark, dangerous, funny and uplifting new novel from the author of Annihilation, the inspiration for the major motion picture directed by Alex Garland. ''Am I a person?'' Borne asks Rachel, in extremis. ''Yes, you are a person,'' Rachel tells him. ''But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.'' A ruined city of the future lives in fear of a despotic, gigantic flying bear, driven mad by the tortures inflicted on him by the Company, a mysterious biotech firm. A scavenger, Rachel, finds a creature entangled in his fur. She names it Borne. At first, Borne looks like nothing at all- a green lump that might be a discard from the Company. But he reminds Rachel of her homeland, an island nation long lost to rising seas, and she prevents her lover, Wick, from rendering down Borne as raw genetic material for the special kind of drugs he sells. But nothing is quite the way it seems: not the past, not the present, not the future. If Wick is hiding secrets, so is Rachel-and Borne most of all. What Rachel finds hidden deep within the Company will change everything and everyone. There, lost and forgotten things have lingered and grown. What they have grown into is mighty indeed.
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE A GUARDIAN NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 From the award-winning author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and Even the Dogs. Reservoir 13 tells the story of many lives haunted by one family''s loss. Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must. As the seasons unfold there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together or break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. Bats hang in the eaves of the church and herons stand sentry in the river; fieldfares flock in the hawthorn trees and badgers and foxes prowl deep in the woods - mating and fighting, hunting and dying. An extraordinary novel of cumulative power and grace, Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a stranger''s tragedy refuse to subside.
The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The Corrections Pip Tyler doesn''t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she''s saddled with student debt and a reclusive mother, but there are few clues as to who her father is or how she''ll ever have a normal life. Then she meets Andreas Wolf - internet outlaw, charismatic provocateur, a man who deals in secrets and might just be able to help her solve the mystery of her origins.
Set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died. This novel contains the three main characters who get swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. It is about Africa, about the end of colonialism, about class and race; and the ways in which love can complicate these things.
From one of our most iconic and influential writers: twelve pieces never before collected that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of this legendary figure. Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, Didion writes about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to William Randolph Hearst''s castle at San Simeon, a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas, and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe, Martha Stewart and Ernest Hemingway. With an Introduction by Hilton Als, this stunning collection reveals what would become her subjects: the press, politics, California robber barons, women, the act of writing, and her own self-doubt. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.
Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughan goes shopping for flowers for a party for her AIDS-suffering poet-friend. This novel meditates on artistic behaviour, love and madness.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.'' For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth. In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates''s latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author''s bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys .
From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Orange Prize-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, come twelve dazzling stories in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West.
Shortlisted for the Women''s Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020 The long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies , the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel''s Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy. ''A masterpiece'' Guardian ''It is a book not read, but lived'' Telegraph ''Her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century'' Observer ''If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?'' England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith''s son from Putney emerges from the spring''s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry''s regime to breaking point, Cromwell''s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? With The Mirror and the Light , Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies . She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man''s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.
'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.'
Gus Vorhees is a pioneer in the advancement of women''s reproductive rights and a controversial abortion provider in the American Midwest. One morning as he arrives at his clinic, he is ambushed by a hardline Christian, Luther Dunphy, and shot dead. This action leaves in its wake two fatherless families: the Vorhees, who are affluent, highly educated, secular and pro-choice, and the Dunphys, their opposite on all counts. When the daughters of the two families, Naomi Vorhees and Dawn Dunphy, glimpse each other at the trial of Luther Dunphy, their initial response is mutual hatred. But their lives are tangled together forever by what has happened, and throughout the years to come and the events that follow - including the eventual execution of Luther Dunphy after years on Death Row - neither can quite forget the other. A heart-rending reckoning with some of the complex issues that divide America in our troubled times - religious extremism; a woman''s rights over her body; gun violence; capital punishment - this is a novel Joyce Carol Oates was born to write. To read it is to encounter the full spectrum of humanity - its ugliness, misery, beauty and hope.
Previously adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola starring Kirsten Dunst, this is the story of the five Lisbon sisters - beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the entire neighbourhood.
From one of the most important chroniclers of our time, come two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks - writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles Here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies'' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters'' Convention. She writes about the stifling heat, the almost viscous pace of life, the sulfurous light, and the preoccupation with race, class, and heritage she finds in the small towns they pass through. And from a different notebook: the "California Notes" that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the piece, watching the trial and being in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the city, its social hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her thinking about the West, its landscape, the western women who were heroic for her, and her own lineage.
Annie Proulx, one of America's finest writers, invites us to share her experience in the building of her new home on a rich plot of untouched, unspoilt prairie and her pleasure in uncovering of the layers of American history locked beneath the topsoil.
''A contemporary masterpiece'' Guardian THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND ( EX MACHINA ) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border - an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness. The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic. Now four women embark on the twelfth expedition into the unknown.
The classic first novel from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Doris Lessing brought the manuscript of ''The Grass is Singing'' with her when she left Southern Rhodesia and came to England in 1950. When it was first published it created an impact whose reverberations we are still feeling, and immediately established itself as a landmark in twentieth-century literature. Set in Rhodesia, it tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush. Trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny brick and iron house, Mary, lonely and frightened, turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding. A masterpiece of realism, ''The Grass is Singing'' is a superb evocation of Africa''s majestic beauty, an intense psychological portrait of lives in confusion and, most of all, a passionate exploration of the ideology of white supremacy.
