1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia''s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger , a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
Maria, a trans woman in her thirties, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters. After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the Pacific, embarking on her version of the Great American Road Trip. Along the way she stops in Reno, Nevada, and meets James, a young man who works in the local Wal-Mart. Maria recognizes elements of her younger self in James and the pair quickly form an unlikely but powerful connection, one that will have big implications for them both. This hilarious, groundbreaking cult classic inspired a whole literary movement, and is now published in the UK for the very first time.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize The Sunday Times Bestseller Trust is a sweeping, unpredicatable novel about power, wealth and truth, told by four unique, interlocking voices and set against the backdrop of turbulent 1920s New York. Perfect for fans of Succession.
Can one person change the course of history?
A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man''s story - of greed, love and betrayal - is about to slip from his grasp.
Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.
''One of the great puzzle-box novels, it''s the cleverest of conceits, wrapped up in a page-turner'' - Telegraph ''Genius'' - Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
Siddhartha, sorti en France en 1925, est une profession de foi individualiste contre toutes les doctrines, une condamnation de la puissance, de l'argent, un éloge de la vie contemplative en Inde. Avec ce roman initiatique, Hesse est devenu dans les années 1960 l'un des maîtres à penser de la jeunesse occidentale.
DAY ONEThe Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb.News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%.WEEK TWOCivilization has crumbled.YEAR TWENTYA band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe.But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild. STATION ELEVENMoving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: famous actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan - warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend Clark; Kirsten, a young actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed 'prophet'. Thrilling, unique and deeply moving, this is a beautiful novel that asks questions about art and fame and about the relationships that sustain us through anything - even the end of the world.
During a season of unprecedented success, Gary becomes increasingly fixated on the threat of nuclear war. Both frightened and fascinated by the prospect, he listens to his team-mates discussing match tactics in much the same terms as generals might contemplate global conflict. But as the terminologies of football and nuclear war - the language of end zones - become interchanged, the polysemous nature of words emerges, and DeLillo forces us to see beyond the sterile reality of substitution.
This clever and playful novel is a timeless and topical study of human beings'' obsession with conflict and confrontation.
Bret Easton Ellis is most famous for his era-defining novel American Psycho and its terrifying anti-hero, Patrick Bateman. With that book, and many times since, Ellis proved himself to be one of the world's most fearless and clear-sighted observers of society - the glittering surface and the darkness beneath.In White, his first work of non-fiction, Ellis offers a wide-ranging exploration of what the hell is going on right now. He tells personal stories from his own life. He writes with razor-sharp precision about the music, movies, books and TV he loves and hates. He examines the ways our culture, politics and relationships have changed over the last four decades. He talks about social media, Hollywood celebrities and Donald Trump. Ellis considers conflicting positions without flinching and adheres to no status quo. His forthright views are powered by a fervent belief in artistic freedom and freedom of speech. Candid, funny, entertaining and blisteringly honest, he offers opinions that are impossible to ignore and certain to provoke. What he values above all is the truth. 'The culture at large seemed to encourage discourse,' he writes, 'but what it really wanted to do was shut down the individual.' Bret Easton Ellis will not be shut down.
A bestseller in China, Brothers is an epic and wildly unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running amok.yes'>#160;Here is China as we've never seen it before, in a sweeping, Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of roughandrumble Chinese history, from the madness of the Cultural Revolution to the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Yu Hua, awardwinning author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two comically mismatched stepbrothers, Baldy Li, a sexobsessed ne'erdowell, and the bookish, sensitive Song Gang, who vow that they will always be brothersyes'>mdash;a bond they will struggle to maintain over the years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love and making and losing millions in the new China.yes'>#160;Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a fascinating vision of an extraordinary place and time.From the Trade Paperback edition.
He became a bestselling novelist while still in college, immediately famous and wealthy. He watched his insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box. He was lost in a haze of booze, drugs and vilification. Then he was given a second chance. This is the life of Bret Easton Ellis, the author and subject of this remarkable novel. Confounding one expectation after another, Lunar Park is equally hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking. It''s the most original novel of an extraordinary career - and best of all: it all happened, every word is true.
The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history, he's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another.
The award-winning author of Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel returns with a novel of time travel that precisely captures the reality of our current moment. Sea of Tranquility is a virtuoso performance and an enormously exciting offering from one of our most remarkable writers. In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core. Two centuries later Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is traveling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive''s bestselling novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in time, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. Sea of Tranquility is a novel that investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities, that plays with the very line along which time should run. Perceptive and poignant about art, and love, and what we must do to survive, it is incredibly compelling.
From Booker-prizewinner Douglas Stuart an extraordinary, page-turning second novel, a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in the hyper-masculine and violently sectarian world of Glasgow''s housing estates. They should be sworn enemies if they''re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they find themselves falling in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo works especially hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo''s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future. Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in literary fiction, Douglas Stuart''s Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.
Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups.
In the dazzling summer of 1926, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley travel from their home in Paris to a villa in the south of France. They swim, play bridge and drink gin. But wherever they go they are accompanied by the glamorous and irrepressible Fife. Fife is Hadley's best friend. She is also Ernest's lover. Hadley is the first Mrs. Hemingway, but neither she nor Fife will be the last. Over the ensuing decades, Ernest's literary career will blaze a trail, but his marriages will be ignited by passion and deceit. Four extraordinary women will learn what it means to love the most famous writer of his generation, and each will be forced to ask herself how far she will go to remain his wife... Luminous and intoxicating, Mrs. Hemingway portrays real lives with rare intimacy and plumbs the depths of the human heart.
The sequel to Jessie Burton''s million-copy bestseller The Miniaturist . In the golden city of Amsterdam, in 1705, Thea Brandt is turning eighteen, and she is ready to welcome adulthood with open arms. At the city''s theatre, Walter, the love of her life, awaits her, but at home in the house on the Herengracht, all is not well - her father Otto and Aunt Nella argue endlessly, and the Brandt family are selling their furniture in order to eat. On Thea''s birthday, also the day that her mother Marin died, the secrets from the past begin to overwhelm the present. Nella is desperate to save the family and maintain appearances, to find Thea a husband who will guarantee her future, and when they receive an invitation to Amsterdam''s most exclusive ball, she is overjoyed - perhaps this will set their fortunes straight. And indeed, the ball does set things spinning: new figures enter their life, promising new futures. But their fates are still unclear, and when Nella feels a strange prickling sensation on the back of her neck, she remembers the miniaturist who entered her life and toyed with her fortunes eighteen years ago. Perhaps, now, she has returned for her . . . The House of Fortune is a glorious, sweeping story of fate and ambition, secrets and dreams, and one young woman''s determination to rule her own destiny.
B>The multi-million copy number one Bestseller/b>A dazzlingly urban satire on modern relationships?br>An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family?br>Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?As Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), she turns for support to four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.Welcome to Bridget's first diary: mercilessly funny, endlessly touching and utterly addictive.Helen Fielding's first Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, sparked a phenomenon that has seen three books, newspaper columns and the smash-hit film series Bridget Jones' Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Bridget Jones's Baby.
B>What would you change if you could go back in time?/b>In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe's time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . . Toshikazu Kawaguchi's beautiful, moving story - translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot - explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot''s flightbag, the plane''s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit - by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.
''[McCarthy] writers prose as clean as a bullet cutting through the air and constructs tales as compelling as any you will read'' - Telegraph A SUNKEN JET. NINE PASSENGERS. A MISSING BODY.
The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.
