A remarkable historical novel by the bestselling author of Fates and Furies Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie''s vision be bulwark enough? Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality and religious ecstasy in a mesmerising portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith and a woman that history moves both through and around.
Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
It begins with a letter from a woman Frank has never met. A pleading letter. A letter that closed his throat. 'Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.' And that is it all it takes.
Set during a year that begins with France's fall to the Nazis in June 1940 and ends with Germany turning its attention to Russia, this work falls into two parts. The first part is a depiction of a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion; and the second follows the inhabitants of a rural community under occupation.
One hot August day a family drives to a mountain clearing to collect birch wood. Jenny, the mother, is in charge of lopping any small limbs off the logs with a hatchet. Wade, the father, does the stacking. The two daughters, June and May, aged nine and six, drink lemonade, swat away horseflies, bicker, sing snatches of songs as they while away the time.
Karoo is a professional fixer of other people's scripts and, by his own acknowledgement, he ruins them all. Calamity and comedy follows shambolic Saul Karoo as his life breaks down. He is a man prone to luck both good and bad, and when a young woman with a strange connection to his past shows up, the plot of his own life comes into sharp focus.
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities he is expected to apologize to save his job, but instead he refuses and resigns, retiring to live with his daughter on her remote farm.
A novel set in a small town in Ohio, focusing on two girls, Nell and Sula, both black, both poor, who share their dreams until Sula escapes to live a vagrant city life for ten years. When she returns, the bond of their friendship is broken.
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year 'Outstanding...a stunningly good read' Observer 'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwan The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.
Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine, a sophisticated graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian - a black American now living in Paris and Rome. Then there's Son, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous - a young American black of extreme beauty from small-town Florida. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
Selected as a Book of the Year in The Times & Guardian *** As read on Radio 4 *** ''You can''t get around Kate Battista as easily as all that'' Kate Battista is feeling stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she''s always in trouble at work - her pre-school charges adore her, but the adults don''t always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner. Dr Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There''s only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr... When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he''s relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he''s really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men''s touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her round? Anne Tyler''s retelling of The Taming of the Shrew asks whether a thoroughly modern, independent woman like Kate would ever sacrifice herself for a man. The answer is as individual, off-beat and funny as Kate herself. ''I loved Kate and Pyotr and the way they discover the oversized, tender, irreverent relationship that fits them... It is joyful'' Rachel Joyce ''Read her books and she can actually change your view, change how you see the world'' Judy Finigan, Mail on Sunday ''Tyler writes with an apparent effortlessness which conceals great art'' Helen Dunmore, Stylist ''Tyler''s sentences are wholly hers, instantly recognisable and impossible to duplicate'' Hanya Yanigihara, Observer ''A new novel from Tyler is always a treat'' Daily Mail
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.
How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical - and sometimes devastating - breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?
Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future.
Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, this is the story of an old man, a young boy, and a giant fish. This text won for Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A story that tells about the confession of Alexander Portnoy who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood.
Seymour Levov, a devoted family man and inheritor of his father's factory, comes of age in thriving post-war America. His daughter Merry is the apple of his eye until America begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s, and Merry grows up to be a terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise.
A novel which describes the dissolution of the once aristocratic Compson family in the American South, told through the eyes of three of its members. In different ways they prove unable to deal with either the responsibility of the past or the imperatives of the present.
The chronicle of the tragic lives of a poor black family in 1940s America. Every night Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays for blue eyes like those of her white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty.
This book is an attempt to piece together a clear portrait of the band's rise to fame and their abrupt and infamous split. The following oral history is a compilation of interviews, emails, transcripts, and lyrics, all pertaining to the personal and professional lives of the members of the band The Six and singer Daisy Jone.
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. It is also the last year of professor Coleman Silk's life, whose own tragic exposure is played out against the background of the Clinton revelations.
Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's sole surviving son, and an introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, this edition includes a number of Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son Jack and his first wife, Hadley.
