Сасси Эни0.0 Lyrical, witty, moving and timely, To Fill a Yellow House is a story of community, friendship and the power of creativity and connection.
When Kwasi's family moves abruptly from one side of London to the other, Kwasi is both excited by the change--the new house is so big--and unsettled by his new school and the pressures placed upon him by his parents and many aunties. One place Kwasi finds refuge and inspiration is the Chest of Small Wonders, an eclectic and run-down charity shop on the high street.
Rupert has run the Chest for decades, but since his wife's death several years before, he has struggled to keep their dreams for the shop alive. These days, fewer people shop second-hand, the Chest has become a depository for unwanted possessions, and Rupert is indulging more and more in herbal and perhaps-not-so-legal teas.
As Kwasi spends time in the Chest, an unexpected friendship develops between man and boy, a relationship that gives each a new sense of belonging. But the community and high street are changing, and when local politics threaten to engulf the Chest, both Kwasi and Rupert must decide who their allies are and where their futures lie.
To Fill a Yellow House is as vibrant and surprising as the city it is set in and marks the arrival of a bright and bold new talent.
Гурнаик Джохал0.0 Here, beneath the planes circling Heathrow, various lives connect. Priti speaks English and her nani Punjabi. Without Priti's mum around they struggle to make a shared language. Not far away, Chetan and Aanshi's relationship shifts when a woman leaves her car in their drive but never returns to collect it. Gujan's baba steps out of his flat above the chicken shop for the first time in years to take his grandson on a bicycle tour of the old and changed neighbourhood. And returning home after dropping out of university, Lata grapples with a secret about her estranged family friend, now a chart-topping rapper in a crisis of confidence.
Mapping an area of West London, these stories chart a wider narrative about the movement of multiple generations of immigrants. In acts of startling imagination, Gurnaik Johal's debut brings together the past and the present, the local and the global, to show the surprising ways we come together.
Мозес Маккензи0.0 Sayon Hughes longs to escape the volatile Bristol neighborhood known as Ends, the tight-knit but sometimes lawless world in which he was raised, and forge a better life with Shona, the girl he’s loved since grade school. With few paths out, he is drawn into dealing drugs alongside his cousin, the unpredictable but fiercely loyal Cuba. Sayon is on the cusp of making a clean break when an altercation with a rival dealer turns deadly and an expected witness threatens blackmail, upending his plans.
Sayon’s loyalties are torn. If Shona learns the secret of his crime, he will lose her forever. But if he doesn’t escape Ends now, he may never get another chance. Is it possible to break free of the bookies’ tickets, burnt spoons, and crooked solutions, and still keep the love of his life?
Rippling with authenticity and power, Moses McKenzie’s dazzling debut brings to life a vibrant and teeming world we have read too little about. In its sheer lyrical power, An Olive Grove in Ends recalls the work of James Baldwin and marks the arrival of an exciting and formidable new voice.
Джей Гао0.0 By reimagining episodes from Homer's Odyssey, Jay Gao's highly anticipated debut collection, Imperium, introduces an innovative talent whose work cuts across poetic traditions, traversing mythic cartographies and imperial formations. Exploring forms of absolute and intimate power, Imperium is an imaginative meditation on how the past lives on in the present by way of, and beyond, a global poetics of diaspora.
'Nuanced, challenging, sometimes hilarious, often anguished, this impressive reimagining of The Odyssey makes for an unforgettable road trip; Gao's Odysseus is a nervy and compelling traveller, a sort of non-hero, itinerant and always somewhat lost. Waylaid with Gao in hotel bars and tour buses, we are estranged, sensitized as we go to the dislocations and non-belonging of children of the world's diasporas, and also to the structures of appropriation and exploitation embedded in travel. We are all conditioned and implicated; but perhaps this acute and attentive Odysseus is exactly who we need to help us listen to the buried histories of Imperialism, to "wait a little differently, mourn a / little more".'
Fiona Benson
'These poems reject the heroism of the legible "I". If a central figure emerges it might be that of the Anti-Translator, not there to disclose personal information but to reveal the bareness of our "corpse-lives". Jay Gao's Imperium marks a new chapter in British poetry, bringing to bear a new complexity, richness of thought and influence.'
Will Harris
Трэвис Алабанза0.0 ‘When you are someone that falls outside of categories in so many ways, a lot of things are said to you. And I have had a lot of things said to me.’
In None of the Above, Travis Alabanza examines seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity. These phrases have stayed with them over the years. Some are deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or offensive, some celebratory; sentences that have impacted them for better and for worse; sentences that speak to the broader issues raised by a world that insists that gender must be a binary.
Through these seven phrases, which include some of their most transformative experiences as a Black, mixed race, non binary person, Travis Alabanza turns a mirror back on society, giving us reason to question the very framework in which we live and the ways we treat each other.
Мья-Роуз Крейг0.0 Discover a powerful, evocative and urgent new young voice in nature writing.
'Birdwatching has never felt like a hobby, or a pastime I can pick up and put down, but a thread running through the pattern of my life.'
Meet Mya-Rose - otherwise known as 'Birdgirl'. Birder, environmentalist, diversity activist. To date she has seen over five thousand different types of bird: half the world's species.
Every single bird a treasure. Each sighting a small step in her family journey - a collective moment of joy and stillness. And each helping her to find her voice.
Since she was young, she has visited every continent to pursue her passion, seeing first-hand the inequality and reckless destruction we are inflicting on our fragile planet. And the simple, mindful act of looking for birds has made her ever-more determined to campaign for all our survival.
This is her story; a journey defined by her love for these extraordinary creatures. Because large or small, brown, patterned or jewelled, there is something about birds that makes us, even for just moments at a time, lift our eyes away from our lives and up to the skies.
Birdgirl is the perfect read for fans of H is for Hawk, Diary of a Young Naturalist, and any young or aspiring environmentalists.
Тайс Син0.0 Cabbages . . . The Turkish variety are prized for their enlarged leaf bud, that’s where we put the heroin . . .
There’s a stash of heroin waiting to be imported, and no one seems sure what to do with it . . . But Ayla’s a gardener, and she has a plan.
Offering a fresh and funny take on the machinery of the North London heroin trade, Keeping the House lifts the lid on a covert world thriving just beneath notice: not only in McDonald’s queues and men’s clubs, but in spotless living rooms and whispering kitchens. Spanning three generations, this is the story of the women who keep their family – and their family business – afloat, juggling everything from police surveillance to trickier questions of community, belonging and love.
Люсия Осборн-Кроули0.0 It occurred to me that the thing that made me the sickest, the thing that made me suffer most, was the fact that I felt so compelled to hide what had been done to me. Because I believed it was all my fault.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley didn't tell a soul when she was raped aged fifteen. Then, eighteen months after she was attacked, her body began to turn on her - and what followed were sudden bouts of searing, unbearable pain that saw her in and out of hospital for the next ten years.
At twenty-five, Lucia for the first time told the truth about her rape. This disclosure triggered an endless series of appointments with doctors, trauma specialists and therapists. Meanwhile, Lucia threw herself into researching the shadowy intricacies of abuse, trauma and shame.
In My Body Keeps Your Secrets, Lucia shares the voices of women and trans and non-binary people around the world, as well as her own deeply moving testimony. She writes of vulnerability, acceptance and the reclaiming of our selves, all in defiance of a world where atrocities are committed and survivors are repeatedly told to carry the weight of that shame.
Widely researched and boldly argued, this book reveals the secrets our bodies bury deep within them, the way trauma can rewrite our biology, and how our complicated relationships with sex affect our connection with others. Crafted in a daring and immersive literary form, My Body Keeps Your Secrets is a necessary, elegant and empathetic work that further establishes Lucia's credentials as a key intersectional feminist thinker for a new generation.
'Brave, unflinching and infuriating, the stories Lucia has collated are ones that desperately need to be heard' Osman Faruqi, award-winning journalist
'Lucia Osborne-Crowley knows the natural range of the human body is so much greater than we have imagined. She has lived it. This book is a clever catalogue of the ways our bodies endure and the work they do in making sure we do, too. Osborne-Crowley writes with an elegant precision about this most urgent of subjects. Like the human body, this book contains a warning: if we do not attend to its revelations, there may well be pain. Bold, sharp and compassionate, this work announces Osborne-Crowley as a writer with great purpose.' Rick Morton, author of One Hundred Years of Dirt and My Year of Living Vulnerably
'It is both thrilling and terrifying when a body refuses to remain silent anymore. My Body Keeps Your Secrets is a beautiful and deeply moving book, and one that is vitally important: we have so much still to learn about the somatic nature of assault and trauma. Lucia Osborne-Crowley has written an insightful and moving witness statement for women who live with the consequence of assault and abuse, and for the world that has refused to see. Our bodies hold our traumas, and Osborne-Crowley refuses to keep the silence anymore.' Virginia Trioli, journalist, author, radio and television presenter
Калеб Азума Нельсон3.4 Они встретились в баре. Оба лондонцы, оба выпускники частных школ, оба темнокожие. Он — фотограф, она — танцовщица. Когда они встретились, то почувствовали, будто знали друг друга всю жизнь. Но могут ли двое людей найти утешение в любви в мире, за принадлежность к которому каждый день приходится бороться?
Стефани Си-Куиа0.0 What does it mean to be a person of many countries and heritages? Amnion excavates migratory histories, colonialism and class, moving from England to France, the United States, Spain, Germany, Libya and the Philippines. In this chronicle of a family's history divided by geography and language, Stephanie Sy-Quia explores the reverberations that the actions of one generation can have on the next, through acts of bravery and resistance, great and small.
Simultaneously mapping and undoing ideas of the self, everything here is contested. Undefinable in form, combining aspects of fiction, epic poetry and the lyric essay, and merging classical thought and contemporary life to show the joy in living and art, Amnion's broad intellect and undulating emotional landscape is a testament to the families we are given and those that we choose.
Майя Элснер0.0 A precocious debut that brims with inquisitive energy and sharp insight, overrun by wild boars is a search for intimacy and strength in the face of persecution and trauma. Unpacking interconnecting legacies of colonial exploitation, capitalist extraction and genocide, it is moderated through Maia’s stunningly intricate family history that embraces multiple faiths and languages, as well as Polish and Mexican mythologies and histories. Themes of painting, architecture and collective memory help trace a journey of resilience that runs from ancient Rome via medieval Cairo, Poland in the 30s and Berlin in the 90s, to modern London and the streets of Mexico City. Formally daring and subversively inventive with language, overrun by wild boars sifts through the wreckage of history and attempts to grasp what is precious, what is worth clinging on to, what it means to survive.
Аким Балогун0.0 Through thirteen remarkably different stories, The Storm uses the intimacy of an evocative and volatile landscape to explore the very basics of human survival, all told in a distinct and slender style of prose.
From a son struggling to hold on to normality in the face of an environment in revolt, to an elderly mother fighting relentless conditions in order to confront the child who has abandoned her; from a future where the personifications of tranquillity can be bought and exploited, to a faraway location where it is possible to unite with deceased loved ones . . .
This collection of stories shows us the unusual and often questionable ways in which people deal with extreme crisis and how ordinary human relationships can become distorted in severe conditions.
The Storm features an original painting and internal artwork by Arantza Pardo, while the audiobook is narrated by dub artist and MC Rider Shafique.
‘Trainspotting for a new generation’ – Independent
‘Raw and lyrical’ – Observer
‘One of the most admired young voices in British fiction’ – The Times
2005. Glasgow is named Europe’s Murder Capital, driven by a violent territorial gang and knife culture. In the housing schemes of adjacent Lanarkshire, Scotland’s former industrial heartland, wee boys become postcode warriors.
2004. Azzy Williams joins the Young Team [YTP]. A brutal gang conflict with their deadly rivals, the Young Toi [YTB] begins.
2012. Azzy dreams of another life. He faces his toughest fight of all – the fight for a different future.
Expect Buckfast. Expect bravado. Expect street philosophy. Expect rave culture. Expect anxiety. Expect addiction. Expect a serious facial injury every six hours. Expect murder.
Изабель Баафи0.0 'Hunger made me’, reveals one speaker in Ripe, and the desire to be satiated fills these poems. Desperate women hide grains of rice in their hair, baked beans evoke a strained father-daughter relationship, plantains endure the fire. Yet hunger takes many forms, as the risks and rewards of its satisfaction are weighed, and cravings for intimacy are charged with danger. ‘When we’re born, we’re someone else’s’, but in this daring exploration of identity and survival, we hear a thrilling new voice come into its own.
Ламорна Эш0.0 A captivating, lyrical and deeply discerning portrait of life in the Cornish town of Newlyn, the largest working fishing port in Britain, from a brilliant debut writer
There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child - the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land's End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn't seem like a place that would welcome strangers.
Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour. Out on the water, miles from the coast, she learns how fishing requires you to confront who you are and what it is that tethers you to the land. But she also realises that this proud and compassionate community, sustained and defined by the sea for centuries, is under threat, living in the lengthening shadow cast by globalisation.
An evocative journey of personal discovery replete with the poetry and deep history of our fishing communities, Dark, Salt, Clear confirms Lamorna Ash as a strikingly original new voice.
Алекс Элисон0.0 Maintaining one person's dignity comes nearly always at the expense of someone else's. I have learned this for you.
Janet is caught between care work and caring for herself. Her life revolves around Sean, a talented fine art student, living and working with cerebral palsy. Both Janet and Sean are new to London and far from their families. Both are finding a means of escape through pushing their bodies to the limit.
When Sean is faced with an unexpected and deeply personal tragedy, Janet must let her guard down at last and discover what she's prepared to fight for.
The Art of the Body is a novel about dignity and intimacy, tenderness and brutality, unafraid to explore uncommon bodies in unusual ways.
Розанна Уотт0.0 'The old Shetland fishermen still speak with something like reverence of the forgotten art of steering by the moder dy (mother wave), the name given to an underswell which it is said always travels in the direction of home'
Written in English, interspersed with Shetlandic dialect throughout, this eagerly awaited debut collection from Shetland poet Roseanne Watt contains profound, assured and willfully spare poems that are built from the sight, sound and heartbeat of the land as much as from the sea. In rigorously controlled, concise, and vivid language Watt offers glimpses of the landscape alongside which we find the most complex and mysterious of human experiences.
Оливер Зоден0.0 The music of the British composer Michael Tippett - including the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas, and four symphonies - is among the most visionary of the twentieth century. But little has been written about his extraordinary life. In this long-awaited first biography, Oliver Soden weaves a century-spanning narrative of epic scope and penetrating insight.
Soden has discovered troves of unpublished letters and manuscripts, and recorded moving interviews with Tippett's friends and colleagues. He paints a portrait of a powerful intellect and infectious personality: charming, stubborn, and great fun. But he also uncovers the sorrows and secrets that Tippett stowed away beneath his cheerfulness, not least the darker reaches of some tempestuous and often tragic love affairs.
Soden's achievement is to have enriched our understanding not only of Tippett but of his times. Figures such as T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Barbara Hepworth, and W.H. Auden jostle in the cast list. An Edwardian world of gaslight and empire cedes to turmoil and warfare; one startling revelation is the extent of Tippett's involvement in the fiery left-wing politics of the 1930s. The narrative roves from the mining villages of the north, blighted by unemployment, to a cell at Wormwood Scrubs, where Tippett was imprisoned as a conscientious objector. Later chapters uncover his operas' game-changing attitudes to gay and civil rights, against a backdrop of the Cold War and the Space Race. And singing from the page comes the music, through which Soden charts an exquisitely written course, offering lucid readings of Tippett's most famous works while resuscitating forgotten masterpieces. The result is a landmark in the study of twentieth-century culture, simultaneously an astonishing feat of scholarship and a story as enthralling as in any great novel.
Нелл Стивенс0.0 History meets memoir in two true-life love stories between two sets of writers--one unfolding in nineteenth century Rome, one in present-day Paris and London--both of which reveal the longings and ambitions of the very contemporary Nell Stevens.
In 1857, English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell completed her most famous work: the biography of her dear friend, the recently deceased Charlotte Bronte. As publication loomed, Elizabeth was keen to escape the reviews and, leaving her wholesome, dull minister husband at home, travelled with her daughters to Rome. And it was there that she met the American writer and critic, Charles Eliot Norton. Seventeen years her junior, he was the love of her life. She knew they could never be together--it would be an unthinkable breach--but when she returned home to Mr. Gaskell, she discovered to her horror that while she was gone he had betrayed her--betrayed her work--in a way that she is not sure she can ever forgive.
In 2013 Nell Stevens is in a PhD program in London, halfheartedly pursuing a post in academia to keep her afloat while she follows her true vocation as a writer. Her dissertation on the artistic expatriate community of nineteenth-century Rome isn't quite coming together. But scholarly questions take a back seat to her budding romance with Max, a soulful American with an unfinished screenplay. That is, until their relationship begins to founder, and the echoes between Nell's life and that of her historical subject become too strong to ignore.
As these two storylines meet up in delightful, funny, and unexpected ways, Mrs. Gaskell and Me evokes the bittersweet ache of lost love and the consolations of female writerly ambition.
Рэймонд Энтробус4.0 The Perseverance is the remarkable debut book by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories.
The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.
Фиби Пауэр0.0 Wandering in central Europe, a traveller observes and records a landscape of lakes, folk culture and uneasy histories. Phoebe Power's Shrines of Upper Austria gathers numerous stories and perspectives, such as the fragmented narrative of an Austrian woman who married a British soldier after the Second World War, and the voices of schoolchildren and immigrants. Strange discoveries are made: a grave for two dead goats; a lantern procession on the night of Epiphany; a baby abandoned by a river; a homemade frog-puppet.
The poems are a collage of stories and histories, set in a variety of forms and registers. They are attentive to local detail, rich in the names of people and places - Marija, Omegepta, Eck 4 and the Loser Mountain. Mixing poetry and prose, image and narrative, German and English, Power's poems are a celebration of creativity in unlikely places. Against a disquieting backdrop of mild winters and memories of snow, they invite us to question what it means to feel at once a stranger and at home.
Дамиан ле Бас0.0 'I needed to get to the stopping places, so I needed to get on the road. It was the road where I might at last find out where I belonged.'
Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language; the places her family stopped and worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lores of their people. But his own experience of life on the road was limited to Ford Transit journeys from West Sussex to Hampshire to sell flowers.
In a bid to better understand his Gypsy heritage, the history of the Britain's Romanies and the rhythms of their life today, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the atchin tans, or stopping places – the old encampment sites known only to Travellers. Through winter frosts and summer dawns, from horse fairs to Gypsy churches, neon-lit lay-bys to fern-covered banks, Damian lives on the road, somewhere between the romanticised Gypsies of old, and their much-maligned descendants of today.
In this powerful and soulful debut, Damian le Bas brings the places, characters and stories of his to bold and vigorous life.
Fiona Mozley3.3 Daniel is heading north. He is looking for someone. The simplicity of his early life with Daddy and Cathy has turned sour and fearful. They lived apart in the house that Daddy built for them with his bare hands. They foraged and hunted. When they were younger, Daniel and Cathy had gone to school. But they were not like the other children then, and they were even less like them now. Sometimes Daddy disappeared, and would return with a rage in his eyes. But when he was at home he was at peace. He told them that the little copse in Elmet was theirs alone. But that wasn't true. Local men, greedy and watchful, began to circle like vultures. All the while, the terrible violence in Daddy grew.
Atmospheric and unsettling, Elmet is a lyrical commentary on contemporary society and one family's precarious place in it, as well as an exploration of how deep the bond between father and child can go.
Кайомбо Чингони0.0 *Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize 2017*
*Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the Guardian and Daily Telegraph*
‘Urban and urbane, it’s a magnificent debut’ Daily Telegraph
‘A brilliant debut – a tender, nostalgic and at times darkly hilarious exploration of black boyhood, masculinity and grief – from one of my favourite writers’ – Warsan Shire
Translating as ‘initiation’, kumukanda is the name given to the rites a young boy from the Luvale tribe must pass through before he is considered a man. The poems of Kayo Chingonyi’s remarkable debut explore this passage: between two worlds, ancestral and contemporary; between the living and the dead; between the gulf of who he is and how he is perceived.
Underpinned by a love of music, language and literature, here is a powerful exploration of race, identity and masculinity, celebrating what it means to be British and not British, all at once.
Мартин Макиннес4.5 A luminous debut novel of modern alienation, of the sinister beauty of the human body and of the enduring splendour of the natural world.
During a sweltering South American summer, a family convenes for dinner at a restaurant. Midway through the meal, Carlos disappears. An experienced, semi-retired inspector takes the case, but what should be a routine investigation becomes something strange, intangible, even sinister. The corporation for which Carlos worked seems to serve no purpose; the staff talk of their missing colleague's alarming, shifting physical symptoms; a forensic scientist uncovers evidence of curious abnormalities in the thriving microorganisms that shared Carlos's body. As the inspector relives and retraces the missing man's footsteps, the trail leads him away from the city sprawl and deep into the country's rainforest interior, where he encounters both horror and wonder
Мелисса Ли-Хоутон0.0 Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain.
Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision.
Includes ‘i am very precious’ – Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016.
Эдмунд Гордон0.0 Angela Carter is widely acknowledged as one of the most important and beguiling writers of the last century. Her work stands out for its bawdiness and linguistic zest, its hospitality to the fantastic and the absurd, and its extraordinary inventiveness and range. Her life was as modern and as unconventional as anything in her fiction.
Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne in 1940, her story spans the latter half of the twentieth century. After escaping an oppressive childhood and a difficult early marriage, the success of her first novels enable the freedoms of travel – journeying across America in a Greyhound bus, and then on to Tokyo, where she lived for three transformative years – before settling in London to write her last, great novels, amid the joys of late motherhood and prestigious teaching posts abroad. By the time of her tragic and untimely death at the age of fifty-one, she was firmly established as an iconoclastic writer whose fearlessly original work had reinvigorated the literary landscape and inspired a new generation.
This is the story of how Angela Carter invented herself – as a new kind of woman and a new kind of writer – and how she came to write such seductive works as The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. Edmund Gordon has followed in Carter’s footsteps to uncover a life rich in incident and adventure. With unrestricted access to her manuscripts, letters and journals, and informed by dozens of interviews with her friends and family, this major biography offers a definitive portrait of one of our most dazzling writers.
Джесси Гринграсс4.0 The twelve stories in this startling collection range over centuries and across the world.
There are stories about those who are lonely, or estranged, or out of time. There are hauntings, both literal and metaphorical; and acts of cruelty and neglect, but also of penance.
Some stories concern themselves with the present, and the mundane circumstances in which people find themselves: a woman who feels stuck in her life imagines herself in different jobs - as a lighthouse keeper in Wales, or as a guard against polar bears in a research station in the Arctic.
Some stories concern themselves with the past: a sixteenth-century alchemist and doctor, whose arrogance blinds him to people's dissatisfaction with their lives until he experiences it himself.
Finally, in the title story, a sailor gives his account - violent, occasionally funny and certainly tragic - of the decline of the Great Auk.
Andrew McMillan0.0 Shortlisted for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body – to male friendship and male love – muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving. We are witness here to an almost religious celebration of the flesh: a flesh vital with the vulnerability of love and loss, to desire and its departure. In an extraordinary blend of McMillan’s own colloquial Yorkshire rhythms with a sinewy, Metaphysical music and Thom Gunn’s torque and speed – ‘your kiss was deep enough to stand in’ – the poems in this first collection confront what it is to be a man and interrogate the very idea of masculinity. This is poetry where every instance of human connection, from the casual encounter to the intimate relationship, becomes redeemable and revelatory.
Dispensing with conventional punctuation, the poet is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving the work an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present – drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. An elegant stylist and unfashionably honest poet, McMillan’s eye and ear are tuned, exactly, to both the mechanics of the body and the miracles of the heart.
Джек Андервуд0.0 Happiness is the long-anticipated debut collection from the award-winning Jack Underwood. With the sort of smart, persuasive voice associated with Simon Armitage and Michael Donaghy, these poems worry at the world in search of consolation, or else meet life's absurdity and strangeness half-way; whether sitting proudly atop an unexploded bomb, or injecting blood under the skin of a banana, playfulness and imagination are vehicles for confronting 'the fearful and forgotten things I've lied to myself about'. Here are poems which address anxiety about fatherhood, remorse for lost lovers and friends, or mourn for a miscarried sibling.
Happiness is a collection preoccupied with the ephemerality of happiness itself, at the ever-present possibility of its departure, and the ways we try to grasp and keep hold of it. 'Every single thought I'm having is about LOVE', here meaning both the pleasure and panic of love, its peculiarity; love as a feeling of risk, love for one's own body, familiar yet estranged, of 'cack-handed LOVE at his console', love like 'pausing to move a snail somewhere safer in the rain'.
Дейзи Хей0.0 Deep in the archives of the Bodleian Library lies a tattered scrap of paper with newlyweds’ scribbles on it. It is a table, listing the qualities of a couple. One column reads ‘Often says what he does not think’, ‘He does not show his feelings’, ‘He is a genius’; the other ‘Never says what she does not think', ‘She shows her feelings’, ‘She is a dunce’. The writing is Mary Anne Disraeli’s: the qualities listed contrast her with her husband, Benjamin Disraeli, one of the foremost politicians of the Victorian age.
The daughter of a sailor, on her second marriage and 12 years older than her husband, Mary Anne was highly eccentric, liable to misbehave and (worse still) overdressed for grand society dinners. Her beloved Diz was of Jewish descent, a mid-ranking novelist and frequently mired in debt. He was fiercely protective and completely devoted to his wife. She was devoted to him, too, and they were both devoted to the very idea of being devoted. They wrote passionate letters to one another through their courtship and their marriage, spinning their unusual tale into a romance worthy of the novels they so loved.
Reading between the lines of a great cache of their letters and the anecdotes of others in chilly Oxford reading rooms, Daisy Hay shows how the Disraelis rose to the top of the social and political pile. Along the way, we meet women of a similar station and situation whose endings were far unhappier than Mary Anne’s, acting as a counterpoint to her fairy tale ending as the landed Angel of the Prime Minister’s House.
In an age where first ladies are under ever-increasing pressure to perform and conform, Mr and Mrs Disraeli offers a portrait of one who refused to do either, in a society which demanded she do both.
Томас Моррис0.0 A young video shop assistant exchanges the home comforts of one mother figure for a fleeting sexual encounter with another; a brother and sister find themselves at the bottom of a coal mine with a Japanese tourist; a Welsh stag on a debauched weekend in Dublin confesses an unimaginable truth; and a twice-widowed pensioner tries to persuade the lovely Mrs Morgan to be his date at the town's summer festival...
Thomas Morris' debut collection reveals its treasures in unexpected ways, offering vivid and moving glimpses of the lost, lonely and bemused. These entertaining stories portray the lives of the people who know where they are, but don't know what they're doing.
Зои Пилгер0.0 Meet 2014's most outrageous, funny and shocking anti-heroine: Ann-Marie. She's 23, her life has collapsed, and she's blaming everyone but herself. Heartbroken, skint and furious, she's convinced that love - sweet love! - is the answer to all of her problems, until she meets legendary feminist Stephanie Haight, a woman who could be her saviour - or her final undoing.
From neo-burlesque pop-up strip clubs, to ironic Little Mermaid-themed warehouse parties via ritual worship ceremonies summoning ancient power goddesses, disastrous one night stands with extravagantly unsuitable men, naked cleaning jobs, a forced appearance on Woman's Hour and baby boomer house parties in Islington, Ann-Marie hurtles through London and life, urged on by Stephanie, who is convinced that if she can save Ann-Marie she'll rescue an entire generation from the curse of ironic detachment.
Fiercely clever and unapologetically wild, Eat My Heart Out is the satire for our narcissistic, hedonistic, post-post-feminist era.
Бен Брукс3.5 She's online.
'I booked a hotel,' I say. 'Near Marble Arch.'
'That sounds great, hon. I can't wait to see you.'
'Yeah. Me too.'
'I'm vaguely nervous.'
'Don't be.'
Do be. I'm a child.
Lolito is a love story about a fifteen year-old boy who meets a middle-aged woman on the internet.
When his long-term girlfriend and first love Alice betrays him at a house party, Etgar goes looking for cyber solace in the arms of Macy, a stunning but bored housewife he meets online. What could possibly go wrong...?
Hilarious, fearless and utterly outrageous, Lolito is a truly twenty-first century love story.
Джонатан Бекман0.0 In 1785, a sensational trial began in Paris that would divide the country and captivate Europe. A leading Catholic cardinal and scion of one of the most distinguished families in France stood accused of forging the queen's signature to obtain the most expensive piece of jewelry in Europe: a 2,800-carat diamond necklace. Where were the diamonds? Was the cardinal innocent? Was, for that matter, the queen? The revelations from the trial would bedevil the French monarchy as the country descended into a bloody revolution.
In How to Ruin a Queen, award-winning author Jonathan Beckman tells of political machinations and enormous extravagance; of kidnappings, prison breaks, and assassination attempts; of hapless French police in disguise, reams of lesbian pornography, and a duel fought with poisoned pigs. It is a detective story, a courtroom drama, a tragicomic farce, and a study of credulity and self-deception in the Age of Enlightenment.
Лиз Берри0.0 ‘When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me…’
In Black Country, Liz Berry takes flight: to Wrens Nest, Gosty Hill, Tipton-on-Cut; to the places of home. The poems move from the magic of childhood – bostin fittle at Nanny’s, summers before school – into deeper, darker territory: sensual love, enchanted weddings, and the promise of new life.
In Berry’s hands, the ordinary is transformed: her characters shift shapes, her eye is unusual, her ear attuned to the sounds of the Black Country, with ‘vowels ferrous as nails, consonants / you could lick the coal from.’ Ablaze with energy and full of the rich dialect of the West Midlands, this is an incandescent debut from a poet of dazzling talent and verve.
Дэйзи Хилдьярд0.0 After her grandfather's death, a young woman returns to his farm in Yorkshire. At his desk she finds the book he left unfinished when he died. Part story, part scholarship, his eccentric history of England moves from the founding of the printing press into virtual reality, linking four journeys, separated by the centuries, of four great men. The exiled Edward IV lands in England and marches on London for one final attempt to win back the throne; Tsar Peter the Great, implausibly disguised as a carpenter, follows his own retinue around frozen London; the former African slave Olaudah Equiano takes his book-tour down a Welsh coal-mine; and Herbert, Lord Kitchener, mysteriously disappears at sea in 1916.
These are the stories she remembers him telling her, and others too - about medieval miracles and EU agricultural subsidies; old people and fallen kings; homemade fireworks and invented dogs; Arctic ice cores, sunk ships, drowning horses, salt, sperm, carbon and miners. The history of great men loses its way in the stories of ordinary great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, including the historian's own.
The National Book Foundation honored Daisy Hildyard as one of 5 Authors Under 35 in 2013.
Amy Sackville0.0 Following her wonderful debut, The Still Point, Sackville returns with a strangely beautiful short novel about love and sex and obsession. A literature professor marries his prize student, a woman forty years his junior, and at her request he takes her to the sea for their honeymoon. He is embarked on his life’s work, a book about enchantment-narratives in literature, most all of them involving strange girls and women, but soon finds himself distracted by his own enchantment for his new white-haired young wife.
They travel to the Orkney Islands, the ancient Mesolithic and Neolithic site north of the Scottish coast, “the Seal Islands,” a barren place of extraordinary beauty. And as the days of their honeymoon pass his desire and his constant, yearning contemplation become his normality. His mysterious bride becomes his entire universe.
Надифа Мохамед0.0 It is 1988 and Hargeisa waits. Whispers of revolution travel on the dry winds but still the dictatorship remains secure. Soon, and through the eyes of three women, we will see Somalia fall. Nine-year-old Deqo has left the vast refugee camp she was born in, lured to the city by the promise of her first pair of shoes. Kawsar, a solitary widow, is trapped in her little house with its garden clawed from the desert, confined to her bed after a savage beating in the local police station. Filsan, a young female soldier, has moved from Mogadishu to suppress the rebellion growing in the north. And as the country is unravelled by a civil war that will shock the world, the fates of the three women are twisted irrevocably together. Intimate, frank, brimming with beauty and fierce love, The Orchard of Lost Souls is an unforgettable account of ordinary lives lived in extraordinary times.
Джо Стретч0.0 WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM PRIZE
'Funny, sad, bewildering and painfully honest, it’s a must-read for all fans of Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine' Emerald Street
Jim Thorne.
He wants to understand love.
His mum.
Her three sisters have epic perms.
And they’re famous.
His dad.
He is focused on a vital question:
Mario or Sonic?
It’s England, 1989–2009.
So expect a little history.
The dolphin's name is Dilly.
Lucy Wood4.0
Along Cornwall's ancient coast, the flotsam and jetsam of the past becomes caught in the cross-currents of the present and, from time to time, a certain kind of magic can float to the surface...
Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Magpies whisper to lonely drivers late at night. Trees can make wishes come true - provided you know how to wish properly first. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A teenager's growing pains are sometimes even bigger than him. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door.
In these stories, Cornish folklore slips into everyday life. Hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wrecker's lamps, standing stones and baying hounds, and relationships wax and wane in the glow of a moonlit sea.
This luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut collection introduces in Lucy Wood a spectacular new voice in contemporary British fiction.
Ned Beauman0.0 NED BEAUMAN HAS BEEN NAMED AS ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE'S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2013
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR
A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR
AN EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR
The fantastically inventive, ingenious and hilarious second novel from Ned Beauman, author of the acclaimed and prizewinning BOXER, BEETLE.
HISTORY HAPPENED WHILE YOU WERE HUNGOVER
When you haven't had sex in a long time, it feels like the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone. If you're living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn't. But that's no consolation to Egon Loeser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theatres of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: whether it was really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, the great Renaissance stage designer Adriano Lavicini; and why a handsome, clever, charming, modest guy like him can't, just once in a while, get himself laid.
From the author of the acclaimed BOXER, BEETLE comes a historical novel that doesn't know what year it is; a noir novel that turns all the lights on; a romance novel that arrives drunk to dinner; a science fiction novel that can't remember what 'isotope' means; a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it. LET'S HOPE THE PARTY WAS WORTH IT
Эби Кёртис0.0 The Glass Delusion draws on the power of animals, the strangeness of home and the mysteries of the future. Blending the mythic and the domestic, it is a book haunted by the lost, by buried objects and preserved creatures, unearthed memories and secrets brought to light. The poems in The Glass Delusion dwell on the meaning of where we live and how we live. They are ecologically aware, uncanny and speculative. Curtis brings to life such characters as Dr Who’s wife; Paul, a psychic octopus; a troublesome poltergeist; an orchestra of insects and an enchanted version of Essex. Sensuous, musical and shot through with wry humour, Curtis’ second book will move and surprise you.
Мириам Гэмбл0.0 The Squirrels Are Dead is a striking and assured debut from a distinctive new talent in Irish poetry. Miriam Gamble is one of the new poets included in the Bloodaxe anthology 'Voice Recognition'. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007.
Адам О'риордан0.0 Adam O'Riordan's remarkable first collection traces the hidden paths from past to present, from the lost to the living, seeking familiarity in a world of 'false trails and disappearing acts'. Here relatives, friends and other absences are coaxed into life and urgently pressed on the reader as they surface, in the flesh.
Journeys begin with indelible detail and open into new and astonishing landscapes of the head and the heart. Whether in graceful elegies for the dead or the charged lyrics of love and desire, poems cross space as well as time, from the 'blackened lung' of Victorian Manchester and the fateful events of the 1913 Derby, to enter a modern era of satellites and late night searches for lost lovers. At the heart of the collection lies the sonnet sequence 'Home', a slant look at the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, intersected by more recent, sometimes unsettling, personal portraits.
Clear-eyed and sensuous, these are poems linked by a strong sense of place and presence, longing and loss; of history captured in an irrevocable moment. In the Flesh is a startling debut from one of our finest young British poets.
Александра Харрис4.0 In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops.
Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately,
wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern”
need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.
A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen,
and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.
Джейкоб Полли0.0 1986, the last day of the summer holidays, and Christopher Hearsey is wondering why his best mate Arthur has suddenly disappeared, and whether lippy Gill Ross a few doors down might know anything about it. The great border city of Carlisle is buzzing with rumours following an act of terrible violence, and in order to begin his search Chris must face down his own dread, not only of the consequences of his own actions, but of local big man Booby Grove, and his psychotic sidekick Carl 'the black' Hole, who is keen to settle an old score. Populated by a menacing and hilarious cast of characters, and moving from the dark aggrieved streets of the city to the agricultural hinterland of the Solway Firth, this is the story of a boy desperate to get out of town, out of a bad situation, even out of his own skin. Written with a moving demotic brilliance, reminiscent of "Huckleberry Finn," "Talk of the Town" is an exhilarating and terrifying odyssey
Helen Oyeyemi3.4 In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly -
Slipping away from them -
And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.
"Miri I conjure you "
This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.
Бен Уилсон0.0 Fear of terrorism, crime, social chaos - factors which have put our ideal of individual liberty very much into retreat. Particularly in light of the debate surrounding 42-day detention, it is important to remind ourselves of just how complex the battle to achieve these rights has been. However, the question remains; how can we resist the growth of intrusive authoritarianism without exposing ourselves to crime, terrorism and other risks?
History provides a guide to answering this question. What Price Liberty? takes us through four centuries of British, American and European history, elaborating not just how civil liberties were constructed in the past, but how they were continually rethought - and re-fought - in response to modernity, and puts into context the controversies of the past decade or so. If liberty is to survive now, it must again adapt to new circumstances, but it is up to us all to agree upon the value we place on it.
An essential and utterly enlightening discussion, What Price Liberty? provides the material and arguments with which we can make sense of our times.
Томас Леверитт0.0 A dysfunctional love story set in Sarajevo 2003 amid reconstruction programs, mercenaries, black marketers, private enterprise initiatives, the UN and the international justice business. It is a brilliantly original and funny new voice in fiction.
Helen Walsh0.0 "A young man with shock-red hair tears through the snowbound streets of Warrington's toughest housing estate. He is Robbie Fitzgerald, and he is running for his life - and that of his young family. In his heart, Robbie knows the odds are stacked against them. In this unbending northern town, he has married the beautiful brown nurse who once stitched up his wounds. Susheela is his Tamil princess, but in the real world the Fitzgeralds have to face up to prejudice, poverty and naked hatred from their neighbours. Now Robbie has seen a way out, and he's sprinting to his date with destiny ..." "This night starts a chain of events that will reverberate throughout this family - Robbie, Susheela, their son Vincent and unborn daughter, Ellie." Across two decades of struggle, aspiration, achievement, misunderstandings, near-misses and shattered dreams, Helen Walsh plunges us into their lives and loves. And in the Fitzgeralds, she has created a family who will stay in your heart, long after the final page.
Adam Foulds0.0 An extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s, eventually becoming a meditation on the inheritance of conflict and its consequences. It is a thrillingly original, profound and lyrical work.
Родж Гласс0.0 Glass plays Boswell to Gray's Johnson in this humorous yet rigorous biography. Glass has used the inventive techniques of Gray's fiction to bear, mixing a chronological narrative of his subject's life with his own diaries of meeting, getting to know and working with the celebrated artist, writer and campaigner.
Генри Хитчингс0.0 Words are essential to our everyday lives. An average person spends his or her day enveloped in conversations, e-mails, phone calls, text messages, directions, headlines, and more. But how often do we stop to think about the origins of the words we use? Have you ever thought about which words in English have been borrowed from Arabic, Dutch, or Portuguese? Try admiral, landscape, and marmalade, just for starters.
The Secret Life of Words is a wide-ranging account not only of the history of English language and vocabulary, but also of how words witness history, reflect social change, and remind us of our past. Henry Hitchings delves into the insatiable, ever-changing English language and reveals how and why it has absorbed words from more than 350 other languages—many originating from the most unlikely of places, such as shampoo from Hindi and kioskfrom Turkish. From the Norman Conquest to the present day, Hitchings narrates the story of English as a living archive of our human experience. He uncovers the secrets behind everyday words and explores the surprising origins of our most commonplace expressions.
The Secret Life of Words is a rich, lively celebration of the language and vocabulary that we too often take for granted.
Элис Альбиния0.0 One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains, flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion; today it is the cement of Pakistans fractious union. Five thousand years ago, a string of sophisticated cities grew and traded on its banks. In the ruins of these elaborate metropolises, Sanskrit-speaking nomads explored the river, extolling its virtues in Indias most ancient text, the Rig-Veda. During the past two thousand years a series of invaders Alexander the Great, Afghan Sultans, the British Raj made conquering the Indus valley their quixotic mission. For the people of the river, meanwhile, the Indus valley became a nodal point on the Silk Road, a centre of Sufi pilgrimage and the birthplace of Sikhism. Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five millennia of history redolent with contemporary importance.
Стивен Холл3.7 Впервые на русском — самый поразительный дебют в британской прозе последних лет! Этого автора сравнивали с Филипом Диком и Майклом Крайтоном, Дугласом Адамсом и Харуки Мураками.
Герой книги, Эрик Андерсен (второй), ничего не помнит о своей прошлой жизни: врачи полагают, что всю память стерла сильнейшая травма. Однако Эрик получает письма от Эрика Андерсена (первого), который объясняет ему, как составить из четырех диктофонов бездивергентную концептуальную петлю, как найти Комитет по исследованию внепространственного мира, как расшифровать Фрагмент о лампе...
Но все эти полумеры не спасут Эрика от безжалостного хищника, неутомимо идущего по его следу. Ключ к спасению — у городской партизанки Скаут, с ее ментоловыми сигаретами и гранатами, собранными из клавиш пишущей машинки...
Adam Thirlwell0.0 Having slept with a prostitute in Egypt, a young French novelist named Gustave Flaubert at last abandons sentimentality and begins to write. He influences the obscure French writer Édouard Dujardin, who is read by James Joyce on the train to Trieste, where he will teach English to the Italian novelist Italo Svevo. Back in Paris, Joyce asks Svevo to deliver a suitcase containing notes for Ulysses, a novel that will be viscerated by the expat Gertrude Stein, whose first published story is based on one by Flaubert.
This carousel of influence shows how translation and emigration lead to a new and true history of the novel. We devour novels in translation while believing that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style. The Delighted States attempts to solve this conundrum while mapping an imaginary country, a country of readers: the Delighted States.
This book is a provocation, a box of tricks, a bedside travel book; it is also a work of startling intelligence and originality from one of our finest young writers.
Гвендолин Райли0.0 In her third novel, Riley charts the peculiar final reckoning of a highly charged romance, exploring the possibility of human connection as two young people try to reconcile themselves to all of life’s bad endings, and give some meaning to their mayfly existences.
Ник Лэйрд0.0 Laird's debut collection, To a Fault (2005), signalled the arrival of a significant new talent, 'doing more, in its range and ambition,' wrote Deryn Rees-Jones in the Independent, 'than any first collection I can think of in at least the last ten years.' On Purpose confirms the promise of that first book and shows the author hitting new and yet more athletic strides.
Blending tones of assurance and delicacy, of confidence and vulnerability, On Purpose is a collection of poems that takes care and consideration in examining the often brutal arena of human relations, concluding with a mercurial and affecting sequence about a marriage, which takes, as its point of departure, that most influential of military treatise, The Art of War.
Джеймс Скадамор3.8 Остров, где изменяется сознание.
Здесь стоит таинственный особняк, куда можно добраться только по воде или по воздуху...
Здесь обитают странные люди, самая нормальная из которых - женщина, скормившая крабам свое обручальное кольцо вместе с пальцем.
Здесь не существует ни мифа, ни реальности, а бред, ложь и истина переплелись настолько плотно, что разделить их невозможно.
Здесь юноша, заблудившийся в лабиринте собственных фантазий, и его друг и летописец обнаруживают пещерный ход в клинику, которой не существует, - и готовы идти по нему до конца.
Горацио Клэр0.0 Before Horatio Clare was born, his parents fell in love with a place -- a remote sheep farm in Wales, physically and in every other way far from the lives they were forging as young professionals in London. The farm was high up a mountain, nearly impassable in winter. The neighbors were surly, or perhaps just unused to foreigners. But the setting was breathtaking, and soon it changed Jenny's and Robert's lives.What began as the somewhat conventional dream of a young, ambitious couple from London looking for a weekend home quickly became a different vision. Horatio's mother, romantic and tenacious, found it impossible to leave the fierce and beautiful land. She abandoned her job, her social world, and eventually her marriage to raise her two sons in the company of a herd of sheep, a few dogs, and the badgers, foxes, and mice who had prior claim to her new world. While other boys were going to films and listening to rock music, Horatio was weaning ewes and watching weather and surviving the furor of irascible neighbors. His childhood was marked by wonder and joy, and it is that wonderment that he bestows upon the reader as he recounts the story of the ancient, sometimes brutal, way of life on a hill farm. This wise book is a moving tribute to his mother, both beautiful and brave.
Крис Клив3.9 В этом мире не осталось места для надежд. Остался только панический парализующий ужас террора. От взрывов гибнут дети, горят заживо их отцы, не сумевшие защитить свои семьи от невидимой угрозы. А что делать женщинам, когда весь мир в одночасье рушится и собственное государство предает тебя в руки террористов? Покончить с собой или просить помощи у бен Ладена. Искать защиты у самого олицетворения зла?
Зэди Смит3.8 В своем новом романе Зэди Смит повествует о двух университетских профессорах-врагах. Белей и Кипсе, чьи семьи оказываются тесно связанными друг с другом. Это комедия положений, разворачивающаяся в академическом межкультурном пространстве, такая же яркая, как и первый роман Смит "Белые зубы".
В доме Белей, в Бостоне, исповедуют идеи равенства всех людей, бесспорное превосходство демократии, все модные теории об искусстве, пренебрегают идеей богатства и презирают политику. В доме Кипсов говорят о реальной политике, о деньгах, об экономике, объявляют равенство мифом, а мультикультурализм - модной выдумкой. Это противостояние приводит ко многим трагикомическим событиям...
Это роман о любви, о понимании того, что есть красота.
В 2006 году Зэди Смит получила за роман "О красоте" премию "Оранж" (Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction) - одну из самых престижных в англоязычном мире премий.
Оуэн Ширс0.0 Ideas of separation and divorce—the geographical divides of borders, the separation of the dead and the living, the movement from childhood to adulthood, and the end of relationships—drive this poetry collection from one of Great Britain's rising young talents. The collection revolves around the poems "Y Gaer" and "The Hillfort," the titles themselves suggesting the linguistic divide in Wales, from poems concerned with childhood, a Welsh landscape, and family to an outward-looking vision that is both geographic and historic.
Maggie O'Farrell0.0 Gripping, insightful and deft, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US by Maggie O'Farrell is a haunting story of the way our families shape our lives, from the award-winning author of THIS MUST BE THE PLACE. It was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller and won the Somerset Maugham Award.
On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous.
They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.
Justin Hill0.0 In the last years of the Tang Dynasty, a beautiful girl is born in a fort along the Great Wall of China, and is set to become the most famous and celebrated courtesan of her age. Set in the 9th century, Passing Under Heaven tells the tragic love story of Lily, a Chinese poet and documents a time when Chinese women enjoyed a window of unprecedented personal freedom - including the freedom to fall in love. But when Lily pushes that freedom to its limits disaster ensues, leaving her child and husband to forever mourn her loss.
Based on historical fact, Passing Under Heaven is more than the story of the end of a love affair, this book also chronicles the passing of the Chinese golden age into civil war and ruin.
Марк Блэйни0.0 These are enticing and intriguing stories by a compelling, thought-provoking author. A woman living inside a stone circle hides an unusual secret, and makes her ever-more confused guest wonder if she is actually human. An elderly, faded artist becomes obsessed with her young model, who re-invigorates her and inspires her to create more vibrant works of art using his hair and blood. Sexual energy drives most of the stories onwards – Blayney seems to be influenced by Iris Murdoch in this respect.
The stories are lyrical and beautiful. You can feel the sweat dripping down your spine in the prickling, dry heat of Turkey, you can feel the dry, sulphurous night in Lille prior to a hot, wet thunderstorm. Blayney has much to say about human belief, the fabric of reality and the unspoken relationships between couples. The title story, for instance, is about two young honeymooners who find it difficult to communicate with each other, reaching new levels of understanding when they go on a boat trip to search for turtles.
Like Paul Bowles or J. G. Farrell, Mark Blayney has the gift of conveying an immensely visual scene in a few broad brush strokes. He strikes the right balance between writing about serious issues whilst also being entertaining and page-turning – there is some beautifully-crafted prose and the stories have pace, verve and excitement. Read the extracts below for a glimpse of these magical, evocative stories.
Also see Mark Blayney’s other book, Conversations with Magic Stones.
Шарлотта Мендельсон0.0 In a shabby, book-choked house in North Oxford live the Lux family. Victor, a dedicated professor, is desperate to be elected to give the prestigious annual Spenser lecture. Jean, his unassuming wife, is tentatively experimenting with the boundaries of her marital freedom. Eve, an over-achiever like her father, is suffering from a dangerous teenage angst - straining to achieve top marks in her exams and yet always in the shadow of her younger sister, Pheobe, who is perfect, it seems. Into this climate of repression and bitterness there comes an unworldly don, Victor's bete-noir, who shows interest in the vulnerable Eve. Meanwhile, Jean's best friend, Helen, has something she is yearning to tell: a confession that may alter everyone's constrainingly absurd life for ever. Daughters of Jerusalem is a captivating tale of hidden love and secret hatred, of the desire to belong and the need for escape, and of the fine line between wanting to be discovered and fearing the consequences when the delicious unknown becomes brutally exposed...
Robert Macfarlane4.0 Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind is the most interesting of the crop of books published to mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest. Macfarlane is both a mountaineer and a scholar. Consequently we get more than just a chronicle of climbs. He interweaves accounts of his own adventurous ascents with those of pioneers such as George Mallory, and in with an erudite discussion of how mountains became such a preoccupation for the modern western imagination.
The book is organised around a series of features of mountaineering--glaciers, summits, unknown ranges--and each chapter explores the scientific, artistic and cultural discoveries and fashions that accompanied exploration. The contributions of assorted geologists, romantic poets, landscape artists, entrepreneurs, gallant amateurs and military cartographers are described with perceptive clarity. The book climaxes with an account of Mallory's fateful ascent on Everest in 1924, one of the most famous instances of an obsessive pursuit. Macfarlane is well-placed to describe it since it is one he shares.
MacFarlane's own stories of perilous treks and assaults in the Alps, the Cairngorms and the Tian Shan mountains between China and Kazakhstan are compelling. Readers who enjoyed Francis Spufford's masterly I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination will enjoy Mountains of the Mind. This is a slighter volume than Spufford's and it loses in depth what it gains in range, but for an insight into the moody, male world of mountaineering past and present it is invaluable. --Miles Taylor
Хари Кунзру4.0 Англичанин по отцу, индиец по матери, герой этой книги вынужден перевоплощаться, становясь тем, кого в нем хотят видеть другие. В Индии он - мальчишка-неприкасаемый, в Англии - молодой аристократ. Меняя маски, он вдруг понимает, что своего лица у него уже нет. Этот реалистический роман, написанный сухим и размеренным языком, затягивает в себя, как воронка, и в конце концов выводит читателя на границы реальности, к метафизическому ужасу пустоты.
Джон Макгрегор3.7 "Если никто не говорит о замечательных вещах" - книга, замедляющая время. Шаг за шагом, почти на цыпочках она ведет читателя по событиям одного дня - последнего дня лета. От страницы к странице, от минуты к минуте, от героя к герою раскрываются живые картины из осязаемых звуков и запахов - картины обыкновенной улицы, живущей своей жизнью. Здесь у каждого персонажа есть история, и каждая история соединяется с другими в результате одного события, произошедшего на улице ближе к концу дня. Именно об этом событии несколько лет спустя будет вспоминать главная героиня, и именно оно однажды заявит о себе самым невероятным образом.
"Если никто не говорит..." - книга о богатстве, скрытом в мелочах, об уникальности, самодостаточной ценности и силе текущего момента, о немыслимой взаимосвязи людей, вещей, и всего того, что с ними происходит. Это экскурсия по берегам реки жизни, достопримечательностями которой являются капля дождя, шелест крыльев голубей, колышущаяся на ветру занавеска... и глубина человеческих переживаний.
Шарлотт Хобсон5.0 In September 1991, the Soviet Union is collapsing and people conquer uncertainty, hunger, and negative-twenty degree temperatures by drinking too much vodka and reveling in their new-found sexual freedom. Charlotte Hobson is our irresistible guide to this tumultuous time. We meet Yakov, who blows half-a-million rubles on a taxi to see a girl in Minsk; Lola, who sleeps with her peers for a share of their dinner; Viktor, who struggles to forget his brutal memories of military service; and Mitya, Hobson’s wild and optimistic lover, whose gradual disillusion and dissolution mirror his country’s lurch from euphoria to despair.
Marcel Theroux5.0 Damien March hadn't thought of his eccentric uncle for almost twenty years until he received a telegram: Patrick dead. Father. Damien, a journalist for the BBC in London, is even more shocked to learn that he has inherited his uncle's ramshackle house on Ionia, an isolated island off the coast of Cape Cod. Damien's step into a new future means moving circuitously into his family's past. He uncovers letters and writings-scattered clues that shed light on Patrick's solitary life. When he discovers a fragment of an unpublished novel, The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes, the stakes in this paper chase are suddenly higher. Mycroft Holmes, the older brother of Sherlock, is one of literature's most intriguing absences. A neglected genius who lived in obscurity, he bears a striking resemblance to Patrick himself. The parallels quickly grow more disconcerting, and a sinister tale of murder and deception takes on new meaning. Soon Damien finds himself revealing dark and unsettling truths that shatter his most fundamental assumptions.
Written with warmth and distinctive humor, The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes is at once an engaging mystery and an illuminating story about family secrets and identity.
Бен Райс0.0 This enchanting tale is at once a beautifully rendered narrative of childhood loss and a powerfully simple fable about the necessity of imagination.
Pobby and Dingan are Kellyanne Williamson’s best friends, maybe her only friends, and only she can see them. Kellyanne’s brother, Ashmol, can’t see them and doesn’t believe they exist anywhere but in Kellyanne’s immature imagination. Only when Pobby and Dingan disappear and Kellyanne becomes heartsick over their loss does Ashmol realize that not only must he believe in Pobby and Dingan, he must convince others to believe in them, too.
Эдвард Платт0.0 "One afternoon in January 1995, as I drove along Western Avenue, I did what I had never done before: I parked the car in a side-street and walked on to the road..."
In "Leadville," Edward Platt tells the story of Western Avenue from the optimism of its construction in the 1920s to its partial demolition seventy years later. It is a tale of the city and the traffic, of suburbia and the dreams of its inhabitants, and of our senseless and all-consuming love affair with the motor car.
'Platt has created a drama that is not only Orwellian in its attention to what you might call the state of the nation . . . but almost Dickensian in the recording of the colour and pathos of its inhabitants' Tim Lott, "The Times"
'endlessly entertaining - an original talent and an excellent book.'
Norman Lewis
'A reporter of fearless imagination.' Simon Jenkins, The Times.
Leadville won a Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non Fiction.
Сара Уотерс3.8 Впервые на русском - самый знаменитый из ранних романов прославленного автора "Тонкой работы", "Бархатных коготков" и "Ночного дозора". Замысел "Нити, сотканной из тьмы" возник благодаря архивным изысканиям для академической статьи о викторианском спиритизме, которую Уотерс писала параллельно с работой над "Бархатными коготками".
Маргарет Прайор приходит в себя после смерти отца и попытки самоубийства. По настоянию старого отцовского друга она принимается навещать женскую тюрьму Миллбанк, беседовать с заключенными, оказывая им моральную поддержку. Интерес ее приковывает Селина Дауэс - трансмедиум, осужденная после того, как один из ее спиритических сеансов окончился трагически. Постепенно интерес обращается наваждением - ведь Селина уверяет, что их соединяет нить, сотканная из тьмы...
Белла Батерст0.0 I for one had no idea that the 14 lighthouses dotting the Scottish coast were all built by the same Stevenson family that produced Robert Louis Stevenson, Scotland's most famous novelist. But Bella Bathurst throws a powerful, revolving light into the darkness of this historical tradition.
Robert Louis was a sickly fellow, and - unlike the rest of his strong-willed, determined family - certainly not up to the astonishing rigours of lighthouse building, all of which are vividly described here.
To build these towering structures in the most inhospitable places imaginable (such as the aptly named Cape Wrath), using only 19th-century technology is an achievement that beggars belief. The comparison that comes to mind is with the pyramid building of ancient Egypt.
For instance, we learn that the ground rocks for the Skerryvore lighthouse were prepared by hand (even though the "gneiss could blunt a pick in three blows") in waves and winds "strong enough to lift a man bodily off the rock" and that "it took 120 hours to dress a single stone for the outside of the tower and 320 hours to dress one of the central stones. In total 5000 tons of stone were quarried and shipped" - and all by hand. It is mind-boggling stuff: you'll look at lighthouses with a new respect.
- Adam Roberts
Андреа Эшворт4.5 Set in 1970s Manchester, ONCE IN A HOUSE ON FIRE tells the harrowing true story of three sisters and their mother, from the point of view of the eldest sister Andrea. They are a close-knit, loving family but are forced to battle with poverty, depression, and terrifying abuse at the hands of two stepfathers. Andrea, a sensitive and highly observant child, witnesses and suffers unbearable cruelty yet refuses to give into despair. Ultimately this is an empowering account of survival and hope, as Andrea forges a future beyond the violent world of home.
Giles Foden0.0 Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his red Maserati, has run over a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, in his obsession for all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. And so begins a fateful dalliance with the central African leader whose Emperor Jones-style autocracy would transform into a reign of terror.
In The Last King of Scotland Foden's Amin is as ridiculous as he is abhorrent: a grown man who must be burped like an infant, a self-proclaimed cannibalist who, at the end of his 8 years in power, would be responsible for 300,000 deaths. And as Garrigan awakens to his patient's baroque barbarism--and his own complicity in it--we enter a venturesome meditation on conscience, charisma, and the slow corruption of the human heart. Brilliantly written, comic and profound, The Last King of Scotland announces a major new talent.
Пол Фарли0.0 In this collection of poetry, the author can be found speaking in the voice of a light bulb, a hungover window-cleaner, a photographer trapped in a condemned block, and a deranged collector of vinyl.
Джонатан Фридленд0.0 On a switchback ride through the USA, riding pillion with America's founding fathers, Jonathan Freedland searches out the qualities that made America the land at the end of his childhood rainbow, the place his grandfather and he conspired to run off to because of its open promise and unbounded potential. Noisy, crass, greedy, riddled with crime, riven by race, obsessed by money: America, exporter of junk to the UK. Or is it?
From Lesbianville in New Hampshire to Tent City in Arizona, from the high kitsch celebration of Liberace to the Bible Belt austerity of Iowa, from the paranoid militia of rural Montana to Florida's Condo Canyon, this is a journey to the heart of modern America-to Normal, Illinois. On his travels Freedland reveals how Americans control of their own lives, shape their own communities and vibrantly assert their rights. And there's even a twist: the spirit that inspires the American secret is actually our own-a British revolutionary fervour mislaid across the Atlantic. This what has made America the diverse, freedom-loving, self-sufficient, independent icon to the world: the place where socialism never took hold because it is inherent in the founding vision, where capitalism at the same time has reached its apogee; where many cultures contribute to the national fabric and yet the sense of belonging to the nation and reverence for its symbols is unmatched across the globe. It's time Britain shared the vitality: time to reclaim the revolution and bring it home.
Роберт Твиггер4.0 "Злые белые пижамы" - книга, написанная Робертом Твиггером о своем пребывании на годовой интенсивной программе Ёшинкан Айкидо. Действие книги разворачивается в середине 90-х в Токио, Твиггер живет с двумя друзьями в маленькой квартирке недалеко от центра Токио. Для укрепления физической формы и смены жизненного распорядка они дружно решают записаться на занятия в Ёшинкан Хомбу Додзё.
Вскоре после начала регулярных занятий, Твиггер решает, что единственный способ прочувствовать айкидо - это пройти в Ёшинкане курс "Сеншусей", изнурительную 11-месячную программу для подготовки инструкторов айкидо Ёшинкан. Курс состоит из четырех часов тренировок в течение пяти дней в неделю, а также обязанностей по уборке додзё, уик-эндов со специализированными тренировками и демонстраций.
Rachel Cusk0.0 Stella Benson, eager to change her life, answers a classified ad for an au pair and arrives in a tiny Sussex village that's home to a family slightly larger than life. What drove her to leave home, job, and life in London for such rural ignominy? Why has she severed all ties with her family? Why is she so reluctant to discuss her past? And who, exactly, is Edward?
Джонатан Рендалл0.0 Fittingly, it is in Las Vegas, boxing's capital, that author Jonathan Rendall, a young British boxing enthusiast, reflects on his own exit from the boxing scene. What unfolds is the true story of his boyhood romance with the sport, his canny coming-of-age as a boxing writer, and his risky bid to bring the unknown Colin "Sweet C" McMillan to the World Featherweight Championship.
Written with the detachment of a seasoned journalist, Jonathan Rendall has produced an uncommon sports memoir about having the faith and losing the faith. Intelligent and funny, This Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own is a boxing book with appeal that extends well beyond the ring.
Кейт Саммерскейл, Джо Карстерс0.0 When Marion "Joe" Carstairs died in 1993 at the age of ninety-three, she was largely forgotten. During the 1920s she held the world record as the fastest female speedboat racer. But as journalist Kate Summerscale discovered, when researching an obituary for the Daily Telegraph, Carstairs was also a notorious crossdresser who favored women and smoked cheroots. Supremely self-confident, she inherited a Standard Oil fortune and knew how to spend her money -- on fast boats and cars. on her female lovers, and on a Caribbean Island. Whale Cay, where she reigned over a colony of Bahamians. There, far from her bohemian past in London and Paris, Carstairs hosted a succession of girlfriends and celebrities, including Marlene Dietrich and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Through it all, she remained devoted to Lord Todd Wadley, a little doll who was her bosom companion until the very end.
