Volume three in David Peace's newly reissued crime masterpiece The Red Riding Quartet
Red Riding Nineteen Eighty is set against an evolving backdrop of power, corruption and lies. The nightmare continues during the winter of 1980 when the Ripper murders his thirteenth victim and the whole of Yorkshire is terrorised. Assistant Chief Constable Hunter struggles to solve the hellish crimes and bring an end to the horror, but is drawn ever deeper into a world of bent coppers and sleaze. After his house is burned down, his wife is threatened and his colleagues turn against him, Hunter's quest becomes personal as he has nothing left to lose.
Nineteen Eighty is a compelling battle between two desperate men, each determined to destroy the other. This third volume of the Red Riding Quartet displays Peace's unique voice which places him as one of the UK's finest crime writers.
Volume three in David Peace's newly reissued crime masterpiece The Red Riding Quartet
Red Riding Nineteen Eighty is set against an evolving backdrop of power, corruption and…
Volume four in David Peace's newly reissued crime masterpiece The Red Riding Quartet
Nineteen Eighty Three's three intertwining storylines see the Quartet's central themes of corruption and the perversion of justice come to a head as BJ, the rent boy from Nineteen Seventy Four, the lawyer Big John Piggott - who's as near as you get to a hero in Peace's world - and Maurice Jobson, the senior cop whose career of corruption and brutality has set all this in motion, find themselves on a collision course that can only end in a terrible vengeance.
Nineteen Eighty Three is an epic tale which concluded an extraordinary body of work confirming Peace as the most innovative and remarkable new British crime writer to have emerged for years.
Volume four in David Peace's newly reissued crime masterpiece The Red Riding Quartet
Nineteen Eighty Three's three intertwining storylines see the Quartet's central…
Volume two in David Peace's newly reissued crime masterpiece The Red Riding Quartet
If you thought fiction couldn't get darker than David Peace's extraordinary debut, Nineteen Seventy Four, then think again. Nineteen Seventy Seven, the second instalment of the Red Riding Quartet, is one long nightmare. Its heroes - the half decent copper Bob Fraser and the burnt-out hack Jack Whitehead - would be considered villains in most people's books. Fraser and Whitehead have one thing in common though, they're both desperate men dangerously in love with Chapeltown prostitutes.
And as the summer moves remorselessly towards the bonfires of Jubilee Night, the killings accelerate and it seems as if Fraser and Whitehead are the only men who suspect or care that there may be more than one killer at large. Out of the horror of true crime, David Peace has fashioned a work of terrible beauty. Like James Ellroy before him, David Peace tells us the true and fearsome secret history of our times.
Volume two in David Peace's newly reissued crime masterpiece The Red Riding Quartet
If you thought fiction couldn't get darker than David Peace's extraordinary…
A defence and celebration of the Essex Girl by the best-selling author of The Essex Serpent
Essex Girls are disreputable, disrespectful and disobedient. They speak out of turn, too loudly and too often, in an accent irritating to the ruling classes. Their bodies are hyper-sexualised and irredeemably vulgar. They are given to intricate and voluble squabbling. They do not apologise for any of this. And why should they?
In this exhilarating feminist defence of the Essex girl, Sarah Perry re-examines her relationship with her much maligned home county. She summons its most unquiet spirits, from Protestant martyr Rose Allin to the indomitable Abolitionist Anne Knight, sitting them alongside Audre Lorde, Kim Kardashian and Harriet Martineau, and showing us that the Essex girl is not bound by geography. She is a type, representing a very particular kind of female agency, and a very particular kind of disdain: she contains a multitude of women, and it is time to celebrate them.
A defence and celebration of the Essex Girl by the best-selling author of The Essex Serpent
Essex Girls are disreputable, disrespectful and disobedient. They speak out of turn,…
Elfriede Jelinek's most famous novel is an explicit, shocking exploration of sex and fantasy
Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. By night she trawls the city's porn shows while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her. Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies' man Walter Klemmer.
With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction. A haunting tale of morbid voyeurism and masochism, The Piano Teacher, first published in 1983, is Elfreide Jelinek's Masterpiece.
Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize For Literature in 2004 for her 'musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power.
The Piano Teacher was adapted into an internationally successful film by Michael Haneke, which won three major prizes at Cannes, including the Grand Prize and Best Actress for Isabelle Huppert.
Elfriede Jelinek's most famous novel is an explicit, shocking exploration of sex and fantasy
Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. By night she trawls…
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.
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.…
'Striking a perfect balance between myth and psychosocial realism, this is a beautifully written debut' Guardian
'Recalls M. R. James at his nastiest' Telegraph
Eshwood Hall is a great English house surrounded by sprawling woods. In 1962, Izzy is thirteen, lives in the servants quarters and doesn't go to school. Neglected by her parents, she spends her moments of freedom exploring the forest and the village beyond. The more she comes to understand the history of the place and her own situation, the stranger are the things she hears and sees. The most tantalising of these is the Green Man who inhabits the woods, and seems to know all about her, even those desires she has buried deep inside.
A family story rooted in folk tale, The Green Man of Eshwood Hall shows us the power that the wild still holds on our imagination, and the shocking nightmares to which it can give rise.
'Striking a perfect balance between myth and psychosocial realism, this is a beautifully written debut' Guardian
On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, the impossible has come to pass. Women control the civic institutions. Decide how the islands' money is spent. Run the businesses. Tend to their families. Teach the children hope for a better world. They say that this gynotopia is Eva Levi's life's work, and that now she has disappeared, it will be destroyed. But they don't know about Cwen.
Cwen has been here longer than the civilisation she has returned to haunt. The clouds are her children, and the waves. Her name has ancient roots, reaching down into the earth and halfway around the world. The islands she inhabits have always belonged to women. And she will do anything she can to protect them.
This remarkable novel is a portrait of female power and female potential, both to shelter and to harm. What are we? Islanders or mainlanders, migrants or landowners, men or women, past or future? Or a mixture of them all? And how do we make sense of these islands we call home?
On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, the impossible has come to pass. Women control the civic institutions. Decide how the islands' money is spent. Run the…
'I need to find somebody and I might need a little help looking...' It's the summer of '48 in the city of Angels and there's heat on the streets when Daphne Monet hits the sidewalk. Heat when she disappears with a trunkload of somebody else's cash. Easy Rawlins is a war veteran just fired from his job. Drinking in a friend's bar, he wonders how to meet his mortgage when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will locate Miss Monet, a blonde with a reputation. It's a simple decision, but for one thing. Nobody warned him - better the devil you know... In the sleazy, fearful city, Easy must rely on his instincts, not just to solve the case, but to save his own life.
'I need to find somebody and I might need a little help looking...' It's the summer of '48 in the city of Angels and there's heat on the streets when Daphne Monet hits the…
The extraordinary life story of Anne Lister, as told in the BBC drama Gentleman Jack
Anne Lister was a Yorkshire heiress, an intrepid world traveller and a proud lesbian during a time when it was difficult simply to be female. She chose to remain unmarried, dressed all in black and spoke openly of her lack of interest in men. The first woman to climb Vignemale in the treacherous Pyrenees, she journeyed as far as Azerbaijan and slept with a pistol under her pillow. As daring as Don Juan and as passionate as Heathcliff, Anne would not be constrained by the mores of Regency society.
Anne's diaries lay hidden for many years, before scholars were brave enough to crack their code. Her erotic confessions and candid letters tell the story of an extraordinary woman. In this groundbreaking new book, celebrated author Angela Steidele gives a fresh perspective on the life of a cult historical figure.
The extraordinary life story of Anne Lister, as told in the BBC drama Gentleman Jack
Anne Lister was a Yorkshire heiress, an intrepid world traveller and a proud lesbian during…
For the first ten years of her life, Jana was a simple Czech girl, a watercolour. Her days were a clock run by the Czechoslovakian State Security, snapping hidden photos in their plainclothes. Much fervent artwork was created: Man Subverting Republic (Black and White), Woman Distributing (Tryptic). Man and Woman Organizing (Reprint).
Jana was a watercolour, until the raven-haired girl Zorka came. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris, hasn't seen Zorka in a decade.
Aimée is in Paris too, happily married and trying to get into her hotel room. On the other side of the door is her wife Dominique, face down on the hotel linen, one hand drooping off the side of the bed, fingers curled in, wedding ring white gold like an eye frozen mid-wink.
A body now, no longer a person.
As Aimée and Jana's stories slowly circle through time and place, they lead inexorably together...
Written with the dramatic tension of a Euripides tragedy, the dreamlike quality of a David Lynch film and the imagination of a unique talent, Yelena Moskovich's Virtuoso is an audacious, mesmerising novel of love, desire, identity and belonging.
For the first ten years of her life, Jana was a simple Czech girl, a watercolour. Her days were a clock run by the Czechoslovakian State Security, snapping hidden photos in their…
How well do you know your girlfriend?
How well do you know your lover?
How well do you know yourself?
Daniel and Victoria are together. They're trying for a baby. Ruby is in prison, convicted of assault on an abusive partner.
But when Daniel joins a pen pal program for prisoners, he and Ruby make contact. At first the messages are polite, neutral - but soon they find themselves revealing more and more about themselves. Their deepest fears, their darkest desires.
And then, one day, Ruby comes to find Daniel. And now he must decide who to choose - and who to trust.
How well do you know your girlfriend?
How well do you know your lover?
How well do you know yourself?
Daniel and Victoria are together. They're trying for a baby. Ruby is in…
Bunny is sick to the back teeth of - well, everything, really, but especially New Year's Eve. It's nothing more than forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats.
And yet Bunny finds herself out at another New Year's dinner with her husband and a group of particularly irritating friends. It's really no wonder that this provokes an extreme action that lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital.
Refusing treatment, Bunny passes the time chronicling the lives of her fellow "lunatics" and writing a novel about what brought her there. Her story is a brilliant, brutally funny insight dive into the disordered mind of someone who sees the world all too clearly.
Propelled by razor-sharp humour and rife with pinpoint observations, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be impervious and raw. A bravura literary performance from one of America's finest writers.
Bunny is sick to the back teeth of - well, everything, really, but especially New Year's Eve. It's nothing more than forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats.
And yet…
When Gilbert Silvester wakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees — immediately, irrationally, inexplicably — for Japan.
In Tokyo he discovers the travel writings of the great Japanese poet Basho. Suddenly, from Gilbert's directionless crisis there emerges a purpose: a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the poet to see the moon rise over the pine islands of Matsushima.
Along the way he falls into step with another pilgrim: Yosa, a young Japanese student clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide. Together, Gilbert and Yosa travel across Basho's disappearing Japan, one in search of his perfect ending and the other a new beginning.
Serene, playful and profound, The Pine Islands is a story of the transformations we seek and the ones we find along the way.
When Gilbert Silvester wakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees — immediately, irrationally, inexplicably — for Japan.
In Eat Up, Ruby Tandoh celebrates the fun and pleasure of food, taking a look at everything from gluttons and gourmets in the movies, to the symbolism of food and sex. She will arm you against the fad diets, food crazes and bad science that can make eating guilt-laden and expensive, drawing eating inspiration from influences as diverse as Roald Dahl and Nora Ephron. Filled with straight-talking, sympathetic advice on everything from mental health to recipe ideas and shopping tips, this is a book that clears away the fog, to help you fall back in love with food.
In Eat Up, Ruby Tandoh celebrates the fun and pleasure of food, taking a look at everything from gluttons and gourmets in the movies, to the symbolism of food and sex. She will…
When two English brothers take the helm of a Barbados sugar plantation, Washington Black - an eleven year-old field slave - finds himself selected as personal servant to one of these men. The eccentric Christopher 'Titch' Wilde is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor and abolitionist, whose single-minded pursuit of the perfect aerial machine mystifies all around him.
Titch's idealistic plans are soon shattered and Washington finds himself in mortal danger. They escape the island together, but then then Titch disappears and Washington must make his way alone, following the promise of freedom further than he ever dreamed possible.
From the blistering cane fields of Barbados to the icy wastes of the Canadian Arctic, from the mud-drowned streets of London to the eerie deserts of Morocco, Washington Black teems with all the strangeness and mystery of life. Inspired by a true story, Washington Black is the extraordinary tale of a world destroyed and made whole again.
When two English brothers take the helm of a Barbados sugar plantation, Washington Black - an eleven year-old field slave - finds himself selected as personal servant to one of…
When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing 40, spends an evening with a rogue academic named Dick, she falls madly and inexplicably in love, enlisting her husband in her haunted pursuit. Dick proposes a kind of game between them, but when he fails to answer their letters Chris continues alone, transforming an adolescent infatuation into a new form of philosophy.
Blurring the lines of fiction, essay and memoir, Chris Kraus's novel was a literary sensation when it was first published in 1997. Widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades, I Love Dick is still essential reading; as relevant, fierce and funny as ever.
When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing 40, spends an evening with a rogue academic named Dick, she falls madly and inexplicably in love, enlisting her husband in her…
Simon Critchley first encountered David Bowie in the early seventies, when the singer appeared on Britain’s most-watched music show, Top of the Pops. His performance of “Starman” mesmerized Critchley: it was “so sexual, so knowing, so strange.” Two days later Critchley’s mum bought a copy of the single; she liked both the song and the performer’s bright orange hair (she had previously been a hairdresser). The seed of a lifelong love affair was thus planted in the mind of her son, aged 12.
In this concise and engaging excursion through the songs of one of the world’s greatest pop stars, Critchley, whose writings on philosophy have garnered widespread praise, melds together personal narratives of how Bowie lit up his dull life in southern England’s suburbs with philosophical forays into the way concepts of authenticity and identity are turned inside out in Bowie’s work. The result is nearly as provocative and mind-expanding as the artist it portrays.
Simon Critchley first encountered David Bowie in the early seventies, when the singer appeared on Britain’s most-watched music show, Top of the Pops. His performance of “Starman”…
Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890's, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way.
They are Cora Seaborne and Will Ransome. Cora is a well-to-do London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species. But Will sees his parishioners' agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith. Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart.
Told with exquisite grace and intelligence, this novel is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take.
Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890's, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its…
Born in Lancashire as the wealthy heiress to her British father's textiles empire, Leonora Carrington was destined to live the kind of life only known by the moneyed classes. But even from a young age she rebelled against the strict rules of her social class, against her parents and against the hegemony of religion and conservative thought, and broke free to artistic and personal freedom. Today Carrington is recognised as the key female Surrealist painter, and Poniatowska's fiction charms this exceptional character back to life more truthfully than any biography could. For a time Max Ernst's lover in Paris, Carrington rubbed elbows with Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Andre Breton and Pablo Picasso. When Ernst fled Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War, Carrington had a breakdown and was locked away in a Spanish asylum before escaping to Mexico, where she would work on the paintings which made her name. In the hands of legendary Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska, Carrington's life becomes a whirlwind tribute to creative struggle and artistic revolution.
Born in Lancashire as the wealthy heiress to her British father's textiles empire, Leonora Carrington was destined to live the kind of life only known by the moneyed classes. But…
