FICTION IN HARDBACK
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Freedom Jonathan Franzen £20.00 The new novel from the author of The Corrections. Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbour who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outre rocker and Walter's old college friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbour," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes |
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Fall of Giants Ken Follett £20.00 This is a huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian brothers, whose plans to emigrate to America fall foul of war, conscription and revolution. In a plot of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, this moves seamlessly from Washington to St Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. |
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All Men are Liars Alberto Manguel £18.99 Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexplained death: that of the brilliant South American writer Alejandro Bevilacqua, found lying on his balcony floor in Madrid in the mid-1970s. The few accounts of those who knew the deceased - including those of his last lover, a former fellow prison inmate, a sworn enemy and even the author Manguel himself - are contradictory and unreliable. Poor devil and with a troubled childhood, literary genius and irresistible seducer, ordinary bastard masquerading as hero, pure and simple impostor - those are but a few of the roles attributed to a mysterious and captivating figure in this tribute to falsehood, between the lines of which the reader must discover the only worthwhile truth: that of the fascinating homage the author pays to literature and its shapeshifting inventions, in which the objects of our desires are infinitely reincarnated |
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The Fort Bernard Cornwell £18.99 The Penobscot Expedition is an extraordinary story, one that has fascinated the author for years, and will now fascinate his readers. Summer 1779, a British force of fewer than one thousand Scottish infantry were sent to build a garrison in the State of Maine. The war of Independence was in its third year and no other British troops stood between Canada and New York. The State of Massachusetts was determined to expel the British, but when they sent a fleet of forty vessels to 'captivate, kill and destroy' they underestimated their enemies, calm in battle and ready for victory. Told from both sides of the battle, the main characters are all real figures from history. Based on diaries, letters and court transcripts, we meet many of the war's greatest heroes, including Paul Revere and John Moore, destined to become famous subjects of war poetry. |
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Daniel Henning Mankell £12.99 In 1875 Hans Bengler, a young entomologist, leaves Sweden for the expedition of a lifetime to the Kalahari Desert where he hopes to find a previously undiscovered insect to name after himself and advance his career. Instead, after his long and arduous journey through the sands, he finds a small boy, whose tribe has been decimated by European raiders. Accustomed to collecting specimens, Bengler decides to adopt the boy and names him Daniel. He takes the traumatised child home with him to Sweden and plans to 'civilise' him. But Daniel cannot slip into an alien culture, and a new life in the cold and snow, so easily. He yearns desperately for the desert and his real family, who visit him in his dreams. His only consolation comes from his friendship with a vulnerable young girl called Sanna, who is also an outsider in her community. But even this bond is destined to be violently broken, as Daniel's isolation and increasing desperation lead to a chilling tragedy. As well as an acute psychological depiction of the life of a child thrown into extraordinary circumstances, in this stand alone novel Mankell also gives us a compelling and disturbing story of the dangerous gaps and misunderstandings that can exist between individuals and cultures. |
