26a
ISBN : 9780099479048
Identical twins Georgia and Bessi live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Down below there is not such harmony. Their Nigerian mother puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding and ahs mysterious ways of dealing with homesickness; their father angrily roams the streets of Neasden, prey to the demons of his Derbyshire upbringing. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe. Older sister Bel discovers sex, high heels and organic hairdressing, the twins prepare for a flapjack empire, and baby sister Kemy learns to moonwalk for Michael Jackson. It is when reality comes knocking that the fantasies of childhood start to give way. How will Georgia and Bessi cope in a world of them will be stronger?
Lone Eagle
ISBN : 9780552148511
The phone call came on a snowy December afternoon. Kate was certain it was Joe, her soulmate since they'd met thirty-four years before - but what she got was the one call she had never wanted. It took her mind back to the moment when she and Joe first met, when she was just seventeen and he was young, powerful, dazzling and different from any man she'd ever known Christmas, 1940, and Kate is making her début in New York society. Joe, the brilliant protege of Charles Lindbergh, seems just out of Kate's reach. As the months pass, they meet again, and although Kate goes off to study at Radcliffe and Joe skyrockets to fame in modem aviation, he is always drawn back to her, as a moth to a flame. When the war is over Kate wants a marriage and family - while Joe wants the world. Unwilling to wait any longer, Kate moves on with her life. But when a chance encounter brings them together again, the time has come to make a choice, one that will have profound consequences for the rest of their lives. A novel of extraordinary grace and compassion from a master storyteller.
The World According to Garp
ISBN : 9780552776783
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields - a feminist leader ahead of her times. It is also the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes - even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with 'lunacy and sorrow'; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. It provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."
Five Quarters of the Orange
ISBN : 9780552998833
Beyond the main street of Les Laveuses runs the Loire, smooth and brown as a sunning snake - but hiding a deadly undertow beneath its moving surface. This is where Framboise, a secretive widow named after a raspberry liqueur, plies her culinary trade at the crêperie - and lets her memory play strange games. Into this world comes the threat of revelation as Framboise's nephew - a profiteering Parisian - attempts to exploit the growing success of the country recipes she has inherited from her mother, a woman remembered with contempt by the villagers of Les Laveuses. As the spilt blood of a tragic wartime childhood flows again, exposure beckons for Framboise, the widow with an invented past.