Miss Benson's Beetle
ISBN : 9780552779487
It is 1950. In a devastating moment of clarity, Margery Benson abandons her dead-end job and advertises for an assistant to accompany her on an expedition. She is going to travel to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty, in her unlikely pink travel suit, is not the companion Margery had in mind. And yet together they will be drawn into an adventure that will exceed every expectation. They will risk everything, break all the rules, and, at the top of a red mountain, discover their best selves.
Jemima J
ISBN : 9780140276909
Treated like a slave by her thin and bitchy flatmates, lorded over at the Kilburn Herald by the beautiful Geraldine (less talented, but better paid), her only consolation is food. What with that and her passion for her charming, sexy colleague Ben, she knows her life needs changing. But can Jemima reinvent herself? Should she? A brilliantly funny, honest novel from the author of Straight Talking, about ugly ducklings and swans, about attraction, addiction and the meaning of true love.
The Testaments
ISBN : 9781784708214
The Republic of Gilead is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, two girls with radically different experiences of the regime AiIlk come face to face with the legendary, ruthless Aunt Lydia. But how far will each go for what she believes ?
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
ISBN : 9780241372555
Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, Metamorphosis, the story of an ordinary man transformed into an insect, is brought together in this collection with the rest of his works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Contemplation, a collection of his earlier short studies ; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity ; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America ; and an eyewitness account of an air display. Together, these stories, fragments and miniature gems reveal the breadth of his vision, his sense of the absurd, and above all his acute, uncanny wit.
Killing Commendatore
ISBN : 9781784707330
When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he holes up in the mountain home of a famous artist. The days drift by, spent painting, listening to music and drinking whiskey in the evenings. But then he discovers a strange painting in the attic and unintentionally begins ajourney of self-discovery that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt and a haunted underworld.
Seize the Day
ISBN : 9780141184852
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, lie still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos : he is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain, successful father, failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as "the type that loses the girl") and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day lie reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding, and offers him one last hope... "Saul Bellow is one of the grants of the twentieth-century novel. Read Seize the Day and see why" Irish Times
This Blinding Absence of Light
ISBN : 9780141022826
In 1971 disaffected student Salim took part in a failed coup to oust King Hassan II of Morocco. With sixty others he was incarcerated in a secret prison complex in the Moroccan desert ; they were to remain there for nearly twenty years. In starkly eloquent, beautiful prose, Tahar Ben Jelloun relates the prisoners' experiences as they struggle to survive. The son of a witty, feckless courtier who disowns him, Salim tells stories to keep sane - from the suras of his beloved Koran to the plot of A Streetcar Named Desire. Even in the darkest, most terrible conditions, sympathy, insight, the human quest for meaning and understanding never desert Salim. The resulting novel is a wrenching yet exquisite celebration of the human spirit and its determination to survive.
JAZZ
ISBN : 9780099750918
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Joe Trace - in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband - shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life. Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
Home
ISBN : 9780099555940
It begins with a letter from a woman Frank has never met. A pleading letter. A letter that closed his throat. 'Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.' And that is it all it takes.