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Books in the Picador Collection series

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  • by Cormac McCarthy
    £9.99

    'I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as Blood Meridian . . . A nightmare odyssey' Evening Standard

  • by Bret Easton Ellis
    £9.49

    A cult classic, adapted into a film starring Christian Bale. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?Patrick Bateman has it all: good looks, youth, charm, a job on Wall Street, reservations at every new restaurant in town and a line of girls around the block. He is also a psychopath. A man addicted to his superficial, perfect life, he pulls us into a dark underworld where the American Dream becomes a nightmare . . . With an introduction by Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is one of the most controversial and talked-about novels of all time. A multimillion-copy bestseller hailed as a modern classic, it is a violent black comedy about the darkest side of human nature.

  • by Oliver Sacks
    £9.99

    With an introduction by Will Self.A classic work of psychology, this international bestseller provides a groundbreaking insight into the human mind.If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have been dismissed as autistic or retarded, yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human. A provocative exploration of the mysteries of the human mind, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a million-copy bestseller by the twentieth century's greatest neurologist.

  • by Cormac McCarthy
    £9.49

    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

  • by Emily St. John Mandel
    £9.49

    'Best novel. The big one . . . stands above all the others . . . beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac, a book that I will long remember, and return to.' - George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones.The New York Times BestsellerWinner of the Arthur C. Clarke AwardLonglisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards FinalistPEN/Faulkner Award FinalistStation Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a bold vision of a dystopian future, frighteningly real, perfect for fans of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again. Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened. If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?

  • by Emma Donoghue
    £8.99 - 9.49

    A major film starring Brie Larson.Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.Shortlisted for the Orange Prize.With an introduction by John Boyne.Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra.Jack lives with his Ma in Room. Room has a single locked door and a skylight, and it measures ten feet by ten feet. Jack loves watching TV but he knows that nothing he sees on the screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits there is a world outside.Devastating yet uplifting, Room by Emma Donoghue is a luminous portrait of a boundless maternal love. It has sold more than two million copies, was a number one bestseller and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange prizes. Few books have reached modern classic status so swiftly.

  • - A Memoir of Moods and Madness
    by Kay Redfield Jamison
    £9.99

    With an introduction by Andrew Solomon'It stands alone in the literature of manic depression for its bravery, brilliance and beauty.' Oliver SacksI was used to my mind being my best friend. Now, all of a sudden, my mind had turned on me: it mocked me for my vapid enthusiasms; it laughed at all of my foolish plans; it no longer found anything interesting or enjoyable or worthwhile.Dr Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic depression (bipolar disorder) - and has experienced its terrors and cruel allure first-hand. While pursuing her career in medicine, she was affected by the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic lows that afflicted many of her patients. From her jubilant childhood to the disquiet that has dominated her adult life, she charts a journey through her own mind, and those of others.An Unquiet Mind is a definitive examination of manic depression from both sides: doctor and patient, the healer and the healed. A classic memoir of enormous candour and courage, it teems with the wit and wisdom of its creator.

  • - Notes in the Margin of My Time
    by Clive James
    £14.49

    'In this book can be heard the merest edge of an enormous conversation. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room, wearing name tags in case they don't recognize each other (although some recognize each other all too well, and avoid contact). My heroes and heroines are here. The reader will recognize some of their names, while other names will be more obscure. My intellectual betes noires are here too, and the same division might apply.' An almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James' unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the twentieth-century. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.

  • by Oliver Sacks
    £9.99

    'The story of a disease that plunged its victims into a prison of viscous time, and the drug that catapulted them out of it' Guardian Hailed as a medical classic, and the subject of a major feature film as well as radio and stage plays and various TV documentaries, Awakenings by Oliver Sacks is the extraordinary account of a group of twenty patients. Rendered catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War, all twenty had spent forty years in hospital: motionless and speechless; aware of the world around them, but exhibiting no interest in it - until Dr Sacks administered the then-new drug, L-DOPA, which caused them, temporarily, to awake from their decades-long slumber.

  • - Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
    by Oliver Sacks
    £9.99

    'If you did not think that gallium and iridium could move you, this superb book will change your mind' The Times In Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks evokes, with warmth and wit, his upbringing in wartime England. He tells of the large science-steeped family who fostered his early fascination with chemistry. There follow his years at boarding school where, though unhappy, he developed the intellectual curiosity that would shape his later life. And we hear of his return to London, an emotionally bereft ten-year-old who found solace in his passion for learning. Uncle Tungsten radiates all the delight and wonder of a boy's adventures, and is an unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary young mind.

  • by Bret Easton Ellis
    £9.99

    He became a bestselling novelist while still in college, immediately famous and wealthy. He watched his insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box. He was lost in a haze of booze, drugs and vilification. Then he was given a second chance. This is the life of Bret Easton Ellis, the author and subject of this remarkable novel. Confounding one expectation after another, Lunar Park is equally hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking. It's the most original novel of an extraordinary career - and best of all: it all happened, every word is true.

  • by Don DeLillo
    £9.49

    'America's greatest living writer.' - ObserverJack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life; a life that is going well enough, until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an 'Airborne Toxic Event' and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear - his own mortality. White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which Don DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism. It captures the particular strangeness of life lived when the fear of death cannot be denied, repressed or obscured and ponders the role of the family in a time when the very meaning of our existence is under threat.

  • by Cormac McCarthy
    £9.99

    'A uniquely brilliant book . . . told in language as subtly beautiful as its desert setting. One of the most important pieces of American writing of our time' Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood. All the Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece from Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy, and a grand love story: a novel about childhood passing, along with innocence and a vanished American age. Steeped in the wisdom that comes only from loss, it is a magnificent parable of responsibility, revenge and survival.

  • by Don DeLillo
    £11.49

    An epic novel combining fiction and history in a collaboration that encompasses fifty years of American history.

  • by Jon Ronson
    £9.49 - 9.99

    From the Sunday Times top ten bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, this is a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame.'It's about the terror, isn't it?''The terror of what?' I said.'The terror of being found out.'For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they're being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job.A great renaissance of public shaming is sweeping our land. Justice has been democratized. The silent majority are getting a voice. But what are we doing with our voice? We are mercilessly finding people's faults. We are defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it. We are using shame as a form of social control.Simultaneously powerful and hilarious in the way only Jon Ronson can be, So You've Been Publicly Shamed is a deeply honest book about modern life, full of eye-opening truths about the escalating war on human flaws - and the very scary part we all play in it.

  • - Selected Stories
    by Lucia Berlin
    £9.99

    The New York Times bestseller 'This selection of 43 stories should by all rights see Lucia Berlin as lauded as Jean Rhys or Raymond Carver' - IndependentThe stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentieth-century American fiction.With extraordinary honesty and magnetism, Lucia Berlin invites us into her rich, itinerant life: the drink and the mess and the pain and the beauty and the moments of surprise and of grace. Her voice is uniquely witty, anarchic and compassionate. Celebrated for many years by those in the know, she is about to become - a decade after her death - the writer everyone is talking about. The collection will be introduced by Lydia Davis.'With Lucia Berlin we are very far away from the parlours of Boston and New York and quite far away, too, from the fiction of manners, unless we are speaking of very bad manners . . . The writer Lucia Berlin most puts me in mind of is the late Richard Yates.' - LRB, 1999

  • by Bret Easton Ellis
    £9.99

    Incisive, controversial and startlingly funny, The Rules of Attraction examines a group of affluent students at a small, self-consciously bohemian, liberal-arts college on America's East Coast. Lauren, who changes the man in her bed even more often than she changes course, is dating Victor but sleeping with Sean. Sean - cool, ambivalent and deeply cynical - might be in love with Lauren, but he's not going to let that stop him from bedding Paul. Paul, as shrewd as he is passionate, is Lauren's ex-lover and the final point in this curious triangle. From the author of American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction is a breathtaking tale of sex, expectation, desire and frustration.

  • by Jamaica Kincaid
    £9.49

    Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador BooksIn this acclaimed travel memoir Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a spectacular and exotic three-week trek through the Himalayan land of Nepal, where she and her companions are gathering seeds for planting at home. The natural world and, in particular, plants and gardening are central to Kincaid's work. Among Flowers intertwines meditations on nature and stunning descriptions of the Himalayan landscape with observations on the ironies, difficulties and dangers of this magnificent journey.For Kincaid and three botanist friends, Nepal is a paradise, a place where a single day's hike can traverse climate zones, from subtropical to alpine, encompassing flora suitable for growing at their homes, from Wales to Vermont. Yet as she makes clear, there is far more to this foreign world than rhododendrons that grow thirty feet high. Danger, too, is a constant companion - and the leeches are the least of their worries. Unpredictable Maoist guerrillas live in these perilous mountains, and when they do appear - as they do more than once - their enigmatic presence lingers long after they have melted back into the landscape. And Kincaid, who writes of the looming, lasting effects of colonialism in her works, necessarily explores the irony of her status as memsahib with Sherpas and bearers.A wonderful blend of introspective insight and beautifully rendered description, Among Flowers is a vivid, engrossing, and characteristically frank memoir from one of the most striking voices in contemporary literature.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best in modern literature.

  • by Jamaica Kincaid
    £9.49

  • by Cormac McCarthy
    £9.49

    The Crossing forms second part of Cormac McCarthy's critically acclaimed Border Trilogy, that began with All the Pretty Horses and concludes with The Cities of the Plain. Set on the south-western ranches in the years before the Second World War, Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing follows the fortunes of sixteen-year-old Billy Parham and his younger brother Boyd. Fascinated by an elusive wolf that has been marauding his family's property, Billy captures the animal - but rather than kill it, sets out impulsively for the mountains of Mexico to return it to where it came from. When Billy comes back to his own home he finds himself and his world irrevocably changed. His loss of innocence has come at a price, and once again the border beckons with its desolate beauty and cruel promise.

  • by Cormac McCarthy
    £9.99

    No Country for Old Men. Collection Edition, Author: Cormac McCarthy, Publication Year: 2022-08-04, Publisher: Pan Macmillan, Language: eng

  • by Imogen Binnie
    £9.49

    Maria, a trans woman in her thirties, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters.After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the Pacific, embarking on her version of the Great American Road Trip.Along the way she stops in Reno, Nevada, and meets James, a young man who works in the local Wal-Mart. Maria recognizes elements of her younger self in James and the pair quickly form an unlikely but powerful connection, one that will have big implications for them both.This hilarious, groundbreaking cult classic inspired a whole literary movement, and is now published in the UK for the very first time.

  • - A Life
    by Oliver Sacks
    £9.99

    When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far'. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks's earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels - sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents.With unbridled honesty and humour, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions - bodybuilding, weightlifting, and swimming - also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual, his guilt over leaving his family to come to America, his bond with his schizophrenic brother, and the writers and scientists - Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick - who influenced him.On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer - and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.

  • by Oliver Sacks
    £9.99

    'Oliver Sacks is a perfect antidote to the anaesthetic of familiarity. His writing turns brains and minds transparent' Observer When Oliver Sacks, a physician by profession, injured his leg while climbing a mountain, he found himself in an unusual position - that of patient. The injury itself was severe, but straightforward to fix; the psychological effects, however, were far less easy to predict, explain, or resolve: Sacks experienced paralysis and an inability to perceive his leg as his own, instead seeing it as some kind of alien and inanimate object, over which he had no control. A Leg to Stand On is both an account of Sacks' ordeal and subsequent recovery, and an exploration of the ways in which mind and body are inextricably linked.

  • by Jamaica Kincaid
    £9.49

    An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived a peaceful and content life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful and influential presence, who sits at the very centre of the little girl's existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother's shadow.When she turns twelve, however, Annie's life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she makes rebellious friends and frequently challenges authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a 'young lady', ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary.A haunting and tragicomic tale of the end of childhood, Annie John is told with Jamaica Kincaid's trademark candour and complexity, and is a true coming-of-age classic.

  • by Jamaica Kincaid
    £9.49

    Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. At first glance Lewis and Mariah are a blessed couple - handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Almost at once, however, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade.With a mixture of anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the privileged, facile world of her employers while comparing it to the vivid realities of her home in the Caribbean. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is.In this environment a new person unfolds: passionate, sexually forthright, and disarmingly honest. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new character: a captivating heroine possessed with clear-sightedness and ferocious integrity.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

  • by Jamaica Kincaid
    £9.49

    At the Bottom of the River is Jamaica Kincaid's first published work, a selection of inter-connected prose poems told from the perspective of a young Afro-Caribbean girl.Collecting pieces written for the New Yorker and the Paris Review between 1978 and 1982, including the seminal 'Girl', these stunning works announced a fully-formed, generational talent and firmly established the themes that Kincaid would continue to return to in her later work: the loss of childhood, the fractious nature of mother-daughter relationships, the intangible beauty of the natural world, and the striving for independence in a colonial landscape.Powerful and lyrical, this is an unforgettable collection from a unique and necessary literary voice.Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

  • by Oliver Sacks
    £9.99

    'A mine of treasures, a source of visions, a microcosm of human experience and suffering, the philosopher's stone: Migraine is a remarkable achievement' Sunday Telegraph Migraine is an age-old - the first recorded instances date back over two thousand years - and often debilitating condition, affecting a 'substantial minority' of the population across the globe. In Migraine, Oliver Sacks offers at once a medical account of its occurrence and management; an exploration of its physical, physiological, and psychological underpinnings and consequences; and a meditation on the nature and experience of health and illness.

  • by Cormac McCarthy
    £9.49

    Volume Three of the Border Trilogy In Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain, two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing beyond recognition. In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn again and again, in this story of friendships and passion, to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.

  • by Don DeLillo
    £9.49

    Bucky Wunderlick is a rock and roll star. Dissatisfied with a life that has brought fame and fortune, he suddenly decides he no longer wants to be a commodity. He leaves his band mid-tour and holes up in a dingy, unfurnished apartment in Great Jones Street. Unfortunately, his disappearing act only succeeds in inflaming interest . . . Great Jones Street, Don DeLillo's third novel, is more than a musical satire: it probes the rights of the individual, foreshadows the struggle of the artist within a capitalist world and delivers a scathing portrait of our culture's obsession with the lives of the few.

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