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FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE ADVERSARYLittle Nicolas is a delicate, timid schoolboy, with an excitable, if morbid imagination - the child of an overbearing father.
When the headaches started, Sarah Lippett would stand alone on a different side of the playground from the other children. When she started to drag one of her legs, her parents took her to hospital, and so began the visits to many different doctors, each one more bewildered by her illness than the last. Initially schooled at home, when Sarah went back to school she was placed with the struggling kids, and still so often ill, she felt even more alone. But although Sarah''s parents often despaired of the stream of appointments and no cure, they never showed it and she grew up in the midst of a boisterous, loving family and found good friends at last, as well as venturing into bands, art, boys, books and records. Finally, when Sarah turned sixteen, she was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital where the doctors diagnosed her with the rare disease, Moyamoya. The book ends with Sarah waking up after brain surgery.
In his customary pose as the grumpiest of grumpy old men, Raymond Briggs contemplates old age and death... and doesn't like them much.
The eleven-year-old who wanted to become a poet becomes the woman 'buried under ice with words burning inside', who becomes the old woman still 'searching for words' - fearful now of memory loss and a failing body. I Want!
For football fans who hungrily feed on gossip and rumour, Christmas comes twice a year - once in August and again in January.
Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, including Orfeo (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark. He is the recipient of a MacArthur grant and the National Book Award, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time NBCC finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Discover this heartrending story of orphans, outcasts and the grip of the past from award-winning novelist Caryl Phillips - inspired by Wuthering Heights. It is the 1960s.
Healthy sleepers are urged to donate their slumber to insomniacs after a crisis of sleeplessness sweeps America. A haunting novella from the author of "Swamplandia!"
Beautifully illustrated, it is the perfect gift. One day in autumn, in the days when all the trains were driven by steam, a railway guard found something abandoned on a train... Mr Ginger Leghorn is used to collecting up umbrellas and other lost property but he's never found an abandoned puppy on his train before.
When Tom Cutter hires Constantine Shaklin as an engineer in his air freight business, he little realises the extraordinary gifts of his new recruit. As Cutter's business grows across Asia, so does Shaklin's fame, until he is widely regarded as a unifying deity.
Emmanuel Carr¿, novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and biographer, is the award-winning internationally renowned author of The Adversary (a Sunday Times bestseller and New York Times Notable Book, translated into twenty-three languages), Lives Other Than My Own, My Life as a Russian Novel, Class Trip, Limonov (winner of the 2011 Prix Renaudot), The Mustache and, most recently, The Kingdom.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in Physics and Mathematics from Rostov University and studied literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957 he formally rehabilitated, and settled down to teaching and writing, in Ryazan and Moscow. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by publication, in the West, of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008.
From the author of the bestselling Darwin: A Life in Poems, Ruth Padel¿s new collection follows in the footsteps of one of the world¿s greatest composers, Beethoven, and investigates what his life and music might mean to us todayTwo hundred and fifty years since Beethoven was born, Ruth Padel goes on a personal search for him, retracing his steps through war-torn Europe of the early nineteenth century, delving into his music, letters, diaries and the conversation books he used when deaf, to uncover the man behind the legend. Her quest, exploring the life of one of the most creative artists who ever lived, turns more personal than she expects, taking her into the sources of her own creativity and musicality. From a deeply musical family herself, Padel¿s parents met through music, and she grew up playing chamber music on viola ¿ Beethoven¿s instrument as a child. Her father¿s grandfather, a concert pianist born on the German¿Danish border, studied in Leipzig with a friend of Beethoven before immigrating to the UK. The poems in this illuminating biography in verse conjure not only Beethoven¿s life and personality, but her own music-making and love both of the European music-making tradition to which her father¿s family belongs, and to the continent itself Europe.
'A book of resistance and love, as urgently necessary now as it was thirty years ago' Olivia Laing First published in 1990, discover this blistering novel about a love triangle in New York during the AIDS crisis.
'Because "God" is infinite, nobody can have the last word'What is this thing, religion, supposedly the cause of bloodshed and warring for centuries? Selected from A Case for God, Fields of Blood and The Lost Art of Scripture VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS.
'It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer' Nicci French, IndependentIt was 1932 when Joseph Mitchell first came across Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated vagrant of Greenwich Village.
Two women a week are killed by a spouse or partner. Every seven minutes a woman is raped. Now is the time for change.‘Fascinating and chilling’ Caroline Criado Perez, bestselling author of Invisible Women Helena Kennedy, one of our most eminent lawyers and defenders of human rights, examines the pressing new evidence that women are being discriminated against when it comes to the law. From the shocking lack of female judges to the scandal of female prisons and the double discrimination experienced by BAME women, Kennedy shows with force and fury that change for women must start at the heart of what makes society just. ‘An unflinching look at women in the justice system… an important book because it challenges acquiescence to everyday sexism and inspires change’ The Times, **Books of the Year**
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Her collections include Dart, which won the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize, Woods etc. (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Hawthornden Prize), Weeds and Wildflowers (Ted Hughes Award), Memorial (Warwick Prize for Writing), and Falling Awake, which won the 2016 Costa Poetry Award and the Griffin Prize for Poetry. She was elected as the Oxford University Professor of Poetry in 2019.
'This is a history of intellectual courage, hard work, occasional inspiration and every conceivable form of human failing.
HELEN PHILLIPS is the author of five books. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Helen has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer¿s Award and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her family. www.helencphillips.com.
'No other voice has borne truer witness to the dark of our times' George SteinerAfter an embarrassing sexual misadventure with a servant girl, sixteen-year-old Karl Rossman is banished to America by his parents.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself - Westerners cannot pronounce her name) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain...Xiaolu Guo was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists
French-Rwandan Ga¿Faye is an author, composer and hip hop artist. He was born in 1982 in Burundi, and has a Rwandan mother and French father. In 1995, after the outbreak of the civil war and the Rwandan genocide, the family moved to France. Ga¿studied finance and worked in London for two years for an investment fund, then he left London to embark on a career of writing and music. He is as influenced by Creole literature as he is by hip hop culture, and released an album in 2010 with the group Milk Coffee & Sugar. In 2013, his first solo album, Pili Pili sur un Croissant au Beurre, appeared. It was recorded between Bujumbura and Paris, and is filled with a plethora of musical influences: rap laced with soul and jazz, semba, Congolese rumba... In 2018 he received the prestigious Victoires de la Musique Award.Small Country is his first novel. It was a huge bestseller in France, winning the Prix Goncourt des Lyc¿s 2016, and is being published in thirty territories worldwide.
Captain Sam Wyndham and his sidekick Surrender-Not Banerjee are back, in this mystery of 1920s Calcutta taking place against a backdrop of Gandhi's non-cooperation movement and the fight for Indian independence.
Serena Katt's grandfather, whom she knew as Opa, was a 'Sunday's Child', one of the lucky ones for whom everything always went right. From then on the games he played were actually military training, designed to produce a 'new German youth ... violent, domineering, unafraid, cruel ... which the world will fear'.
Now Ellis's translation of the entire poem is published here for the first time, and Dante's epic can be experienced afresh and in new glorious life and colour, the physicality and immediacy of Dante's verse rendered in English as never before. A NEW TRANSLATION BY STEVE ELLIS
From the dusky pinks the Queen wore in girlhood all the way through to #NeonAt90, by way of that hat she wore on the announcement of Brexit, and not forgetting her trusty Launer handbag ever at her side, this must-have collection celebrates the iconic fashion statements of our longest reigning and most vibrant monarch.
*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION*'A Great American Novel in the guise of a Great Nonfiction Epic, The Unwinding asks...do we truly like the world we have made for ourselves?' The TimesAmerica is in crisis.
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