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From one of the most significant thinkers of our day, ‘The Beginning Comes After the End’ is an optimistic call to arms for our turbulent times, which maps the extraordinary revolution in politics, thinking and human rights that we are living through.
To the untrained eye, the rabbi is far from desirable. He is lofty and unkempt, he is ageing and his congregation is ever diminishing. But to one man, he is the object of obsession. Our narrator adores the rabbi and worships the universe between his legs. But so too does he bristle at being relegated to the peripheries of the rabbi’s life. When they’re apart, he manically contemplates every element of the rabbi’s being: his absent husband; his first (and only) wife and child, both now deceased; his unstable, yet alluring, adopted son. Until, in a bid to help sustain their relationship, our narrator embarks on an increasingly urgent quest to better understand his mercurial lover – one which threatens to upturn the lives of both men.
In our near-future world, children are solely conceived by artificial insemination. Even sex between married couples is viewed as taboo. Amane’s family is irregular. Her parents copulated to create her and hope that she too will find love and have a child with the person she marries. But Amane falls in line with society’s way of thinking and wants a regular ‘clean’ marriage. Then she hears of a place that is the subject of a social experiment. Everyone in Paradise-Eden will act as one big family. Could this be the perfect third way?
The discovery of minerals beneath our feet has transformed our species. Ochre first prompted humans to express themselves in art; tin and copper helped instigate the Bronze Age and later the Industrial Revolution; silver kick-started the engines of global trade. Each of these substances generated a leap forward in technology, each one opened the imagination a little further – and each one brought with it a cache of unexpected dangers. ‘Under A Metal Sky’ begins and ends in Philip Marsden’s homeland of Cornwall, one of the world’s great geological hotspots. Rich with revelations, this book traces the dazzling achievements and dark consequences of our ability to extract what we want from the earth, and presents a fascinating new perspective on European history and on our troubled relationship with the natural world.
She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur. He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn’t long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.
When X – an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter – dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals and destruction. All the while she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.
Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, but Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike.
Keiko has never really fitted in. At school and university people find her odd and her family worries she’ll never be normal. To appease them, Keiko takes a job at a newly opened convenience store. Here, she finds peace and purpose in the simple, daily tasks and routine interactions. She is, she comes to understand, happiest as a convienience store worker. But in Keiko’s social circlel it just won’t do for an unmarried woman to spend all her time stacking shelves and re-ordering green tea.