Showing 1–12 of 22 resultsSorted by latest
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£10.99
At nine, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion’s legendary L.A. party for the publication of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In his early 20s, he shared an apartment in Manhattan’s Hotel Des Artistes with his best friend and soulmate Carrie Fisher, while she was filming some sci-fi movie called Star Wars and he was a struggling actor working as a popcorn seller at Radio City Music Hall. A few years later, he produced and starred in the now-iconic film After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. But, ‘The Friday Afternoon Club’ is no celebrity memoir. It is, down to its bones, a family story that brilliantly embraces the poignant absurdities and best and worst efforts of its loveable, infuriating, funny and moving characters.
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£10.99
No matter where we live, ‘we are all ocean people’, Helen Scales observes in her bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how prehistoric ocean ecology holds lessons for the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes readers into the realms of animals that epitomize current increasingly challenging conditions, from emperor penguins to sharks and orcas. Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain. Increasing numbers of no-fish zones around the world are restoring once-diminishing populations. Astonishing giant kelp and sea grass forests, rivaling those on land, are being regenerated and expanded, while efforts to reengineer coral reefs for a warmer world are growing.
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£12.99
‘Dream Work’, a collection of 45 poems, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness – so steadfast and radiant in ‘American Primitive’ – continues in ‘Dream Work’. Additionally, she has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labours of the spirit – to accepting the truth about one’s personal world, and to valuing the triumphs while transcending the failures of human relationships.
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£10.99
‘My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.’ Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new democracy for the Philippines. Three decades later, a nation that once taught the world the meaning of nonviolent resistance discovers the fragility of its democratic principles under the regime of populist autocrat Rodrigo Duterte. ‘Some People Need Killing’ is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ ongoing drug war and Duterte’s assault on the country’s fledgling democracy.
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£10.99
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, ‘The Covenant of Water’ follows a family in southern India that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning – and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century a twelve-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this poignant beginning, the young girl and future matriarch – known as Big Ammachi – will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life, full of the joys and trials of love and the struggles of hardship.
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£8.99
Tessa is a successful writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more – but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship. While Tessa’s husband Milton enjoys Charlie’s company, Charlie’s wife Wah is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah’s traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to Tessa’s martini-fueled declaration that Wah is ‘an insult to womankind’.
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£20.00
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, ‘The Covenant of Water’ follows a family in southern India that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning – and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century a twelve-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this poignant beginning, the young girl and future matriarch – known as Big Ammachi – will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life, full of the joys and trials of love and the struggles of hardship.
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£9.99
Vauhini Vara’s lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel begins in India in the 1950s, following a young man born into a Dalit family of coconut farmers in a remote village in Andhra Pradesh. King Rao, as he comes to be known, later moves to the US, where he studies in Seattle, meeting the love of his life and his business partner, the smart and self-assured Margie. King Rao ultimately rises up through Silicon Valley to become the most famous tech CEO in the world and the leader of a powerful, corporate-owned global government. Yet he ultimately ends up living on a remote island off the coast of Washington state, an exile from the world which he has helped build.
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£12.99
Tessa is a successful writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more – but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship. While Tessa’s husband Milton enjoys Charlie’s company, Charlie’s wife Wah is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah’s traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to Tessa’s martini-fueled declaration that Wah is ‘an insult to womankind’.
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£16.99
As a young woman growing up in a small, religious community, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she discovered philosophy and fell in love with its rationality, its abstractions, its beauty. What Penaluna didn’t realize was that philosophy – at least the canon that’s taught in Western universities, as well as the culture that surrounds it – would slowly grind her down through its devaluation of women and their minds. ‘How to Think Like a Woman’ is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.
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£9.99
Having moved his family from England to Detroit and opened a car dealership, ex-rally driver Spencer Burnham’s life was derailed by the death of his beloved wife. Now disconnected from his young daughter and losing control of the cocktail of drugs and alcohol that gets him through the day, he only just keeps Child Protective Services at bay while his business teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. Then he has a seemingly chance encounter with a charismatic but lethal gangster, Dominic McGrath. Feeling the squeeze from informants, the rise of tech surveillance and a hotshot detective who’s made busting him a personal crusade, McGrath’s been planning a last heist that would allow a comfortable retirement, provided he can find a very special type of driver – one who’s capable, trustworthy – and naïve.
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£16.99
From one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed ‘the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation’ by the Guardian, Will Self’s ‘Why Read’ is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature. Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell and Conrad. He writes movingly on W.G. Sebald’s childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs’s Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask readers how, what and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world.
