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Thought-provoking and powerfully ambivalent, this book offers an extraordinary meditation on the many complex afterlives of the Holocaust. It is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement. It asks what it means to be a Jew in the long wake of the 20th century, and how the past lives on in the present.
One morning in December, Kyungha is called to her friend Inseon’s hospital bedside. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation following a wood-chopping accident, Inseon is bedridden and begs Kyungha to take the first plane to her home on Jeju Island to feed her pet bird, who will quickly die unless it receives food. Unfortunately, as Kyungha arrives a snowstorm hits. Lost in a world of snow, she begins to wonder if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. But she doesn’t yet suspect the darkness which awaits her at her friend’s house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive, documenting the terrible massacre seventy years before that saw 30,000 Jeju civilians murdered.
It is late September in 2001 and the walls of New York are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. Her mother died long ago and now, orphaned on the cusp of adulthood, Cora is adrift and alone. Soon, a letter will arrive with the offer of a new life: far out on the ragged edge of Ireland, in the town where her parents were young, an estranged aunt can provide a home and fulfil a long-forgotten promise. There the story of her family is hidden, and in her presence will begin to unspool.
1926. On the towering cliffs of Yorkshire, men are lowered on ropes to steal the eggs of the sea birds who nest there. The most beautiful are sold for large sums. But when small and hungry Celie Sheppard finds an ‘impossible’ red egg, it will forever alter the course of her life – and the lives of others. One hundred years later in a remote cottage in Wales, Patrick Fort discovers his friend, Nick, and his mother tied up and robbed. The only thing missing: a carved case containing an incredible scarlet egg. Doggedly attempting to retrieve it, Patrick and Nick discover the cruel world of egg trafficking, and soon find themselves on the trail of a priceless collection of eggs lost to history. Until now.
One of the most inspiring and counter-intuitive thinkers of our age, the author of ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’, transforms the way we think about the world with his reflections on science, history, and humanity. In this collection of writings, the logbook of an intelligence always on the move, Carlo Rovelli follows his curiosity and invites us on a voyage through science, history, philosophy, and politics.
Christmas, 1983. In the aftermath of yet another furious argument, seven-year-old Andrev’s mother lets him in on a secret: his father is, in fact, not his father. And so begins a new kind of childhood, in which fathers come and go, arriving in red Volvos and sweeping his mother off her feet. Fathers can be magicians or murderers, artists or canoe enthusiasts, and, like growing pains, or the weather, they appear uninvited and leave without warning. Fathers are drawn to his mother like moths to a flame – but even she can’t control how they behave.
1820. Mary Dorothea Knatchbull is living under the sole charge of her widowed father, Sir Edward – a man of strict principles and high Christian values. But when her father marries Miss Fanny Knight of Godmersham Park, Mary’s life is suddenly changed. Her new stepmother comes from a large, happy and sociable family and Fanny’s sisters become Mary’s first friends. Her aunt, Miss Cassandra Austen of Chawton, is especially kind. Her brothers are not only amusing, but handsome and charming. And as Mary Dorothea starts to bloom into a beautiful young woman, she forms an especial bond with one Mr Knight in particular. Soon, they are deeply in love and determined to marry. They expect no opposition. After all, each is from a good family and has known the other for some years. It promises to be the most perfect match. Who would want to stand in their way?
In this compulsive collection of twelve witty stories, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels, as she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends. In ‘The Patron Saints of Middle Age,’ a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In ‘A for Alone,’ a married artist embarks on a project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in ‘Lost but Not Forgotten,’ Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel ‘Prep’ a new window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an awkward school reunion. Witty, confronting and full of tenderness, Sittenfeld peels back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.
The life-affirming memoir of Lindsey Burrow, the working mother of three young children who has inspired the nation through her selfless commitment to husband Rob Burrow (CBE), the rugby league legend she cared for throughout his heroic battle with motor neurone disease (MND) until his death in June 2024.
Eve is a successful novelist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. Her husband, never far from her side, explains that she has had an operation to remove the large, malignant tumour growing in her brain. As Eve learns to walk, talk, and write again – and as she wrestles with her diagnosis, and how and when to explain it to her beloved children – she begins to recall what’s most important to her: long walks with her husband’s hand clasped firmly around her own, family game nights and always buying that dress when she sees it. Recounted in brief anecdotes, each one is an attempt to answer the type of impossible questions recognizable to anyone navigating the labyrinth of grief.
The power dynamics of the office are never more obvious than when it comes to food: mandatory lunches with the boss, the colleague who tries to curry favour with home-baked goods, discovering the discarded remnants of someone else’s late-night binge. In their Saitama office, Ashikawa is the kind of woman Nitani knows he will likely marry: sweet, obliging, and determined to wean him off his addiction to instant noodles. But he finds himself increasingly unable to respect her – or the sugary treats she shares around the workplace, winning their colleagues’ affection with baking rather than hard work. Oshio is bolder and uninhibited – she is Nitani’s drinking buddy. In the oppressive office atmosphere, the pair grows closer, both outsiders struggling with the rigid status quo.
The epic adventure story of humanity’s obsession with the North Pole, from Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge who travelled there in 1990. ‘The North Pole’ is an adventure story, a book about enacting hidden human dreams, about difficult fathers and their difficult sons, and a psychological record of what it means to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of adversity. It is for anyone who’s gazed out at the horizon – and wondered what happens if you just keep walking.
‘Source Code’ describes with unprecedented candour Bill Gates’ life from his childhood in Seattle to dropping out of Harvard aged 20 in 1975. Shortly afterwards he wrote, with Paul Allen, the programme which became the foundation of Microsoft and eventually for the entire software industry, changing the way the world works and lives. Gates writes about the centrality of family to his life – his encouraging grandmother and ambitious parents, about struggles to fit in, his rebelliousness, and the impact on him of the death of his closest friend. We see his extraordinary mind developing as a teenager, his excitement about the rapidly emerging technology of computing, and the earliest signs of his phenomenal business acumen. ‘Source Code’ is a warm, wise and revealing self-portrait of one of the most influential people of our age.
How could the Nazis have committed the crimes they did? Why did commandants of concentration and death camps willingly – often enthusiastically – oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews? In this book, Laurence Rees combines history and the latest research in psychology to help answer some of the most perplexing questions surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust. Ultimately, he delves into the darkness to explain how and why these people were capable of committing the worst crime in the history of the world. Rees traces the rise and eventual fall of the Nazis through the lens of ‘twelve warnings’ – whilst also highlighting signs to look out for in present day leaders who, for example, take control of the media, propound conspiracy theories, and talk about ‘them’ against ‘us’.
There is a heatwave across Europe, and Goose and his three sisters gather at the family’s house by Lake Orta in Piedmont, Italy. Their father, a famous artist, recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his masterpiece. Now he is dead. And there is no sign of his new wife and or his final painting. Though the siblings have always been close, the things they learn that summer – about themselves, their father and their new stepmother – will drive them apart before they can come to any kind of understanding of what their father’s legacy truly is.
At the Inns of Court, the intellectual, literary, and social heart of early 17th century London, many pivotal friendships were forged: few closer than that of Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward (Ned) Hyde. Both young men were lively characters, industrious, well-connected, principled and optimistic. They dreamed of reforming the government of Charles I, a young court with age-old problems, by restoring the traditional harmony of Crown and Parliament. This is the story of how their hopes climbed, overreached, and fell into an abyss of relentless civil war.
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