Showing 1–12 of 16 resultsSorted by latest
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£12.99
In the 1990s, Gaia’s family moves from the neglected peripheries of Rome to an idyllic lakeside town in search of a new life that will lift them out of poverty. Each of them bears their own scars: Gaia’s mother is fiercely determined to secure a better future for her children at any cost; her father, a once proud man, now suffers in bitter silence after a devastating accident; her anarchist older brother rebels against the political apathy he sees at home; and her young twin brothers wordlessly bear witness to a family in decay. When Gaia meets two local girls, Agata and Carlotta, the trio builds a fragile friendship. Gaia’s encounters with callous boys and contemptuous teachers convince her that she might always be an outsider – excluded from a privileged life and beyond the possibility of happiness.
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£12.99
Toru Sakanishi is a recent university graduate who joins a small, prestigious architecture firm founded by Shunsuke Murai, a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. A sensitive and observant narrator, Sakanishi is captivated by the artistic quality and careful consideration the Murai Office shows to each of its designs. As the sweltering summer months approach, the team migrates from Tokyo to Kita-Asama, a mountain village and artists’ colony whose heyday has passed. There, they set out to design the National Library of Modern Literature, competing against a rival firm that snaps up one government project after the next. Over the course of this summer, Sakanishi encounters four remarkable women who change the course of his life.
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£12.99
Fourteen-year-old Billie rarely crosses the boundaries of her high-rise housing estate. By the end of the month their money just about stretches to pasta with ketchup, but her mother, Marika, lights up Billie’s world with her imagination and big heart. One day they receive an unwelcome visit from her Hungarian grandmother, and Billie loses much more than the colourful everyday life she shared with her mother. No longer able to ask Marika questions, Billie sets off alone in their old Nissan – determined to meet the father she never knew and find out why she keeps dreaming about the sea, even though she’s never been there. Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2023, Paradise Garden is a spellbinding journey and a deeply affecting story of class, resilience and belonging.
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Hope Gleason has many names. The child of a shepherd raised in the remote moors of Northern England, Hope has always understood the satanic brutality of the land. But when an ear-splitting, unknowable sound destroys the nearby village, she must embark on a dangerous journey to survive through the ravaged land – alone, and with a lad, newly orphaned. As they trek the wilds together to find her husband, her violent past chases her at every turn and long-buried memories begin to resurface. A pitch-black, magnetic, and unforgettable meditation on the nature of love, evil, and the power of redemption, ‘Land of Hope’ mixes history and the myths of the English moors to tell a compelling modern English fable of serial killers at the end of the world.
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£12.99
Jeanne learns from an early age to dodge her father’s abuse, but her mother and sister resign themselves to his brutality. One day when she is eight he attacks her viciously, angered by her self-assurance. Convinced that the village doctor will put an end to their nightmare, she is shocked by his silence. From then on, Jeanne’s hatred of her father and her disgust at the doctor’s cowardice drive her on. At boarding school she experiences five years of respite, but is then triggered by an unbearable replica of the violence that started it all. Moving to Lausanne, unable to come to terms with her past and to engage fully with life, she nevertheless finds solace in the arms of lovers and in the waters of Lake Geneva, while further tragedy fuels her rage.
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£10.99
Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into.
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£9.99
Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of…
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In the summer of 2006, a chance encounter on the London Underground finds eighteen-year-old Ali tagging along with a school friend and a mysterious girl to a club. The girl is Cece, and she seems to be everything Ali is not. For one night he is transfixed and transformed into someone who might belong. All he knows is he will remember it forever. In 2064, Ali takes his final flight out of the UK to Morocco, in a world upturned by climate collapse. He has a wife and a daughter, reasons to return. Yet Ali is willing to abandon everything to find Cece again, finally to recapture that long summer night when he was young, and to understand how the actions taken and not taken – have changed all their lives. Luminous and full of longing, Constance is a novel of teenage fragility, male blindness and everyday complicity.
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£11.99
Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. As time passes and those around her seem to move on, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete. Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of a river in rainfall, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction.
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£10.99
Fifteen-year-old Noemi has no choice but to leave school and work in the house of the wealthy De Grandbourg family, just across the road from the Mauritian slums where she grew up. She encounters a world that is starkly different from her own yet one which would have been all too familiar to her ancestors. Bewitched by a pair of green eyes and haunted by echoes, her life begins to mirror those of girls who have gone before her. In Riambel, Priya Hein invites us to protest, to rail against longstanding structures of class and ethnicity. She shows us a world of natural enchantment contrasted with violence and the abuse of power, a flawed paradise undergoing slow but unstoppable change. This seemingly simple tale of servitude, seduction and abandonment blisters with a fierce sense of injustice.
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Here is a powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged, politicised, and intractably polar spaces – between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.
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£11.99
Arrival is an exploration of the ripple effects of domestic abuse. The story follows a young woman fleeing her home country and trying to rebuild her life, after she has suffered domestic violence at the hands of an alcoholic father. Prompted by her therapist, the unnamed protagonist starts processing the abuse experienced in her childhood while also pondering what it means to be a mother when consumed by trauma. The novel bends form to accommodate the narrator’s scattered mind and her attempt to assemble a version of herself through fragments and stitches of memories, borrowed conversations and minutiae that linger and haunt. Infused with love and determination and interwoven with folk tales and rituals, ‘Arrival’ depicts the ways in which we are resilient, capable of carving our own paths and reimagining our lives.
