Showing 49–60 of 60 resultsSorted by latest
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£9.99
A retired couple, Gerry and Stella Gilmore, fly to Amsterdam for a midwinter break. A holiday to refresh the senses, to see the sights and to generally take stock of what remains of their lives. But amongst the wintry streets and icy canals we see their relationship fracturing beneath the surface. And when memories re-emerge of a troubled time in their native Ireland things begin to fall apart. As their midwinter break comes to an end, we understand how far apart they are – and can only watch as they struggle to save themselves.
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£12.99
His father Brian taught Rory Stewart how to walk, and walked with him on journeys from Iran to Malaysia. Now they have chosen to do their final walk together along ‘the Marches’ – the frontier that divides their two countries, Scotland and England. Brian, a 90-year-old former colonial official and intelligence officer, arrives in Newcastle from Scotland dressed in tartan and carrying a draft of his new book ‘You Know More Chinese Than You Think’. Rory comes from his home in the Lake District, carrying a Punjabi fighting stick which he used when walking across Afghanistan. On their 600-mile, 30-day journey – with Rory on foot, and his father ‘ambushing’ him by car – the pair relive Scottish dances, reflect on Burmese honey-bears, and on the loss of human presence in the British landscape.
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£9.99
Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She’s still in the marital home – a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse – but not with John. Instead, she’s with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, 9-month-old resident of Trudy’s womb.
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In a near-future France, François, a middle-aged academic, is watching his life slowly dwindle to nothing. His sex drive is diminished, his parents are dead and his lifelong obsession – the ideas and works of the 19th-century novelist and pessimist Joris-Karl Huysmans – has led him nowhere. In a late-capitalist society where consumerism has become the new religion, François is spiritually barren, but seeking to fill the vacuum of his existence with something.
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£12.99
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, ‘Sapiens’ challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power … and our future.
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£10.99
As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White’s tortured masterpiece, ‘The Goshawk’, which describes White’s struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. This book is a record of a spiritual journey – an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald’s struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk’s taming and her own untaming.
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£10.99
Karl Ove Knausgaard writes with painful honesty about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father, and his bewilderment and grief on his father’s death.
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£12.99
264 wood and ivory carvings of animals, plants and people, none of them larger than a matchbox; apprentice potter Edmund de Waal was entranced by the collection when he first encountered it in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. When he inherited them, he discovered that they unlocked a story larger than he could have imagined.
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This text tells the story of Marjane Satrapi’s life in Tehran from six to 14, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution & the devastating effects of war with Iraq. Satrapi paints a portrait of daily life in Iran & of the bewildering contradictions between home life & public life.
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£10.99
Toru Watanabe is looking back on the love and passions of his life and trying to make sense of it all. As his first love, Naoko, sinks deeper and deeper into mental despair, he is inexorably pushed to find new meanings and new love to survive.
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Okada is apparently a happy man – his domestic life seems familiar and comfortable, but admittedly he has just quit his job, the cat has disappeared and a strange woman is bothering him with explicit phone calls.
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It’s the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle & Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of agony & torment. The world of Sethe is to turn to violence & death.
