Showing 1–12 of 116 resultsSorted by latest
Alexander’s beauty, strength and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. Killing his first man in battle at the age of 12, he became regent at sixteen and commander of Macedon’s cavalry at 18.
In this novel, Mary Renault traces the last years of Alexander’s life through the eyes of his lover, Bagoas. Bagoas was gelded as a child and was sold as a courtesan to King Darius of Persia before Alexander’s army conquered Persia. Initially he was taken on as an attendant to Alexander’s household.
Izumi needs to get a job. Haruka needs to stop talking about how she once had cancer. Kato needs to get through a shift at the convenience store without being harassed. Mito needs to break up with her boyfriend – or marry him. Sumie just needs somewhere to live. In this classic Japanese bestseller, published in English 25 years after it took Japan by storm, the lives of five ordinary women are depicted with irresistible humour and searing emotional insight.
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men – not for love, but to fund her work – entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.
When Emily catches sight of Gennifer Hall at a party, she is transported back to the moment they fell in love as teenagers. Their connection was electric, and they thought it was forever. Twenty years later, Gen is an Olympic runner, the career she strived for, while Emily is living a picture-perfect life: Manhattan townhouse, two young children and a wealthy husband, Jack. But Jack’s controlling behaviour is spiralling, and Emily has lost sight of who she once was. Now, despite Emily’s fracturing marriage and the pressures of Gen’s career, they are drawn back together by a magnetic attraction. After years of heartbreak, missed chances and misunderstandings, will they finally get a second chance at first love?
A woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter’s face. A mysterious virus wipes out all the boys on one street. A young architect turns up to measure a house, only to find that her drawings make no sense, and the house seems to resist her. The Lagos of these twelve sinister and beguiling stories is multi-faceted, peopled by Pentecostal Christians and exasperated atheists; by tight-knit extended families and struggling single fathers. Here are characters cursed by guilt, bound by the ties of ancestors and community; or enchanted by the allure of mysticism and would-be prophets.
Drawing from a fascinating range of sources, from Richard Scarry to Siri Hustvedt, from historians to trade unionists, philosophers and crucially, to hours of original research through workshops, Hilary Cottam writes of the history of work and new ways of looking at work. She writes of work as a cultural revolution which will alter the meaning and the place of work in all our lives. Crucially, she is an optimist who believes we can work better and therefore live better too.
The lark rose in the brilliant air, higher, higher on its spun-glass spiral of song, knowing nothing of peace or war, accepting joyously the bounty of another day. A hot summer’s day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria must find their way in an altered world. Their rambling garden refuses to be tamed, the house seems perceptibly to crumble. Hour by hour, as the glorious weather holds, it seems a perfectly ordinary day. And yet, as evening falls, something will have changed forever.
Her mother’s dying request takes Mary Yellan on a sad journey across the bleak moorland of Cornwall to reach Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. With the coachman’s warning echoing in her memory, Mary arrives to find Patience a changed woman, cowering from her overbearing husband, Joss Merlyn.
On a trip to the South of France, the shy heroine of ‘Rebecca’ falls in love with Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower. Although his proposal comes as a surprise, she happily agrees to marry him. But as they arrive at her husband’s Cornish estate, Manderley, a change comes over Maxim, and the young bride is filled with dread. Friendless in the isolated mansion, she realises that she barely knows him. In every corner of every room is the phantom of his beautiful first wife, Rebecca, and the new Mrs de Winter walks in her shadow.
High in the Himalayas, the mountaintop palace shines like a jewel. Built for the General’s harem, laughter and music once floated out over the gorge. Now it sits abandoned, windswept and haunting. The palace is bestowed to the Sisters of Mary, and what was once known as ‘the House of Women’ becomes the Convent of St Faith. Close to the heavens, the nuns feel inspired, working fervently to establish their school and hospital. But as the isolation and emptiness of the mountain become increasingly unsettling, passions long repressed emerge with tragic consequences.
They used to say I had a chip on my shoulder. Whatever that means. I couldn’t ever work that out but I know I always felt that I wasn’t as good as other people. I was angry. ‘Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile’ tells the story of the tragically short life of playwright Andrea Dunbar. Interweaving fact and fiction, letters and scripts, newspaper stories and memory, Adelle Stripe reveals how a shy teenage girl defied the circumstances into which she was born, and the prejudice she met, to become one of her generation’s greatest dramatists.
Notifications