Ten-Minute Book Club
£16.99A book of brilliant literary excerpts providing a new approach to engagement with literature in an inviting, accessible way.
Showing 289–304 of 1492 resultsSorted by latest
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Sinners
£9.99Rome, 1599. Beatrice yearns to escape the clutches of her abusive father and determined to find a way back to Rome, enlists the help of Olimpio, the castle’s keeper. Soon the love that grows between them will transform Beatrice’s fortunes, for better and for worse. History has sold her short. She is no doe-eyed victim of her father’s brutality, nor the cunning murderer who plotted her father’s demise. No, this Beatrice – a woman pregnant by her lover, incarcerated in a remote castle by her father, and brim-full of white-hot rage – is both innocent and guilty, saint and sinner. And she will stand tall in the face of the violence of men, no matter the cost.
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The Eleventh Hour
£9.99Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of ‘Midnight’s Children’, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English college, an undead academic can’t rest until he avenges his former tormentor.
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Passage
£14.99Kathleen lies awake in the operating theatre as she undergoes brain surgery, her husband Robert watching. Soon afterwards, the couple leave for an ill-advised holiday in Egypt, together with the third person in their marriage, Robert’s brother Alan. Each of them is aware that the tumour in Kathleen’s brain may be fatal. For Kathleen, an actor, the trauma of her operation brings a haunting sense of the frailty of her identity. Her descent along the ancient Egyptian tomb corridors – symbols of the passage beyond death – evokes a fevered elation. Ashraf, their Egyptian guide, is compulsively drawn to her, even as he is caught up in the conflicted politics of his country. As each character struggles with the weight of the past and the uncertainty of the future, the mounting tension resolves in delusion – and a shattering betrayal. Colin Thubron shifts among the perspectives of the four protagonists in a narrative of mesmerising scope and po
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Children of Wolves
£18.99At the Mexican border, Diana ditches her car and jumps on a bus. Adam walks out of his Athens hotel with just his passport and credit cards. Marco abandons his life in London, leaving no note. At an idyllic spot on the Turkish Riviera, their comrade Chana waits for them. Also waiting there is Tyler, a private investigator hired by an American billionaire to find his wayward, troubled daughter. Once the five meet, a train of events is set in motion that will play out along this glittering coast, in the backstreets and renovated palaces of Istanbul and all the way to Cairo. A clash of generations, civilisations and ideologies that will test the young friends’ theory that a handful of collaborators can tilt the axis of the world through a single, striking act.
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Sky City
£18.99London in the 90s. After years in a hostel for young homeless women, Jaycee finally has a room of her own high up in Sky City, a housing estate in north London carved out of the glow-in-the-dark sky. But the past is not so easily forgotten and her childhood continues to haunt her. When an old classmate, Sol, reappears, he seems to offer her a lifeline. Sol was her first love, and the only person who looked out for Jaycee when they were kids. Can she trust him now? Her best friend from the hostel is Ella-G, who has left London for the glamorous world of the New York music scene. Both Jaycee and Ella-G are daughters in search of fathers. When Jaycee finds a rare record that seems to lead to Ella-G’s father, the two women go searching for answers in Atlantic City. What Jaycee encounters there brings her to the edges of her identity. Back in London, she finally begins to confront the traumas of her own past.
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Boy A
£10.99His new name is Jack. To his new friends, he is a good guy with occasional flashes of unexpected violence. To his new girlfriend, he is strangely inexperienced and unreachable. To his case worker, he’s a victim of the system and of media-driven hysteria. And to himself, Jack is on permanent trial: most of his life has been spent in juvenile institutions, guilty of a monstrous childhood crime. Searing and heartfelt, ‘Boy A’ is a devastating exploration of guilt, retribution and the blurred lines between fact and fabrication.
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Children of the Wild
£14.99Ewer’s Rock, Virginia, 1917. Roy Young is restless, determined to leave this rural valley and make his mark on the twentieth century. Samantha Hatton, the minister’s daughter, knows the town expects her and Roy to marry, but she hungers for more. The arrival of Ennis Duke – a mysterious wild boy tending to a lost herd of cattle up the mountain – will change everything. Within a year, the lives of these three young people will be dramatically transformed. In the crucible of conflict, Roy and Ennis forge a fierce bond. Meanwhile, back in Virginia, Samantha’s love and courage endure unthinkable sacrifice in a corner of the world fractured by violence.
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Salutation Road
£9.99A speculative literary debut for fans of Mohsin Hamid and Nadifa Mohamed. Twenty-three-year-old South Londoner Sirad Ali’s life is changed for ever when she finds herself transported inexplicably to an alternate reality in present-day Mogadishu during her morning commute . . .
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The Millionaire Waltz
£22.00London in the 1920s: a young woman treads the path between danger and desire. Against a backdrop of thuggish blackmail, constricting high society and a London still fragile from the war, Edie Greenlaw is trying to decide what she wants from the world. The closer the prospect of marriage with her handsome war hero fiancé becomes, the less fulfilling it seems. Defying caution she goes to the aid of a friend and entangles herself in a dangerous demi-monde of sexual extortion and violence.
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Delirious
£20.00It’s time. Mary, an ex cop, and her husband Pete, a former librarian, have decided to move into a retirement village. Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but the past, it seems, has other ideas. A detective calls with new information about the case of their son, Will, who died in an accident 40 years earlier. Mary finds herself returning to the last months of her sister’s shortened life. And Pete is haunted by memories of his late mother, who developed delirium and never recovered. An unforgettable novel of rare power and grace, this story poses the questions we all eventually face, if we’re lucky – or unlucky – enough. How do we care for others? How do we face each new phase of life? And how do we ever cope?
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Tenderness
£16.99Just a few months after leaving the mysterious and dangerous cult Synanon, Shay is finally marrying her fiancé Andrew. Although their relationship has been rocky since Shay got involved with Synanon, Andrew, wealthy and loyal, has stuck by her. As the wedding party arrives on a small island off the coast of Virginia, where Andrew’s family has vacationed for generations, rumours are swirling about the couple. Shay’s former college flame, Joel, has brought his new girlfriend, but it’s clear he’s still not over Shay. Shay’s brother, William, is deeply uncomfortable with the wealth Shay is marrying into and is hiding a tragic secret from his family. When a strange woman is spotted around the island, and a series of near-disasters begin to escalate, it becomes clear that Shay has not fully cut her ties to Synanon.
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Outside
£16.99A warm yet tragic exploration of a fragile mind from the bestselling author of If I Can’t Have You
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Triage
£22.00Two friends meet in an art gallery after decades of silence. The idealism that once bound them together fissured and fractured under the weight of collective and personal griefs. Through their memories of youthful certainty, the antagonism of their conversation and the embers of their enduring kinship, they navigate the wreckage of our world today – the hope, the anger and the exhaustion. In her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet, Claudia Rankine blends narrative, memory and criticism in a poignant exploration of the beautiful but complicated friendships that we rely on to unsettle us, to make us better – exposing the fiction in the facts of our lives and demanding action in our time of relentless loss.
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The Lunatics
£10.99Layla Fitzpatrick lives a simple life, for a werewolf. And that’s just how she likes it. Her childhood was less than ideal. She’d like to spend her adult years flying under the radar of more powerful preternatural creatures. Because she knows from experience what happens when they notice you. Everything changes one early summer night when she attends a ritual bonding ceremony meant to join two werewolves together for life. Midway through, the spell becomes corrupted and she finds herself unexpectedly mated to the stuffiest shifter she’s ever laid eyes on. Michael Kolbeck is more man than wolf. He spends his days in a skyscraper, building his family’s empire. At night, he prowls the streets of Boston, a city where shifters, witches, and vampires walk a delicate tightrope of ceasefire masquerading as peace. Little do they know that Layla’s arrival will act as the spark that ignites the fire, and that thin veneer of peace is about to vanis
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Embrace
£9.99The final book in the Sunday Times bestselling Off the Ice series, from TikTok smash hit author Bal Khabra.