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Can you leave your parents behind? Can you slam the door, walk down the stairs, and decide never to see them again? Can you ever escape the grip of your origins? A son asks himself these questions as he celebrates a bittersweet anniversary: it is a decade since he saw his parents. Now he finally feels able to tell their story. This is his lucid portrait of a family devastated by a father’s violence and the woman who silently accepts him; of an airless relationship, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, a visiting classmate or a friend who is soon rejected. And it is the story of how a son is possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free: to be himself, to live his own life, to open up to others without fear of reprisals.
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£9.99
Fair, elegant, and ambitious, Clare is married to a white man unaware of her African American heritage and has severed all ties to her past. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, but refuses to acknowledge the racism that continues to constrict her family’s happiness. A chance encounter forces both women to confront the lies they have told others – and the secret fears they have buried within themselves.
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Camille loves Alain, but Alain loves his cat, whom he has had from childhood, more than he could love any woman.
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£9.99
Born in the body of a 70-year-old man, Benjamin Button is cursed to live life in reverse. As he ages backwards, he embraces life, finds love and seeks out adventure, all while getting younger and younger. But time, however skewered, waits for no man, and even youth waits to rob Benjamin Button of the one rare thing we all share – life.
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£9.99
1930s Berlin is a realm of glamour and sleaze, poverty and excess. There, a lonely young Brit working on a novel is charmed by an English runaway and want-to-be star, the delightfully decadent Sally Bowles. The intimate, fleeting connection they form will stay with him for all his days.
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£9.99
Recently widowed and dangerously charming, Lady Susan Vernon arrives among her relatives determined to secure her own advantage. Through a flurry of letters, alliances shift, affections are tested, and reputations quietly unravel. ‘Lady Susan’ is Jane Austen’s sharp, mischievous portrait of a woman who refuses to behave. Bold, manipulative and irresistibly alive, it reveals Austen at her most daring – and her most amused.
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In a single afternoon’s walk, Virginia Woolf captures the infinite life of a garden…A couple pause among the flowerbeds, their thoughts drifting apart. A woman’s mind fixes on a small, troubling mark on the wall. A chance meeting becomes an imagined life, rich with longing and regret. In six luminous, experimental stories, Virginia Woolf remakes the short story as a space of transcendence. Moving fluidly between inner lives and outward scenes, Kew Gardens captures moments of consciousness as they shimmer, fracture and pass, revealing the beauty and strangeness of everyday existence.Includes the stories: Kew Gardens, The Mark on the Wall, An Unwritten Novel, Monday or Tuesday, The String Quartet and Blue & GreenBRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.
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A young couple build their lives around the objects they long to own. From furniture to clothes to carefully imagined interiors, their desires shape their sense of who they are – and who they might become. Yet satisfaction always seems just out of reach. Precise and quietly ironic, the story explores the promises of material life – and the emptiness that can follow.
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£9.99
Herman Melville’s enduringly comic and affecting tale of a man who takes quiet quitting to extreme limits. A new office clerk in a Wall Street lawyer’s office is the cause for quiet dismay when he refuses to do his job. But how to deal with Bartleby, The Scrivener, especially when he refuses to leave the office altogether.
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£9.99
From one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century, these delicate stories illuminate the most intimate matters of the human heart. Since childhood, Ruliang has had the peculiar habit of sketching a certain profile in the margins of his books. He has mapped out this same face, over and over again, without knowing why – until he meets Cythnia. As brief and evocative as sketches themselves, these five stories of lost loves, nostalgia and migration reveal a master of feeling at the peak of her powers.
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The poetry of Dylan Thomas has long been heralded as amongst the greatest of the Modern period, and along with his play, ‘Under Milk Wood’, his books are amongst the best-loved works in the literary canon. First published in 1940, at the height of his fame, this is a collection of short autobiographical stories that paint fascinating and humorous portraits of life in rural Wales, and pre-empt characters and traits that echo throughout his later work. Now rightly considered one of the most important volumes in his oeuvre, this book is the key to unlocking the great poet’s work.
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£9.99
Masks is Enchi’s elegant, seductive story of sexual deception, revenge, and the haunting legacy of the past.Ibuki loves widow Yasuko, who is young, charming and sparkling with intelligence. His friend, Mikame, desires her too but that is not the difficulty. What troubles Ibuki is the curious bond that has grown between Yasuko and her mother-in-law, a beautiful, cultivated yet jealous woman, who is manipulating the relationship between Yasuko and the two men who love her.