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Chess players
Available on backorder (5-7 days)
Subtotal: £29.95
We recently launched our new website and are facing a few teething issues. If you see any problems please contact us.
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For readers of David Nicholls, Ann Patchett, and Colm Tóibìn, Almost Life is a love story that begins when Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-C?ur in 1978. Theirs is a story that will last a lifetime – even if their lives take them in very different directions.
Rafaela Acuña y Daubón remembers everything that matters: her beautiful childhood in San Juan, her marriage to Peter, uprooting their children, Ruth & Benny, to the American Midwest, & losing all sense of her place in the world. So she tells no one when her memory begins to slip. Her daughter, in New York with a family of her own, wishes she could forget her muddy feelings about where she comes from – the same feelings which motivated her 22-year-old daughter Daisy to reconnect with their past. Daisy, who has momentarily forgotten everything, hears the word critical in a hospital room in San Juan & remembers, all at once, the car that hurtled towards her, the terrible storm, & something else. What was it? Now Ruth & Rafaela must return to the city where it all began, to gather by Daisy’s bedside & confront the twists of fate that have caused a growing rift in their family & led them to this moment.
For Constance ‘Connie’ Costa, life is just beginning. She dreams of leaving behind her dull, dreary life in ’70s East London, shaking off her deeply embarrassing Greek-Cypriot community of interfering aunties and pretend ‘cousins’, and running away with her best mate Vas (fellow misfit; NHS specs; soul of a poet). She is determined to take her rightful place alongside her hero, David Bowie, onstage at Wembley Stadium. Only one thing stands in her way: her father, The Fat Murderer. No longer content with being an absolute imbecile and general abomination of nature, he has dialled up his campaign to ruin Connie’s life ever since the death of her mother. If she ever wants to claim the destiny that is rightfully hers, Connie has only one option left: to kill him.
The crumbling Gothic mansion of Thornwalk, long-term home of the Gilbert family, is being handed over to a chain of luxury ‘historic’ hotels. Millions will be spent in its restoration. But for every ‘improvement’, what will be lost? What value can there possibly be in a threadbare carpet, a tarnished spoon and a thousand empty jam jars? Before the hotel people arrive, with their clipboards and their skips and their bottles of bleach, Maximus, loyal guardian of the Gilberts’ legacy, invites us on a final tour of the once-stately home, where each room holds a secret. From the bolt on the blue room door to the tiny dents in the bars at the nursery window. These are the keys that will unlock the lives of the five fatherless Gilbert children.
Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered. Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.
Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the family firm to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him doubting the wisdom of past decisions. Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. But who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate?
It’s the mid-1960s and Lillian Wells is a clever teenager with a daring pixie cut, tangerine mini-dress and new boyfriend, Jim, who works at the brewery. Even better, he lives across the road, so she’s never far from her bee-hived, high-heeled single mother Winnie, who is prone to attacks of the nerves. But Lillian harbours secret dreams of going to art school in London. When she gets in, how will she tell her mother – and Jim – that she’s leaving Abingdon – and them? Forty years later, Lillian’s own daughter Rachel is heading off to university, but Lillian is not sure either of them are ready. She sees herself and Winnie in Rachel, who is ambitious and intelligent, but also prone to nervous habits. As Lillian tries to bite her tongue about Rachel’s symptoms, she is reminded of what everyone in Abingdon used to say: It’s a short road to Longbrook – the local institution for the mentally ill.
A newborn baby is the sole survivor of a terrifying plane crash. She is raised in wealthy isolation by an overprotective father. She knows nothing of the rumours about a beautiful young woman, hidden from the world. When a suitor visits, he understands far more than he should. Forced to run for his life, he escapes aboard The Porpoise, an assassin on his tail. So begins a wild adventure of a novel, damp with salt spray, blood and tears. A novel that leaps from the modern era to ancient times; a novel that soars, and sails, and burns long and bright; a novel that almost drowns in grief yet swims ashore; in which pirates rampage, a princess wins a wrestler’s hand, and ghost women with lampreys’ teeth drag a man to hell – and in which the members of a shattered family, adrift in a violent world, journey towards a place called home.
Jeanette Winterson’s version of Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’ vibrates with echoes of the original but tells a contemporary story of betrayal, paranoia, redemption and hope. Time itself is a player in this game of high stakes that will either end in tragedy or forgiveness, showing us that, however far we have been separated, whatever is lost shall be found.
It is late September in 2001 and the walls of New York are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. Her mother died long ago and now, orphaned on the cusp of adulthood, Cora is adrift and alone. Soon, a letter will arrive with the offer of a new life: far out on the ragged edge of Ireland, in the town where her parents were young, an estranged aunt can provide a home and fulfil a long-forgotten promise. There the story of her family is hidden, and in her presence will begin to unspool.
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?
When she first meets Adam, Coralie is new to London and feeling adrift. But Adam is clever, witty, and (he insists) a quarter of an inch taller than the average British male. His charming four-year-old daughter, Zora, only adds to his appeal. But ten years on, something important is missing from the life Coralie and Adam have built. Or maybe, having gained everything she dreamed of, Coralie has lost something she once had: herself.
Chess players
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Subtotal: £29.95
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