The Master and Margarita
£10.99Mikhail Bulgakov’s astonishing Russian masterpiece, which has been translated into more than twenty languages, with an introduction by Orlando Figes.
Before The Coffee Gets Cold
1 × £10.99
I Who Have Never Known Men
1 × £9.99 Subtotal: £20.98
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Mikhail Bulgakov’s astonishing Russian masterpiece, which has been translated into more than twenty languages, with an introduction by Orlando Figes.

Keiko has never really fitted in. At school and university people find her odd and her family worries she’ll never be normal. To appease them, Keiko takes a job at a newly opened convenience store. Here, she finds peace and purpose in the simple, daily tasks and routine interactions. She is, she comes to understand, happiest as a convienience store worker. But in Keiko’s social circlel it just won’t do for an unmarried woman to spend all her time stacking shelves and re-ordering green tea.

Harpman has crafted a short but poignant tale that hauntingly blends a bleak atmosphere with hope. Women imprisoned underground escape only to find an abandoned world, but they chase life and love despite it all. This is a story that lingers with you.
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Deep underground, 39 women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there and only vague notions of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl – the fortieth prisoner – sits alone and outcast in the corner. But soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above.

For as long as anyone can remember, Britt-Marie has been an acquired taste. It’s not that she’s judgemental, or fussy, or difficult – she just expects things to be done in a certain way. A cutlery drawer should be arranged in the right order, for example (forks, knives, then spoons). We’re not animals, are we? But behind the passive-aggressive, socially awkward, absurdly pedantic busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams and a warmer heart than anyone around her realizes. So when Britt-Marie finds herself unemployed, separated from her husband of 20 years, left to fend for herself in the miserable provincial backwater that is Borg – of which the kindest thing one can say is that it has a road going through it – and somehow tasked with running the local football team, she is a little unprepared. But she will learn that life may have more to offer her that she’s ever realised.

A beautiful, fully illustrated gift edition of The Little Prince, Antione de Saint-Exupéry’s delightful story of humanity, philosophy and the stars.

‘War & War’ begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on the verge of being attacked and robbed by thuggish teenagers. From here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town’s archives an antique manuscript of startling beauty: it narrates the epic tale of brothers-in-arms struggling to return home from a disastrous war. Korim is determined to do away with himself, but before he commits suicide, he feels he must escape to New York with the precious manuscript and commit it to eternity by typing it all out onto the world wide web.

Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.

In the book which put South America on the literary map, Márquez tells the haunting story of a community in which the political, the personal and the spiritual worlds intertwine.

Set in Camus’ native Algeria, this story centres around Meursault. The young French-Algerian leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life until his involvment in a violent incident calls into question the fundamental values of society.

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.

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the nervous Frau Rosenthal, the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm, and the unassuming working-class couple Otto and Anna Quangel.

Russia’s literary world is shaken to its foundations when a mysterious gentleman – a professor of black magic – arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a bizarre retinue of servants. It soon becomes clear that he is the Devil himself, come to wreak havoc among the cultural elite of a disbelieving capital.

Lampedusa’s masterpiece is set amongst an aristocratic family facing social and political changes in the wake of Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in 1860. At the head of the family is the prince, Don Fabrizio. Proud and stubborn, he is accustomed to knowing his own place in the world and expects his household to be run accordingly.

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.

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.
Before The Coffee Gets Cold
1 × £10.99
I Who Have Never Known Men
1 × £9.99 Subtotal: £20.98