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For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to the beach. The humble, quirky house they rent has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, shared mishaps and memories. It is a place where her family comes together and Rocky wants to cling to every moment. But with her body in open revolt and surprises invading her peaceful haven, the seesaw of Rocky’s life is tipping towards change.
Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of his youth: every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as a travel writer, capturing the changing, intriguing landscapes of a world in the grip of the Cold War, and very occasionally couriering packages and obscure messages for his brother, whom he quietly suspects of being a spy. A tap on the shoulder, though, pulls Gabriel further into the shadows of his life, and into the orbit of Faith Green, a beguiling and persuasive MI6 handler. She soon makes Gabriel a seemingly irresistible offer: he must simply make a trip to Cadiz, Spain, and buy a painting, and in turn will receive a life-changing sum. But in that sun-drenched, suspicious sea town he will find more than just a paycheck and spy craft: in the rolling waves of Mediterranean, life-changing choices and consequences beckon.
Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday. She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand – the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced. But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain. As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape.
Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood. The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, ‘Table for Two’ is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction.
This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives – all connected by a single drop of water. In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies hidden in the sand fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur’s only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: ‘Nineveh and Its Remains’. In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptised with water brought from the holy sit of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.
The final novel from the universally acclaimed master and PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter. A sweeping, seductive love story set in the years after the Second World War.
Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex-film star given to shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway. He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with 20 years ago, and this discovery will send him off-course, far away from wife and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?
One night Lauren finds a strange man in her flat who claims to be her husband. All the evidence – from photos to electricity bills – suggests he’s right. Lauren’s attic, she slowly realises, is creating an endless supply of husbands for her. There’s the one who pretends to play music on her toes. The one who’s too hot (there must be a catch). The one who makes a great breakfast sandwich. The one who turns everything into double entendres (‘I’ll weed your garden’). And the one who can calm her unruly thoughts with a single touch. But when you can change husbands as easily as changing a lightbulb, how do you know whether the one you have now is the good-enough one, or the wrong one, or the best one? And how long should you keep trying to find out?
In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a job in a new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel. Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more. But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, they are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures.
When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker – a young married woman, bored and unhappy with domestic life – becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead. What begins in a peaceful neighbourhood reaches its climax on a remote, unwelcoming Scottish island as the search puts Sarah in league with a man who finds himself being hunted down by murderous official forces.
On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast – the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.
‘Reads like a feminist War and Peace. A magnificent novel’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘A complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. Extraordinary’ NEW STATESMAN
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