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Two sisters must find their way in a world designed to confine them. Marcelle is the elder sister, a woman whose ambitions focus on becoming the companion of a ‘man of genius’. Marguerite is the younger sister, a girl whose sanity depends on breaking free of the oppressive expectations of society. Both end up focusing their attentions on the same disappointing man.
Four of Kurt Vonnegut’s best dystopian stories, ‘Monkey Business’ distils his darkly comic vision of the modern world and the cost of trying to engineer a better life. In a future where everyone is forced to be equal, a gifted teenager dares to rebel. A suburban family discovers a device that delivers perfect happiness. A world frightened of death turns to drugs to slow the march of time. And in a quiet American town, a couple must decide how many children they are willing to raise – for ever.
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.
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.
Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, when they were thrown together in a girls’ shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only to meet again later at a diner, a grocery store and then at a protest. Recitatif keeps Twyla’s and Roberta’s races ambiguous – we know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?
Welcome to Vermilion Sands, the fully automated desert-resort ready to fulfil your most exotic whims. Out over the towering Coral D, sky artists paint the sky with clouds. A musical statue is broken down, but finds new life in unwanted places. A mysterious new resident introduces a new way of making poetry – aided by machine. Drawing together some of the most mesmerising and mind-blowing stories from J.G. Ballard’s ‘Vermillion Sands’ art-infused universe, this short collection is a passport into the genius of science fiction’s most visionary pioneer.
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.
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.
A flood brings not only rising waters but the full force of a brutal, racist world. With the Mississippi flooding, a Black farmer struggles to get his pregnant wife to safety. In the chaos, a single desperate decision sets off a chain of events that cannot be undone. This novel is Richard Wright’s unflinching novella of race, power and consequence. Starkly told and painfully resonant, it captures how quickly the world can turn – and who is forced to pay the price.
Jean Muir arrives at the wealthy Coventry household as a humble governess. But beneath her meek exterior lies a woman of steely ambition and dangerous cunning. What begins as a tale of domestic harmony turns swiftly into a drama of seduction, betrayal, and psychological gamesmanship.
What begins as a celebratory weekend between two families soon devolves into a reckoning of sins, past and present, as an act of violence shatters their finely made world.
It’s summer and a young man walks through the gates of a luxurious mansion in the south of France. At the dinner table, the Blakes are waiting for him: Annie, the family matriarch and world-famous singer, her inscrutable husband David and their children, Dot, aloof and rebellious, Lily, the man’s carefree university friend, and their enigmatic older brother Felix. Between sun-drenched days spent lounging by the pool and nights blurring into endless, opulent parties far from the reality of life in London, a restless attraction grows between Felix and the man. The possibility to be part of a family – and an entire world – in which he doesn’t belong is suddenly within reach. But the idyllic haze of the summer slowly fades as they return to the city. While the man struggles with his troubled past and the challenges of navigating Felix’s world as a black, working-class person, Felix is tormented by demons of his own.
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