Narrative theme: Social issues

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  • American Dirt

    £10.99

    ‘American Dirt’ explores the experience of attempting to illegally cross the US-Mexico border, a journey which thousands of migrants make each year. Yesterday, Lydia had a bookshop. Yesterday, Lydia was married to a journalist. Yesterday, she was with everyone she loved most in the world. Today, her eight-year-old son Luca is all she has left. For him, she will carry a machete strapped to her leg. For him, she will leap onto the roof of a high speed train. For him, she will find the strength to keep running.

  • Grand Union

    £9.99

    Interleaving ten completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from the New Yorker and elsewhere, Zadie Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction.

  • Girl, Woman, Other: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019

    £9.99

    ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends, and lovers, across the country and through the years.

  • Convenience Store Woman

    £9.99

    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.

  • The Silence of the Girls

    £9.99

    When her city falls to the Greeks, Briseis’s old life is shattered. She is transformed from queen to captive, from free woman to slave, awarded to the god-like warrior Achilles as a prize of war. And she’s not alone. On the same day, and on many others in the course of a long and bitter war, innumerable women have been wrested from their homes and flung to the fighters. The Trojan War is known as a man’s story: a quarrel between men over a woman, stolen from her home and spirited across the sea. But what of the other women in this story, silenced by history? What words did they speak when alone with each other, in the laundry, at the loom, when laying out the dead?

  • My Year Of Rest And Relaxation

    £10.99

    A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

  • Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

    £10.99

    ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ transports us across a subcontinent on a journey of many years. It takes us deep into the lives of its gloriously rendered characters, each of them in search of a place of safety – in search of meaning, and of love.

  • Beartown

    £10.99

    Beartown is a small town in a large Swedish forest. For most of the year it is under a thick blanket of snow, experiencing the kind of cold and dark that brings people closer together – or pulls them apart. Its isolation means that Beartown has been slowly shrinking with each passing year. But now the town is on the verge of an astonishing revival. Everyone can feel the excitement. Change is in the air and a bright new future is just around the corner. Until the day it is all put in jeopardy by a single, brutal act. It divides the town into those who think it should be hushed up and forgotten and those who’ll risk the future to see justice done. At last, it falls to one young man to find the courage to speak the truth that it seems no one else wants to hear. With the town’s future at stake, no one can stand by or stay silent. Everyone is on one side or the other. Which side would you be on?

  • Swing Time

    £9.99

    Two girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, ‘Swing Time’ is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them.

  • Jane Eyre

    £10.99

    A beautiful collector’s edition of Charlotte Brontë’s most popular novel

  • The Flea Palace

    £10.99

    Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families. When the rubbish at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth.

  • Catcher In The Rye

    £9.99

    A 16-year-old American boy relates in his own words the experiences he goes through at school and after, and reveals with unusual candour the workings of his own mind. What does a boy in his teens think and feel about his teachers, parents, friends and acquaintances?

  • American Wife

    £9.99

    On one of the most important days of her husband’s presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led them to the White House, and faces contradictions years in the making. Weaving race, class, wealth and fate into a tapestry, this novel lays bare the pleasures and pain of intimacy and love.

  • Vintage Classics To Kill A Mockingbird

    £9.99

    ‘Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’. This is a lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of the story – a black man charged with raping a white girl in the 30s.

  • PMC Things Fall Apart

    £10.99

    ‘Things Fall Apart’ tells the story of Okonkwo, an important man in the Igbo tribe in the days when white men were first on the scene. Okonkwo becomes exiled from his tribe, as a result of his pride and his fears, with tragic consequences.

  • PMC Grapes Of Wrath

    £10.99

    Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer prize-winning epic remains his undisputed masterpiece. It tells of the Joad family who travel West in search of the promised land, and find only broken dreams.