Showing 13–24 of 44 resultsSorted by latest
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£6.99
From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on four Italian spaces. Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ – a traveller moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice, Rome, the Basilica and Santa Maria Maggiore vividly to life.
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£9.99
Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, ‘Take What You Need’ traces the parallel lives of Jean, and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who’s sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah’s urban life with her young family, she’s revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother’s hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition. But with Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind. What Leah discovers is staggering: Jean has filled the house with giant sculptures she’s welded from scraps of the area’s industrial history. There’s also a young man now living in the house who’s played an unknown role in Jean’s last years and in her art.
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£9.99
Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, is holidaying at her family’s distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera. She spends the summer beneath the green umbrella pines and oppressive purple bougainvillea scribbling into her Anthology of Hates to pass the time. Until she meets the Bradleys. Don and Eva Bradley are well-behaved and middle-class – everything she is not. It is love at first sight. But the friendship ends in tears. Penelope and Don Bradley leave the Riviera, embarking on the painful process of growing up. She, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm. He, in rebellion against the philistine values of his parents.
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£9.99
Irene Wilson knows that a ‘no-name invisible something’ has settled over her parents’ marriage, and suspects her glamorous new teacher is to blame. Irene is not alone in her suspicions. In the town of Rattlebone, a small Black neighbourhood of Kansas City, secrets are hard to keep and growing up is a community affair. As Irene is initiated into adult passion and loss, her family story takes its place in a tightly woven tapestry of individuals whose griefs and joys are as vivid as her own.
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£8.99
Valentino is the spoiled child of doting parents who have no doubt he will be ‘a man of consequence’. His sisters, however, see him for what he really is: a lazy, indifferent and self-absorbed medical student who whiles away time with nights out on the town, resulting in a string of failed and incomplete classes. His parents’ dreams are soon undone when, out of the blue, Valentino brings home Maddalena, a wealthy and strikingly ugly wife. What ensues is yet another work of quiet devastation told with Ginzburg’s unflinching moral realism and keen psychological insight, as the family is scandalised by Valentino’s decision and suspicious of Maddalena’s motives.
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£8.99
Valentino is the spoiled child of doting parents who have no doubt he will be ‘a man of consequence’. His sisters, however, see him for what he really is: a lazy, indifferent and self-absorbed medical student who whiles away time with nights out on the town, resulting in a string of failed and incomplete classes. His parents’ dreams are soon undone when, out of the blue, Valentino brings home Maddalena, a wealthy and strikingly ugly wife. What ensues is yet another work of quiet devastation told with Ginzburg’s unflinching moral realism and keen psychological insight, as the family is scandalised by Valentino’s decision and suspicious of Maddalena’s motives.
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£8.99
A mother decides to follow her daughter to the city, she settles in the suburbs with her older daughter and son-in-law in tow. She quickly grows restless and is eager to find new friends. Brassy, bossy and perpetually dissatisfied she strikes up a friendship with the mysterious Scilla, and soon the two women are planning to open an art gallery. But there is more to Scilla than meets the eye. After a series of afternoons spent at bars having coffee granitas with cream, and at Scilla’s apartment on Via Tripoli, it quickly becomes apparent that the connections and the cultured life promised by Scilla may never materialise, despite always being just within reach. What proceeds is a story of the dissolution of a family, and the role that class plays in its downfall. Sagittarius is the story of misplaced confidence and ambition gone awry, recounted by a wary daughter.
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£8.99
A mother decides to follow her daughter to the city, she settles in the suburbs with her older daughter and son-in-law in tow. She quickly grows restless and is eager to find new friends. Brassy, bossy and perpetually dissatisfied she strikes up a friendship with the mysterious Scilla, and soon the two women are planning to open an art gallery. But there is more to Scilla than meets the eye. After a series of afternoons spent at bars having coffee granitas with cream, and at Scilla’s apartment on Via Tripoli, it quickly becomes apparent that the connections and the cultured life promised by Scilla may never materialise, despite always being just within reach. What proceeds is a story of the dissolution of a family, and the role that class plays in its downfall. Sagittarius is the story of misplaced confidence and ambition gone awry, recounted by a wary daughter.
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£12.99
From the author of the beloved novel ‘The Towers of Trebizond’, a book about Portugal that is part travelogue, part history and wholly perosnal.
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£9.99
For more than three decades, Louise Erdrich has won prizes, critical acclaim, and the hearts of readers the world over with her spellbinding novels of Native American life. In ‘Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country’ she travels, with her 18-month-old daughter, to the terrain her ancestors inhabited for centuries: the lakes and islands of southern Ontario. Summoning to life the Ojibwe’s sacred spirits and songs, their language and sorrows, Erdrich considers the many ways in which her tribe – whose name derives from the word ozhibii’ige, ‘to write’ – have influenced her. Her journey, through a landscape of breathtaking beauty, links ancient stone paintings with an island where a recluse built an extraordinary library, and she reveals how both have transformed her.
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£9.99
From Carl Phillips asking how wildness is tamed, to Esm̩ Weijun Wang finding moments of stillness in the simple act of observing her dog, to Cal Flyn befriending a sled dog called Suka in Finland, here we see dogs at every stage of their life. This anthology promises to bring Рmuch as our four-legged furry friends do Рjoy and delight, and surprising depth and poignancy. It goes beyond the wet snouts and wagging tails and gets to the heart of what makes dogs our true lifelong companions. These essays are sometimes toothy, sometimes bloody, and sometimes gentle: much like dogs.
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£9.99
Admired by W. H. Auden as one of the greatest American writers, M.F.K. Fisher never focuses on just the food set before her. Instead, with unfailingly elegant prose, an eye for evocative detail and a knack for sharpedged wit, she draws us in to the whole experience: from the company to the setting, from the preparation to the scraped-clean plate. She liberates her readers from caution, sweeps away adherence to culinary tradition, and celebrates cooking, eating and dining in all its guises.
