Doubleday

  • The Hole

    £14.99

    Oghi wakes in a hospital bed unable to speak or move. The car accident that killed his wife has left him trapped in his own body and under the control of his mother-in-law, as she grieves the loss of her only child. Isolated from his friends and neglected by his nurse, Oghi’s world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his wife, a sensitive woman who found solace in cultivating her garden. But as Oghi remains alone and paralysed, his mother-in-law is hard at work in the now-abandoned garden, uprooting what her daughter had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes.

  • Happiness and Love

    £16.99

    Years after escaping her unbearable artworld life, an unnamed writer finds herself attending a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole – an artist-curator couple – and attended by their pretentious circle. It’s the evening after the funeral of a mutual friend, and if the narrator once loved and admired Eugene and Nicole and their important friends, she now despises them all. Most of all, however, she despises herself for being lured back to this hollow, bourgeois social setting. As the guests sip at their drinks, the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa entertains herself – and us – with a silent, tender, merciless takedown.

  • Births, Deaths and Marriages

    £16.99

    Zoe, Al, Rachel, Rob, Yas and Indie. Six friends who were inseparable at university, who have all had their secret or not so secret passions for each other, their own hopes and fears. Over the years, they have gone their separate ways. Rob is a history teacher, with a string of broken relationships behind him. Yas is a surgeon and very much her own woman. Indie is married and a successful coffee entrepreneur. Rachel is a stay at home mum with two children. Al, widowed young, is about to take over his father’s funeral business. When Rob’s engagement party throws the gang together once more, some passions are reignited, old connections and resentments resurface. Over the next twelve months, there will, among the friends, be a birth, a marriage, and a death – but whose?

  • The Passengers on the Hankyu Line

    £14.99

    Famously scenic, the Hankyu commuter train trundles daily through changing landscape unaware of the heartaches of the passengers it carries. On the outward journey we are introduced to the emotional dilemmas of five characters as we puzzle out how they will unravel; on the return journey six months later, we watch them resolve.

  • When the cranes fly south

    £14.99

    Bo is running out of time. Yet time is one of the few things he’s got left; his body is failing him and his quiet existence is only broken up by the daily visits from his home care team. His hands soon too weak to open the precious jar housing the scarf of his Alzheimer-stricken wife Frederika, which still bears her scent. Fortunately he still has his beloved dog Sixten for company, only now his son insists upon taking the dog away. The very same son that Bo is wanting to mend his relationship with before his time is up. The threat of losing Sixten stirs up a whirlwind of emotions that make him look back at his life, his fatherhood and the way he expresses his love.

  • Air

    £12.99

    ‘Air’ is a contemplative story about one man trying to move forward from the trauma of his youth to become a better father to his son. Being in limbo, 30,000 feet in the air, offers time to reflect and take stock. For Aaron Umber, it’s an opportunity to connect with his 14-year-old son as they travel halfway across the world to meet a woman who isn’t expecting them. Unsettled by his past, and anxious for his future, Aaron is at a crossroads in life. The damage inflicted upon him during his youth has made him the man he is, but now threatens to widen the growing fissures between him and his only child. This trip could bind them closer together, or tear them further apart. In this penetrating examination of action and consequence, fault and attribution, acceptance and resolution, John Boyne gives us a redemptive story of a father and a son on a moving journey to mend their troubled lives.

  • Liquid

    £16.99

    ‘Liquid’ tells the story of a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles who decides to give up her career in academia and marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in the course of a single summer. By midsummer reality hits, taking her – and her project – to Tehran.

  • The homemade god

    £20.00

    There is a heatwave across Europe, and Goose and his three sisters gather at the family’s house by Lake Orta in Piedmont, Italy. Their father, a famous artist, recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his masterpiece. Now he is dead. And there is no sign of his new wife and or his final painting. Though the siblings have always been close, the things they learn that summer – about themselves, their father and their new stepmother – will drive them apart before they can come to any kind of understanding of what their father’s legacy truly is.

  • Lost souls meet under a full moon

    £14.99

    When Hirase, a young woman from Tokyo, arranges an appointment with the Go-Between, she doesn’t expect a teenager to show up. Dressed preppy-style in a duffel coat and carrying a notebook, he invites the dead back into the real world – at least, this is what Hirase has pieced together from his website page. Ushered into a luxury hotel to await her meeting, the Go-Between lays down the ground-rules: the reunion lasts one evening under a full moon; the dead person cannot be called back by anyone else, and may refuse to meet.

  • Story of a murder

    £25.00

    On 1 February, 1910, vivacious musichall performer, Belle Elmore, suddenly vanished from her north London home, causing alarm among her circle of female friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild who demanded an immediate investigation. They could not have known what they would provoke: the unearthing of a gruesome secret, followed by a fevered manhunt for the prime suspect: Belle’s husband, medical fraudster, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen. Hiding in the shadows of this evergreen tale is Crippen’s typist and lover, Ethel Le Neve – was she really just ‘an innocent young girl’ in thrall to a powerful older man as so many people have since reported? In this examination of one of the most infamous murders of the twentieth century, Hallie Rubenhold gives voice to those who have never properly been heard – the women.

  • A thousand blues

    £16.99

    2035: In the shadow of a race course, a young woman finds a robot named Coli on a scrap heap, contemplating the sky. Intrigued, she takes him into her care and learns how he is designed to be a humanoid jockey. She and Coli are determined to rescue his beloved race horse who is heading for the knackers’ yard after a lifetime of overwork. To remind the horse of happier times, they hatch a special plan to let her run another race. But it will be no ordinary event – they will train her to run the slowest time of her life. In the heat of the race, Coli feels the horse running too fast. She is in pain and will soon injure herself. To save his friend, Coli will commit one final act of bravery.

  • Madame Matisse

    £18.99

    This is the story of three women – one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years. The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her mother and a father she adores. Amelie is first drawn to Henri Matisse as a way of escaping the conventional life expected of her. A free spirit, she sees in this budding young artist a glorious future for them both. Ambitious and driven, she gives everything for her husband’s art, ploughing her own desires, her time, her money into sustaining them both, even through years of struggle and disappointment. Lydia Delectorskaya is a young Russian emigree, who fled her homeland following the death of her mother. After a fractured childhood, she is trying to make a place for herself on France’s golden Riviera, amid the artists, film stars and dazzling elite.

Nomad Books