Showing 13–24 of 91 resultsSorted by latest
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£9.99
Lilach has it all: a beautiful home in the heart of Silicon Valley, a successful husband and stable marriage, and a teenage son, Adam, with whom she has always felt a particular closeness. Israeli immigrants, the family has now lived in the U.S. long enough that they consider it home. But after a brutal attack on a local synagogue shakes their sense of safety, Adam unexpectedly enrolls in a self-defense class taught by a former Israeli Special Forces officer and finds a new sense of confidence and belonging. Then, tragedy strikes again when an African American boy dies at a house party. Rumours begin to circulate that the death was not accidental, and that Adam and his new friends had a history with Jamal. And soon Lilach is questioning everything she thought she knew about her son.
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£9.99
Johnny von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control – and that threatened human destruction.
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£12.99
Teffi’s literary genius made her a star in pre-revolutionary Russia, beloved by Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin alike. An extremely funny writer with a scathing critical eye, she was also capable of Chekhovian subtlety and depth of character. Ranging from humorous sketches of a vanished Russia to ironic, melancholy evocations of post-revolutionary exile, ‘And Time Was No More’ showcases the full range of Teffi’s gifts. A new selection by the celebrated Robert Chandler, it includes previously untranslated stories alongside more famous work, demonstrating the enduring freshness of one of the great wits of Russian literature.
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£12.99
The only novel by the twentieth century’s most acclaimed surrealist painter, a richly visual depiction of a group of eccentric aristocrats in the years preceding World War II.
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£18.99
Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies in December 2018, she gets the result of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, desperately seeking answers from her ailing mother whose memories and English are failing. Maclear no longer speaks Japanese, her mother’s first language, so she turns to her mother’s second fluent tongue: the wild and green language of soil, seed, leaf and mulch. Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother?
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£9.99
‘Demian’ is a coming-of-age story that follows a young boy’s maturation as he grapples with good and evil, lightness and darkness, and forges alternatives to the ever-present corruption and suffering that he sees all around him. Crucial to this development are his relationships with a series of older mentors, of who the titular Demian is the most charismatic, otherworldly and ultimately influential. Many have noted the influence of Jungian psychology upon this novel and it is fascinating to see Herman Hesse’s interests in the self, existence and free will play out through through the lens of early 20th-century Europe; Christian imagery and themes are ever-present, as is the shadow of the First World War.
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£12.99
Dylan Thomas is one of most beloved British poets of all time. Richly melodious and vividly expressive, Thomas’s poems strike to the heart of eternal themes of living and dying, of innocence lost and the persistence of nature’s cycles. In this selection, Cerys Matthews brings together poems from across Thomas’s career to showcase the very best of his work.
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£9.99
Set in Manhattan in the 1940s, a middle-aged man tells a young woman whom he has just met the story of his last love affair. As much an indictment of love as an elegy to it, ‘In Love’ is an examination of heartbreak rather than of the heart.
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£10.99
In 1921, Fran̤oise Frenkel Рa Jewish woman from Poland Рopens her first bookshop in Berlin. It is a dream come true. The dream lasts nearly two decades. Then suddenly, it ends. It ends with police confiscations and the Night of Broken Glass, as Jewish shops and businesses are smashed to pieces. It ends when no one protests. So Fran̤oise flees to France, just weeks before war breaks out. In Paris, on the wireless and in the newspapers, horror has made itself at home. When the city is bombed, Fran̤oise seeks refuge in Avignon, then Nice, which is awash with refugees and terrible suffering; children are torn from their parents; mothers throw themselves under buses. Horrified by what she sees, Fran̤oise goes into hiding. She survives only because strangers risk their lives to protect her.
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£10.99
Told with vivacious wit and a lust for life, ‘Parisian Days’ is a bittersweet portrayal of youthful dreams, and the elusive search for happiness. The Orient Express hurtles towards the promised land, and Banine is free for the first time in her life. She has fled her ruined homeland and unhappy forced marriage for a dazzling new future in Paris. Now she cuts her hair, wears short skirts, mingles with Russian émigrés, Spanish artists, writers and bohemians in the 1920’s beau monde – and even contemplates love. But soon she finds that freedom brings its own complications. As her family’s money runs out, she becomes a fashion model to survive. And when a glamorous figure from her past returns, life is thrown further into doubt. Banine has always been swept along by the forces of history. Can she keep up with them now?
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£16.99
They call him the Wizard of the Kremlin. Working at the heart of Russian power, the enigmatic Vadim Baranov-Putin’s chief spin doctor has used his background in experimental theatre and reality TV to turn the entire country into an avant-garde political stage. Here truth and lies, news and propaganda, have become indistinguishable. But Vadim is growing increasingly entangled in the dark secret workings of the regime he has helped build, and now he is desperate to get out.
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£12.99
In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to ‘read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content’, but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive. At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies. But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic’s harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life.
