Showing 13–24 of 53 resultsSorted by latest
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£8.99
On a balmy evening in late March, an oligarch’s wife hosts a party on a superyacht moored in the Maldives. Tables cover the massive deck, adorned with orchids, champagne bottles, name cards of celebrities. Uniformed staff flank a red carpet on the landing dock. This is what Kata has wanted for a long time – acceptance into the glittering world of high society. But there are those who aim to come between Kata and her goal, and they are closer to home than she could have imagined. Witness to the corruption and violence underneath the shiny surfaces is Mel, a young English woman employed to tutor Kata’s precocious daughter and navigate her through the class codes of English privilege. Now the closest Mel gets to such privilege is as hired help to the wealthy, and she is deeply resentful.
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£9.99
The reclusive Sylvia Wren, one of the most important American artists of the past century, has been running from her past for 60 years. Born Iris Chapel, of the Chapel munitions dynasty, second youngest of six sisters, she grew up in a palatial Victorian ‘Wedding Cake House’ in New England, neglected by her distant father and troubled, haunted mother. The sisters longed to escape, but the only way out was marriage. Not long after the first Chapel sister walks down the aisle, she dies of mysterious causes, a tragedy that repeats with the second sister, leaving the rest to navigate the wreckage, with heart-wrenching consequences. ‘The Cherry Robbers’ is a wonderfully atmospheric, propulsive novel about sisterhood, mortality and forging one’s own path.
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£16.99
When Anya is arrested at a Moscow anti-corruption rally under false pretences, she is given a 10-day sentence at a detention centre. Her cellmates are five other ordinary women arrested on petty charges. Ten listless days stretch before Anya and, as she appeals her sentence and recalls her progress from apolitical youth to informed citizen, she is troubled by strange, dreamlike visions, and wonders if her cellmates might somehow not be as ordinary as they seem.
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£9.99
Junius is the patriarch of the Booth family, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war. Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise – but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will change the course of history – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. ‘Booth’ is a riveting novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.
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£8.99
Mona is a Peruvian writer based on a Californian campus, open-eyed and sardonic, a connoisseur of marijuana and prescription pills. In the humanities she has discovered she is something of an anthropological curiosity – a female writer of colour treasured for the flourish of rarefied diversity that reflects so well upon her department. When she is nominated for ‘the most important literary award in Europe’, Mona sees a chance to escape her sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, and leaves for a village in Sweden. Now she is stuck in the company of her competitors, who arrive from all over the world. They do what writers do: exchange flattery, nurse envy and private resentments, stab rivals in the back and go to bed together. All the while, Mona keeps stumbling across traces of violence on her body, the origins of which she can’t – or won’t – remember.
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£9.99
In trailblazing poet, essayist, teacher and activist June Jordan’s poems, love is a vision of revolutionary solidarity, crossing borders both emotional and literal with an outstretched hand.
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£9.99
As the bookish daughter of a travelling salesman, Jami Attenberg was drawn to the road. Her wanderlust led her to drive solo across America, and eventually on travels around the globe, embracing – for better and worse – all the messy life she encountered along the way. As she travelled she was crafting, grafting and honing her work, piecing together a living and career, and wrestling with a deep longing for independence while also searching for community, and eventually, a place she might want to stay in for good. This memoir reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life, and voice, she could claim for herself.
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£9.99
Anat Levit never considered herself a cat lover, but when her life was thrown into upheaval, she found herself adopting one cat at the suggestion of her daughters, and then six more in quick succession. She recounts how each cat came into her life, their distinct demeanours and curiosities and their ability to live fully in each moment.
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£14.99
Eshwood Hall is a great English house surrounded by sprawling woods. In 1962, Izzy is thirteen, lives in the servants quarters and doesn’t go to school. Neglected by her parents, she spends her moments of freedom exploring the forest and the village beyond. The more she comes to understand the history of the place and her own situation, the stranger are the things she hears and sees. The most tantalising of these is the Green Man who inhabits the woods, and seems to know all about her, even those desires she has buried deep inside. A family story rooted in folk tale, this novel shows us the power that the wild still holds on our imagination.
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£8.99
When Julia flees her unhappy marriage for the handsome tailor Eve Perret, she expects her life from now on will be a challenge, not least because the year is 1911. They leave everything behind to settle in Vienna, but their happiness is increasingly diminished by Julia’s longing for a child. Ada Bauer’s wealthy industrialist family have sent her to Dr Freud in the hope that he can fix her mutism and do so without a scandal. But help will soon come for Ada from an unexpected quarter and change many lives irrevocably. This is an epic novel about family, freedom and how true love might survive impossible odds.
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£14.99
Narrated by J in the days, weeks and months after the marriage collapses, and interspersed with the departed wife’s diary entries, ‘Is This Love’ is an addictive, deeply unsettling, and provocative novel of deception and betrayal, and passion turned to pain. As the story unfolds, and each character’s version of events undermines the other, all our assumptions about victimhood, agency, love and control are challenged – for we never know J’s gender. If we did, would it change our minds about who was telling the truth?
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£18.99
‘Alison’ tells the story of a young woman born into a quiet life in Dorset at the end of the 1950s, who escapes in her twenties to the thrumming art scene of London at the end of the 1970s. But the vehicle for her escape is an older man whose reputation as an artist and philanderer casts a shadow which will follow Alison for years. A complex love and coming of age story, it is also a meditation on female friendship and empowerment, on art, patriarchy and class. With her combina- tion of immaculate prose and stunning artwork, Lizzy Stewart immerses the reader in the precise milieu of bohemian London in the late 20th century, while at the same time conjuring a story that has resonance for all women’s lives.
