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From Japan’s most famous, classic novelist comes a remarkable gem of wit, irony, and feline observation. A stray kitten, catapulted to literary fame loudly observes the world of Meiji Japan in all its absurdity. But he’s not the only cat in the neighbourhood, and as he rallies against the stupidity of human habit, he grows closer to the sophisticated Miss Calico – but he can’t hide his own inadequacies for long.
An intimate, magical novel about one enduring church in a rural Icelandic valley – an ode to a quiet way of life now lost to time forever. The resting place of legendary Viking warrior Egil Skallagrímsson’s skull, Mosfell Church is a lonely, country church, fated to be destroyed. But as the plans to destroy it take shape, stories, myth and folklore abound in one magical last attempt to leave Mosfell standing.
Fair, elegant, and ambitious, Clare is married to a white man unaware of her African American heritage and has severed all ties to her past. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, but refuses to acknowledge the racism that continues to constrict her family’s happiness. A chance encounter forces both women to confront the lies they have told others – and the secret fears they have buried within themselves.
This miniature array of perfect stories by the legendary Margaret Atwood flash before us the joys and despairs of mothers good and bad, evoking laughter, compassion and recognition in us all.
Camille loves Alain, but Alain loves his cat, whom he has had from childhood, more than he could love any woman.
Nanda Kaul has chosen to spend her final years alone in the tranquil mountains. But her solitude is broken when her strange and secretive great-grand-daughter comes to stay. Through the long hot summer months, hidden dependencies and old wounds are uncovered, until tragedy seems as inevitable as a forest fire on the mountainside.
Born in the body of a 70-year-old man, Benjamin Button is cursed to live life in reverse. As he ages backwards, he embraces life, finds love and seeks out adventure, all while getting younger and younger. But time, however skewered, waits for no man, and even youth waits to rob Benjamin Button of the one rare thing we all share – life.
1930s Berlin is a realm of glamour and sleaze, poverty and excess. There, a lonely young Brit working on a novel is charmed by an English runaway and want-to-be star, the delightfully decadent Sally Bowles. The intimate, fleeting connection they form will stay with him for all his days.
Recently widowed and dangerously charming, Lady Susan Vernon arrives among her relatives determined to secure her own advantage. Through a flurry of letters, alliances shift, affections are tested, and reputations quietly unravel. ‘Lady Susan’ is Jane Austen’s sharp, mischievous portrait of a woman who refuses to behave. Bold, manipulative and irresistibly alive, it reveals Austen at her most daring – and her most amused.
From dragons and unicorns to beings born only in Borges’s labyrinthine mind, this extraordinary compendium blurs the line between scholarship and fantasy. At once encyclopaedia and storybook, it reveals Borges’s genius for turning knowledge into wonder.
Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, when they were thrown together in a girls’ shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only to meet again later at a diner, a grocery store and then at a protest. Recitatif keeps Twyla’s and Roberta’s races ambiguous – we know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?
In a single afternoon’s walk, Virginia Woolf captures the infinite life of a garden…A couple pause among the flowerbeds, their thoughts drifting apart. A woman’s mind fixes on a small, troubling mark on the wall. A chance meeting becomes an imagined life, rich with longing and regret. In six luminous, experimental stories, Virginia Woolf remakes the short story as a space of transcendence. Moving fluidly between inner lives and outward scenes, Kew Gardens captures moments of consciousness as they shimmer, fracture and pass, revealing the beauty and strangeness of everyday existence.Includes the stories: Kew Gardens, The Mark on the Wall, An Unwritten Novel, Monday or Tuesday, The String Quartet and Blue & GreenBRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.
Welcome to Vermilion Sands, the fully automated desert-resort ready to fulfil your most exotic whims. Out over the towering Coral D, sky artists paint the sky with clouds. A musical statue is broken down, but finds new life in unwanted places. A mysterious new resident introduces a new way of making poetry – aided by machine. Drawing together some of the most mesmerising and mind-blowing stories from J.G. Ballard’s ‘Vermillion Sands’ art-infused universe, this short collection is a passport into the genius of science fiction’s most visionary pioneer.
Haunted by memories of a doomed love affair, and living in something of a strange hiatus in Tokyo, the narrator finds himself dreaming of the days he used to wile away playing pinball in J’s Bar. Until one day he embarks on a quest: to find the exact model of pinball machine he played years earlier – the infamous three-flipper Spaceship.
A young couple build their lives around the objects they long to own. From furniture to clothes to carefully imagined interiors, their desires shape their sense of who they are – and who they might become. Yet satisfaction always seems just out of reach. Precise and quietly ironic, the story explores the promises of material life – and the emptiness that can follow.
Private detective Albert Campion is summoned to the village of Kepesake to investigate a particularly distasteful death. The body turns out to be that of Pig Peters, freshly killed five months after his own funeral. Soon other corpses start to turn up, just as Pig’s body goes missing. It takes all Campion’s coolly incisive powers of detection to unravel the crime.