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£18.99
Staff Pick!
Aude Says…
Such a small but powerful and intense novel.
Fictionalised biography? Auto fiction? Essay on Art and artists in 20th Century Paris? This book takes many forms and they are all fascinating. Every sentence matters, you will not want to miss a single word, a single thought.
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Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius – a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy’s novel has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.
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£18.99
Staff Pick!
Aude says…
Cynthia d’Aprix Sweeney’s prose is gentle, her characters real and her stories incredibly relatable. She writes human interactions, mistakes and with a sharp eye and a tender touch. After The Lake Effect, read The Nest for maximum family drama!
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It’s 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly non-existent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a neighbour brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible-but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.
Years later Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down.
Written with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature humour and insight, LAKE EFFECT is a wise and probing look at love and desire, mothers and daughters, loss and grief, and what we owe the people we love most.
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£16.99
Staff Pick!
Aude says…
This is a promising debut. There are some flaws and predictable plot twists but they wont prevent you from enjoying the wonderful characters threaded along the book.
The interactions of the Webb family will make you want to have a seat at their table. Those fierce sisters and the men surrounding them will remain with you and capture your heart.
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£18.99
Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules. She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love. Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth. Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, ‘Heart the Lover’ is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love.
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£20.00
‘Reads like a feminist War and Peace. A magnificent novel’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘A complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. Extraordinary’ NEW STATESMAN
