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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE Shortlisted for the 2024 Gordon Burn Prize An electrifying, hilarious and deeply moving tragicomic debut novel following a Jamaican family grappling with a new life in the US. ‘What are you?’ This is the puzzled question that greets a young Trelawny growing up in a Miami where his racial ambiguity is regarded with confusion and suspicion. It’s not just his neighbours, his Jamaican parents Topper and Sanya don’t seem to understand him either. Then there’s his stubborn older brother Delano, who is determined to secure a better future for his own children, no matter what it takes. As both brothers navigate the challenges littered in their path – a woefully unreliable father, racism, recession and even a hurricane – they find themselves increasingly at odds. Will they make it through together or must one brother’s future come at the cost of the other? 
THE EXTRAORDINARY LOST NOVEL FROM THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA AND ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE Sitting alone, overlooking the still and blue lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach surveys the men of the hotel bar. She is happily married and has no reason to escape the world she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Amid sultry days and tropical downpours, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire, and the fear that sits quietly at her heart. Constantly surprising and wonderfully sensual, Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, and the mysteries of love, from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.
Winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Shortlisted for the 2020 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Goodreads Choice Awards.  In a war of lies she seeks the truth . .  . Ambassador Mahit Dzmare travels to the Teixcalaanli Empire's interstellar capital, eager to take up her new post. Yet when she arrives, she discovers her predecessor was murdered. But no one will admit his death wasn't accidental - and she might be next. Now Mahit must navigate the capital's enticing yet deadly halls of power, to discover dangerous truths. And while she hunts for the killer, Mahit must somehow prevent the rapacious Empire from annexing her home: a small, fiercely independent mining station. As she sinks deeper into an alien culture that is all too seductive, Mahit engages in intrigues of her own. For she's hiding an extraordinary technological secret, one which might destroy her station and its way of life. Or it might save them from annihilation. A Memory Called Empire is followed by A Desolation Called Peace in the Teixcalaan duology.
Melancholy I-II is a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902. In this wild, feverish narrative, Jon Fosse delves into Hertervig’s mind as the events of one day precipitate his mental breakdown. A student of Hans Gude at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Hertervig is paralyzed by anxieties about his talent and is overcome with love for Helene Winckelmann, his landlady’s daughter. Marked by inspiring lyrical flights of passion and enraged sexual delusions, Hertervig’s fixation on Helene persuades her family that he must leave. Oppressed by hallucinations and with nowhere to go, Hertervig shuttles between a cafe, where he endures the mockery of his more sophisticated classmates, and the Winckelmann’s apartment, which he desperately tries to re-enter – a limbo state which leads him inexorably into a state of madness. Published here in one volume in English for the first time, Melancholy I-II is a major novel by ‘the Beckett of the twenty-first century’ (Le Monde).
A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning author. On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society. How far will she go to save her family? And what - or who - is she willing to leave behind? Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2016 Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North. In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.
Longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize They had not lost anyone that year, or the ones they had lost were not worth remembering... Set in the fictional Kenyan town of Mapeli, Things They Lost tells the story of four generations of women, each haunted by the mysterious curse that hangs over the Brown family. At the heart of the novel is Ayosa Ataraxis Brown, twelve years old and the loneliest girl in the world. Okwiri Oduor's stunningly original debut novel sings with Kenyan folklore and myth as it traces Ayosa's fragile, toxic relationship with Nabumbo Promise, her mysterious and beguiling mother who comes and goes like tumbleweed: lost, but not quite gone.
Carmel had been alone all her life. The baby knew this. They looked at each other, and all of time was there. The baby knew how vast her mother's loneliness had been. A contemporary novel of daughterhood and motherhood, from the Booker Prize-winning Irish author Nell - funny, brave and so much loved - is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell's leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel's famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A multigenerational novel that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter - sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.
A post-apocalyptic classic set in a burned-out America, a father and his young son walk under a darkened sky, heading slowly for the coast. They have no idea what, if anything, awaits them there. The Road is a masterpiece of American fiction from Cormac McCarthy. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for FictionThe landscape is destroyed. Nothing moves save the ash on the wind. Cruel, lawless men stalk the roadside, lying in wait. Attempting to survive in this brave new world, the young boy and his protector have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves. They must keep walking. In this unflinching study of the best and worst of humankind, Cormac McCarthy boldly divines a future without hope, but one in which, miraculously, this young family may yet find tenderness.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2022 Perfect for fans of Succession, Trust is a sweeping puzzle of a novel about power, greed, love and a search for the truth that begins in 1920s New York. Can one person change the course of history?A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man's story - of greed, love and betrayal - is about to slip from his grasp. Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart. 'One of the great puzzle-box novels .
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023  A GUARDIAN AND FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flaneur named Gaustine opens a 'clinic for the past' that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. As Gaustine's assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a 'time shelter', hoping to escape from the horrors of our present - a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov's reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, a major voice in international literature. Georgi Gospodinov is one of Europe's most acclaimed writers. Originally from Bulgaria, his novels have won his country's most prestigious literary prize twice and have been shortlisted for more than a dozen international prizes - including the 2015 PEN Literary Award for Translation, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Premio Strega Europeo, the Bruecke Berlin Preis, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Literaturpreis. He has won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize and the 2021 Premio Strega Europeo, among others Click here to find out about our BOOKCLUB
WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD Charles Highway is every mother's worst nightmare. Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets the aloof, wildly unattainable, Rachel. As Charles's twentieth birthday - and the Oxford entrance exams - loom, his plans for seducing Rachel will draw him into a private collection of obsessional notes and observations: the eponymous 'Rachel Papers'. Click here to find out about our BOOKCLUB
From the Booker Prize-winning author of THE SENSE OF AN ENDING We'd like to introduce you to Elizabeth Finch. We invite you to take her course in Culture and Civilisation. She will change the way you see the world. 'The task of the present is to correct our understanding of the past. And that task becomes the more urgent when the past cannot be corrected.' Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration - always rigorous, always thoughtful. With measured empathy, she guided her students to develop meaningful ideas and to discover their centres of seriousness. As Neil, a former student, unpacks Elizabeth's notebooks, and remembers her uniquely inquisitive mind, her passion for reason resonates through the years. Her ideas unlock the philosophies of the past, and explore key events that show us how to make sense of our lives today. And underpinning them all is the story of J - Julian the Apostate, her historical soulmate and fellow challenger to the institutional and monotheistic thinking that has always threatened to divide us. This is more than a novel. It's a loving tribute to philosophy, a careful evaluation of history, an invitation to think for ourselves. It's a moment to reflect and to gently explore our own theories and assumptions. It is truly a balm for our times. -- This book has been printed with two different colour designs, blue and yellow. We are unable to accept requests for a specific cover. The different covers will be assigned to orders at random
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022 - THE YOUNGEST EVER BOOKER NOMINEETHE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER We'll laugh because we can, until the sun disintegrates and nighttime threatens to set us free just to capture us again, back into the things we can't escape. Kiara does not know what it is to live as a normal seventeen-year-old. With her mother in a halfway house, she fends for herself - and for nine-year-old Trevor, whose own mother disappears for days at a time. But as the pressures of rent to pay and mouths to feed increase, Kiara finds herself walking the streets after dark, determined to survive in a world that refuses to protect her. Nightcrawling is an unforgettable novel about young people navigating the darkest corners of an adult world, told with a humanity that is at once agonising and utterly mesmerising.
THE NO. 1 BESTSELLER (The Times) * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023 ** WINNER OF THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022 ** SHORTLISTED FOR BRITISH BOOK OF THE YEAR: DEBUT FICTION ** SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2022 ** AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2022 ** A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME * One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street. If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt. There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever. As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like 'petrol bomb' and 'rubber bullets'. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together. Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE FAMILY CAN HOLD YOU TOGETHER. AND TEAR YOU APART. Joan was only a child the last time she visited Memphis. She doesn't remember the bustle of Beale Street or the smell of honeysuckle as she climbs the porch steps to her aunt's house. But when the front door opens, she does remember her cousin Derek. As Joan learns more about her family's past she discovers she's not the only North woman to have experienced great hurt. But she also sees their resilience and courage, how these extraordinary women fry green tomatoes and braid hair and sing all the while. Joan can't change the past, but she can change her future. It's time to find her own song to sing.
From the bestselling author of Fresh Water for Flowers Adrien, Etienne and Nina are 10 years old when they meet at school and become inseparable. Years later, a car is pulled up from the bottom of a lake, with a body inside. Virginie, a local journalist with an enigmatic past, follows the case. Step by step she reveals the extraordinary bonds that unite the three childhood friends. How is the car wreck connected to their story? Why did their friendship fall apart? Three is a compelling story of love and loss, hope and grief, and of the distance that comes with the passing of time. A masterly crafted story full of suspense and unexpected plot twists. Click here to find out about our BOOKCLUB
Longlisted for the Booker Prize Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize ‘Original, memorable, shimmering’ - Sarah Moss Lia has only one child, Iris; her magical, awkward, endlessly creative daughter who has just entered the battleground of her teenage years. Lia and Iris have always been close, but there is a war playing out inside Lia’s body, too, and everything is about to change. As she confronts what might be the end, memories of her own childhood and a passionate love affair come rushing into her present, unearthing buried secrets and her family’s deepest fears. But Lia hopes: for more time, for more love, for more Iris. Dancing between voices within Lia’s body and without, flitting back and forth in time, this sweeping, dazzling story of a life and what it is to let go marks the arrival of an extraordinary novelist.
‘A moving, compelling, deeply human novel about love, hope and resilience in a city under siege. Everyone should read it’ Emma Stonex, bestselling author of The Lamplighters Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect barricades, splitting the diverse city into ethnic enclaves; each morning, the residents – whether Muslim, Croat or Serb – push the makeshift barriers aside. When violence finally spills over, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety with her daughter in England. Reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a handful of weeks, she stays behind while the city falls under siege. As the assault deepens and everything they love is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops, Zora and her friends are forced to rebuild themselves, over and over. Theirs is a breathtaking story of disintegration, resilience and hope.
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and collective, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.
WINNER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2021 AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY 'MUST READ' A TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK This is a true story. An author goes on a book tour for his new bestseller which, as people keep telling him, is one hell of a book. This is a coming-of-age story. One morning, he meets The Kid: a young Black boy who looks just like the one he keeps seeing on the news. And The Kid wants him to tell his story. This is a sad story. It's the story of a boy who spent most of his life trying to hide. And it may not be that different from the story of our author. This is a love story. But to find out why, you'll have to read this for yourself.
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience. Click here to find out about our BOOKCLUB
THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOSTER, ANTARCTICA AND WALK THE BLUE FIELDS WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION AND THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR. SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE AND THE IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE DALKEY LITERARY AWARDS ** A BBC TWO BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK** **CHOSEN AS A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME** It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church. The long-awaited new work from the author of Foster, Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.
"Manifoldly clever...brilliant... 'Glory' is its own vivid world, drawn from its own folklore. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny." -Violet Kupersmith, The New York Times Book Review From the award-winning author of the Booker-prize finalist We Need New Names, an exhilarating novel about the fall of an oppressive regime, and the chaos and opportunity that rise in its wake. NoViolet Bulawayo's bold new novel follows the fall of the Old Horse, the long-serving leader of a fictional country, and the drama that follows for a rumbustious nation of animals on the path to true liberation. Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup in November 2017 of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president of nearly four decades, Glory shows a country's imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices that unveil the ruthlessness required to uphold the illusion of absolute power and the imagination and bulletproof optimism to overthrow it completely. By immersing readers in the daily lives of a population in upheaval, Bulawayo reveals the dazzling life force and irresistible wit that lie barely concealed beneath the surface of seemingly bleak circumstances. And at the center of this tumult is Destiny, a young goat who returns to Jidada to bear witness to revolution-and to recount the unofficial history and the potential legacy of the females who have quietly pulled the strings here. The animal kingdom-its connection to our primal responses and its resonance in the mythology, folktales, and fairy tales that define cultures the world over-unmasks the surreality of contemporary global politics to help us understand our world more clearly, even as Bulawayo plucks us right out of it. Although Zimbabwe is the immediate inspiration for this thrilling story, Glory was written in a time of global clamor, with resistance movements across the world challenging different forms of oppression. Thus it often feels like Bulawayo captures several places in one blockbuster allegory, crystallizing a turning point in history with the texture and nuance that only the greatest fiction can.
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