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Weidenfeld & Nicholson Alice Walker's new novel features Kate Talkingtree, a 57 year old writer, engaging on a soul-searching quest after she feels she has arrived at a sort of 'dead-end' in her life and career. She leaves her partner Yolo and embarks on a mesmerising journey of self-discovery down the Colorado river and then into the thick of the Amazon jungle. She encounters shamans and the spiritual world of the native Indians and attempts to heal herself through trances induced by the hallucinogenic beverage 'yag'. Distanced from her life and relationship with Yolo, who has gone to Hawaii on his own journey, both gain shifting insights into their lives and the world around them, but will their paths lead them back to each other?
Price: EUR 9.90
Set against the background of impending war in Iraq, an unlikely pair set aside their initial differences to get justice closer to home. Academic Jonathan Hart and George Gardener, a fiesty local councillor, are obsessed with clearing the name of Howard Stamp, a retarded reclusive convicted of fatally stabbing his grandmother in 1970. Stamp provided the perfect scapegoat for a community unwilling to face its own erosion, and his subsequent suicide put to rest any lingering doubts about his guilt. But Jonathan and George have found connections with another unsolved crime and the story begins to unravel with consequences for those who were silent for all those years. Minette Walters is as sharp as ever in this novel about who pays the price of justice and at what cost.
Macmillan When Lieutenant Charles Acland is flown home from Iraq with serious head injuries, he suffers not only permanent disfigurement but also a change in his personality. He displays bouts of aggression, particularly towards his ex-fiancée who cannot accept that their relationship is over. Mistrustful of his psychiatrist, Acland cuts all ties with his past and moves to London. Alone and unmonitored, he sinks into a world of guilt and paranoia, attracting the attention of the police who are investigating three ‘gay’ murders in the Bermondsey area. Acland is finally forced to confront the real issues behind his isolation and ask why, if he hates women so much, does he look to a woman for help? This intricate, complex and skilfully plotted novel takes Ms. Waters even deeper into the genre of psychological thriller she has developed so brilliantly over the years. A ‘must’ read.
Price: EUR 10.90
When elderly Ailsa Lockyer-Fox is found dead in her garden, dressed only in her night-gown, her wealthy land owning husband is suspected. Although the verdict of her death is natural causes, finger-wagging in the village does not abate. What has happened in the past to create such antagonism and mistrust towards the Colonel? What secret lies hidden in the isolated, sleepy Dorset village? London based solicitor, Mark Ankerton, becomes concerned about the increasingly reclusive behaviour of his client and begins to seriously investigate the allegations against him. Chilling stuff!
Picador 'Lili' is a remarkable first novel that chronicles the emotional and psychological awakening of a Chinese girl during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. When her parents are branded as disreputable intellectuals, Lili accompanies them into exile. She eventually meets an American journalist and begins to see the Chinese Revolution through Western eyes. This awakening reveals to Lili the true meaning behind the cultural change and she takes a stand, with her peers, against its oppressive practices. Lili is a sharp eyed witness to historical events, a woman who does not shirk from psychological and emotional truths.
Price: EUR 11.90
This suspense novel follows the lives of two orphaned girls. The story begins in 1860's London in a thieves' den and ends in a dilapidated country house. Susan is a pickpocket, who poses as a lady's maid and infiltrates the household of Maud, a young heiress. Susan does this on behalf of a mysterious character known as Gentleman. Both girls are affected by greed and corruption from a very early age, which gives the plot its highly creative, unexpected twists and turns.
Price: EUR 10.80
Oxford University Press In our everyday rational world, why are so many of us interested in the supernatural? Why have angels, ghosts, fairies and vampires continued to excite our imagination? Marina Warner explores the products of these fantasies bringing vital new insights about the supernatural and its relationship to the self and society. Illustrated with eight pages of colour and over forty black and white images, ‘Phantasmagoria’ is packed full of apparitions, illusions and other strange things that go ‘bump in the night’. This wonderfully evocative, imaginative study of the supernatural comprises a range of ideas few other writers would dare attempt.
Price: EUR 19.00
Quercus When their mother catches their father with another woman, twelve-year-old Blessing and her fourteen-year-old brother, Ezikiel, are forced to leave their comfortable home in Lagos to live with their mother’s family in a village in the Niger Delta. Without running water or electricity, the village is a nightmare for Blessing. Her mother works all day and suspiciously late into the night to pay the children’s school fees. Her brother, once a promising student, seems to be falling under the influence of a local group of violent teenage boys. Her grandfather, a recent convert to Islam, is even considering the possibility of bringing in a second wife. But Blessing’s grandmother, wise and practical, soon becomes a mentor, teaching Blessing the ways of a midwife in rural Nigeria. As Warri comes to feel like home, Blessing becomes increasingly aware of the threats to its safety, both from its unshakable but dangerous traditions and the relentless carelessness of the modern world. Religious tensions, the multiple hazards of female circumcision and the ecological toll of the oil industry are just some of the topics woven into this beautifully crafted, immensely absorbing novel that is funny, heart wrenching and ultimately uplifting.
Price: EUR 15.35
Doubleday This clever, unusually skilful first novel, tells the story of Christine, who since her ‘accident’ suffers from memory loss. Every night, sleep wipes her memory clean so she cannot remember the day before or details of her previous life. Every morning her husband, Ben, tells her who she is, where she lives and what to do. Then after Ben has left for work, Dr Nash rings Christine as a daily routine, to tell her to look at the journal she has forgotten she is writing and has hidden. Christine’s story is told through her journal where she slowly pieces together her lost memory. She learns that she has written and published a novel although Ben has never mentioned it. Then she remembers that she had a child, Adam, but Ben tells her that Adam died young. Is Ben sparing her tragic memories or does he have a different, more sinister agenda? The build-up of tension, suspicion and dread is well handled as Christine emerges slowly, retrieving her memories from the malignant fog that surrounds her and the ‘accident’ which robbed her of her life.
Price: EUR 14.90
Harper Lauren Weisberger, who has had an immense success with ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, has written a new novel featuring three New York women about to turn thirty. They make a pact: within the next twelve months, each will make a life-altering change. For marriage-minded Emmy, whose boyfriend left her for the personal trainer she had hired for him, this means having attachment-free one-night stands. Her sexy man-eater friend, Adriana, vows she can be monogamous and will be engaged to a fabulous man before she turns thirty-one. And then there is Leigh, who privately promises herself that she will dump her perfect boyfriend. By the end of the book only one will have succeeded in following through, but each will have gained insight into what (or who) they really want in their lives. The book’s message is clearly that guys will come and go, but best girlfriends will always be there for one another – great fun and a perfect light summertime read!
The Town of Winthrop has decided that it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the town’s founding black settlers, and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. Enter our hero, a nomenclature consultant who is engaged by the town to resolve the problem. Colson Whitehead’s energetic, engaging prose toys with language and phrasing in this wickedly funny satire of our smoothly packaged, hyper-verbal and strangely stupid times. ‘Apex’ allows the reader to see their world with a new sense of laughable awe and warns of the dangers of valuing sign over substance.
Jim Foley sits before a blank page in his cottage in County Clare and begins a love letter to his wife, in the hope that his words will bring her closer to him. Retracing his life from childhood in County Clare, to early adulthood in America, then returning to County Clare again, he tells of his hopes, fears, fantasies, of the people in his life, the ever-evolving relationships with them and his love for books, which remains constant. In sensitive, lyrical prose, Niall Williams has crafted an uplifting novel about words, books, the attempt to make sense of grief and a haunting, intimate testament to the enduring nature of love.
As inspector Jefe Javier Falcón is investigating a faceless corpse unearthed at a municipal dump, Seville is rocked by a massive explosion. An apartment block is destroyed in the blast; its basement reveals a hidden mosque, confirming, it seems, everyone’s fear of terrorism. The climate of panic infects everybody as more bodies are being dragged from the rubble. But Falcón realises that not all is as it appears to be. As he comes closer to cracking the conspiracy, he discovers a more devastating one, which threatens the security of people beyond Spain’s borders. If you read only one thriller this year, make it this one! Wilson’s plotting is both intricate and fast paced: his detective, Falcón, very likeable and the venue, Seville, captivating.
John Murray ‘An Incomplete Revenge’ is the fifth instalment of Winspear’s absorbing series featuring intrepid private investigator, Maisie Dobbs. A number of mysterious fires and petty thefts plague the inhabitants of a village in rural, post WW I Kent, but when Daisie tries to get to the bottom of the village’s long buried secrets, some of the locals become remarkably tight-lipped about a wartime tragedy whereby a zeppelin raid wiped out an entire family. When some gypsies come into town for the seasonal hop harvest, Maisie needs all her psychological skills to navigate between their world and the prejudiced villagers. Although each of Maisie Dobbs’ cases are unique in their own right, Winspear develops Maisie’s character with each book, making them not just crime novels but also an increasingly fascinating portrait of the unusual woman, herself.
Set in London in the 1920s, Jacqueline Winspear has created in the character of Maisie Dobbs a unique private investigator. The combination of her rather unorthodox psychological methods and sharp logical mind, make it an exquisite pleasure to follow Maisie as she solves her first case. It all starts off as a straight-forward routine task: she is supposed to confirm the alleged affair of her client's wife. But by following the wife, Maisie's search leads her to a mysterious retreat for disfigured war veterans from which several young men seem to have disappeared. Digging deeper, Maisie finds herself confronted with her own war memories when she served as a nurse behind the front. This truly entertaining novel is not just a detective story but also the story of an exceptional young woman and her coming of age in the turbulent aftermath of war. As a fresh and sparkling start to a new mystery series, there will be a lot more to look forward to!
Harper Motherless and anchorless, Silver is taken in by the timeless, Mr Pew, the blind keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse in Scotland. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of the ties that bind and of the slippages that occur throughout every life. One life, in particular, that of Babel Dark, a nineteenth-century clergyman, is displayed before Silver on a salt stained map she instinctively understands and follows, re-experiencing Dark's feelings of love, loss and betrayal as if her own. Ms Winterson's unique, lyrical and imaginative gift of storytelling shines through like a polished gem, perfect for curling up with on those dark, unsettled nights!
Even with two Booker-nominated novels to his credit, Winton is a writer who continues to improve with each work that he publishes. In this latest work we are treated to seventeen exquisite overlapping tales of second thoughts and mid-life regret - turnings of all kinds. Beneath their surface robustness, these vivid stories are threaded through with subtleties and oblique connections. Winton writes with sharp clarity and with such sympathy for his characters that we are transported into their landscape, struggling with them to salvage their lives. His stories artfully clarify life’s abrupt turns, but it is his prose which makes this work exceptional with its liveliness and resonance.
Picador ‘Breath’ is narrated by Bruce Pike (‘Pikelet’), a young boy growing up in small mill town in coastal Australia. When he becomes friends with ‘Loonie’, the town’s wild boy, he seizes the opportunity to ignore his parents’ misgivings and hurl himself into the oceanic roar. Together they discover the pull and rush of surfing and the excitement of confronting their fears. They attach themselves to the enigmatic Sando, an experienced surfer who propels them into deeper and more treacherous waters. However, Sando and his wife’s addiction to risk creates dark undercurrents in their lives and poses challenges that affect and far outlast their adolescence. Tim Winton’s vivid and gritty language -‘men with fags-and-sawdust coughs who speak in the barking tones of the industrial deaf ‘- rings as true as ever, but his physical descriptions of the ocean in ‘Breath’ are truly remarkable, tangibly conjuring up the power and briny taste of the sea as well as the thrill and beauty of ‘dancing’ on waves.
Set in the wild landscape of Western Australia, this moving novel is about breaking with the past and of people stifled with grief or regret. Georgie Jutland is forty years old, her career is in ruins and she is socially isolated. Sapped of all self confidence, she barely recognises herself. To combat her loneliness, she develops an unlikely relationship with Luther Fox, the local poacher. Out of this dangerous encounter, however, develops something new and creative, which Winton describes as the music that sometimes arises from the dirt between two people whose dreams have been lost and their hopes dried up.
Dupont University with its marble halls of learning and well manicured green lawns seems a dream come true for sheltered and clever freshman, Charlotte Simmons, who has come up on a full scholarship. But she soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that sex, drugs and Cool take priority over academic performance in the popularity stakes. As Charlotte encounters Dupont's elite, she has to find her own way through a bewildering, contradictory mesh of values in her efforts to fit in. Wolfe charts Charlotte's progress of disillusionment with an uncanny eye which focuses mainly on the hypocrisy and hedonism of elite university academic life. Despite the odds, Charlotte does remain true to herself. She gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power and intellect which acts as a catalyst in the lives of her fellow students.
