Moving beyond travelogue, V. S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization.
Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul’s journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as the country does, in South Africa.
Focusing upon the theme of belief – though sometimes the political or economical realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account – Naipaul examines the fragile but enduring quality of the old world of magic. To witness the ubiquity of such ancient ritual, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of this book.
A ruthless satire of academic life, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury is a witty campus novel and one of the most influential books of the 1970s.
Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That’s your problem-solving system . . . But haven’t we tried all that?
Howard Kirk, native son of the Swinging Sixties, radical university lecturer, and one half of a very modern marriage, is throwing a party. The night will have all sorts of repercussions: for Henry Beamish, Howard’s desperate and easily neglected friend, and for Howard’s wife, promiscuous ’70s liberal and exhausted victim of motherhood.
Funny, disconcerting and provocative, this fiftieth anniversary edition of Bradbury's classic novel brilliantly satirizes a world of academic power struggles as his anti-hero seduces his way around campus. It also reveals a marriage in crisis and demonstrates the fragility of the human heart.
Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.
Over one million copies sold
Too many broken hearts to count
The 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition
‘A book unlike any other’ – The Guardian
‘This novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship’ – Dua Lipa
This exclusive 10th anniversary edition of A Little Life features artwork by acclaimed artists RF. Alvarez and Linus Borgo, painted in response to the book, as well as a Q&A with Hanya Yanagihara.
JB, Jude, Malcolm and Willem.
Four young men move to New York broke, adrift and buoyed only by friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem; the sardonic painter JB; Malcolm, a frustrated architect; and Jude, brilliant and enigmatic – their centre of gravity.
Winner of Fiction of the Year at the British Book Awards
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize
Finalist for the US National Book Award for Fiction
A perfect world. A betrayal that could shatter everything.
'Every sentence keeps you hanging in the air, waiting for the next punch to the gut' - Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
'A hard diamond of a novel . . . I have not stopped thinking of it since' - Coco Mellors, author of Blue Sisters
For thirty years, Amos and Emerson have built a life others envy. Their wives are close, their teenage daughters have grown up together, their days are passed in the comfortable languor of New York City wealth. Their bond seems unbreakable.
This weekend, however, something is different. After gathering for Emerson’s birthday at his country home, celebration gives way to old rivalries and resentments. When tensions erupt, their finely made world is ruptured in one shocking act of violence.
In its wake, each must ask: when your world collapses, what — and who — will you sacrifice to survive?
Hal Ebbott’s Among Friends is a razor-sharp look at the dark side of American wealth, the brittle foundations of friendship, and the desperate lengths we go to to keep our secrets hidden.
‘Bracingly honest and affectingly intimate’ The Guardian
'Assured, acutely perceptive and beautifully written’ Financial Times
'Packs a huge emotional punch. I couldn’t put it down' Daily Mail
‘I’m already begging my friends to read it so we can discuss the ending’ ELLE
'Like a cold gin and tonic on a hot day' The Washington Post
Molly Jong-Fast is the daughter of acclaimed writer Erica Jong. How to Lose Your Mother is Molly’s delicious and despairing memoir about that intense mother–daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and how that can really mess you up. But with her mother’s heartbreaking descent into dementia, and Molly’s realization that she is going to lose this remarkable woman, it is also a story of love, loss, confusion and deep grief.
Honest, moving and brutally funny, How to Lose Your Mother takes us behind the scenes of a fascinating and sometimes tumultuous family dynamic, revels in the gossipy details of Erica’s famous friends and enemies, and leaves us with a better understanding of our own most precious relationships.
The final novel in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove quartet, Streets of Laredo is an exhilarating and achingly poignant tale of heroism and friendship, set in the American West.
Captain Woodrow Call, Gus McCrae’s old partner, once a youthful Texas Ranger, is now a bounty hunter hired to track down a brutal young Mexican bandit. Riding with Call are an Eastern city slicker, a witless deputy, and one of the last members of the Hat Creek outfit, Pea Eye Parker, now married to Lorena – once Gus’s sweetheart.
Their long, perilous chase leads them across the last wild stretches of the West into a hellhole known as Crow Town and, finally, deep into the vast, relentless plains of the Texas frontier.
Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.
Taking you deep into the heart of the American West, Dead Man’s Walk is the first book in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove quartet.
These are the wild days when Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call – heroes of Lonesome Dove – first encounter the untamed frontier that will form their characters.
Not yet twenty, Gus and Call enlist as Texas Rangers under the command of Caleb Cobb, a capricious outlaw determined to seize Santa Fe from the Mexicans. The two young men experience their first great adventure in the barren, empty landscape of the great plains, in which arbitrary violence is the only law – whether from nature, or from those whose territory they must cross in order to reach New Mexico.
Danger, sacrifice and fear test Gus and Call to the limits of endurance, as they seek the strength and courage to survive against almost insurmountable odds in the West of early nineteenth-century America.
Continue the series set in the Wild West with Comanche Moon.
The second book in the Lonesome Dove quartet, Comanche Moon, which follows on from Dead Man’s Walk, follows Rangers Gus and Call in their bitter struggle to protect the advancing West frontier against the defiant Comanches, courageously determined to defend their territory and their way of life. It showcases Larry McMurtry’s strong affinity for the landscape and its inhabitants with a deeply felt lyrical intensity.
On the wild Texas frontier where barbarism and civilization come in many forms, Rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call are pitched into the long, bitter, bloody fighting under the command of Captain Inish Scull.
When Scull’s favourite horse is stolen by the Comanches, he decides to track him down, leaving Gus and Call in charge. However, on their return to Austin, Gus is greeted by the news that his sweetheart is to marry another man and Call finds that the town’s most notorious woman is desperate to settle down with him and become respectable. When Scull’s wealthy wife demands that her errant husband be brought home, with feelings akin to relief the two men set off once more into the vast, untamed plains . . .
Continue the series set in the American West with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove.
Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.
But Dunky Logan, a 15-year-old brought up in a tenement flat in working-class Kilcaddie, is ditching school to be a labourer on a local farm. Dead set on becoming a hard case, he wants to work shoulder to shoulder with so-called real men.
Irish Catholic Mary O’Donnell arrives at the farmhouse as the new maid. She is pregnant - no boyfriend in sight. But she’s smart, and she has a plan to get herself up in the world.
As Dunky is swallowed up by a vicious cycle of violence, betrayal, and booze, Mary becomes entangled in a savage family feud.
The love story of the century
A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn - perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future.
And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?
Some Hope is the third in Edward St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical series, The Patrick Melrose novels.
Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd of flitting social dragonflies, he finds his search for redemption and capacity for forgiveness challenged by his observation of the cruelties around him. Armed with his biting wit and a newly fashioned openness, can Patrick, who has been to the furthest limits of experience and back again, find release from the savageries of his childhood?
This title was originally published, along with Never Mind and Bad News, as part of a three-book omnibus, also called Some Hope.
Natsuki Books was a tiny second-hand bookshop on the edge of town. Inside, towering shelves reached the ceiling, every one crammed full of wonderful books. Rintaro Natsuki loved this space that his grandfather had created. He spent many happy hours there, reading whatever he liked. It was the perfect refuge for a boy who tended to be something of a recluse.
After the death of his grandfather, Rintaro is devastated and alone. It seems he will have to close the shop. Then, a talking tabby cat called Tiger appears and asks Rintaro for help. The cat needs a book lover to join him on a mission. This odd couple will go on three magical adventures to save books from people who have imprisoned, mistreated and betrayed them. Finally, there is one last rescue that Rintaro must attempt alone . . .
Sosuke Natsukawa’s international bestseller, translated from Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai, is a life-affirming story for those for whom books are so much more than words on paper. Now read the second book in the series: The Cat Who Saved the Library.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a breakup, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Nanami sees nothing wrong with a library and cat combination. But a talking cat is a whole other story.
Thirteen-year-old Nanami Kosaki loves reading. The local library is a home from home and books have become her best friends. When Nanami notices books disappearing from the library shelves, she’s particularly curious about a suspicious man in a grey suit whose furtive behaviour doesn’t feel right. Should she follow him to see what he’s up to?
When a talking tabby cat called Tiger appears to warn her about how dangerous that would be, together they’re brave enough to follow the frightening trail to find out where all the books have gone. Will Nanami and Tiger overcome the challenges of the adventure ahead?
Warm, wonderful and wise, Sosuke Natsukawa's The Cat Who Saved the Library is also a powerful lesson never to underestimate the value of great literature, and a reminder always to think for ourselves, no matter what our charismatic leaders might say.
A memoir about thinking and reading, eating and denying your body food, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.
In the household of Sarah Moss's childhood she learnt that the female body and mind were battlegrounds. 1970s austerity and second-wave feminism came together: she must keep herself slim but never be vain, she must be intelligent but never angry, she must be able to cook and sew and make do and mend, but know those skills were frivolous. Clever girls should be ambitious but women must restrain themselves. Women had to stay small.
Years later, her self-control had become dangerous, and Sarah found herself in A&E. The return of her teenage anorexia had become a medical emergency, forcing her to reckon with all that she had denied her hard-working body and furiously turning mind.
My Good Bright Wolf navigates contested memories of girlhood, the chorus of relentless and controlling voices that dogged Sarah’s every thought, and the writing and books in which she could run free. Beautiful, audacious, moving and very funny, this memoir is a remarkable exercise in the way a brain turns on itself, and then finds a way out.
From Sarah Moss, the Sunday Times bestselling author of Summerwater, My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir like no other.
Bad News is the second of Edward St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, adapted for TV for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the aristocratic addict, Patrick.
Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his father’s ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patrick’s remorseless search for drugs on the avenues of Manhattan, haunted by old acquaintances and insistent inner voices, sends him into a nightmarish spiral. Alone in his room at the Pierre Hotel, he pushes body and mind to the very edge – desperate always to stay one step ahead of his rapidly encroaching past.
Bad News was originally published, along with Never Mind and Some Hope, as part of a three-book omnibus also called Some Hope.
A woman determined to make her mark. A journey that will change everything.
Paris, 1895. Glamour hides a city on the brink. One morning, a young woman boards the Granville express with a deadly plan.
On the journey lives intertwine in explosive ways. There are the railway crew who have everything to lose, a little boy travelling alone for the first time, an elderly statesman with his fragile wife and a lonely artist far from home.
The train speeds towards the City of Light and into a future that will change everything . . .
Craig Suder, third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is in a slump. His batting average is shocking, his marriage somehow worse, and he secretly fears he’s inherited his mother’s insanity. Ordered to take a midseason rest, Suder instead takes his LP of Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” and flees.
A dazzling tale of madness, confinement and the need for escape, Suder introduced Percival Everett to the world as a writer already fully capable of conjuring whole lives and worlds on the page.
David Larson can never go home.
His parents are dead. His sister and her hippie husband, staunchly anti-war, won't even have the newly returned Vietnam veteran in the house. So Larson takes his chances on the road, travelling west from Georgia until he breaks down in the nowhere town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming.
There he finds lodging with Chloë Sixbury, a one-legged sexagenarian widow, and her disabled son. Their ersatz family is complete when Larson takes in Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at the highway rest stop where he works, but at the edge of this tableau lingers the unmistakable spectre of violence.
Blending the grotesquerie of the Southern Gothic with the Western's codes of frontier justice, in Walk Me to the Distance Percival Everett renders a vivid and haunting landscape of the American badlands, where cruelty is the lingua franca.
Part travelogue, part reportage, part autobiography, The Sign of the Cross is the story of Colm Tóibín's religious pilgrimage across Europe.
Between 1990 and 1994, Colm Tóibín made a series of trips through Catholic Europe. His journey led him into close contact with people from all walks of life, from priests to politicians, from the intellectually open to the spiritually bigoted. He then set down his impressions in The Sign of the Cross, a beautifully written book filled with personal detail set within its historical context.
Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature
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