eong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye’s decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister’s husband, a video artist. She becomes the focus of his increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, while spiralling further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming – impossibly, ecstatically – a tree.
Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend’s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma.
Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense
Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.
From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.
Juan Gay lies dying in a room in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert. There, a young man cares for him - someone whom Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since.
As the end approaches, the two trade stories - resurrecting lost loves, mothers and fathers - and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of sexuality, pathology and oppression. And, through their conversations, another story is told: that of the radical queer anthropologist Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served.
Blending fact with fiction, and drawing on oral histories and historical records, screenplay, testimony and image, Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure - on the ways in which stories sustain histories.
Having married her childhood sweetheart, Riko now finds herself trapped in a relationship that has been soured by infidelity. One day, by chance, she runs into her old friend Mr Takaoka, who offers friendship, love, and an unusual escape: he teaches her the trick of living inside her dreams. And so, each night, she sinks into another life: first as a high-ranking courtesan in the 17th century, and then as a serving lady to a princess in the late Middle Ages. As she experiences desire and heartbreak in the past, so Riko comes to reconsider her life as a 21st century woman, as a wife, as a mother, and as a lover, and to ask herself whether, after loving her husband and loving Mr Takaoka, she is now ready for her third great love.
Birnam Wood is on the move... Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards.
For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.
But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker - or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land.
But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
Addiction is possible to describe, but hard to explore. From the outside, it can look life wilful, arrogant self-destruction; from the inside, it can feel as inevitable and insistent as a heartbeat.
Reader, your life is full of choices. Some will bring you joy and others will bring you heartache. Will you choose to cheat (in life, the examination that follows) or will you choose to copy? Will you fall in love? If so, will you remember her name and the number of freckles on her back? Will you marry, divorce, annul? Will you leave your run-down neighbourhood, your long-suffering country and your family? Will you honour your dead, those you loved and those you didn't? Will you have a child, will you regret it? Will you tell them you regret it? Will you, when all's said and done, deserve a kick in the balls? Will you find, here, in this slender book, fictions that entertain and puzzle you? Fictions that reflect yourself back to you? Will you find yourself? Relax, concentrate, dispel any anxious thoughts.
Let the world around you settle and fade. Are you ready? Now turn over your papers, and begin.
Following on from the success of Men Explain Things to Me comes a new collection of essays in which Rebecca Solnit opens up a feminism for all of us: one that doesn’t stigmatize women’s lives, whether they include spouses and children or not; that brings empathy to the silences in men’s lives as well as the silencing of women’s lives; celebrates the ways feminism has shifted in recent years to reclaim rape jokes, revise canons, and rethink our everyday lives.
Rebecca Solnit’s essay ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ has become a touchstone of the feminist movement, inspired the term ‘mansplaining’, and established Solnit as one of the leading feminist thinkers of our time – one who has inspired everyone from radical activists to Beyoncé Knowles. Collected here in print for the first time is the essay itself, along with the best of Solnit’s feminist writings.
From rape culture to mansplaining, from French sex scandals to marriage and the nuclear family, from Virginia Woolf to colonialism, these essays are a fierce and incisive exploration of the issues that a patriarchal culture will not necessarily acknowledge as ‘issues’ at all. With grace and energy, and in the most exquisite and inviting of prose, Rebecca Solnit proves herself a vital leading figure of the feminist movement and a radical, humane thinker.
Nolan Jackson is a journeyman carpenter by trade and an itinerant by nature. While fellow Americans fight in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he builds tract homes across the west of America, travelling between jobs. Following a shocking workplace accident in his temporary home of Las Vegas, he uproots himself from the relationships he has made to head west towards the ocean. On his way he passes through his brother's town and is forced to stay put after an unexpected accident. Bereft of his car and his tools, with only the little-used and much-neglected mechanisms of his heart, Nolan turns to the task of building the foundations of a meaningful life.
'These stories of bewilderment, heartbreak and psychotropics will charm you with their humour and stun you with wisdom that's both rigorous and compassionate'
Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody is Ever Missing
The State We're In is the first new collection in a decade from the writer that John Updike credited with creating 'an entirely different kind of short story'. Cool, ironic and witty, these stories are sharply observed, but underpinned with a quiet tenderness. Told through the voices of vivid and engaging women of all ages, The State We're In explores their doubts and desires and reveals the unexpected moments and glancing epiphanies of daily life. Some of Beattie's idiosyncratic and compelling characters have arrived in the coastal state of Maine by accident, while others are trying to escape. The collection is woven around Jocelyn, a disaffected teenager living with her aunt and uncle for the summer, forging new friendships, avoiding her mother's calls, taking writing classes, and encountering mortality for the first time. Beattie's voice is mesmerising and her keen insight into the human heart cuts through our preconceptions and prejudices. The State We're In is a pitch-perfect meditation on the singular strangeness of life.
Austin Duffy grew up in Ireland and studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin. He is a practising medical oncologist at the National Cancer Institute in Washington DC, where he now lives with his wife and son. In 2011, Duffy was awarded RTE's Francis MacManus award for his short story 'Orca'. This Living and Immortal Thing is his first novel.
After returning from a pleasant holiday with his wife, Astrid, and their two children, Thomas walks out the front door. Thomas walks up the street. Thomas keeps walking. Astrid gradually realizes that her husband has not just gotten up early to go to work. She waits for as long as she can and then puts as much energy as she can into trying to find him - coming to understand, along the way, that there is little she can do if Thomas is striving to stay lost. In precise and hypnotic prose that cuts as cleanly as a scalpel, To the Back of Beyond is a novel that takes away the safe foundations of a marriage and a lifestyle to ask deeper questions about identity, connection and how free we are to change our lives. It is a graceful and resonant work from one of Europe's most important writers.
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