People kept asking: Why would you have cats that don’t love you back?
The morning after Courtney Gustafson moved into an old house in the Poets Square neighbourhood of Tucson, Arizona, she noticed tiny pawprints all over her driveway. They were the first evidence of a colony of feral cats who would, in time, become part of her family and help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life.
Beebs was the first cat to appear, allowing herself to be petted in the driveway. And then came so many others. There was Monkey, the hissing, dark-blotched calico, and Reverse Monkey, her timid, white-blotched opposite. There were Sad Boy and Lola, the inseparable pair who made their way across the internet and into strangers’ wedding vows. There was the sweet, serene Dr. Big Butt, who brought lessons about grief. And there was Goldie, the tiny king of Poets Square: sick, skinny, but completely unafraid. These cats – and many, many others – would expand her world spectacularly.
Poets Square is a love letter to community in a broken society, told through the cats Courtney meets in dark alleys, neglected homes and her own driveway; cats she cherishes and must sometimes let go. Above all, she explores what her encounters with feral cats can teach us about care, connectedness and the power
of hope.
It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West's spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy.
But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley will soon find himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come, and strike at the heart of his greatest enemy…
Set in the missing decade between two iconic instalments in the George Smiley saga, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Nick Harkaway's Karla's Choice is an extraordinary, thrilling return to the world of spy fiction's greatest writer, John le Carré.
Razor-sharp, pugnacious and blackly funny, Wang Xiaobo’s essays established him as one of China’s most popular – and subversive – writers. From the political power of silence to the irrepressible spirit of a pig he met while working in a commune, these reflections on life and literature in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution provide a rare glimpse of a fearless satirical genius.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name
Nuns, maidens, adventurers – with electricity, The Story of an Hour collects stories of female freedom, as Kate Chopin asks the question: what will emancipation feel like for her, looking at the horizon and the future, to the frontier?
Journey into space with Polish scifi master Stanislaw Lem. The whimsical time-loops of Ijon Tichy’s cosmic adventure ‘The Seventh Voyage’ are reminiscent of Douglas Adams, while the spectral whispers haunting Pirx the Pilot as he navigates his spaceship to Mars in ‘Terminus’, echo the author’s masterpiece Solaris. Then ‘The Mask’ introduces a perfect robot assassin and asks, can AI fall in love or refuse its programming? What if the target of its affections is also its prey?
All moonlight is moving, wherever it may be…
Japanese gentlewoman Sei Shonagon invites us to look behind the painted screens in the Emperor’s palace and discover a lost world, in which games of poetry are the highest form of wit, lovers send each other elegant morning-after letters, and appreciation of the natural world – wild geese in autumn, the pure white frost of winter – is one of life’s most exquisite pleasures.
In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain; to narrowly escape execution by your own side; to kill a man with a borrowed rifle and feel nothing but shame. Moving and shrapnel-sharp, A Moment of War recalls the defeat of idealism; ‘that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck’.
Wu Cheng’en’s 16th-century novel Journey to the West is widely regarded as one of the most important Chinese novels ever written. Here, in Julia Lovell’s witty and charismatic translation, we meet one of its heroes: Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, whose powers include shape-shifting, immortality and being incredibly rude. Though he rises to a position of power in the heavenly bureaucracy, Monkey King’s arrogant exploits attract the attention of the Buddha – with very unfortunate consequences.
I am not a man, I am dynamite
Weeks before his final mental breakdown, Nietzsche set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo is the result. A summary of his life’s work as a philosopher, with chapter headings including ‘Why I Am So Wise’ and ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, it is part mocking self-judgement and part battle cry, and remains one of the most singular, strange examples of the genre ever written.
On a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain’s wife in the nude and becomes obsessed with her. But Captain Penderton – unhappily married to the unfaithful Leonora – in turn erotically fixates on Williams. Spare, muscular and sensual, with the dramatic vision of a Greek myth, Carson McCullers’ novella is a timeless work about the alienation of forbidden desire.
Muriel Spark claimed The Driver’s Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise – heading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily garish dress and with violence on her mind – you will understand why.
And this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy!’
A bashful dragon, a lost wood-sprite, the prophet Elijah and the Devil disguised as a middle-aged woman appear in these playful, exuberant stories by Vladimir Nabokov. So do a vengeful husband, a barber confronting his torturer and the author himself, as he recalls his first love. Each of the thirteen tales here enchants and enraptures us, only to gleefully confound our expectations.
The whole town got involved with the hunger-artist; from day to day of his starving, people’s participation grew; everyone wanted to see the hunger-artist at least once a day; on the later days there were season-ticket holders who sat for days on end in front of his little cage
Reading these stories by the master of the absurd is like entering a dreamworld in which nothing, and yet somehow everything, makes sense.
Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale’
In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull of a mysterious pavilion in the lush grounds, and the terrible secret she buried there many years ago . . .
On the fields of Troy, war is raging. At its centre is Achilles: godlike, swift-footed, the greatest champion of the Greeks. But when his pride is wounded and he refuses to fight, the thread of fate begins to spin . . . From frenzied rampages to intimate moments of grief, this selection from Homer’s Iliad traces the tale of a warrior whose name echoes through the ages, and whose story remains as powerful as ever.
“All art,” Oscar Wilde once announced, “is quite useless.” Selected here are some of his finest prose works on the subject of art – useless, illuminating, artificial, uplifting, radical, gorgeous, boring, sublime – and his most brilliant aphorisms on the creative life. Whether lamenting the crass urge to hold art to realist or natural standards or arguing against morality as a guiding principle, Wilde defends the artist while delighting the audience.
Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity.
Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the journeys of three pilots delivering mail overnight. The author’s beautiful, weightless prose is as haunting as his own disappearance in flight, eerily foreshadowed by his protagonist Fabien, who becomes lost in otherworldly darkness. Letter to a Hostage, Saint-Exupéry’s meditation on displacement and friendship, also explores solitude and questions the human condition.
‘I walked in a daze of illusions toward my future.’
Deeply felt and told with an intrepid spirit, Tales from the Heart are the intimate, formative stories from the childhood of the legendary Caribbean writer, Maryse Condé.
These affecting vignettes follow Condé’s early encounters with love, grief, friendship, as she navigates the pernicious legacy of slavery and colonialism in her home of Guadeloupe and as a student in Paris.
It is 1837 and a brilliant German artist sets out to cross the mountains between Chile and Argentina. Perhaps nobody before him has been able to paint the sights that unfold: vast chasms, surreal plants and animals… But then something goes appallingly wrong.
This is one of Aira’s great works, filled with his baffling ability to veer between grandeur and absurdity. Each page fails to provide clues as to what lies in wait for the reader on the next.
Arrested in Cologne for remarking that the Fuhrer looked sweaty, nineteen-year-old Sanna has fled to Frankfurt. But her troubles are far from over. Her best friend Gerti has fallen for a Jewish boy, her brother writes books that have been blacklisted, and her own aunt could turn her in to the authorities at any moment. Darkly humorous and utterly heart rending, this gripping novel vividly captures the terror and hysteria of pre-war Nazi Germany.
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