Bulawayo broaches what it means to fight for democracy and call somewhere home in a timely and imaginative way . . . A memorable, funny and yet serious allegory about a country's plight under tyranny and what individual and collective freedom means in an age of virtual worlds and political soundbites
Franklin Nelson, Financial Times
It delivers, over the course of 400 pages of wordplay and animal magic, a surprisingly warm, intimate and, yes, human feeling
Melissa Katsoulis, The Times
We are in a new era.
From Trump, Putin and Bolsonaro to Erdogan, Xi and Modi, self-styled strongmen have become a central feature of global politics. At home, they claim to be standing up for ordinary people against 'globalist' elites; abroad, they posture as the embodiment of their nation. And everywhere they go, they encourage a cult of personality.
How and why did this new style of authoritarian leadership arrive? How likely is it to lead the world into war and economic collapse? And what liberal forces are in place, not only to keep these strongmen in check but to reverse the trend? The Age of the Strongman explores these essential questions and offers a bold new portrait of our world.
SUZUKI IS JUST AN ORDINARY MATHS TEACHER...UNTIL HIS WIFE IS MURDERED.
Seeking justice, he leaves his old life behind to infiltrate the criminal gang responsible. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of the most unusual professional assassins, each with their own agenda:
THE WHALE convinces his victims to take their own lives using just his words.
THE CICADA is a talkative and deadly knife expert.
THE PUSHER dispatches his targets in deadly traffic 'accidents'.
Suzuki must take on the three assassins to avenge his wife - but can he keep his innocence in a world of seasoned killers?
THEIR MISSION IS MURDER. HIS IS REVENGE.
Empire Falls, Maine: once a thriving hub of industry, this small town nestles in a bend of the vast and winding Knox River, and has always been the empire of the wealthy Whiting family. Now the last Mrs Whiting presides like a black widow spider over its declining fortunes. She harbours a grudge against her employee Miles Groby, who runs the Whiting-owned Empire Grill, but hopes one day to own it himself. Miles, gentle and hopeless, has other problems: his wife has run off with his worst customer, he frets about his adored teenage daughter, and his drunken father sponges off everyone.
As the novel builds to a shocking climax, Russo constantly surprises with characters who will disarm you, a plot with as many twists and falls as the Knox River itself, and an ending that will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.
It's 1967 and London is alive with the new youth revolution. In the suburbs, meanwhile, Phyllis Fischer inhabits a world of conventional stability. Married with two children, her life is both comfortable and predictable.
But when Nicky - a twenty-something friend of the family - visits one hot summer evening and kisses Phyllis in the dark of the garden, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations . . .
Love sonnets are for romantics, starry-eyed lovers and ardent hearts. And Shakespeare's sonnets are the best ever written. But this is why they are also for cynics, for star-crossed lovers and for those who know the anguish of unrequited love.
Some appear to be written to a young man, some to a woman. And although the poems are full of mystery - why did Shakespeare write them, and to whom? - each one speaks to us from across the centuries of love, hate and the intensity of being alive.
A brilliantly wide-ranging essay collection from the author of My Struggle, spanning literature, philosophy, art and how our daily and creative lives intertwine.
In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English, and these brilliant and wide-ranging pieces meditate on themes familiar from his groundbreaking fiction.
Here, Knausgaard discusses Madame Bovary, the Northern Lights, Ingmar Bergman, and the work of an array of writers and visual artists, including Knut Hamsun, Michel Houellebecq, Anselm Kiefer and Cindy Sherman.
These essays beautifully capture Knausgaard's ability to mediate between the deeply personal and the universal, demonstrating his trademark self-scrutiny and his deep longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world.
'Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive' New York Times
It was 1941 when the German army rolled into Kyiv. The young Anatoli was just twelve years old. This book is formed from his journals in which he documented what followed.
Many Ukrainians welcomed the invading army, hoping for liberation from Soviet rule. But within ten days the Nazis had begun their campaign of murdering every Jew, and many others, in the city. Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) was the place where the executions took place. It was one of the largest massacres in the history of the Holocaust. Anatoli could hear the machine guns from his house.
This gripping book is the story of Ukraine's Nazi occupation, told by one ordinary, brave child. His clear, compelling voice, his honesty and his determination to survive guide us through the horrors of that time. Babi Yar has the compulsion and narration of fiction but everything recounted in this book is true.
Ernest Hemingway's adventure novel set on the verge of the tropics.
'Listen,' I told him. 'Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.'
Harry Morgan is a tough guy making his living during the Depression from his motor boat in Key West, Florida. Although he normally takes out fishing parties, sometimes his boat can be put to other uses. If the money offered is worth his while, Harry will run guns, rum and men to and from Cuba. But he is playing a dicey game. Hemingway's hardest hero risks not just his living, but his life.
'Absorbing and moving. It opens with a fusillade of bullets, reaches its climax with another, and sustains a high pitch of excitement throughout' Times Literary Supplement
Elizabeth Anscombe: defiantly brilliant, chain-smoking, trouser-wearing Catholic and (eventual) mother of seven.
Philippa Foot: pathalogically discreet, quietly rebellious granddaughter of a US president.
Mary Midgley: witty scholar and careful observer of humans and animals alike.
Iris Murdoch: aspiring novelist and Francophile with the power to seduce (almost) anyone.
Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a vivid portrait of the endeavours and achievements of these four remarkable women. As undergraduates at Oxford during the Second World War, they shared ideas (as well as shoes, sofas and lovers). From the disorder and despair of war, they went on to breathe new life into philosophy, creating a radically fresh way of thinking about freedom, reality and human goodness that is there for us today.
Social media is supposed to bring us together - but it is tearing us apart. 'A blisteringly good, urgent, essential read' Zadie Smith
The evidence suggests that social media is making us sadder, angrier, less empathetic, more fearful, more isolated and more tribal. Jaron Lanier is the world-famous Silicon Valley scientist-pioneer who first alerted us to the dangers of social media.
In this witty and urgent manifesto he explains why its toxic effects are at the heart of its design, and, in ten simple arguments, why liberating yourself from its hold will transform your life and the world for the better. WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR 'Informed, heartfelt and often entertaining ... a timely reminder that even if we can't bring ourselves to leave social media altogether, we should always think critically about how it works' Sunday Times 'Indispensable.
Everyone who wants to understand the digital world, its pitfalls and possibilities should read this book - now' Matthew d'Ancona, author of Post-Truth
It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them'
Huck Finn spits, swears, smokes a pipe and never goes to school. With his too-big clothes and battered straw hat, Huck is in need of 'civilising', and the Widow Douglas is determined to take him in hand. And wouldn't you know, Huck's no-good Pap is also after him and he locks Huck up in his cabin in the woods. But Huck won't stand too much of this, and after a daring escape, he takes off down the Mississppi on a raft with an runaway slave called Jim. But plenty of dangers wait for them along the river - will they survive and win their freedom?
BACKSTORY: Discover how to write secret messages in code, and learn about the extraordinary Mark Twain.
Cleveland, Ohio, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily. They share a passion for Edward Albee and ecstasy and fall hard and fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school and joins the army.
Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him. His fellow soldiers smoke; they huff computer duster; they take painkillers; they watch porn. And many of them die. He and Emily try to make their long-distance marriage work, but when he returns from Iraq, his PTSD is profound, and the drugs on the street have changed. The opioid crisis is beginning to swallow up the Midwest.
Soon he is hooked on heroin, and so is Emily. They attempt a normal life, but with their money drying up, he turns to the one thing he thinks he could be really good at - robbing banks.
Hammered out on a prison typewriter, Cherry marks the arrival of a raw, bleakly hilarious, and surprisingly poignant voice straight from the dark heart of America.
Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated.
Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections. Atomised tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is the dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls' magazines. A dissection of modern lives and loves.
By turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.
First published in 1962, a year after Revolutionary Road, this sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Out of the lives of Manhattan office workers, a cab driver seeking immortality, frustrated would-be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true - and just beginning to ring a little hollow.
From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and SteelMore than 98 % of human genes are shared with two species of chimpanzee. The 'third' chimpanzee is man. Jared Diamond surveys our life-cycle, culture, sexuality and destructive urges both towards ourselves and the planet to explore the ways in which we are uniquely human yet still influenced by our animal origins.
A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.
A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.
Václav Havel’s remarkable and rousing essay on the tyranny of apathy, with a new introduction by Timothy Snyder
Cowed by life under Communist Party rule, a greengrocer hangs a placard in their shop window: Workers of the world, unite! Is it a sign of the grocer’s unerring ideology? Or a symbol of the lies we perform to protect ourselves?
Written in 1978, Václav Havel’s meditation on political dissent – the rituals of its suppression, and the sparks that re-ignite it – would prove the guiding manifesto for uniting Solidarity movements across the Soviet Union. A portrait of activism in the face of falsehood and intimidation, The Power of the Powerless remains a rousing call against the allure of apathy.
'Havel’s diagnosis of political pathologies has a special resonance in the age of Trump' Pankaj Mishra
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD AND DAVID BRADSHAW
Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...
Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece.
**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
Barthes investigation into the meaning of photographs is a seminal work of twentieth-century critical theory. This is a special Vintage Design Edition, with fold-out cover and stunning photography throughout. Examining themes of presence and absence, these reflections on photography begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs - their content, their pull on the viewer, their intimacy. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind. He was grieving for his mother at the time of writing. Strikingly personal, yet one of the most important early academic works on photography, Camera Lucida remains essential reading for anyone interested in the power of images. 'Effortlessly, as if in passing, his reflections on photography raise questions and doubts which will permanently affect the vision of the reader' Guardian
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