It is a book I reread every few years - for the pure pleasure and skill of it' Michael Ondaatje 'Don't pick this up if you want a night's sleep' Scotsman When she is sent to an orphanage at the age of eight, Beth Harmon soon discovers two ways to escape her surroundings, albeit fleetingly: playing chess and taking the little green pills given to her and the other children to keep them subdued. Before long, it becomes apparent that hers is a prodigious talent, and as she progresses to the top of the US chess rankings she is able to forge a new life for herself.
But she can never quite overcome her urge to self-destruct. For Beth, there's more at stake than merely winning and losing. 'I loved it. I just loved it, it really drew me in and I know nothing about chess... The writing about addiction is just fantastic. I underlined so many bits of it... I didn't want it to end' Bryony Gordon on BBC Radio 4'Few novelists have written about genius - and addiction - as acutely as Walter Tevis' Telegraph
Short stories from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of History of Wolves.
These are stories about how people grow together and pull apart, the strangeness of lives lived at close quarters. Envy, distrust, confidence, collusion, hope - in this remarkable collection, Emily Fridlund delves into the small lies and large truths that make up our lives. Selected by Ben Marcus as winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
On the day of her wedding-dance, Ada feels lucky. She loves her broad-shouldered, bashful husband and her job as an apprentice midwife.
But her luck will not last. It is every woman’s duty to have a child, to replace those that were lost in the Great Flu. And after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are hanged as witches, Ada’s survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.
She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang. Its leader, a charismatic preacher-turned-robber, known to all as The Kid, wants to create a safe haven for women outcast from society. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan. And Ada must decide whether she’s willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.
When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mother?
Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOTHER is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.
On the day of their estranged father’s wedding, half-sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It’s been years since the two have seen each other – Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle after a failed marriage, Livy works refinishing boats – but the promise of a shot at financial security brings the two together to claim what’s theirs.
Except: instead of money, their father gives them information – a name – that reveals a stunning family secret. In the face of their new reality, the sisters each set out on journeys that will test their faith in each other, as well as their definitions of freedom.
Moving from Seattle’s underground to the docks of the Far North, from the hideaways of the southern swamps to the storied reaches of the Great Offshore Grounds, this is an epic tale told with boundless verve, linguistic vitality and undeniable tenderness – a book that fearlessly reimagines what the ‘great American novel’ can do.
A deeply moving picaresque… Veselka is a remarkable writer, able to break through the surfaces of her narrative to reveal the animal chaos underneath’ Los Angeles Times
‘This is a novel that feels like hitchhiking: the route is unpredictable but fated and exciting, with an air of treachery… Thrilling’ Vulture
How Mass Migration Will Reshape the World – and What It Means for You
Where will you live in 2030? Where will your children settle in 2040? What will the map of humanity look like in 2050?
In the 60,000 years since people began colonising the continents, a recurring feature of human civilisation has been mobility - the constant search for resources and stability. Seismic global events - wars and genocides, revolutions and pandemics - have only accelerated the process. The map of humanity isn't settled, not now, not ever.
As climate change tips toward full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilise and technology disrupts, we're entering a new age of mass migrations - one that will scatter both the dispossessed and the well-off. Which areas will people abandon and where will they resettle? Which countries will accept or reject them? As today's world population, which includes four billion restless youth, votes with their feet, what map of human geography will emerge?
Here global strategy advisor Parag Khanna provides an illuminating and authoritative vision of the next phase of human civilisation - one that is both mobile and sustainable. As the book explores, in the years ahead people will move to where the resources are and technologies will flow to the people who need them, returning us to our nomadic roots while building more secure habitats. Move is a fascinating look at the deep trends that are shaping the most likely scenarios for the future. Most importantly, it guides each of us as we determine our optimal location on humanity's ever-changing map.
After 1933, as the brutal terror regime took hold, most of the two-thirds of Germans who had never voted for the Nazis – some 20 million people – tried to keep their heads down and protect their families.
They moved to the country, or pretended to support the regime to avoid being denounced by neighbours, and tried to work out what was really happening in the Reich, surrounded as they were by Nazi propaganda and fake news. They lived in constant fear. Yet many ordinary Germans found the courage to resist. Catrine Clay argues that it was a much greater number than was ever formally recorded. Her ground-breaking book focuses on six very different characters. They are not seen in isolation but as part of their families. Each experiences the momentous events of Nazi history as they unfold in their own small lives – Good Germans all.
Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her.
I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate. The man was famous, the fate obscure; not a bad balance.'Lavinia is the daughter of the King of Latium, a victorious warrior who loves peace; she is her father's closest companion. Now of an age to wed, Lavinia's mother favours her own kinsman, King Turnus of Rutulia, handsome, heroic, everything a young girl should want.
Instead, Lavinia dreams of mighty Aeneas, a man she has heard of only from a ghost of a poet, who comes to her in the gods' holy place and tells her of her future, and Aeneas' past... If she refuses to wed Turnus, Lavinia knows she will start a war - but her fate was set the moment the poet appeared to her in a dream and told her of the adventurer who fled fallen Troy, holding his son's hand and carrying his father on his back…
‘Arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music,’ says Jimi Hendrix’s citation in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. James Marshall Hendrix remains unique as an African American who broke out of the traditional ‘Black’ genres of blues, r&b and soul to play hard rock to an overwhelmingly white audience, almost single-handedly creating what became known as heavy metal.
With unprecedented access to Jimi’s younger brother, Leon, the two most important women in his life and numerous previously untapped sources, bestselling music biographer Philip Norman resurrects the real Jimi from the almost mythical icon who has continued to influence young guitarists. His death in 1970, aged only twenty-seven when his fame was at its height, has long been rock’s greatest unsolved mystery. But finally we learn where the responsibility lay for Jimi’s lonely, squalid end.
‘An engaging memorial to a rock revolutionary whose music, in contrast to many of his revered Sixties peers, retains much of its explosively thrilling voodoo power’ The Times
John Lennon was a rock star, a school clown, a writer, a wit, an iconoclast, a sometime peace activist and finally an eccentric millionaire. He was also a Beatle – his plain-speaking and impudent rejection of authority catching, and eloquently articulating, the group’s moment in history.
Chronicling a famously troubled life, Being John Lennon analyses the contradictions in the singer-songwriter’s creative and destructive personality.
Drawing on many interviews and conversations with Lennon, his first wife Cynthia and second Yoko Ono, as well as his girlfriend May Pang and song-writing partner Paul McCartney, Ray Connolly unsparingly reassesses the chameleon nature of the perpetually dissatisfied star who just couldn’t stop reinventing himself.
Olga is an orphan raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village around the turn of the 20th century. Smart and precocious, she fights against the prejudices of the time to find her place in a world that sees her as second-best.
When she falls in love with Herbert, a local aristocrat obsessed with the era’s dreams of power, glory and greatness, her life is irremediably changed.
Theirs is a love against all odds, entwined with the twisting paths of German history, leading us from the late 19th to the early 21st century, from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to the German south-west.
This is the story of that love, of Olga’s devotion to a restless man – told in thought, letters and in a fateful moment of great rebellion.
MEET THE SORENSON FAMILY
MARILYN has somehow fallen into motherhood and spent four decades married to
DAVID, who’s pretty certain he loves her more than anyone has ever loved another person.
WENDY, their eldest, a cause for concern, soothes herself with drink after being widowed young,
while VIOLET, lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mother, is disturbed by the reappearance of a son placed for adoption fifteen years earlier.
LIZA, a professor, is pregnant with a baby she’s not sure she wants by a man she’s not sure she loves
and GRACE, their dawdling youngest daughter, lives a lie that no one in her family suspects.
‘A gripping and poignant ode to a messy, loving family in all its glory’ Madeline Miller
‘A moving, immersive, often very funny study of family and sisterhood’ Sunday Times
‘Like Meg Wolitzer. A forensic dissection of family past and present, I loved it. If you like reading about relationships, this one is for you.’ Pandora Sykes
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