Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers. 'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino Hat, ribbon, bird rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existe...
The Darling children are tucked up in bed when Peter Pan bursts in to their nursery. Peter and his mischievous fairy Tinker Bell entice Wendy and her brothers to fly away with them to a magical world called Neverland. There you can swim with mermaids and play all day with the Lost Boys. But you must watch out for pirates, especially Captain Hook. And how do you find Neverland? Second to the right and straight on till morning of course...
If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor.These five dazzling works of f...
The phenomenal global and Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Sapiens For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. International and political tensions are rising. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – an alien information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all tha...
What will you find in the city?READERS LOVE THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS‘Felt like stepping into a dream’‘I really loved getting lost in this book’‘Everyone on this planet should read Murakami at least once in their lifetime’‘Riveting and irresistible’‘It’s magical, it’s wise . . . deeply comforting’A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, a breathtaking new novel about the boundaries between worlds and individuals, from the Sunday Time...
After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life.The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing friendship with her cousin ...
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Jane Austen's first novel, with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon.Elinor is as prudent as her sister Marianne is impetuous. Each must learn from the other after they are they are forced by their father's death to leave their home and enter into the contests of polite society. The charms of unsuitable men and the schemes of rival ladies mean that their paths to success are thwart ...
A poetic meditation on life and death, by one of the most renowned and respected film-makers and intellectuals of our time.In November 1974, when Werner Herzog was told that his mentor Lotte Eisner, the film historian and critic, was dying in Paris, he set off to walk there from Munich, ‘in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot’. Along the way he recorded what he saw, how he felt, and what he experienced, from the physical discomfort of the journey...
'All roads lead to Rome.' It's a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire, stitching together our histories and continuing to inspire our imaginations.Over the two thousand years since they were first built, the roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. Catherine Fletcher shows how the roads – as channels of trade and tr...
In the course of his famous travels, Gulliver is captured by miniature people who wage war on each other because of religious disagreement over how to crack eggs, is sexually assaulted by giants, visits a floating island, and decides that the society of horses is better than that of his fellow man. Swift's tough, filthy and incisive satire has much to say about the state of the world today and is presented here in its unexpurgated entirety.
These two novellas by the inimitable Tanizaki were among his favourites.The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi recounts the dark sexual obsessions of a sixteenth-century warlord, accidentally initiated in his youth into the morbid rites attendant upon battle. Based on invented documents that overlap with historical reality, the story unfolds a masterly balance of irony and melodrama, elegance and brutality.Arrowroot also touches on the pursuit of legend, but in a very diff...
A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative non-fiction at its best' GUARDIANOver the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe.She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the mountains. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled re...
‘Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel…elegant, original and often very funny’ Kevin Barry, New Statesman Books of the YearTwo couples inhabit the same apartment in Paris, almost fifty years apart…2019. When David takes a job in London, Anna is left alone in their Paris apartment. It’s August and the city is deserted but when Clémentine moves into the building, Anna finds herself drawn inextricably into the younger woman’s world…1972. Florence is finishing her...
* A Financial Times Book of the Year * A Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday Summer Read *HOLD THE POWER AND GLORY OF ANCIENT ROME IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND.A wild she-wolf tenderly nurses infant twins Romulus and Remus.Marcus Junius Brutus looks out over chaos and conflict, flaunting the bloodied daggers with which he murdered Julius Caesar. Trumpets blare, crowds roar, gladiators enter the grand Colosseum. Let the games begin.Frescoes fade and books vanish, but the story of Rome...
Four sisters live in dilapidated houses, the daughters of a once-great merchant family of Osaka.Each of the women navigates her own complex relationship to the fading lustre of the Makioka family name, in the years leading up to the Second World War. Rich with breathtaking descriptions of ancient customs and an ever-changing natural world, Tanizaki evokes in poignant detail a long-lost way of life even as it withers under the harsh glare of modernity.‘An exquisite novel about...
Facts alone are wanted in life': the children at Mr Gradgrind's school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. They live in a smoky, troubled industrial town so entertainment is hard to come by and resentments run deep. The effects of Gradgrind's teaching on his own children, Tom and Louisa, are particularly profound and leave them ill-equipped to deal with the unpredictable desires of the human heart. Luckily for them th...
"Ho! ho! I am the Toad, the motor-car snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes!" Tired of spring cleaning, Mole ventures above ground into the warm sunshine, and happens upon his friend Ratty. Together they picnic on the sparkling, burbling river, brave the sinister Wild Wood in wintertime to visit the bad-tempered Badger, and take to the open road in a caravan with dear, silly old Toad. But when Toad's attention turns to motor cars, his reckless behaviour go...
The serene and maternal Mrs Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr Ramsay, together with their children and assorted guests, are holidaying on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable and moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life, and the conflict between male and female principles. One of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century, To the Lighthou...
Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her social circle and Anne finds her old feelings for him reignited. However, when they meet again Wentworth behaves as if they are strangers and seems more interested in her friend Louisa. In this, her final novel, Jane Austen tells the story of a love that endures the tests of time and ...
The midnight hour approaches. You lie in bed and try to sleep, but there is the howling of the wind outside, the creak of a floorboard, the scream of a cat, the ticking clock...Your heart beats, your skin crawls, and despite yourself you reach for this book and enter a world like a nightmare, haunted by dark fears, guilty secrets and the bloody consequences of rage, revenge and obsession.You cannot tear yourself away, these tales will appall and yet enthrall you, for no mere ...
In an unnamed country, on the first day of the New Year, people stop dying. There is great celebration and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Soon, though, the residents begin to suffer. Undertakers face bankruptcy, the church is forced to reinvent its doctrine, and local 'maphia' smuggle those on the brink of death over the border where they can expire naturally.Death does return eventually, but with a new, courteous app...
A favourite childhood classic. What little girl can turn a whole household upside down and breathe new life back into a strange, old manor? The wonderfully contrary, strong-willed, angry, misunderstood Mary Lennox. When Mary Lennox is sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody says she is the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It is true, too. Mary is pale, spoilt and quite contrary. But she is also horribly lonely. Then one day she hears about a g...
Brilliantly imaginative fiction or the shape of things to come? H.G. Wells's masterpiece still retains its power to provoke and enthral.In the Time Traveller's miraculous new machine, we will be carried from a Victorian dinner table to 802,701 AD, when the Earth is divided between the gentle, ineffective Eloi, and the ape-like Morlocks; forward again by a million years or so to glimpse a dying world of blood-red beaches and menacing shapes; and on again to the last days of ou...
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY RUTH RENDELLM. R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a dolls house, a lonely beach, a branch tapping on a window - ordinary things take on more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the or...
