Sceptre
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@00000400@@00000327@The spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS, 'one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of this, or any country' (@00000373@Independent@00000155@).@00000133@@00000163@@00000400@Utopia Avenue are the strangest British band you've never heard of. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folksinger Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief and blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and draughty ballrooms to @00000373@Top of the Pops @00000155@and the cusp of chart success, to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968. @00000163@@00000400@David Mitchell's new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don't; of fame's Faustian pact and stardom's wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us? Utopia means 'nowhere' but could a shinier world be within grasp, if only we had a map?@00000163@
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Marnie is stuck.
Stuck working alone in her flat - a half-eaten packet of feta and a half-dead cactus her only company - and stuck in a life that increasingly feels like it''s passing her by.
Michael is coming undone.
Separated from his wife (just temporarily?), increasingly reclusive (a momentary phase), taking himself on long, punishing walks (the perfect opportunity for some good, old-fashioned, solitary brooding).
Surely there must be more to life . . . but how to get there?
When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks - from the Lake District to the Yorkshire Dales, across the North York Moors and all the way to the North Sea.
And as the miles go by and their lives become unexpectedly entwined, what had begun as a fun little weekend away becomes the journey of a lifetime . . . -
As Maurice Hall makes his way through a traditional English education, he projects an outer confidence that masks troubling questions about his own identity. Frustrated and unfulfilled, a product of the bourgeoisie he will grow to despise, he has difficulty acknowledging his nascent attraction to men.
At Cambridge he meets Clive, who opens his eyes to a less conventional view of the nature of love. Yet when Maurice is confronted by the societal pressures of life beyond university, self-doubt and heartbreak threaten his quest for happiness. -
FLEABAG: THE SCRIPTURES - THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
- Sceptre
- 13 Mai 2021
- 9781529341799
The complete Fleabag. Every Word. Every Side-eye. Every Fox. Fleabag: The Scriptures includes new writing from Phoebe Waller-Bridge alongside the filming scripts and the never-before-seen stage directions from the Golden Globe, Emmy and BAFTA winning series. ''Perfect'' Guardian ''Perfect'' Daily Telegraph ''Perfect'' Stylist ''Perfect'' Independent ''Perfect'' Evening Standard ''Perfect'' Metro ''Perfect'' Irish Times ''Perfect'' RTE ''Perfect'' Spectator ''Perfect'' Refinery29 ''Perfect'' Catholic Herald ''Perfection'' Financial Times *** HAIRDRESSER NO. (pointing to Claire) That is EXACTLY what she asked for. FLEABAG No it''s not. We want compensation. HAIRDRESSER Claire? CLAIRE I''ve got two important meetings and I look like a pencil. HAIRDRESSER NO. Don''t blame me for your bad choices. Hair isn''t everything. FLEABAG Wow. HAIRDRESSER What? FLEABAG Hair. Is. Everything. We wish it wasn''t so we could actually think about something else occasionally. But it is. It''s the difference between a good day and a bad day. We''re meant to think that it is a symbol of power, a symbol of fertility, some people are exploited for it and it pays your fucking bills. Hair is everything, Anthony .
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From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, awardwinning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mindbending imagination and scope.A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in betweenthewars Belgium; a highminded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on deathrow; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’ s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.
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''An outrageously brilliant debut... This is already the best new book I will have read next year'' ELEANOR CATTON, SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF BIRNAM WOOD ''Hugely enjoyable: ingeniously constructed, beautifully written, and unexpectedly sexy. It is the rarest of creations: a boldly entertaining page-tuner that is also deeply, thoughtfully engaged with our past, present and future'' JOANNA QUINN, SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE WHALEBONE THEATRE ''Kaliane Bradley writes with the maximalist confidence of P. G. Wodehouse, but also with the page-turning pining of Sally Rooney. It''s thought-provoking and horribly clever - but it also made me laugh out loud'' ALICE WINN, SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF IN MEMORIAM ''A fantastic debut: conceptually brilliant, really funny, genuinely moving, written in the most exquisite language and with a wonderful articulation of the knotty complexities of a mixed-race heritage'' MARK HADDON, AUTHOR OF THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME ''Sly and illusionless in its use of history, lovely in its sentences, warm - no, hotter than that - in its characterisation, devastating in its denouement. A weird, kind, clever, heartsick little time bomb of a book'' FRANCIS SPUFFORD, AUTHOR OF GOLDEN HILL A BOY MEETS A GIRL. THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE. A FINGER MEETS A TRIGGER. THE BEGINNING MEETS THE END. ENGLAND IS FOREVER; ENGLAND MUST FALL.
There are several ways to tell a story.
A civil servant starts working as a ''bridge'' - a liaison, helpmeet and housemate - in an experimental project that brings expatriates from the past into the twenty-first century. This is a science-fiction story.
In a London safehouse in the 2020s, a disorientated Victorian polar explorer chain smokes while listening to Spotify and learning about political correctness. This is a comedy.
During a long, sultry summer - as the shadows around them grow long and dangerous - two people fall in love, against all odds. This is a romance.
The Ministry of Time is a novel about Commander Graham Gore (R.N. c.1809-c.1847) and a woman known only as the bridge. As their relationship turns from the strictly professional into something more and uneasy truths begin to emerge, they are forced to face the reality of the project that brought them together.
Can love triumph over the structures and histories that shape them? -
STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL ; LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
Charlotte Wood
- Sceptre
- 3 Octobre 2023
- 9781399724357
''Both profound and addictively entertaining. I loved it'' CLARE CHAMBERS, bestselling author of Small Pleasures ''Beautiful, strange and otherworldly'' PAULA HAWKINS, bestselling author of A Slow Fire Burning ''Subtly powerful and utterly engrossing'' CLAIRE FULLER, bestselling author of Unsettled Ground Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, finding solace in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Australian outback. She doesn''t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of her new life, she ruminates on her childhood in the nearby town, turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can''t forget.
But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past. -
Following his hugely celebrated debut novel, The Yellow Birds , Kevin Powers returns to the battlefield and its aftermath, this time in his native Virginia, just before and during the Civil War and ninety years later. The novel pinpoints with unerring emotional depth the nature of random violence, the necessity of love and compassion, and the fragility and preciousness of life. It will endure as a stunning novel about what we leave behind, what a life is worth, what is said and unsaid, and the fact that ultimately what will survive of us is love.
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Siri Hustvedt''s first novel, The Blindfold, was published by Sceptre in 1993. Since then she has published The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American, The Summer Without Men, The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Memories of the Future. She is also the author of the poetry collection Reading To You, and four collections of essays: Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, A Plea for Eros and Living, Thinking, Looking, as well as the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.
Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and in 2012 was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities.
She delivered the Schelling Lecture in Aesthetics in Munich in 2010, the Freud Lecture in Vienna in 2011 and the opening keynote at the conference to mark Kierkegaard''s 200th anniversary in Copenhagen in 2013, while her latest honorary doctorate is from the University of Gutenburg in Germany. She is also Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph and several exhibition catalogues. -
Sam is 28, Swedish and spending the summer in London. Here she gets involved with Lucas, a man she first met as a teenager, who is working at a boutique clothing store, trying to get a foot on the corporate ladder, and struggling to hold the pieces of his life together - Sam is a gorgeous distraction. But you can only avoid reality for so long, and both Sam and Lucas know their relationship can''t last. Nobody can be this happy forever, surely?
Told in alternating chapters, Okay Days tells the rise and fall of Sam and Lucas''s affection for each other, over the course of a year. Set between London, Stockholm and Greece, and exploring the ideas of reproductive choice, body image and the pitfalls of modern love, Okay Days asks what it is worth sacrificing for a life which is better than just okay. -
Nouv.
PACHINKO meets THE NOTEBOOK in this transportive and heartrending novel about first loves, new beginnings and second chances, set between Shangai, Taiwan, Hong Kong and LA and spanning almost seventy years
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A powerful and timely literary thriller by the Guardian Award-winning author of The Yellow Birds, a sinuous, edge-of-the-seat tale of treachery, the tentacles of war, and conscience.
One early morning on a beach in Virginia, a dead body is discovered by a man taking his daily swim - Arman Bajalan, formerly an interpreter in Iraq. After surviving an assassination attempt that killed his wife and child, Arman has been given lonely sanctuary in the US. Now, sure that the murder is connected with his past, he knows he''s still not safe.
Seasoned detective Catherine Wheel and her fresh-off-the beat partner have little to go on beyond a bus ticket in the man''s pocket. It is to lead them to Sally Ewell, a local journalist as grief-stricken as Arman by the Iraq war, who is investigating a nefarious corporation: one on the cusp of landing a multi-billion-dollar government defence contract.
As victims mount around Arman, taking the team down wrong turns and towards startling evidence, they find themselves in a race, committed to unravelling the truth and keeping Arman alive - even if it costs them everything. -
A 62-year-old writer - initials S.H. - discovers the journal she wrote during her first year in New York in 1978/9 and looks back on her 23-year-old self with amusement and anger. Reproducing extracts from it, which include parts of the novel she'd set herself 12 months to write about a teenage boy obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, she relives an exhilarating, eventful and often frightening year. Then she was fresh from Minnesota, poor, innocent and hungry for all the city could offer - new friends, books, sex, poetry, ideas, LIFE! She does eventually make friends, but her experiences with men go from the disappointing to far worse. And from the outset she is caught up in a mystery: her neighbour chants bizarre things through the paper-thin walls of her apartment, with references to the murder of a young girl. S.H. becomes fixated on discovering the truth about the woman next door. Now, our heroine can see that both she and her neighbour were victims of their era, when women were second-class citizens. But, if she considers the recent presidential election - 'I hear the roaring spleen of the white crowd as they spit and scream at the woman. The abomination. Cast her out'. - how much has fundamentally changed?
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When Tia accidentally overhears a whispered conversation between her mother - terminally ill and lying in a hospital bed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria - and her aunt, the repercussions will send her on a desperate quest to uncover a secret her mother has been hiding for nearly two decades.
Back home in Lagos a few days later, Adunni, a plucky fourteen-year-old runaway, is lying awake in Tia''s guest room. Having escaped from her rural village in a desperate bid to seek a better future, she''s finally found refuge with Tia, who has helped her enroll in school. It''s always been Adunni''s dream to get an education, and she''s bursting with excitement.
Suddenly, there''s a horrible knocking at the front gate. . . .
It''s only the beginning of a harrowing ordeal that will see Tia forced to make a terrible choice between protecting Adunni or finally learning the truth. And Adunni will learn that her ''louding voice'' is more important than ever, as she must advocate to save not only herself but all the young women of her home village, Ikati.
If she succeeds, she may transform Ikati into a place where girls are allowed to claim the bright futures they deserve - and shout their stories to the world. -
By the bestselling author of WHAT I LOVED, an account of her search for the key to her mysterious nervous disorder and a fascinating exploration of the mind and its connection with the body - 'provocative but often funny, encyclopedic but down to earth' Oliver Sacks.
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Nick is an illustrator isolated by his tendency to observe rather than participate in life. But when bravely experiments with stepping outside the comforts of ''small talk'', he discovers that when he asks genuine questions of those around him, he unlocks the potential for mundane interactions to become meaningful, and sometimes even unforgettable. And when he does, when a person opens their world to him, he explores it as if it were a real place: a physical manifestation of each person''s true self and the meaningful conversation that Nick is having with them. Finally taking part in life, Nick is no longer watching from the outside. He''s in. And that new world literally bursts into colour.
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'a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases'. BARACK OBAMA *the #1 Sunday Times bestseller * instant New York Times bestseller * an Observer 'best brainy book of the decade' * #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller * Irish Times bestseller * Audio bestseller * Guardian bestseller * ---Longlisted for the 2018 Financial Times /McKinsey Business Book of the Year--- 'One of the most important books I've ever read - an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.' BILL GATES 'Hans Rosling tells the story of "the secret silent miracle of human progress" as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.' MELINDA GATES Factfulnes s: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends - why the world's population is increasing; how many young women go to school; how many of us live in poverty - we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness , Professor of International Health and a man who can make data sing, Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens, and reveals the ten instincts that distort our perspective. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world.
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Places remember us. . . A missionary begs to be moved from disease-ridden Bangkok. A musician plays a private show for ghosts. A student abandoned by his lover bleeds to death in the street. A plastic surgeon designs a girl a new face. A woman decides whether to cook a final meal for a dying murderer. Lurching through decades, from Bagkok's rich past to its imagined, uploaded future, witness the city as it changes from a booming capitalist hub to a city engulfed by water, through human tales seeping into one another, held together by delicate threads. For fans of A VISIT FROM THE GOOD SQUAD and CLOUD ATLAS, this is a startling and intimate novel by a lyrical new writer.
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FACTFULNESS - 10 REASONS WE''RE WRONG ABOUT THE WORLD AND WHY THINGS BETTER THA YOU
Hans Rosling
- Sceptre
- 3 Octobre 2019
- 9781529387155
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Jeanie Masterson has a gift: she can hear the last words of the dead. Passed down from generation to generation, this gift means she is able to make wrongs right, to give voice to unspoken love and dying regrets. She and her father have worked happily alongside each other for years, but now he's unexpectedly announced that he wants to retire early and leave the business to her and her life is called into question. Does she really want to be married to the embalmer, or does she want to be with her childhood sweetheart, off in London? Does she want to have children, and pass this gift on to them? And does she want to be stuck in this small town, or is there more of the world she wants to see - like the South of France, where she's discovered a woman who shares her gift? Tied to her home by this unusual talent, she begins to question: what if what she's always thought of as a gift is a curse?
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Combining rigorous research with myth and folklore, Alexandria is an authoritative history of a city that has shaped our modern world. Soon after being founded by Alexander the Great, Alexandria became the crucible of cultural exchange between East and West for millennia and the undisputed global capital of knowledge. It was at the forefront of human progress, but it also witnessed brutal natural disasters, plagues, crusades and violence.
Major empires fought over Alexandria, from the Greeks and Romans to the Arabs, Ottomans, French and British. Key figures shaped the city from its eponymous founder to Aristotle, Cleopatra, Saint Mark the Evangelist, Napoleon Bonaparte and many others, each putting their own stamp on its identity and its fortunes. And millions of people have lived in this bustling seaport on the Mediterranean. From its humble origins to its dizzy heights and its latest incarnation, Islam Issa tells us the rich and gripping story of a city that changed the world. -
Boy-made-good Teo Erskine is back in the north London suburb of his youth, visiting his father - stubborn, selfish, complicated Vic. Things have changed for Teo: he''s got a steady job, a brand new car and a London flat all concrete and glass, with a sliver of a river view.
Except, underneath the surface, not much has changed at all. He''s still the boy seeking his father''s approval; the young man playing late-night poker with his best friend, unreliable, infuriating Ben Mossam; the one still desperately in love with the enigmatic Lia.
Lia''s life, on the other hand, has been transformed: now a single mum to two-year-old Joel, she doesn''t have time for anyone - not even herself.
When the unthinkable happens, little Joel finds himself at the centre of a strange constellation of men - Teo, Vic, Ben - none of whom is fully equipped to look after him, but whose strange, tentative attempts at love might just be enough to offer him a new place to call home. -
STRAIGHT ACTING ; THE MANY QUEER LIVES OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Will Tosh
- Sceptre
- 13 Juin 2024
- 9781529390483
Shakespeare''s early work was profoundly influenced by the queer culture of the time - much of it totally integrated into mainstream society - from a relentless schooling in Latin to a less formal education on the streets of London, and beyond. Taking a closer look at the gender-bending homoeroticism of the early comedies and astonishingly queer literary scene that nurtured Shakespeare''s sonnets, Will Tosh tells a story of artistic development and of personal crisis, of Shakespeare as a young man and as we have never before seen him.
Straight Acting is a fresh, surprising portrait of Shakespeare''s England, revealing its deeply queer nature, a heritage that we have forgotten but that powerfully and fundamentally shaped the life and career of the world''s most famous playwright. -
After abandoning his once promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Helen-a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love, but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Helen on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington DC that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush''s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel,the larger-than-life father-figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.
With Helen and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he''d been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel''s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breath-taking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America''s most prodigiously gifted novelists.
