Amid the harsh landscape of the Ozark Hills, sixteen-year-old Ree is taking care of her mother and two brothers. Her father has put their house up as bail and if he doesn't show up at court it'll be sold from under them. To save her family she needs to track him down but in a community riven with long-running feuds getting answers isn't easy.
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' ( Independent ). Utopia Avenue might be the most curious British band you've never heard of. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967, folksinger Elf Holloway , blues bassist Dean Moss , guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet and jazz drummer Griff Griffin together created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent times. The band produced only two albums in two years, yet their musical legacy lives on. This is the story of Utopia Avenue's brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs and draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was receding into something much darker - a multi-faceted tale of dreams, drugs, love, sexuality, madness and grief; of stardom's wobbly ladder and fame's Faustian pact; and of the collision between youthful idealism and jaded reality as the Sixties drew to a close. Above all, this bewitching novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul.
@2@Turn down Slade Alley - narrow, dank and easy to miss, even when you're looking for it. Find the small black iron door set into the right-hand wall. No handle, no keyhole, but at your touch it swings open. Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn't quite make sense; too grand for the shabby neighbourhood, too large for the space it occupies. @3@@2@A stranger greets you and invites you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't.@3@@2@This unnerving, taut and intricately woven tale by one of our most original and bewitching writers begins in 1979 and comes to its turbulent conclusion around Hallowe'en, 2015. Because every nine years, on the last Saturday of October, a 'guest' is summoned to Slade House. But why has that person been chosen, by whom and for what purpose? The answers lie waiting in the long attic, at the top of the stairs . . .@3@
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.
A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan`s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified `dinery server` on death-row; 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.
'a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases'. BARACK OBAMA '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.
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.
This provocative, experimental novel . . .joins several narratives to illustrate the roles of memory and perspective in making sense of a life . . . The many moods and flavors of this brash "portrait of the artist as a young woman" constantly reframe and complicate the story, making for a fascinating shape-shifter of a novel.
Tim Cranmer, retired scret servant and Larry Pettifer, bored radical don, philanderer and for 20 years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanished Communist threat, have an unresolved rivalry that dates back decades. They follow each other to Moscow and then Southern Russia.
An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz buff in downtown Tokyo? A woman on a holy mountain talks to a tree - and the tree talks back, unaware of the effect of the financial irregularities of a burnt-out lawyer will have on her life.
In 1975 art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a New York gallery. He buys the work, tracks down its creator, Bill Weschler, and the two men embark on a life-long friendship.
By the bestselling author of WHAT I LOVED, an intimate and enlightening account of her search for the key to her mysterious nervous disorder, which brilliantly illuminates the connection between mind and body.
Lily, a 19-year-old waitress in Minnesota, becomes enchanted with an outsider - an artist from New York. Thrust into a new world of erotic adventure and friendship, Lily finds herself the target of mysterious, frightening acts of madness as she strains against the confines of a small town.
A beautifully written novel which inspired the Oscar-winning film directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law, and Renee Zellweger. Over 1 million copies sold in the UK.
Iris Vegan is a graduate student, living alone and impoverished in New York City. In the course of the novel, she encounters four strong characters, each of whom fascinates and in some way subordinates her to alter the shape of her identity.
In 1616, Nathaniel Courthope arrived on a remote East Indies island on a secret mission - to persuade the islanders to grant a monopoly to England over their nutmeg, a fabulously valuable spice in Europe. Despite being overwhelmed by Dutch forces, his heroism led to the founding of a great city.
The dazzling new novel by the author of the international bestseller, WHAT I LOVED, about the secrets and ghosts that haunt families from one generation to the next
