Disgrace : A Novel

Ian Mcewan,

A young girl’s imagination runs riot with far-reaching and devastating consequences, in Ian McEwan’s masterpiece of metafiction.On a hot day in the summer of 1934, 13-year-old Briony sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching is Cecilia’s friend from childhood, Robbie Turner. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not imagined at its start. Briony will have committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone."Ian McEwan's remarkable new novel Atonement is a love story, a war story and a story about the destructive powers of the imagination...It is, in short, a tour de force ... The novel, supposedly a narrative constructed by one of the characters, stands as a sophisticated rumination on the hazards of fantasy and the chasm between reality and art ... There is nothing self-conscious or mannered about Mr McEwan's writing. Indeed Atonement emerges as the author's most deeply felt novel yet – a novel that takes the glittering narrative pyrotechnics perfected in his last book, Amsterdam, and employs them in the service of a larger, tragic vision." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesIan McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His... Lire plus…

Toni Morrison; [With A New Foreword By The Author]

Evocative and kaleidoscopic, Song of Solomon is a brilliantly imagined coming-of-age tale."Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her." - The GuardianSoon after a local eccentric leaps from a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight, Macon 'Milkman' Dead III is born. Brought up by his well-off black family to revere the white world around him, Milkman strives to make sense of his conflicting identities. Always seeking flight in some way, he leaves his Michigan home for the South, retracing the steps of his forebears in search of his own buried heritage and is introduced to an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins; the inhabitants of a fully realised black world. "The poetry of the language. The vernacular and the rhythms of speech... It's eavesdropping on a slice of life. You care for every character. You love them, you bleed for them. It's a masterclass in narrative fiction. It's a book that not only makes me want to be a better writer but a better person as well." - Sarah Winman, Good HousekeepingToni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford) was an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed... Lire plus…

J. M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost—and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy—Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse. Lire plus…

Iris Murdoch; Introduction By Mary Kinzie

Iris Murdoch turns her microscopic gaze on vanity and obsession in her 19th novel - a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs"... a rich and textured study of vanity and self-delusion." - The GuardianCharles Arrowby, leading light of England’s theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. But his plans fail, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of strange events and unexpected visitors - some real, some spectral - that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core."One of the best and most influential writers of the 20th century... She connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest can be relaxed." — Peter Conradi, The GuardianIris Murdoch made her writing debut with Under the Net in 1954. She wrote 26 novels and several books of philosophy that include the Booker prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978), the James Tait Black Memorial prize-winning The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread prize-winning The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Iris Murdoch had a number of other novels on the long and shortlists for the Booker Prize over the years, including A Fairly Honourable Defeat... Lire plus…

Italo Calvino; Translated From The Italian By William Weaver

Italo Calvino's masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book's central character. “The single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick’s career.” — New York TimesBased on a witty analogy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book are constantly and comically frustrated. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literature, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another."Calvino is that very rare phenomenon, a true original... If on a winter’s night a traveler is breathtakingly complex and self-conscious (there are moments when it quite literally makes one gasp with astonishment)... [yet it] is one of the most accessible and enchanting novels written in the last fifty years.” - from an Introduction by Peter WashingtonThe real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches - stories of menace, spies, mystery, and premonition - with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to.... Lire plus…

John M Coetzee

These deluxe editions are packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front. "A real literary event."--The New York Times Book Review"A story of profound beauty, clarity and eloquence, which even at its most melodramatic holds to a biblical nobility."--Chicago Tribune Book WorldOther Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century:The Grapes of Wrath by John SteinbeckHeart of Darkness by Joseph ConradLove in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia MarquezThe Adventures of Augie March by Saul BellowThe Age of Innocence by Edith WhartonA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James JoyceSwann's Way by Marcel ProustMy Antonia by Willa CatherOn the Road by Jack KerouacWhite Noise by Don DeLillo Lire plus…

J M Coetzee; Secker & Warburg

In his first Booker Prize-winning novel, J.M. Coetzee sets his main character on an arduous physical journey, which becomes a quest for inner freedom.In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life-affirming novel illuminates the human experience: the need for an interior, spiritual life; meaningful connections to the world in which we live; and purity of vision."If Life & Times of Michael K has a flaw, it is in the last-minute imposition of an interior choral interpretation. In the final quarter, we are removed, temporarily, from the plain seeing of Michael K to the self-indulgent diary of the prison doctor who struggles with the entanglements of an increasingly abusive regime. But the doctor's commentary is superfluous; he thickens the clear tongue of the novel by naming its "message" and thumping out ironies." - Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book ReviewJohn Maxwell Coetzee is an author and academic from South Africa. He became an Australian citizen in 2006 after relocating there in 2002. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. Lire plus…

J. M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker twice with this tale set in post-apartheid South Africa, where a professor’s complacency contributes to his utter downfall. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths [that] cut to the bone" (The New York Time Book Review).Refusing to apologise after an impulsive affair with a student, David Lurie, a 52-year-old professor in Cape Town, seeks refuge on his daughter’s farm. Here, a savage and disturbing attack brings into relief the faults in their relationship. Pitching the moral code of political correctness against the values of Romantic poetry, Disgrace examines dichotomies both in personal relationships and in the unaccountability of one culture towards another."Any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace—a somewhat perverse fascination, as some will feel—is the way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme alternatives in tension. Salvation, ruin. Even a single paragraph can accommodate the transformation of hope into its opposite.” - Adam Mars-Jones, The GuardianJ. M. Coetzee is a multi-award-winning author and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works of fiction include Dusklands; Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honour, the Central News Agency Literary Award; and Life & Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was... Lire plus…

Zadie Smith, Jenny Sterlin, Ana María De La Fuente Suárez

Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. "The almost preposterous talent was clear from the first pages." - Julian Barnes, The Guardian The international bestseller and modern classic of multicultural Britain - an unforgettable portrait of London One of the most talked about debut novels of all time, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book. "'Quirky, sassy and wise... a big, splashy, populous production reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie... demonstrates both an instinctive storytelling talent and a fully fashioned voice that's street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time." - The New York TimesSet against London's racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Lire plus…

J. M. Coetzee

Despite her fame, a celebrated author continues the struggle to articulate her vision, in J.M. Coetzee’s exploration of the creative mind.Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public. She has made her life's work the study of other people - yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny."The book has a shape, rather a religious one: it inclines towards death. (...) Against all likelihood, the book is more affecting than anything else he has written, and, I think, deeply confessional. (...) Coetzee's recourse to Elizabeth Costello, and to fiction over traditional argumentation, is a way of saying that the only means of arguing for the literary -- for feeling over reason, imagination over thought -- is via the literary. Literary argumentation must take literary form. But this, in turn, means that ideas cannot be won, that they are vulnerable." - James Wood, London Review of BooksJ. M. Coetzee is a multi-award-winning author and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works of fiction include Dusklands; Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honour, the Central News Agency Literary Award;... Lire plus…

Howard Jacobson

A scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity, from the brilliant Howard Jacobson.Julian Treslove, a former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. With both Libor and Sam recently widowed, and with Julian’s unsuccessful romantic record rendering him an honorary third, the three dine at Libor’s apartment. And that very evening, at exactly 11.30pm, everything changes."Mr. Jacobson doesn’t just summon Roth; he summons Roth at Roth’s best. This prizewinning book is a riotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity, though it is by no means too myopic to be enjoyed by the wider world. It helps that Mr. Jacobson’s comic sensibility suggests Woody Allen’s, that his powers of cultural observation are so keen, and that influences as surprising as Lewis Carroll shape this book... Treslove so loathes his old friend Finkler that he has turned ‘Finkler’ into his own private synonym for ‘Jew.’ So the real meaning of the book’s title, The Finkler Question, is The Jewish Question, and that’s only where the Finklerisms begin. Obsessively, and with a razor-sharp acuity that justifies the Roth comparisons, Mr. Jacobson has Treslove begin cataloging what he thinks are Finkler traits, Finkler talents, Finkler... Lire plus…

Hilary Mantel, Mike Poulton

SUMMARY: In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power. England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king's freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death. Lire plus…

Michael Ondaatje

Set in 1945, Michael Ondaatje’s brilliant and moving historical fiction has been translated into 40 languages and turned into an Oscar-winning film.Four very disparate war-torn people, a young woman and three men, take refuge in a damaged villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them. In an upstairs room lies the badly burned English patient, alive but unable to move. His extraordinary adventures and turbulent love affair in the North African desert before the war provide the focus around which the vivid tales of his companions revolve. His very presence will forever change the destiny of those around him."A challenging, disorienting, periodically captivating journey without maps, best when least showy, as in the marvellous account of Kip's adoption by an eccentric English peer, his bomb-disposal instructor." - Kirkus Reviews"That rare novel which gets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight." - Kamila Shamsie, Golden Man Booker Prize judgeMichael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels, a memoir, a non-fiction book on film and several books of poetry. The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992 and the Golden Booker in 2018; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Ondaatje was also shortlisted, for his entire body of work, for The Man Booker International Prize 2007. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje now lives in Toronto. Lire plus…

Yann Martel; Andy Bridge

Yann Martel’s warmly engaging philosophical novel is brimming with invention, ideas and playful conceits. A true modern classic.Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is his third novel. It is narrated by Pi (Piscine) Molitor, who grows up as the son of a zoo manager in India. As a boy, Pi practices not only Hinduism but also the teachings of Christianity and Islam – in his eyes, all different yet equal ways of knowing God. In 1976, when The Emergency is announced, the Molitors’ zoo animals are sold, and Pi and his family embark on a Japanese freight ship to North America. It sinks a few days into its passage. Pi is left alone on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger named Richard Parker. He is rescued after 227 days afloat, barring one excursion to a surreally depicted carnivorous island. "Despite the extraordinary premise and literary playfulness, one reads Life of Pi not so much as an allegory or magical-realist fable, but as an edge-of-seat adventure." - Justine Jordan, The Guardian"Right out of the gate, Life of Pi is full of fierce but friendly storytelling energy. It's a real adventure: brutal, tender, expressive, dramatic and disarmingly funny. (...) Though it's still difficult to stop reading when the pages run out, Martel closes the book elegantly." - Jonathan Kiefer, San Francisco ChronicleYann Martel has written three other novels; Self, Beatrice & Virgil and The High Mountains of Portugal as well as a short story collection, The Facts Behind the... Lire plus…

Ian Mcewan

A fragile friendship descends into hatred and revenge, in Ian McEwan’s darkly humorous 1998 Booker Prize-winning novel. "(F)unnier than anything McEwan has written before, though just as lethal" (Gabrielle Annan, The New York Review of Books).Gorgeous, feisty Molly Lane had many lovers, among them Clive Linley, Britain’s most famous composer, Vernon Halliday, editor of a respected broadsheet, and Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary - and tipped to be the next prime minister. When Clive and Vernon meet to pay their last respects to Molly at her funeral, they make a pact that will have unforeseen and profound consequences for everyone concerned."The boiling wit of Amsterdam won't be everyone's cup of tea, but those thirsty for satire will gulp down this little book... McEwan writes the sort of scathing retorts and witty repartee we wish we could think of in the heat of battle. On a broader scale, his portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between politicians and journalists is as damning as it is comic... This is a dark morality tale in the spirit of Evelyn Waugh's best work." - Ron Charles, The Christian Science MonitorIan McEwan is a critically acclaimed author and winner of the 1998 Booker Prize. His collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the 1975 Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement;... Lire plus…

J. M. Coetzee

The author of Waiting for the Barbarians narrates his personal story of growing up under apartheid in South Africa with a father he cannot respect and a mother he both adores and despises. Reprint.In Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee revisits the South Africa of half a century ago, to write about his childhood and interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he imitated but could not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he picked his way through a world that refused to explain its rules, but whose rules he knew he must obey. Steering between these contradictions, Boyhood evokes the tensions, delights and terrors of childhood with startling, haunting immediacy. Coetzee examines his young self with the dispassionate curiosity of an explorer rediscovering his own early footprints, and the account of his progress is bright, hard and simply compelling. Lire plus…

Hollinghurst, Alan

Alan Hollinghurst portrays a ruthless decade through Nick, an increasingly less innocent abroad, as he gets caught up in the boom years of the 80s.It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children. As the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes embroiled in the Feddens’ world, with its grand parties, its holidays in the Dordogne, and its parade of monsters both comic and threatening."As a novelist, Alan Hollinghurst has set himself an intimidating standard. There haven't been many English debuts more exquisitely executed or scorchingly candid than "The Swimming-Pool Library" (1988), nor follow-ups that could outdazzle it as brilliantly as did "The Folding Star" (1994)... Although it gathers ominously in mood, "The Line of Beauty" feels more blissful than baleful in its anatomy of the era... Hollinghurst's alertness to the tiniest social and tonal shifts never slackens, and positively luxuriates in a number of unimprovably droll set pieces... It is highly characteristic of Hollinghurst to oscillate between the high and the low, often within the same paragraph... It is also of a piece with the elegiac close, rendered with a grace and decorum entirely appropriate to this outstanding novel." - Anthony Quinn, The New York TimesAlan Hollinghurst is a novelist, poet, short story... Lire plus…

Desai, Kiran

Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for this funny and politically acute family saga about a peaceful retirement under siege from all sides.In the north-eastern Himalayas, at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, in an isolated and crumbling house, lives an embittered old judge, who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and the son of his chatty cook trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy."Kiran Desai's extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence ... Though relieved by much humor, The Inheritance of Loss may strike many readers as offering an unrelentingly bitter view. But then, as Orhan Pamuk wrote soon after 9/11, people in the West are ‘scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population,’ which ‘neither magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manages to fathom.’ This is the invisible emotional reality Desai uncovers as she describes the lives of people fated to experience modern life as a continuous affront to their notions of order, dignity and justice. We do not need to agree with this vision in order to marvel at Desai's artistic power in expressing it." -... Lire plus…

Banville, John

A man attempts to escape a recent loss while confronting a trauma from a long-lost summer, in John Banville’s haunting and evocative novel.Led back to Ballyless by a dream, Max Morden returns to the coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth. The Grace family appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Drawn to the twins, Chloe and Myles, Max soon found himself entangled in their lives, which were as seductive as they were unsettling. What ensued haunts him for the rest of his years and shapes everything that is to follow."As Michael Cunningham's The Hours was to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, so, roughly, is The Sea to [Henry James’] The Turn of the Screw. It is deconstruction and homage at once, an utterly contemporary novel that nonetheless could only have come from a mind steeped in the history of the novel and deeply reflective about what makes fiction still worthwhile ... Max becomes a character in a story of his own making. No longer merely a narrator, he becomes a true author. He resumes control. He gets what he came for. The unsayable is said at last." - Jack Miles, The Los Angeles TimesJohn Banville is the author of more than fifteen novels, a short story collection, and several mysteries written under the pseudonym, Benjamin Black. His novel Ancient Light won the Irish Book Award. In addition to winning The Man Booker Prize 2005, he was also shortlisted for his entire body of work, for The Man Booker International Prize 2007. In 2011,... Lire plus…