She never presumed she herself would live out her natural life, so she wouldn’t mind leaving this world through an untimely death.
Hornclaw is a sixty-five-year-old female contract killer who is considering retirement. But while on an assassination job for the ‘disease control’ company she works for, Hornclaw makes an uncharacteristic error, causing a sequence of events that brings her past well and truly into the present.
Threatened with sabotage by a young male upstart and battling new desires and urges when she least expects them, Hornclaw steels her resolve, demonstrating that no matter their age, the female of the species is always more deadly than the male.
She never presumed she herself would live out her natural life, so she wouldn’t mind leaving this world through an untimely death.
Hornclaw is a sixty-five-year-old female…
Dream Angus comes to you at night and bestows dreams. Just the sight of him may be enough to make you lose your heart, for he is also the god of love, youth and beauty.
In this mesmerising retelling of the Celtic myth, Alexander McCall Smith unites dream and reality, leaving us to wonder: what is life but the pursuit of dreams?
Dream Angus comes to you at night and bestows dreams. Just the sight of him may be enough to make you lose your heart, for he is also the god of love, youth and beauty.
In this…
Sophie, a twenty-something Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A., and Lola, a German immigrant who has settled in Hollywood, know that while Los Angeles is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal. The two women dazzle – one with the promises of youth, the other with the fulfilment of nostalgia – as they wend their way through the pink sunsets and the palm trees of Los Angeles.
Living out their addictively decadent lives, Sophie and Lola are cult writer Babitz’s literary embodiment of the iconic L.A. Woman – more than in part inspired by her own wild and hedonistic youth.
Sophie, a twenty-something Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A., and Lola, a German immigrant who has settled in Hollywood, know that while Los Angeles…
Fantastic, fantastical and utterly incomparable, Get in Trouble rummages in the cupboards of our psyches and pulls out fierce truths about everything from the essence of ghosts to the nature of love. And hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the pyramids …
Strange, dark and wry, the stories in Get in Trouble reveal Kelly Link at the height of her creative powers and stretch the boundaries of the human imagination.
Fantastic, fantastical and utterly incomparable, Get in Trouble rummages in the cupboards of our psyches and pulls out fierce truths about everything from the essence of ghosts to…
1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world’s most famous author. But fame comes at a price.
In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find respite, so leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes his last days will pass in peaceful isolation. But the battle for Tolstoy’s soul will not be so simple.
1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world’s most famous author. But fame comes at a price.
In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is…
Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and drink in the overlapping work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver.
From Hemingway’s Key West to Williams’s New Orleans, Laing pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, and strips away the tangle of mythology to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links…
Jock McLeish, failed husband, lover and businessman is alone in a hotel room, drinking whisky, fantasising about sex and contemplating suicide. As he tries to distance himself from reality, his lonely, alcohol-fuelled fantasies are interrupted by a flood of memories, reminding him of his own shortcomings.
An unforgettably imaginative book, deeply experimental in its form and charged with a dark humour, 1982, Janine is a searing portrait of male need and inadequacy. Gray’s exploration of politics, religion, powerlessness and pornography has lost none of its power to shock and entertain.
Jock McLeish, failed husband, lover and businessman is alone in a hotel room, drinking whisky, fantasising about sex and contemplating suicide. As he tries to distance himself…
Ron Rash has been acclaimed as ‘the best American novelist I have come upon in the last twenty years’ (Scotsman), a writer with an ‘exceptional quality of characterisation and storytelling’ (Irvine Welsh). Set deep in the heart of the Appalachian mountains, this new collection of short stories confirms his reputation again and again. Nothing Gold Can Stay transports the reader to another place, and illuminates the world around us in unexpected ways.
Ron Rash has been acclaimed as ‘the best American novelist I have come upon in the last twenty years’ (Scotsman), a writer with an ‘exceptional quality of characterisation and…
The Bondurant Boys were notorious gangster brothers who ran liquor though Franklin County during Prohibition. LAWLESS is their story.
Based on the true account of Matt Bondurant’s grandfather and two granduncles, this is a gripping tale of bootlegging, brotherhood and revenge.
The Bondurant Boys were notorious gangster brothers who ran liquor though Franklin County during Prohibition. LAWLESS is their story.
Based on the true account of Matt Bondurant’s…
Revenge of the Lawn is Richard Brautigan in miniature and contains no fewer than 62 ultra-short stories set mainly in Tacoma, Washington (where the author grew up) and in the flower-powered San Francisco of the late fifties and early sixties.
In their compacted form, which ranges from the murderously short ‘The Scarlatti Tilt’ to one-page wonders like the sexually poignant poetry of ‘An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimetre Film’, Brautigan’s stories take us into a world where his fleeting glimpses of everyday strangeness leave stories and characters resonating in our heads long after they’re gone.
Revenge of the Lawn is Richard Brautigan in miniature and contains no fewer than 62 ultra-short stories set mainly in Tacoma, Washington (where the author grew up) and in the…
Chris Guthrie, torn between her love of the land and her desire to escape the narrow horizons of a peasant culture, is the thread that links these three works. In them, Gibbon interweaves the personal joys and sorrows of Chris’ life with the greater historical and political events of the time.
Sunset Song, the first and most celebrated book of the trilogy, covers the early years of the twentieth century, including the First World War. Chris survives, with her son Ewan, but the tragedy has struck and her wild spirit subdued. In Cloud Howe, as the minister’s wife, Chris learns to love again, and we witness the cruel gossip and high comedy of small village life until, once again, Chris suffers a terrible loss. Grey Granite focuses on her son Ewan and his passionate involvement with justice for the common man. For Chris, with her intuitive strength, nothing lasts - only the land endures.
Chris Guthrie, torn between her love of the land and her desire to escape the narrow horizons of a peasant culture, is the thread that links these three works. In them, Gibbon…
After years away from her family, Maya Haque is on the journey home to Dhaka. But what if, as Maya discovers, everything you once knew has changed beyond recognition? What if you must re-learn what it means to be a good daughter? And how do you begin to understand a brother who has taken a path so different from your own? Maya faces these questions and many more in The Good Muslim, an extraordinary novel about faith, family and the long shadow of war.
After years away from her family, Maya Haque is on the journey home to Dhaka. But what if, as Maya discovers, everything you once knew has changed beyond recognition? What if you…
This award-winning story collection summons all the laughter, darkness and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity - and a stiff drink.
These stories, filled with a grand sense of life’s absurdity, form a remarkably surefooted collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners.
This award-winning story collection summons all the laughter, darkness and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a…
There is no such thing as history, you see. It’s a dream, perhaps even a dream of a dream …
Walter Benjamin is dead. One of the most radiant minds of the twentieth century has been snatched away by death in a small town on the border between Spain and France. His thousand-page manuscript, carried the length of France during his flight from the Nazis, has vanished with him, never to be recovered.
Jay Parini’s extraordinary novel traces Benjamin’s steps back through time, from the salons of Berlin to the winding roads of Catalonia. A tale of escape and pursuit, Benjamin’s Crossing dramatises one of the most moving peripheral episodes of the Holocaust; and above all, it is a love story.
There is no such thing as history, you see. It’s a dream, perhaps even a dream of a dream …
Walter Benjamin is dead. One of the most radiant minds of the twentieth century has…
The Sick Bag Song is an exploration of love, inspiration and memory. It began life scribbled on airline sick bags during Cave’s 22-city journey around North America in 2014. It soon grew into a restless full-length contemporary epic.
Spurred by encounters with modern day North America, and racked by romantic longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments, the people, the books and the music that have influenced and inspired him, and drops them into his sick bag.
The Sick Bag Song is an exploration of love, inspiration and memory. It began life scribbled on airline sick bags during Cave’s 22-city journey around North America in 2014. It…
Cairo at the very end of Ottoman rule. Behind the doors of the Automobile Club of Egypt, Egyptian staff attend to the every need of Cairo’s European elite - the way they always have done, it seems.
But soon the social upheaval out on the street will break its way through the club’s gilded doors, and its inhabitants above and below stairs must all confront their choices: to live safely without dignity, or to fight for their rights and risk everything.
Cairo at the very end of Ottoman rule. Behind the doors of the Automobile Club of Egypt, Egyptian staff attend to the every need of Cairo’s European elite - the way they always…
After suffering a catastrophic breakdown, J.J. O’Malley volunteers for a government project exploring the possibility of using coma as a means to keep prisoners under control. Floating in a maintained coma on a prison ship off the west coast of Ireland, his coma goes viral and the nation turns to watch.
Brilliantly imagined and artfully constructed - merging science fiction with an affectionate portrait of small town Ireland - Notes from a Coma is a compassionate examination of a man cursed with guilt and genius.
After suffering a catastrophic breakdown, J.J. O’Malley volunteers for a government project exploring the possibility of using coma as a means to keep prisoners under control.…
Zubaida is on a journey to unearth the past. It will lead her from the corridors of Harvard to the scorching deserts of Pakistan, and the bones of an ancient whale. It will carry her back to Bangladesh, and the dark horrors of a ship-breaking yard. Here - deep inside a beached ocean liner, steeped in mystery and tragedy - lies the key to her story. And a lifeline to the man she loves, but whose heart she may never win back.
Echoing with loneliness and longing, The Bones of Grace is a story of lost love and conflicted identity; of the urgent need to discover who we are, before we can truly belong anywhere and truly love anyone.
Zubaida is on a journey to unearth the past. It will lead her from the corridors of Harvard to the scorching deserts of Pakistan, and the bones of an ancient whale. It will carry…
One relentlessly hot summer, six children explore the scorched wheat fields that enclose their tiny Italian village. When the gang find a dilapidated farmhouse, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano makes a discovery so momentous that he dare not tell a soul. It is a secret that will force Michele to question everything and everyone around him, and will bring his innocent world toppling down.
An unputdownable thriller, I’m Not Scared has become a contemporary classic in Italian literature, read and celebrated the world over.
One relentlessly hot summer, six children explore the scorched wheat fields that enclose their tiny Italian village. When the gang find a dilapidated farmhouse, nine-year-old…
Aden Grace Sawyer has travelled a long way to begin her new life, and she’ll travel further to protect her secret. But once she’s in Pakistan, Aden finds herself in more danger than she could have imagined. Faced with violence and loss, she must make choices that will test not only her faith, but her understanding of who she is.
Compelling, unnerving and timely, Godsend is a study of what it means for a person to give themselves to their faith, and how far they will go to find a place to belong.
Aden Grace Sawyer has travelled a long way to begin her new life, and she’ll travel further to protect her secret. But once she’s in Pakistan, Aden finds herself in more danger…
