Killing Eve meets Sapiens in this spy novel, farce, profound treatise on human history, propulsive page-turner, and the best novel yet from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Mars Room
''One of America''s greatest living novelists''
DAILY TELEGRAPH
''A thrilling and prodigious novelist''
JONATHAN FRANZEN, author of Freedom
Sadie Smith - a sardonic, strikingly sexy, 30-something American undercover agent of questionable morals - is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her instructions are to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists led by the charismatic svengali Bruno Lacombe and coax them into violent action, provoking the French state to crush them and their dangerous ideas for good.
At first Sadie finds Bruno''s idealism laughable - he lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. But over time she falls for his narrative about the futility of civilisation and his promise of a new dawn for humanity. His ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own devastating story, become impossible to turn away from.
Beneath this parodic spy novel about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history. Written in short, vaulting sections, Creation Lake is Rachel Kushner''s finest achievement yet as a novelist - a work of high art, high comedy, keen insights and irresistible pleasure.
Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below
''A slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas''
GUARDIAN
''Stunning... An uplifting book''
SUNDAY TIMES
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
James is an enthralling and ferociously funny novel that leaves an indelible mark, forcing us to see Mark Twain''s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a wholly new and transformative light. From the shadows of Huck Finn''s mischievous spirit, Jim emerges to reclaim his voice, defying the conventions that have consigned him to the margins. Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize for his novel The Trees, Professor Percival Everett is one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime.
1861, The Mississippi River. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter for ever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson''s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, toward the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.
With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he cannot protect and the constant lie he must live. Together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all . . .
An epic story of survival at all odds and one of the most anticipated books of the year, soon to also be a major Apple TV series.
''Thrilling, thought-provoking and memorable ... one of dystopian fiction''s masterpieces alongside the likes of 1984 and Brave New World.'' DAILY EXPRESS _____________ In a ruined and hostile landscape, in a future few have been unlucky enough to survive, a community exists in a giant underground silo.
Inside, men and women live an enclosed life full of rules and regulations, of secrets and lies.
To live, you must follow the rules. But some don''t. These are the dangerous ones; these are the people who dare to hope and dream, and who infect others with their optimism.
Their punishment is simple and deadly. They are allowed outside.
Jules is one of these people. She may well be the last.
_____________ ''The next Hunger Games'' SUNDAY TIMES ''Well written, tense, and immensely satisfying, Wool will be considered a classic for many years in the future.'' WIRED ''Howey''s Wool is an epic feat of imagination. You will live in this world.'' JUSTIN CRONIN ''Wool is frightening, fascinating, and addictive. In one word, terrific.'' KATHY REICHS
*Discover The Secret Hours, the gripping new thriller from Mick Herron and an unmissable read for Slough House fans*
*Now a major TV series starring Gary Oldman*
'To have been lucky enough to play Smiley in one's career; and now go and play Jackson Lamb in Mick Herron's novels - the heir, in a way, to le Carre - is a terrific thing' Gary Oldman
Spooks are supposed to be stealthy . . . But those who make a noisy mess of their careers end up in Slough House.
This is Jackson Lamb's kingdom: a dumping ground for spies who've screwed up. Once high fliers, they're now slow horses, condemned to a life of pushing paper as punishment for crimes of drugs and drunkenness, lechery and failure, politics and betrayal. In drab and mildewed offices, these highly trained spies moan and squabble, stare at the walls, and dream of better days - not one of them joined the Intelligence Service to be a slow horse, and the one thing they have in common is their desire to be back in the action.
So when a young man is kidnapped and held hostage, his beheading scheduled for live broadcast on the net, the slow horses aren't going to just sit quietly and watch. And unless they can prove they're not as useless as they're thought to be, a public execution is going to echo round the world.
'The most exciting development in spy fiction since the Cold War' The Times
'The most enjoyable British spy novel in years' Mail on Sunday
From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father''s death, he''s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE SUMMER BY OPRAH DAILY, NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME, NPR, LOS ANGELES TIMES, ESSENCE AND MORE
A BBC BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK
''Whether in high literary form or entertaining, page-turner mode, the man is simply incapable of writing a bad book'' IAN WILLIAMS, GUARDIAN
''A dazzling treatise . . . gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people'' NEW YORK TIMES
''Crook Manifesto gave me something I had missed in recent reading: joy'' TELEGRAPH
''A masterpiece'' PEOPLE MAGAZINE
From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead comes the thrilling and entertaining sequel to Harlem Shuffle
1971, New York City. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is going bankrupt, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney is trying to keep his head down, his business up and his life straight. But then he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up an old police contact, who wants favours in return. For Ray, staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.
1973. The old ways are being overthrown by the thriving counterculture, but Pepper, Carney''s enduringly violent partner in crime, is a constant. In these difficult times, Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem, finding himself in a world of Hollywood stars and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.
1976. Harlem is burning, while the country gears up for the Bicentennial. Carney is trying to come up with a celebratory July 4th advertisement he can actually live with, while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire seriously injures one of Carney''s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it, navigating a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupt.
In scalpel-sharp prose and with unnerving clarity and wit, Colson Whitehead writes about a city that runs on cronyism, threats, ego, ambition, incompetence and even, sometimes, pride. Crook Manifesto is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem, and a searching portrait of how families work in the face of chaos and hostility.
''Funny, effortlessly streetwise, and criminally pleasurable to read it''s also politically enlightening and quietly incendiary'' BIG ISSUE
''When he moves into a new genre, he keeps the bones but does his own decorating'' WASHINGTON POST
''Indecently entertaining . . . [Whitehead] is a stylist whose sentences sing'' I NEWSPAPER
The top ten bestseller from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize In one of the most acclaimed novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.
The internationally bestselling historical thriller, now a major Netflix series starring Luke Evans, Dakota Fanning and Daniel Bruhl. Some things never change. New York City, 1896. Hypocrisy in high places is rife, police corruption commonplace, and a brutal killer is terrorising young male prostitutes. Unfortunately for Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, the psychological profiling of murderers is a practice still in its infancy, struggling to make headway against the prejudices of those who prefer the mentally ill - and the ''alienists'' who treat them - to be out of sight as well as out of mind. But as the body count rises, Roosevelt swallows his doubts and turns to the eminent alienist Dr Laszlo Kreizler to put a stop to the bloody murders - giving Kreizler a chance to take him further into the dark heart of criminality, and one step closer to death. ''An ingenious thriller'' Independent ''Gripping, atmospheric, intelligent, and entertaining'' USA Today ''Richly atmospheric . . . You can smell the fear'' New York Times
Juan Gay lies dying in a room in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert. There, a young man cares for him - someone whom Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since.
As the end approaches, the two trade stories - resurrecting lost loves, mothers and fathers - and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of sexuality, pathology and oppression. And, through their conversations, another story is told: that of the radical queer anthropologist Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served.
Blending fact with fiction, and drawing on oral histories and historical records, screenplay, testimony and image, Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure - on the ways in which stories sustain histories.
* A TIMES ''Book of 2023'' * ''Addictive'' STYLIST Books to Look Out For 2023 * ''Destined to be the status read of 2023'' HARPER''S BAZAAR BEST NEW FICTION * ''The perfect summer read'' CULTURE WHISPER * An EVENING STANDARD ''Best New Books for Spring'' * A Financial Times Best Summer Read 2023 *
Summer is coming to a close on Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome...
One misstep at a dinner party and the older man she''s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources, but a gift for navigating the desires of others, Alex stays on the island. She drifts like a ghost through the gated driveways and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world, trailing destruction in her wake.
Taut, sensual and impossible to look away from, The Guest captures the latent heat and potential danger of a summer that could go either way for a young woman teetering on the edge.
PRAISE FOR EMMA CLINE
''Taut, beautiful and savage'' GUARDIAN
''Stunning . . . thrilling . . . a spectacular achievement'' THE TIMES
''Something about Cline''s intimate tone, her talent for conjuring the feeling of being alive, is entirely and uniquely her own'' RACHEL KUSHNER
''An astonishingly gifted stylist'' BRANDON TAYLOR
''A masterful writer'' - RAYMOND CARVER Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is, here, once more our guide to the great American midway.
Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful lives - sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent - Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all; caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter''s odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank in typical Bascombe fashion faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days.
In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on display the prose, wit and intelligence that make him one of the world''s most acclaimed living writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.
''One of the finest achievements of modern American fiction'' The Independent
''Warm and wonderful'' KILEY REID ''Musical and revolutionary'' JASON REYNOLDS A queen of punk before her time. A duo on the brink of stardom. A night that will define their story for ever. Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, Afro-punk before that term existed. Despite her unconventional looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her one night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together. In early seventies New York City, just as she''s finding her niche as part of a flamboyant and funky creative scene, a rival band signed to her label brandishes a Confederate flag at a promotional concert. Opal''s bold protest and the violence that ensues set off a chain of events that will not only change the lives of those she loves, but also be a deadly reminder that repercussions are always harsher for women, especially Black women, who dare to speak their truth. Decades later, as Opal considers a 2016 reunion with Nev, music journalist S. Sunny Shelton seizes the chance to curate an oral history about her idols. Sunny thought she knew most of the stories leading up to the cult duo''s most politicized chapter, but as her interviews dig deeper, a nasty new allegation from an unexpected source threatens everything. Provocative and haunting, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev introduces a bold new name in contemporary fiction and a heroine the likes of which we''ve not seen in storytelling.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015. Shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women''s Fiction 2016. Finalist for the National Book Awards 2015. The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance. When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they''re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he''ll not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.
One photograph, one treasured memory, one chance to go back . . .
In a cosy photography studio in the mountains between this world and the next, someone is waking up as if from a dream. A kind man will hand them a hot cup of tea and gently explain that, having reached the end of their life, they have one final task.
There is a stack of photos on their lap, one for every day of their life, and now they must choose the pictures that capture their most treasured memories, which will be placed in a beautiful lantern. Once completed, it will be set spinning, and their cherished moments will flash before their eyes, guiding them to another world.
But, like our most thumbed-over photographs, our favourite memories become faded with age, so each visitor to the studio has the chance to choose one day to return to and photograph afresh. Each has a treasured story to tell, from the old woman rebuilding a community in Tokyo after a disaster, to the flawed Yakuza man who remembers a time when he was kind, and a strong child who is fighting to survive.
Extraordinarily moving and wise, The Lantern of Lost Memories is a beautiful Japanese tale about the people that make us and the moments that change us.
'Fantasy as it ought to be written' George R.R. Martin Return to the world of Fitz, the Fool and Nighteyes in the first book of The Tawny Man Trilogy by international bestselling author, Robin Hobb.
'Fantasy as it ought to be written' George R.R. Martin The second book in Robin Hobb's thrilling fantasy series returns readers to the Six Duchies and the magical world of the Fitz and the Fool.
"What a beautiful, haunting and hued narrative of American living. I'm in love with this story and the way Tyriek White breathes life into these characters." --Jacqueline Woodson, MacArthur Fellow and;author of
A poignant debut for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Jamel Brinkley,
