First published in 1953, this is Bradbury's prophetic dystopian vision of a weird but too distant future where happiness is allocated on a four-walled TV screen, where individuals, eccentrics and scholars are outcasts of society and where books are burnt by a special task-force.
''Breahtaking'' Vogue ''So engrossing! Betty is a page-turning Appalachian coming-of-age story steeped in Cherokee history, told in undulating prose that settles right into you'' Naoise Dolan, Sunday Times bestselling author of Exciting Times ''I felt consumed by this book. I loved it, you will love it'' Daisy Johnson, Booker Prize shortlisted author of Everthing Under ''I loved Betty : I fell for its strong characters and was moved by the story it portrayed'' Fiona Mozley, Booker Prize shortlisted author of Elmet ''A girl comes of age against the knife.'' So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence - both from outside the family and also, devastatingly, from within. When her family''s darkest secrets are brought to light, Betty has no choice but to reckon with the brutal history hiding in the hills, as well as the heart-wrenching cruelties and incredible characters she encounters in her rural town of Breathed, Ohio. Despite the hardship she faces, Betty is resilient. Her curiosity about the natural world, her fierce love for her sisters and her father''s brilliant stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and in the face of all she bears witness to, Betty discovers an escape: she begins to write. A heartbreaking yet magical story, Betty is a punch-in-the-gut of a novel - full of the crushing cruelty of human nature and the redemptive power of words. ''Not a story you will soon forget'' Karen Joy Fowler, Booker Prize shortlisted author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves ''Shot through with moonshine, Bible verses, and folklore, Betty is about the cruelty we inflict on one another, the beauty we still manage to find, and the stories we tell in order to survive'' Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child
The captivating Sunday Times and New York Times number one bestseller by the Orange Prize-winning author of The Song of Achilles ; 'spellbinding . a thrilling tour de force of the imagination' ( Mail on Sunday ) 'Fabulous' Daily Telegraph 'Blisteringly modern' The Times 'Bold and sensuously written' Daily Mail 'An airy delight' Observer God. Mortal. Daughter. Monster. Saviour. Outcast. Lover. Destroyer. Creator. Mother. Witch.
Scorned, rejected and at last exiled from her father's house for her dark gifts, Circe arrives on the remote island of Aiaia with nothing but her wits and magic to help her. But there is danger for a solitary woman in the world, and Circe's independence and strange powers draw the wrath of men and gods alike. To protect what she holds dear, Circe must decide whether she belongs with the deities she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.
Complicated and wounded, gifted and passionate, Madeline Miller's captivating Circe steps out of myth and into the present as a heroine for our time, and all times.
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.
'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.' Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants.
Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?
THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2018 WINNER OF THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE SPECSAVERS NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS INTERNATIONAL AUTHOR OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR AWARD 2019 LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019 LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019 Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation - awkward but electrifying - something life-changing begins. Normal People is a story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find they can't.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize The Sunday Times Bestseller Trust is a sweeping, unpredicatable novel about power, wealth and truth, told by four unique, interlocking voices and set against the backdrop of turbulent 1920s New York. Perfect for fans of Succession.
Can one person change the course of history?
A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man''s story - of greed, love and betrayal - is about to slip from his grasp.
Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.
''One of the great puzzle-box novels, it''s the cleverest of conceits, wrapped up in a page-turner'' - Telegraph ''Genius'' - Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
A tender masterpiece of love, memory and loss from one of the world''s great writers.
The life of Sy Baumgartner - noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor - has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna. Now Anna is gone, and Baumgartner is embarking on his seventies whilst trying to live with her absence. But Anna''s voice is everywhere still, in every spiral of memory and reminiscence, in each recalled episode of the passionate forty years they shared.
Rich with compassion, wit and an eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient episodes of ordinary life, Baumgartner is one of Auster''s most luminous works - a tender late masterpiece of the ache of memory.
Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
'She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day' On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. Here, Virginia Woolf perfected the interior monologue and the novel's lyricism and accessibility have made it one of her most popular works. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.
A beautiful, arresting story about race and the relationships that shape us through life by the legendary Toni Morrison, in a stand-alone, slim Chatto hardback for the first time. In this 1983 short story - the only short story Morrison ever wrote - we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other''s throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Another work of genius by this masterful writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla''s and Roberta''s races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif , a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in uncertain times.
Auggie wants to be an ordinary ten-year-old. He does ordinary things - eating ice cream, playing on his Xbox. He feels ordinary - inside. But ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. Ordinary kids aren't stared at wherever they go.
Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton , Arcadia and Fates and Furies , and two short story collections, Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in the New Yorker , the Atlantic and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta ''s 2017 Best Young American Novelists.>
Harry Potter has never even heard of Hogwarts when the letters start dropping on the doormat at number four, Privet Drive. Addressed in green ink on yellowish parchment with a purple seal, they are swiftly confiscated by his grisly aunt and uncle. Then, on Harry's eleventh birthday, a great beetle-eyed giant of a man called Rubeus Hagrid bursts in with some astonishing news: Harry Potter is a wizard, and he has a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. An incredible adventure is about to begin!
These new editions of the classic and internationally bestselling, multi-award-winning series feature instantly pick-up-able new jackets by Jonny Duddle, with huge child appeal, to bring Harry Potter to the next generation of readers. It's time to PASS THE MAGIC ON .
A GUARDIAN BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021 AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR Set in a historical moment of moral crisis, Crossroads is the stunning foundation of a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigate the political and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years A WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR A LIT HUB BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR ''His best novel yet ... A Middlemarch -like triumph'' Telegraph ''Crossroads is the spiritual successor to The Corrections . .. It is a testament to Franzen''s authorial habits of empathy, his curiosity about the lives of others, his efforts in a land of cliche to add twists to easy assumptions, that you are likely to find yourself caring about how things turn out for each of the Hildebrandts equally '' Observer It''s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless - unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem''s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who''s been selling drugs to seventh-graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.
Jonathan Franzen''s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and their keen-eyed take on the complexities of contemporary America. Now, for the first time, in Crossroads , Franzen explores the history of a generation. With characteristic humour and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that feels no less immediate.
A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a historical moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen''s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.
Harry Potter's summer has included the worst birthday ever, doomy warnings from a house-elf called Dobby, and rescue from the Dursleys by his friend Ron Weasley in a magical flying car! Back at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for his second year, Harry hears strange whispers echo through empty corridors - and then the attacks start. Students are found as though turned to stone . Dobby's sinister predictions seem to be coming true.
These new editions of the classic and internationally bestselling, multi-award-winning series feature instantly pick-up-able new jackets by Jonny Duddle, with huge child appeal, to bring Harry Potter to the next generation of readers. It's time to PASS THE MAGIC ON .
Madeline Whittier is allergic to the outside world. So allergic, in fact, that she has never left the house in all of her seventeen years. But when Olly moves in next door, and wants to talk to Maddie, tiny holes start to appear in the protective bubble her mother has built around her. Olly writes his IM address on a piece of paper, shows it at her window, and suddenly, a door opens. But does Maddie dare to step outside her comfort zone?
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.
When Harry and his friends go back for their third year at Hogwarts, the atmosphere is tense. There's an escaped murderer on the loose and the sinister prison guards of Azkaban have been called in to guard the school. Lessons, however, must go on and the subjects include Care of Magical Creatures.
THE SECOND THRILLING NOVEL IN VAL MCDERMID''S NEW SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING SERIES There''s nothing like a killer story . . . 1989. The world is changing, and Allie Burns is still on the front line, covering the stories that count. Although Allie is no longer an investigative journalist, her instincts are sharper than ever. When she discovers a lead about the exploitation of society''s most vulnerable, Allie is determined to give a voice to those who have been silenced. As Allie edges closer to exposing the truth, she travels beyond the Iron Curtain, to East Berlin on the brink of revolution. The dark heart of the story is more shocking than she ever imagined. And to tell it, Allie must risk her freedom and her life . . . The latest Allie Burns thriller, set a decade after the bestselling first novel in the ground-breaking, iconic new series. Praise for 1979 '' McDermid is at her considerable best'' GUARDIAN ''Irresistible'' PATRICIA CORNWELL ''A brilliant novel by a supremo of the genre'' PETER JAMES ''Outstanding'' SPECTATOR ''Another masterpiece'' DAVID BALDACCI ''Sensational. One of Britain''s most accomplished writers'' SUNDAY EXPRESS
