When he was 15, Kevin murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a teacher. Here, our narrator, Kevin's mother, Eva, tells the story of his upbringing to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Who is to blame for teenage atrocity?
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the most celebrated inspirational fable of our time, tells the story of a bird determined to be more than ordinary. This bestselling modern classic, reissued with a beautiful new cover design, is a story for people who want to follow their dreams and make their own rules and has inspired people for decades. 'Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight -- how to get from shore to food and back again,' writes author Richard Bach in this allegory about a unique bird named Jonath... read more
Traumatised by a tour of duty in Iraq, Richard Gaunt returns home to his girlfriend with very little of a plan in mind. Finding it difficult to settle into civilian life, he turns to drink and gambling - and is challenged to a bet he cannot resist. All he has to do is walk from London to Oxford in under twelve hours. But what starts as a harmless venture turns into something altogether different when Richard recklessly accepts an unusual request from a stranger ...
Budo is Max's imaginary friend. He and his fellow imaginary friends watch over their children until the day comes that the child stops imagining them. And then they're gone. Budo has lasted a lot longer than most imaginary friends - four years - because Max needs him more. His parents argue about sending him to a special school. But Max is perfectly happy if everything is just kept the way it is, and nothing out of the ordinary happens. Unfortunately, something out of the ordinary is going to happen - and then he'll need Budo more than ever...
Nick Hornby returns to his roots - music and messy relationships - in this funny and touching new novel which thoughtfully and sympathetically looks at how lives can be wasted but how they are never beyond redemption. Annie lives in a dull town on England's bleak east coast and is in a relationship with Duncan which mirrors the place; Tucker was once a brilliant songwriter and performer, who's gone into seclusion in rural America - or at least that's what his fans think. Duncan is obsessed with Tucker's work, to the point of derang... read more
Tip and Teddy are becoming men under the very eyes of their adoptive father, Bernard Doyle. A student at Harvard, Tip is happiest in a lab, whilst Teddy thinks he has found his calling in the Church, and both are increasingly strained by their father's protective plans for them. But when they are involved in an accident on an icy road, the Doyles are forced to confront certain truths about their lives, how the death of Doyle's wife Bernadette has affected the family, and an anonymous figure who is always watching.
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word "Kommunist" and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's li... read more
'It's the way things work, isn't it? Chance, happenstance..and choice. Things might happen accidentally...but then we make choices. That's what we have to live with; not the accident, the fluke - but the choices we make in the wake of it. Because they really determine our fate.' Manhattan, Thanksgiving eve, 1945. The war is over, and Eric Smyth'e party was in full swing. All his clever Greenwich Village friends were there. So too, was his sister, Sara - an independent, canny young woman, starting to make her way in the big city. A... read more
Seattle, 1972: Neil Countryman and John William Barry, two teenage boys from very different backgrounds, are at the start of an 800m race. Their lives collide for the first time, and so begins an extraordinary friendship. As they grow older Neil follows the conventional route of the American dream, but the eccentric, fiercely intelligent John William makes radically different choices, dropping out of college and moving deep into the woods. Convinced it is the only way to live without hypocrisy, John William enlists Neil to help him... read more
This is a great, glorious, big-hearted novel set in a travelling circus touring the backblocks of America during the Great Depression of the early 1930s. It's a story of love and hate, trains and circuses, dwarves and fat ladies, horses and elephants - or to be more specific, one elephant, Rosie, star of Benzini Bros Most Spectacular Show on Earth ...When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, swindlers and misfits in a second-rate circus struggling to surviv... read more
'It's time to stop fighting, and go home'. These are the words that persuade Aruna to walk out of her East London flat in the middle of breakfast, and keep on walking. Leaving behind her marriage to Patrick, her adoring husband, she gets on a plane to Singapore, running back home to the city she had run away from in the first place. And there she finds her childhood friend and former lover, Jazz, who has never stopped waiting for her to return. After years spent fleeing the ghosts of her past - the life she and Jazz had together, t... read more
Set in Whitechapel in 1888, The Tea Rose is a tale of a love lost and won, of a family's destruction, of murder and revenge - and one young woman's quest to escape the poverty of her childhood and make her fortune in the tea trade. Fiona Finnegan is the spirited, ambitious daughter of an Irish dock worker. She longs to break free from the squalid lanes and alleys of Whitechapel, where she has a job in a tea factory. With the love of her life, Joe Bristow, she dreams of escaping the poverty and opening her own tea shop. But one by ... read more
In a novel reminiscent of the work of Penelope Lively, Anne Tyler, and Alice Munro, acclaimed author Marina Endicott gives us one of the most profound and most memorable reads of the year. Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her life into a sharp left turn, taking the young family in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara - against all habit and comfort - moves the three children and their terrible grandmother into her own house. We know what is good, b... read more
Change is in the air in a shabby apartment in the 19th arrondissment in Paris. One unremarkable day Madame Lefevre invites Feliks to call her Sandrine. As his indomitable landlady's manners have been as unvarying as her dresses for the last 36 years, this feels significant to Feliks. And it is. As the face of Europe transforms beyond recognition Feliks's own life teeters on the edge of change. All it takes is one uncharacteristic decision and suddenly an unstoppable chain of life-changing events is set in motion. Feliks does not em... read more
Sam, Bonzi, Lola, Mbongo, Jelani, and Makena are no ordinary apes. These bonobos, like others of their species, are capable of reason and carrying on deep relationships - but, unlike most bonobos, they also know American Sign Language. Isabel Duncan, a scientist at the Great Ape Language Lab, doesn't understand people, but animals she gets, especially the bonobos. Isabel feels more comfortable in their world than she's ever felt among humans...until she meets John Thigpen, a very married reporter who braves the ever-present animal ... read more
Sequestered in his blitz-battered Regent's Park house in 1944, the ailing Herbert George Wells, 'H.G.' to his family and friends, looks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. Has it been a success or a failure? Once he was the most famous writer in the world, 'the man who invented tomorrow'; now he feels like yesterday's man.
A secret shared. Two lives entwined. Finally the past must come to light.
Scotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley - the wide-eyed Irish heroine of 'The Observations' - takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella. Bessy is intrigued by her new employer, but puzzled by her increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts. And it seems that Arabella has a few secrets of her own - including her near-obsessive affection for Nora, a former maid who died in mys... read more
This title is the winner of the Booker Prize. In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past ...A contemporary classic, "The Remains of the Day" is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.
By the side of a lake in Brandenburg, a young architect builds the house of his dreams - a summerhouse with wrought-iron balconies, stained-glass windows the colour of jewels, and a bedroom with a hidden closet, all set within a beautiful garden. But the land on which he builds has a dark history of violence that began with the drowning of a young woman in the grip of madness and that grows darker still over the course of the century: the Jewish neighbours disappear one by one; the Red Army requisitions the house, burning the furni... read more
