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Love Like Salt
CHOSEN BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL IN THE GUARDIAN AS ONE OF HER BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'It's a slice of a life . . . a complex, intelligent, beautiful, thoughtful, rather lyrical book' -Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love 'A moving treatise on inheritance, not just of a disease like cystic fibrosis, but of our attitudes to living and loving, our sense of cultural and familial landscape, and how these intangibles pass down through generations. Stevenson picks apart her life like a strand of DNA to uncover just how we become the sum of our parts' Daily Telegraph 'A beautiful memoir . . . [Stevenson] is a novelist and a translator and her memoir is about translation in the larger sense....
Instructions for Visitors
If you are lucky enough to find your place, you should never actually live in it, never make it your home. And never live with the man you think you cannot live without.Le Village is a small town at the southwestern-most tip of France. Here a young Englishwoman fell in love with France, the French and one Frenchman in particular.In her seductive, lyrical and witty memoir Helen Stevenson writes about life in Le Village, not as an expat, but as someone adopted by her neighbours as one of their own. By Stefan, the Maoist tennis fanatic, who lives off his lover in solidarity with the unemployed; by Gigi, the chic Parisian who dresses her ex-lovers' girlfriends from the stock of her exquisite bou...
The Lights of Pointe-Noire
Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When at last he comes home to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on Congo's south-eastern coast, he finds a country that in some ways has changed beyond recognition: the cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture has become a Pentecostal temple, and his secondary school has been re-named in honour of a previously despised colonial ruler. But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture which still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Mabanckou though, now a decorated French-Congolese writer and esteemed professor at UCLA, finds he can only look on as an outsider at the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to Congo, Mabanckou slowly builds a stirring exploration of the way home never leaves us, however long ago we left home.
Instructions For Visitors
If you are lucky enough to find your place, you should never actually live in it, never make it your home. And never live with the man you think you cannot live without. Le Village is a small town at the southwestern-most tip of France. Here a young Englishwoman fell in love with France, the French and one Frenchman in particular. In her seductive, lyrical and witty memoir Helen Stevenson writes about life in Le Village, not as an expat, but as someone adopted by her neighbours as one of their own. By Stefan, the Maoist tennis fanatic, who lives off his lover in solidarity with the unemployed; by Gigi, the chic Parisian who dresses her ex-lovers' girlfriends from the stock of her exquisite b...
Black Moses
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF PRIZE It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, the orphanage's corrupt director. So Moses escapes to Pointe-Noire, where he finds a home first with a larcenous band of Congolese Merry Men and then among the Zairian prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. But the authorities won't leave Moses in peace, and intervene to chase both the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls out of town. All this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. Could he really be the Robin Hood of the Congo? Or is he just losing his marbles? Vivid, exuberant and heartwarming, Black Moses is a vital new extension of Alain Mabanckou's extraordinary, interlinked body of work dedicated to his native Congo, and confirms his status as one of our great storytellers.
The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard
Sick of striving? Giving up on grit? Had enough of hustle culture? Daunted by the 10,000-hour rule? Relax: As the French know, it's the best way to be better at everything. In the realm of love, what could be less seductive than someone who's trying to seduce you? Seduction is the art of succeeding without trying, and that's a lesson the French have mastered. We can see it in their laissez-faire parenting, chic style, haute cuisine, and enviable home cooking: they barely seem to be trying, yet the results are world-famous, thanks to a certain je ne sais quoi that is the key to a more creative, fulfilling, and productive life. For fans of both Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, philosopher Ollivier Pourriol's book draws on the examples of such French legends as Descartes, Stendhal, Rodin, Cyrano de Bergerac and Françoise Sagan to show how to be efficient à la française, and how to effortlessly reap the rewards.
The Girls Next Door
The story of the intrepid young women who volunteered to help and entertain American servicemen fighting overseas, from World War I through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The emotional toll of war can be as debilitating to soldiers as hunger, disease, and injury. Beginning in World War I, in an effort to boost soldiers’ morale and remind them of the stakes of victory, the American military formalized a recreation program that sent respectable young women and famous entertainers overseas. Kara Dixon Vuic builds her narrative around the young women from across the United States, many of whom had never traveled far from home, who volunteered to serve in one of the nation’s most brutal wo...
Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty
Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Michel is ten years old, living in Pointe Noire, Congo, in the 1970s. His mother sells peanuts at the market, his father works at the Victory Palace Hotel, and brings home books left behind by the white guests. Planes cross the sky overhead, and Michel and his friend Lounès dream about the countries where they'll land. While news comes over the radio of the American hostage crisis in Tehran, the death of the Shah, the scandal of the Boukassa diamonds, Michel struggles with the demands of his twelve year old girlfriend Caroline, who threatens to leave him for a bully in the football team. But most worrying for Michel, the witch doctor has told his mother that he has hidden the key to her womb, and must return it before she can have another child. Somehow he must find it. Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty is a humorous and poignant account of an African childhood, drawn from Alain Mabanckou's life.
Broken Glass
Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 The history of Credit Gone West, a squalid Congolese bar, is related by one of its most loyal customers, Broken Glass, who has been commissioned by its owner to set down an account of the characters who frequent it. Broken Glass himself is a disgraced alcoholic school teacher with a love of French language and literature which he has largely failed to communicate to his pupils but which he displays in the pages of his notebook. The notebook is also a farewell to the bar and to his fellow drinkers. After writing the final words, Broken Glass will go down to the River Tchinouka and throw himself into its murky waters, where his lamented mother also drowned. Broken Glass is a Congolese riff on European classics from the most notable Francophone African writer of his generation.
Mad Elaine
On the face of it, Madelaine is a dumpy, dull librarian, respectable, outwardly timid, inwardly enraged, and of no consequence to anyone whatsoever. That is, until a mysterious would-be novelist enters her life and turns her world upside down.
