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Jon Michaels receives a sudden phone call from his brother, informing him that their estranged uncle Rey has been found dead in his caravan on Canvey Island. Recently sacked from his job, carrying a hangover from hell and craving some sort of escape, Jon reluctantly agrees to spend the week on the island to sort through his uncle's belongings - and unearths a disturbing family secret ...
Jon Michaels - a divorced and fatigued editor living a nondescript life in North London - receives a phone call informing him that his uncle has been found dead in his caravan on Canvey Island. Dismissed from his job only the day before, Jon reluctantly agrees to sort through his uncle's belongings. What follows is a quixotic week on Canvey as Jon unfolds a disturbing secret, ever more enchanted by the island - its landscape and its atmosphere.
O'Rourke's book offers a onestop shop for understanding foreignimposed regime change. Covert Regime Change is an impressive book and required reading for anyone interested in understanding hidden power in world politics.― Political Science Quarterly States seldom resort to war to overthrow their adversaries. They are more likely to attempt to covertly change the opposing regime, by assassinating a foreign leader, sponsoring a coup d'état, meddling in a democratic election, or secretly aiding foreign dissident groups. In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey A. O'Rourke shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. She argues that conventional focus on overt cases misses t...
"Reading Vantablack I felt I'd found something I needed to read for a very long time. Something at the threshold of experience, beyond it, transcending it. To conceive of being disembodied, one has to first have a body; then one has to be able to conceptualise something beyond our singular subjectivity, which is impossible unless you are a poet, a philosopher, or a physicist. Something I always understood, and this book makes clear - black is not merely a colour, a concept or a substance but a terrifying lure. To be carried away so far by a piece of literature is an extraordinary achievement fully realised by the poet, and in turn, this reader. I experienced a recognition rarely felt - something indescribable - to find a word for that sensation is impossible - read this book."--Melissa Lee-Houghton, author of Sunshine (Penned in the Margins, 2016) Named after a black material developed by Surrey NanoSystems, a material which absorbs up to 99.965% of visible light, Vantablack is a meditation on the physical properties of the colour black, on the black of grief, elegance, seriousness, formality, rebellion, darkness, death and sadness.
The Power of Flies begins in a courtroom, where a man is undergoing an interrogation. He has committed a crime, and he must now explain himself. But instead of letting the judge, lawyer, and psychiatrist question him, he asks himself all the questions--and answers them. While ranting on to the court about various topics--his family, the museum where he works as a tour guide, and even the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal--the narrator of The Power of Flies reveals himself to be both calculating and unstable. In this latest novel from acclaimed French writer Lydie Salvayre, it is up to the reader to sort through his philosophical diatribe to discover why this man turned killer.
In a deeply compelling debut novel, Lee Rourke, the underground literary sensation and author of Everyday (Social Disease, 2007), tells the tale of a man who finds his life so boring it actually frightens him. So, in response, the man leaves his job and takes time out to sit on a park bench next to a canal in a quiet corner of London. But his tranquillity is disturbed by a jittery woman who comes to sit by his side every day. Although she won't even tell him her name, she slowly begins to tell him a chilling story about a terrible act she committed, leaving him more scared than ever.
'A powerful and gripping piece of writing from a born storyteller.' Joseph O'Connor 'The narrative is just like his singing voice, full of powerful strength and compassion.' Michael Harding 'Lucid, lovingly-written and lyrical.' Professor Christine Kinealy 1846. County Cork. On the barren outskirts of Macroom, Pádraig and Cáit ua Buachalla face a perilous winter after the comprehensive failure of their blighted crop – the final episode in a whole history threatening to push them over the edge. From his shop at the centre of town, pawnbroker Cornelius Creed sees the poor in their darkest hour, his premises often being their last stop on the way to the workhouse. Perfectly placed at the ju...
P.J. sets off on a world tour to investigate funny economics. Having seen ‘good’ capitalism on Wall Street, he looks at ‘bad’ capitalism in Albania, views ‘good’ socialism in Sweden and endures ‘bad’ socialism in Cuba. The result is the world’s only astute, comprehensive and concise presentation of the basic principles of economics that can make you laugh on purpose. ‘P.J. O’Rourke is the acceptable face of US Republican arrogance. He sneers so irresistibly, you cough up your liberal guts laughing’ Observer ‘The first thing you learn about O’Rourke is this: he cannot turn off his mirth valve. Such is the severity of P.J.’s condition, the only person to have more entries in The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations is Oscar Wilde. This makes O’Rourke either the funniest man alive, or the wittiest heterosexual of all time . . . In Eat the Rich, O’Rourke’s ninth book, he squares up to the daunting topic of the world’s wealth: who has it, who hasn’t and why’ Mail on Sunday ‘P.J. at his scathing best . . . This is economics for the uninitiated’ Irish News
A genre-bending meditation on sickness, spirituality, creativity, and the redemptive powers of writing. Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatized and sickened selves in fiction and film. It offers a fresh, visceral, and idiosyncratic perspective on creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction itself. At its heart is a story of a disastrously traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the out-of-time roots of both trauma and creativity in an extraordinary childhood. Moving from fairgrounds to Agatha Christie, from literary festivals to neuroscience and the Bible, from Chernobyl to King Lear, Ashworth takes us on a fantastic ...
A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it. Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place. How he goes about bringing his visions to life–and what happens afterward–makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory. Remainder is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.