You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Art, fashion, fame and sex - artist Esther Glass has it all. That is, until a ghost from her past threatens to destroy her perfect life. Trying to cover her tracks, Esther goes for ultimate sensation, selling herself as a living work of art. She takes the international art scene by storm, performing as the female sitters inside seven great paintings. But underneath the surface the cracks start to show as Esther is forced to reconcile a very private history with a very public life. Fast-paced, smart and scintillating, Masterpiece gives the reader a rare glimpse into a closed world.
Even long ago, there was day and night. The day was full of light and warmth, and people and animals alike rejoiced in the rays of the sun. But what happens when people get greedy and take the Night for granted? What will become of the Earth and those who dwell upon it? Katherine Jumbe masterfully brings the world of the Malawian savanna to life, telling a rhythmic tale perfect for bedtime. Rich illustrations by Shana Dixon depict Baby Mwana and her older Sister Alekachawo as they trek up the great Sky Road to bring the heavens back into balance.
Set on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, "Waiting for a hurricane," follows a girl obsessed with escaping both her life and her country. Emotionally detached from her family and disillustioned with what the future holds, the takes drastic steps, seemingly oblivious to the damage she causes to herself and those around her. "Sexual education" examines the attempts of a student to tally the strict doctrine oabstinencece taught at her school with the very different social norms of her social circles. The short stories offer snapshots of lives in turmoil, frayed by relationships, dreams of escape, family taboos and rejection of, and by, society.
A feminist reimagining of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about a single mother and an enchanted friendship—from one of most bewitching British writers of the 20th century. “Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful . . . Tragic , comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius.” —The Observer Bella Winter has hit a low. Homeless and jobless, she is the mother of a toddler by a man whose name she didn’t quite catch, and her once pretty face is disfigured by the scar she acquired in a car accident. Friendless and without family, she’s recently disentangled herself from a selfish and indifferent boyfriend and a cruel and indifferent mother. But she shares a quality common to Barbara Comyns’s other heroines: a bracingly unsentimental ability to carry on. Before too long, Bella has found not only a job but a vocation; not only a place to live but a home and a makeshift family. As Comyns’s novel progresses, the story echoes and inverts the Brothers Grimm’s macabre tale The Juniper Tree. Will Bella’s hard-won restoration to life and love come at the cost of the happiness of others?
'Sometimes - not often - a book comes along that feels like Christmas. Philip Hensher's timely, but timeless, selection of the best short stories from the past 20 years is that kind of book. His introduction is as enriching as anything that has been published this year' Sunday Times A spectacular treasury of the best British short stories published in the last twenty years We are living in a particularly rich period for British short stories. Despite the relative lack of places in which they can be published, the challenge the medium represents has attracted a host of remarkable, subversive, entertaining and innovative writers. Philip Hensher, following the success of his definitive Penguin Book of British Short Stories, has scoured a vast trove of material and chosen thirty great stories for this new volume of works written between 1997 and the present day.
Colombia's Pacific coast, where everyday life entails warding off the brutal forces of nature. Damaris lives with her fisherman husband in a shack on a bluff overlooking the sea. Childless and at that age 'when women dry up,' as her uncle puts it, she is eager to adopt an orphaned puppy. But this act may bring more than just affection into her home. The Bitch is written in a prose as terse as the villagers, with storms - both meteorological and emotional - lurking around each corner. Beauty and dread live side by side in this poignant exploration or the many meanings of motherhood and love.
A novel written as a sharp parable of American society, addressing love, purpose, discrimination, and poverty. In Jeffrey Lewis’s novel, the Land of Cockaigne, once an old medieval peasants’ vision of a sensual paradise on earth, is reimagined as a plot on the coast of Maine. In efforts to assuage their grief over their son’s death and to make meaning of his life, Walter Rath and Catherine Gray build what they hope will be a version of paradise for a group of young men from the Bronx. As Walter and Catherine work to reinvent this land, formerly a summer resort, the surrounding town of Sneeds Harbor proves resistant. The residents’ well-meaning doubts lead to well-hidden threats, and ...
Winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize From one of the most daring voices in European fiction, this is a story of the twentieth century traced through the various possible lives of one woman. She is a baby who barely suffocates in the cradle. Or perhaps not? She lives to become as an adult and dies beloved. Or dies betrayed. Or perhaps not? Her memory is honoured. Or she is forgotten by everyone. Moving from a small Galician town at the turn of the century, through pre-war Vienna and Stalin's Moscow to present-day Berlin, Jenny Erpenbeck homes in on the moments when life follows a particular branch and 'fate' suddenly emerges from the sly interplay between history, character and pure chance. The End of Days is a novel that pulls apart the threads of destiny and allows us to see the present and the past anew.
In this poignant novel, a man guilty of a minor offense finds purpose unexpectedly by way of his punishment—reading to others. After an accident—or “the misfortune,” as his cancer-ridden father’s caretaker, Celeste, calls it—Eduardo is sentenced to a year of community service reading to the elderly and disabled. Stripped of his driver’s license and feeling impotent as he nears thirty-five, he leads a dull, lonely life, chatting occasionally with the waitresses of a local restaurant or walking the streets of Cuernavaca. Once a quiet town known for its lush gardens and swimming pools, the “City of Eternal Spring” is now plagued by robberies, kidnappings, and the other myriad ...
In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family's maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped re-enacting their past traumas. Heralding a brutal and singular new voice, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it.