Fiction

FROM THE BOOKER AND WOMEN’S-PRIZE SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY AND THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES

During a time of great turmoil, Gustave Flaubert created literature’s most scandalous heroine: Madame Bovary. He then poisoned her with arsenic. But what if, 175 years later, Emma and the women history overlooked could seize the quill from his hands and tell a different story?

In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a luminous reinvention of an iconic male writer, told through the eyes of the women real and fictional who shaped him: a devoted nursemaid, an Egyptian dancer and a passionate, jealous lover who refuses to be forgotten.

Through their voices, visionary author Elif Shafak creates both an intimate portrait of a great artist and an epic meditation on storytelling itself: who gets remembered, who gets erased, and how can literature endure through political upheaval, war and injustice? When the world feels broken, how do we find the hope to carry on?

Shafak takes readers on an extraordinary journey through time and space, from Flaubert’s unusual childhood in a house that was part home, part hospital, part morgue, to nineteenth-century Paris during the Revolution, and onwards to Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine and Beirut. In this exhilarating tale, the questions at the heart of her work take on a thrilling new urgency: who gets to speak, and what would the silenced have said?

Boldly inventive, transporting and illuminating, spanning decades and continents, In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a dazzling love letter to literature, untold stories, neglected communities and the enduring spirit of humanity.

November 11th, 1918. As the guns of the Great War fall silent, two babies draw their first breath. Eve is the daughter of an Earl.

Adam, a shepherd’s son. Yet from their first meeting they form an extraordinary bond that neither privilege nor prejudice can break. Then on a single September night in 1940, as Hitler prepares to invade the British Isles, their actions will change his mind.

Determining not just their own futures but the fate of a nation. They will show extraordinary courage. They will make unimaginable sacrifices.

And the story of what they did will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page. From the broads of Norfolk to the beaches of Dunkirk, Adam & Eve is a breathtaking epic of courage, sacrifice, and love forged in Britain’s darkest hour.

Yale student Lily Chen arrives in Taipei hungry: for family, for culture, for connection.But her summer of discovery quickly unravels. Her classes are grueling, her roommate unbearable, and a reckless, deeply awkward trip to the hot springs with a guy she barely knows soon ignites vicious gossip.Then her grandfather dies.Grieving and adrift, Lily must confront her own questions about the culture she inherited but never fully understood. She embarks on a wryly funny, often devastating search for understanding: of herself, her family, and the meaning of home.All over one unforgettable summer in Taipei.’Kuang is sharply attuned to current mores, but prefers satire to lecturing – reminiscent, in this respect, of her fellow American writers Kiley Reid and Curtis Sittenfeld, who have also written wonderful campus novels.

Philip Deval, a soldier recently returned from the beaches of Normandy, arrives in Palestine on a peace-keeping mission in the final days of the British Mandate.

The Sea of Galilee glitters in the distance as war-weary troops marvel at the novelty of oranges and sun a paradise that belies a fierce new conflict about to erupt.

Some years later, Philip begins work teaching at a school in the English countryside and meets the enigmatic music mistress, Frances Darwood. Over long evenings spent listening to records in her music room, they grow close.

But Philip is a changed man, and must confront the secrets and scars of all he has lived through which threaten, even now, to upend his future.

Farewell to Eden is a sweeping and profound novel about faith in all its forms, and a rich portrait of an embattled post-war Britain. It asks the question: how, after great suffering, do we retain our humanity, learn to love again, and believe in the promise of a better life?

The Disappearers is Marlon James s triumphant return to the Jamaica of A Brief History of Seven Killings a place of heat and chaos, and of danger for anyone outside the heteronormal.

So when eight gay men meet for the first time, in Kingston in 1988, answering the casting call for an openly queer play, they are already taking a big risk.

But that is nothing compared to what rains down on them when a mob descends on one of their rehearsals.

By the end of this night, one man is dead, all are injured, and two subsequently disappear. As the survivors heal, each man finds he must confront the bigotry and homophobia that the attack laid bare. Some try to forget; some embrace their rage; and some simply vanish but all are forever scarred.

As one of the victims puts it, there s a difference between when something ends and when something stops .

And this story won t stop until both the disappearers and the perpetrators have been tracked, along trails both hot and cold, and an ending reached.

Epic and intimate, violent and forgiving, The Disappearers is a tour de force which only Marlon James could have written both an unflinching portrait of the hatred and shame faced by gay men in a society which refuses to accept them, and a deeply human story of acceptance and insight.