Literary Fiction

  • Americanah

    Americanah

    12.50

    A delicious, important novel’ The Times ‘Alert, alive and gripping’ Independent ‘Some novels tell a great story and others make you change the way you look at the world. Americanah does both’ Guardian As teenagers in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can.

    The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America. There she suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

    Thirteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a blogger. But after so long apart and so many changes, will they find the courage to meet again, face to face? Fearless, gripping, spanning three continents and numerous lives, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning ‘Americanah’ is a richly told story of love and expectation set in today’s globalized world.

  • All My Puny Sorrows

    All My Puny Sorrows

    12.50

    Shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2015; Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2015; Sunday Times Top Choice Summer Read; A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.

    Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters. Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive.

    When Elf’s latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go.

    The novel she has written – so exquisitely that you’ll want to savour every word – reads as if it has been wrenched from her heart.‘ Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

    [Toews] has produced a masterly book of such precise dignity. It is, also against all the odds, at times a desperately humorous novel.‘ Daily Mail

  • Women Talking

    Women Talking

    12.50

    Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote Mennonite colony, over one hundred girls and women were raped by what many thought were ghosts or demons. Their accounts were dismissed as ‘wild female imagination’. Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events.

    When the women learn the truth, they meet secretly to discuss how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. But they have just two days to decide, before the rapists are bailed out and brought home.

     

    Don’t miss this one! This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid’s Tale‘ – Margaret Atwood, Twitter

    Brave and thoughtful.‘ Observer

    Wickedly funny and fearlessly honest.‘ New Yorker

     

     

  • TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

    TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

    9.95

    Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, this work explores with humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the thirties.

  • Prophet Song

    Prophet Song

    12.50
    Description
    WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE AN POST IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE STREGA EUROPEAN PRIZEA SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR’S CHOICEAN AMAZON TOP 10 BOOK OF DECEMBER 2023A Book of the Year for 2023 according to the Guardian, FT, Irish Independent, Irish Examiner, Sunday Independent, Economist, Big Issue, Daily Telegraph, Irish Times and Waterstones’A CRUCIAL BOOK FOR OUR CURRENT TIMES… BRILLIANTLY HAUNTING.’ OBSERVERThe explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart.
  • Roman Stories

    Roman Stories

    16.95

    From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies comes an exquisitely crafted work of fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margiNS.

    A man recalls a summer party that awakens an alternative version of himself. A couple haunted by a tragic loss return to seek consolation.

    An outsider family is pushed out of the block in which they hoped to settle. A set of steps in a Roman neighbourhood connects the daily lives of the city’s myriad inhabitants. This is an evocative fresco of Rome, the most alluring character of all: contradictory, in constant transformation and a home to those who know they can’t fully belong but choose it anyway.

    Rich with Lahiri’s signature gifts, Roman Stories is a masterful work from one of the finest writers of our time.

    Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz

  • Seven Steeples

    Seven Steeples

    14.95

    The mountain remained, unclimbed, for the first year that they lived there. Bell and Sigh, a couple in the infancy of their relationship, cut themselves off from friends and family. They turn their backs on a city divided by scores of streets and hundreds of sterile cherry trees, by a foul river and a declining population of house sparrows.

    Them in and the world out. From the top of the nearby mountain, they are told, you can see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples. All you have to do is climb.

    Taking place in a remote house in the south-west of Ireland, this rich and vivid novel spans seven years and speaks to the times we live in, asking how we may withdraw, how better to live in the natural world, and how the choices made or avoided lead us home.

  • Night Waking

    Night Waking

    10.50

    Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby’s skeleton in the garden of their house.

    Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women’s vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss’s second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range – showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great emotional depth.

  • THE SONG OF ACHILLES

    THE SONG OF ACHILLES

    11.95

    WINNER OF THE ORANGE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION

    Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper – despite the displeasure of Achilles’s mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess.

    But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfil his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.

    An exciting, sexy, violent Superman version of The Iliad‘ GUARDIAN

  • Never Let Me Go

    Never Let Me Go

    10.95

    This book deals with a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

  • The Autumn of the Patriarch

    The Autumn of the Patriarch

    12.50

    Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, explores the loneliness of power in Autumn of the Patriarch.

    ‘Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside.’

    As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man lying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their arrogant, manically violent leader, known for serving up traitors to dinner guests and drowning young children at sea, can surely not die the humiliating death of a mere mortal?

    Tracing the demands of a man whose egocentric excesses mask the loneliness of isolation and whose lies have become so ingrained that they are indistinguishable from truth, Marquez has created a fantastical portrait of despotism that rings with an air of reality.

  • THE PARIS WIFE

    THE PARIS WIFE

    9.95

    Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for France. But glamorous Jazz Age Paris, full of artists and writers, fuelled by alcohol and gossip, is no place for family life and fidelity.

    Ernest and Hadley’s marriage begins to founder, and the birth of a beloved son serves only to drive them further apart. Then, at last, Ernest’s ferocious literary endeavours begin to bring him recognition – not least from a woman intent on making him her own.

  • One Hundred Years of Solitude

    One Hundred Years of Solitude

    12.50

    ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS BOOKS AND WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

    ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice’

    Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s great masterpiece is the story of seven generations of the Buendia family and of Macondo, the town they built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and its miracles. A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book, and only Aureliano Buendia can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny.

    Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy and comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.

  • Love in the Time of Cholera

    Love in the Time of Cholera

    12.50

    A CLASSIC STORY OF ENDURING LOVE FROM THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR

    ‘It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.’

    Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza’s impassioned advances and married Dr Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half-century, Flornetino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina. When Fermina’s husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love.

    But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?

    An exquisite writer, wise, compassionate and extremely funny‘ Sunday Telegraph

    An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women‘ The Times

  • NEMESIS

    NEMESIS

    10.95

    It’s the sweltering summer of 1944, and Newark is in the grip of a terrifying epidemic. Decent, athletic twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges and ashamed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As polio begins to ravage Bucky’s playground – child by helpless child – Roth leads us through every emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering and the pain.

    The genius of Philip Roth…back at his imperious best in this heartbreaking tale… The eloquence of Roth’s storytelling makes Nemesis one of his most haunting works‘ Daily Mail

    Cantor is one of Roth’s best creations and the atmosphere of terror is masterfully fashioned‘ Sunday Telegraph

    Very fine, very unsettling‘ Douglas Kennedy, The Times

  • The Only Story

    The Only Story

    10.95

    BARNES, JULIAN