Books

  • 7 1/2

    7 1/2

    10.00

    A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away and he becomes lost in memory and beauty.

    He begins to tell us a story … A retired porn star who is made an offer he can’t refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of the danger of opening the door to past temptations and long-buried desires.

    Can he resist the oblivion and bliss they promise? A breathtakingly audacious novel by the acclaimed author of The Slap and Damascus about finding joy and beauty in a raging and punitive world, about the refractions of memory and time and, most subversive of all, the mystery of art and its creation.

  • Young Mungo

    Young Mungo

    10.00

    Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow’s housing estates where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial battles for the sake of reputation. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the doocot that James has built for his prize racing pigeons.

    As they begin to fall in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo must work hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland, with two strange men behind whose drunken banter lie murky pasts, he needs to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future. Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism, Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the meaning of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

  • LISTOGHIL A SEASONAL ALIGNMENT? (Revised 2023)

    LISTOGHIL A SEASONAL ALIGNMENT? (Revised 2023)

    10.00

    Listoghil, the central monument and focal point of the Carrowmore passage tomb complex close to Sligo in north-west Ireland, has been ruined, excavated and eventually partially restored. However, the chamber is preserved in its original position. The author examines the hypothesis that Listoghil was deliberately aligned to mark seasonal transitions equivalent to astronomical cross-quarter days. The methods include a horizon survey, the isolation of directional features in the monument, and computer modelling of the monument and skyscape. Folklore and legends around seasonal transits, locally, in Ireland, and in many and varied (and independently arising) contexts at temperate latitudes of the world, are seen as information sources complementary to data gathering and observation.

  • The Outsiders

    The Outsiders

    10.50

    The Socs and the Greasers are rival gangs from the opposite sides of town. The Socs’ idea of a good time is cruising around town in their flash car and beating up the long-haired greasers line Ponyboy. Ponyboy knows what to expect and he can count on his older brothers and other friends – until one night when someone takes things too far. Ponyboy may seem tough but on the inside he’s running scared. . .

  • HOW MANY MILES TO BABYLON?

    HOW MANY MILES TO BABYLON?

    10.50

    JOHNSTON, JENNIFER

  • The Poisonwood Bible

    The Poisonwood Bible

    10.50
    Description
    An international bestseller and a modern classic, this suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and their remarkable reconstruction has been read, adored and shared by millions around the world. This story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it – from garden seeds to Scripture – is calamitously transformed on African soil.
  • The Innocents

    The Innocents

    10.50

    A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland’s northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family’s boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them.

    Muddling through the severe round of the seasons, through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But soon, even that loyalty will be tested.

  • Ghost Wall

    Ghost Wall

    10.50

    It is high summer in rural Northumberland.

    Seventeen-year-old Silvie and her parents have joined an encampment run by an archaeology professor with an interest in the region’s dark history of ritual sacrifice. As Silvie finds a glimpse of new freedoms with the professor’s students, her relationship with her overbearing father begins to deteriorate, until the haunting rites of the past begin to bleed into the present.

    I have never read a novel this slender that holds inside it quite so much. Wild, calm, dark yet hopeful… This book ratcheted the breath out of me so skilfully that as soon as I’d finished, the only thing I wanted was to read it again‘ Jessie Burton

  • ANIMAL FARM

    ANIMAL FARM

    10.50

    ‘All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.’ Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, leads to the animals taking over the farm.

    Vowing to eliminate the terrible inequities of the farmyard, the renamed Animal Farm is organised to benefit all who walk on four legs. But as time passes, the ideals of the rebellion are corrupted, then forgotten. And something new and unexpected emerges.

    First published in 1945, Animal Farm – the history of a revolution that went wrong – is George Orwell’s brilliant satire on the corrupting influence of power.

    Remains our great satire of the darker face of modern history‘ Malcolm Bradbury

  • 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 Motion of the body Through Space

    The Motion of the body Through Space

    10.50

    From the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin.

    All her life Serenata has run, swum, and cycled – but now that she’s hit 60, all that physical activity has destroyed her knees. And her previously sedentary husband Remington chooses this precise moment to discover exercise. As he joins the cult of fitness, her once-modest husband burgeons into an unbearable narcissist.

    When he announces his intention to compete in a legendarily gruelling triathlon, Serenata is sure he’s going to end up injured or dead – but the stubbornness of an ageing man in Lycra is not to be underestimated. The story of an obsession, of a marriage, of a betrayal: The Motion Of The Body Through Space is Lionel Shriver at her hilarious, sharp-eyed, audacious best.

  • Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race

    Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race

    10.95

    Description
    ‘Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can’t afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak’The book that sparked a national conversation.

    Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to understand race relations in Britain today. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION NARRATIVE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEARBLACKWELL’S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEARWINNER OF THE JHALAK PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONLONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR A BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD

  • The Thing Around Your Neck

    The Thing Around Your Neck

    10.95

    ADICHIE, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI

  • PLOUGH AND THE STARS

    PLOUGH AND THE STARS

    10.95

    This educational edition, with the full play text and an introduction to the playwright, features a detailed analysis of the language, structure and characters of the play, and textual notes explaining difficult words and references. It contains: – The full play text – An introduction to the playwright, his background and his work – A detailed analysis of language, structure and characters in the play – Features of performance – Textual notes explaining difficult words and references Professor Murray’s notes, to be read alongside the full play text provided here, will enable students to better understand, appreciate, enjoy and write about O’Casey’s greatest play

  • One of Us is Lying

    One of Us is Lying

    10.95
    Description
    THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERFive students go to detention. Only four leave alive. Yale hopeful Bronwyn has never publicly broken a rule.

    Sports star Cooper only knows what he’s doing in the baseball diamond. Bad boy Nate is one misstep away from a life of crime. Prom queen Addy is holding together the cracks in her perfect life.

    And outsider Simon, creator of the notorious gossip app at Bayview High, won’t ever talk about any of them again. He dies 24 hours before he could post their deepest secrets online. Investigators conclude it’s no accident.

  • OF MICE AND MEN

    OF MICE AND MEN

    10.95

    George and his simple-minded friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except each other – and a dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch, but their hopes are doomed as Lennie – struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and jealousy – becomes a victim of his own strength.