Rose Tremain3.0 Lev is on his way to Britain to seek work, so that he can send money back to eastern Europe to support his mother and little daughter. He struggles with the mysterious rituals of 'Englishness', and the fashions and fads of the London scene. We see the road Lev travels through his eyes, and we share his dilemmas.
Тесса Хэдли0.0 Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate is forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother at Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it's because she's bored and hasn't got anything else to do, but she can't stop.
Adapting to a new way of life, the connections Kate forges in her new home are to have painful consequences, as the past begins to cast its long shadow over the present..
Anita Amirrezvani4.2 Set in seventeenth-century Iran, THE BLOOD OF FLOWERS is the powerful and haunting story of a young girl's journey from innocence to adulthood.
The novel begins in the 1620s in a remote village where the narrator (whose name, in the Iranian storytelling tradition, we are never to know) lives with her mother and rug-maker father. On the sudden death of her father our heroine and her mother fall upon hard times and are forced to travel to the bustling, beautiful, exotic city of Isfahan where relatives take them in.
Everything is new: the grudging charity of her aunt, the encouragement of her uncle, one of the finest carpet-makers in the world, who begins to teach her his craft, the treacherous friendship of the daughter of rich neighbours. And there's an adventure ahead which will introduce her to the sensual side of life as well as to the cruelty of betrayal and rejection before she finds her way to contentment and possibly, even, to happiness, in a world full of contrasts and dangers.
Гейл Джонс0.0 In the remote Australian outback during World War II, the emotionally stunted child of an English couple is befriended by equally adrift strangers. Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary soon come to call one another sister and begin to share a profound bond. They are content with life in this barren corner of the world until a terrible event lays waste to their lives. "Sorry" explores the values of friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice with a brilliance that has earned Gail Jones numerous accolades
Далия Софер0.0 In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known.
As Isaac navigates the tedium and terrors of prison, forging tenuous trusts, his wife feverishly searches for him, suspecting, all the while, that their once-trusted housekeeper has turned on them and is now acting as an informer.
And as his daughter, in a childlike attempt to stop the wave of baseless arrests, engages in illicit activities, his son, sent to New York before the rise of the Ayatollahs, struggles to find happiness even as he realizes that his family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger.
A page-turning literary debut, The Septembers of Shiraz simmers with questions of identity, alienation, and love, not simply for a spouse or a child, but for all the intangible sights and smells of the place we call home
Deborah Moggach0.0 Historical, domestic and sexy like Moggach’s best-selling Tulip Fever, this is a tantalizing, page-turning story set in South London’s dark and dirty streets during WWI.
1916: Pretty young Eithne Clay runs a shabby-genteel South London boarding house while her husband is off at the War. There’s Ralph, her fourteen-year old son, and Winnie the young maid, a homely, goodhearted country girl, and the lodgers, of course, a curious but necessary burden. They include blind Alwyne Flyte, communist and cynic, victim of a gas attack in the trenches. When the dreaded telegram arrives at the house, things turn from difficult to desperate for the two young women.
Then along comes the butcher, Neville Turk, big handsome ladies’ man, irresistible for his meat, money and brutish confidence, who throws flighty Eithne into a turmoil but has sinister plans of his own. Winnie and the blind lodger, meanwhile, conduct a strange, erotic liaison of their own. And young Ralph, ignored by his mother, looks on, feeling the undercurrents of desire, seeing more than he should. All the strands come together in a shocking denouement that turns a coward into a hero and young Ralph into a man.
They’re all in the dark with their dreams, secrets and fantasies, and electric light, new to their world, may be a boon but it reveals both grime and secrets. Life is tough on the home front and they’re all working the system in different ways, sometimes comic sometimes tragic, always human.
Elif Shafak4.0 One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a nineteen-year-old, unmarried woman walks into a doctor's surgery. "I need to have an abortion," she announces. Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. All the Kazanci men die in their early ^? forties, victims of the mysterious family curse, so it is a house of women. Among them are Asya s beautiful, rebellious mother, her clairvoyant aunt and their hopelessly hypochondriac sister. Into the midst of this madhouse comes Asya's feisty American cousin, and she's bringing long-hidden family secrets connected with Turkey's turbulent past in her wake.
Scarlett Thomas3.7 When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookshop, she can't believe her eyes. She knows enough about its author, the outlandish Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas, to know that copies are exceedingly rare. And, some say, cursed.With Mr. Y under her arm, Ariel finds herself thrust into a thrilling adventure of love, sex, death and time-travel.
Stella Duffy0.0 From the author of 'Parallel Lies' and the Orange Prize nominated 'State of Happiness' comes a story about London and its inhabitants. Under his railway arch in Loughborough Junction, Robert Sutton is handing over his dry-cleaning shop to Akeel. More than that, he teaches Akeel all he knows of his world.
