The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka
WINNER OF THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE A searing satire set amid the murderous mayhem of Sri Lanka beset by civil war Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts who cluster around him can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Ten years after his prizewinning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Karunatilaka is back with a rip-roaring epic, full of mordant wit and disturbing truths.
The Twilight World, Werner Herzog
The great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II
In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. Herzog and Onoda developed an instant rapport and would meet many times, talking for hours and together unraveling the story of Onoda’s long war.
At the end of 1944, on Lubang Island in the Philippines, with Japanese troops about to withdraw, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior officer: Hold the island until the Imperial army’s return. You are to defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs. . . . There is only one rule. You are forbidden to die by your own hand. In the event of your capture by the enemy, you are to give them all the misleading information you can. So began Onoda’s long campaign, during which he became fluent in the hidden language of the jungle. Soon weeks turned into months, months into years, and years into decades—until eventually time itself seemed to melt away. All the while Onoda continued to fight his fictitious war, at once surreal and tragic, at first with other soldiers, and then, finally, alone, a character in a novel of his own making.
In The Twilight World, Herzog immortalizes and imagines Onoda’s years of absurd yet epic struggle in an inimitable, hypnotic style—part documentary, part poem, and part dream—that will be instantly recognizable to fans of his films. The result is a novel completely unto itself, a sort of modern-day Robinson Crusoe tale: a glowing, dancing meditation on the purpose and meaning we give our lives.
The Years, Annie Ernaux
The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.
Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.
On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir «written» by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the «I» for the «we» (or «they», or «one») as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): «From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the «we» and impersonal pronouns.»
Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit, Phillip Stephens
A magisterial and profoundly perceptive survey of Britain’s post-war role on the global stage, from Suez to Brexit.
In 1962 the American statesman Dean Acheson famously charged that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a new role. Nearly sixty years later the rebuke rings true again. Britain’s postwar search for its place in the world has vexed prime ministers and government since the nation’s great victory in 1945: the cost of winning the war was giving up the empire.
After the humiliation of Anthony Eden’s Suez expedition, Britain seemed for a time to have found an answer. Clinging to its self-image as a great island nation, it would serve as America’s best friend while acknowledging its geography by signing up to membership of the European Union. Never a comfortable balancing act, for forty years it appeared to work. In 2016 David Cameron called the Brexit referendum and blew it up.
Award-winning journalist Philip Stephens paints a fascinating portrait of a nation struggling to reconcile its waning power with past glory. Drawing on decades of personal contact and interviews with senior politicians and diplomats in Britain, the United States and across the capitals of Europe, Britain Alone is a vivid account of a proud nation struggling to admit it is no longer a great power. It is an indispensable guide to how we arrived at the state we are in.
Skagboys, Irvine Welsh
Prequel to the best-selling phenomenon Trainspotting, this exhilarating and moving novel shows how Welsh’s colorful miscreants first went wrong.
Mark Renton’s life seems to be on track: university, pretty girlfriend, even social success. But, in this prequel to Trainspotting, after the death of his younger brother, Rent falls apart and starts hanging around with his old pals, including Sick Boy, Spud, and Begbie, and being drawn irresistibly into their wacked-out plans.
Set against 1980s Thatcher-era Edinburgh―with its high unemployment, low expectations, and hard-to-come-by money and drugs?Irvine Welsh’s colorful crew lunges from one darkly hilarious misadventure to the next. Gritty, moving, and exhilarating, Skagboys paints their dizzying downward spiral with scabrous humor and raw language
Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes
This beautiful, spare novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch. Neil, the narrator, takes her class “Culture and Civilisation,” taught not for undergraduates but for adults of all ages; we are drawn into his intellectual crush on this private, withholding, yet commanding woman. While other personal relationships and even his family drift from Neil’s grasp, Elizabeth’s application of her material to the matter of daily living remains important to him, even after her death, in a way that nothing else does.
In Elizabeth Finch, we are treated to everything we cherish in Barnes: his eye for the unorthodox forms love can take between two people, a compelling swerve into nonfictional material (this time, through Neil’s obsessive study of Julian the Apostate, following on notes Elizabeth left for him to discover after her death), and the forcefully moving undercurrent of history, and biography in particular, as nourishment and guide in our current lives.
The Museum of Desire, Jonathan Kellerman
LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis has solved a lot of murder cases. On many of them—the ones he calls “different”—he taps the brain of brilliant psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware. But neither Alex nor Milo are prepared for what they find on an early morning call to a deserted mansion in Bel Air. This one’s beyond different. This is predation, premeditation, and cruelty on a whole new level.
Four people have been slaughtered and left displayed bizarrely and horrifically in a stretch limousine. Confounding the investigation, none of the victims seems to have any connection to any other, and a variety of methods have been used to dispatch them. As Alex and Milo make their way through blind alleys and mazes baited with misdirection, they encounter a crime so vicious that it stretches the definitions of evil.
Lessons, Ian McEwan
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines’s life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother’s protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
Haunted by lost opportunities, Roland seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics, and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?
Epic, mesmerizing, and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man’s lifetime.
Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, Sequoia Nagamatsu
«You should be here; he’s simply magnificent.» These are the final words a biologist hears before his Margaret Mead-like wife dies at the hands of Godzilla. The words haunt him as he studies the Kaiju (Japan’s giant monsters) on an island reserve, attempting to understand the beauty his wife saw.
«The Return to Monsterland» opens Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, a collection of twelve fabulist and genre-bending stories inspired by Japanese folklore, historical events, and pop culture. In «Rokurokubi», a man who has the demonic ability to stretch his neck to incredible lengths tries to save a marriage built on secrets. The recently dead find their footing in «The Inn of the Dead’s Orientation for Being a Japanese Ghost». In «Girl Zero», a couple navigates the complexities of reviving their deceased daughter via the help of a shapeshifter. And, in the title story, a woman instigates a months-long dancing frenzy in a Tokyo where people don’t die but are simply reborn without their memories.
Every story in the collection turns to the fantastic, the mysticism of the past, and the absurdities of the future to illuminate the spaces we occupy when we are at our most vulnerable.
Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk
It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria—the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire—located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives—brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria—the island revolts.
To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island—an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And then a murder occurs.
As the plague continues its rapid spread, the Sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island’s governor and local administration and the people’s refusal to respect the bans doom the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the Sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingheria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves.
Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago, with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.
Silver Tears, Camilla Läckberg
Faye Adelheim is living a delicious lie. She is wealthy beyond imagination, she is the Chairman of her self-made global cosmetics brand, and her ex-husband, the monster who killed her beloved daughter Julienne, is living out the remainder of his days behind bars.
But unbeknownst to journalists, police officers, and investors, and even the lovers she occasionally invites to her bed, Faye has a secret: her daughter is, in fact, alive and well and so is her mother, the woman Faye’s father was sentenced for allegedly killing years ago.
Together, three generations of women have survived in hiding from the men who sought to destroy them. But unfortunately for Faye, cages are meant to be opened, pillow talk can lead to betrayal, and secrets always end in tears.
The Man in the Red Coat , Julian Barnes
in the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days’ intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Époque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker and man of science with a famously complicated private life who was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. In this vivid tapestry of people (Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Proust, James Whistler, among many others), place, and time, we see not merely an epoch of glamour and pleasure, but, surprisingly, one of violence, prejudice, and nativism—with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is, at once, a fresh portrait of the Belle Époque; an illuminating look at the longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France; and a life of a man who lived passionately in the moment but whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time.
Down and Out in Paris and London & The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
George Orwell is a difficult author to summarize. He was a would-be revolutionary who went to Eton, a political writer who abhorred dogma, a socialist who thrived on his image as a loner, and a member of the Imperial Indian Police who chronicled the iniquities of imperialism. Both the books in this volume were published in the 1930s, a “a low, dishonest decade,” as his coeval W.H. Auden described it. Orwell’s subjects in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier are the political and social upheavals of his time. He focusses on the sense of profound injustice, incipient violence, and malign betrayal that were ubiquitous in Europe in the 1930s. Orwell’s honesty, courage, and sense of decency are inextricably bound up with the quasi-colloquial style that imbues his work with its extraordinary power. His descriptions of working in the slums of Paris, living the life of a tramp in England, and digging for coal with miners in the North make for a thoughtful, riveting account of the lives of the working poor and of one man’s search for the truth.
Our edition includes the following essays: Marrakech; How the Poor Die; Antisemitism in Britain; Notes on Nationalism
A Clergyman’s Daughter, George Orwell
Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied housekeeper. Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play, by the hopelessness of preaching to the poor and by debts she cannot pay in 1930s Depression England. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket and cannot remember her name. Orwell leads us through a landscape of unemployment, poverty and hunger, where Dorothy’s faith is challenged by a social reality that changes her life.
Keep The Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell
A pre-cursor to his more famous works of Animal Farm and 1984, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is Orwell’s social commentary on capitalism’s constraints. Orwell captures the struggles of an aspiring writer with almost pitch-perfect attention to psychological detail, exploring the gulf between art and life.
Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works in a grubby London bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rented room, trying to write. He is determined to stay free of the “money world” of lucrative jobs, family responsibilities, and the kind of security symbolized by the homely aspidistra plant that sits in every middle-class British window.
The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell
Essays, journalism and essays by the indispensable George Orwell, spanning the first two decades of his writing career. Even many years after his death, the more we read of Orwell, the more clearly we can think about our world and ourselves.
Orwell’s breadth of experience, compassion, and political insight make his early essays among his best. Here he witnesses two kinds of executions in Burma (“A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant”), fires salvos at British colonialism (“How a Nation is Exploited”), copes with poverty in Paris (“A Day in the Life of a Tramp”), and works in a bookshop in Hampstead (“Bookshop Memories”).
It was also during this period that Orwell wrote and published Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier (originally published for the Left Book Club), and the memoir of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia.
This first volume of the Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters contains some of the most remarkable writing of Orwell’s entire career and will be enjoyed by anyone who believes that words can go a long way toward changing the world.
The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell
During the Second World War, George Orwell was rejected for service and so became the literary editor, reviewer, and frequent columnist of the left-wing weekly, Tribune. “What I have most wanted to do,” Orwell said, “is to make political writing into an art.” And there is ample proof here that he achieve his ambition.
Included in this volume are reviews of works by authors as varied as C. S. Lewis and Arthur Koestler, the newspaper column, “As I Please,” and the brilliant essay, “A Nice Cup of Tea.”
Also included are letters to T. S. Eliot, among others, while trying to convince publishers to take a chance on a book called Animal Farm.
This third volume of the Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters by George Orwell will be enjoyed by anyone who believes that words can go a long way toward changing the world.
George Orwell Diaries
This groundbreaking volume, never before published in the United States, at last introduces the interior life of George Orwell, the writer who defined twentieth-century political thought. Written as individual books throughout his career, the eleven surviving diaries collected here record Orwell’s youthful travels among miners and itinerant laborers, the fearsome rise of totalitarianism, the horrific drama of World War II, and the feverish composition of his great masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984 (which have now sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author). Personal entries cover the tragic death of his first wife and Orwell’s own decline as he battled tuberculosis. Exhibiting great brilliance of prose and composition, these treasured dispatches, edited by the world’s leading Orwell scholar, exhibit “the seeds of famous passages to come” (New Statesman) and amount to a volume as penetrating as the autobiography he would never write. 30 illustrations
George Orwell: A Life in Letters
From his school days to his tragic early death, George Orwell, who never wrote an autobiography, chronicled the dramatic events of his turbulent life in a profusion of powerful letters. Indeed, one of the twentieth century’s most revered icons was a lively, prolific correspondent who developed in rich, nuanced dispatches the ideas that would influence generations of writers and intellectuals. This historic work―never before published in America and featuring many previously unseen letters―presents an account of Orwell’s interior life as personal and absorbing as readers may ever see.
Over the course of a lifetime, Orwell corresponded with hundreds of people, including many distinguished political and artistic figures. Witty, personal, and profound, the letters tell the story of Orwell’s passionate first love that ended in devastation and explains how young Eric Arthur Blair chose the pseudonym «George Orwell.» In missives to luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Cyril Connolly, and Henry Miller, he spells out his literary and philosophical beliefs. Readers will encounter Orwell’s thoughts on matters both quotidian (poltergeists and the art of playing croquet) and historical―including his illuminating descriptions of war-shattered Barcelona and pronouncements on bayonets and the immanent cruelty of chaining German prisoners.
The letters also reveal the origins of his famous novels. To a fan he wrote, «I think, and have thought ever since the war began…that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.» A paragraph before, he explained that the British intelligentsia in 1944 were «perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history,» prefiguring the themes of 1984. Entrusting the manuscript of Animal Farm to Leonard Moore, his literary agent, Orwell describes it as «a sort of fairy story, really a fable with political meaning…This book is murder from the Communist point of view.»
Hardly known outside a small circle of Orwell scholars, these rare letters include Orwell’s message to Dwight Macdonald of 5 December 1946 explaining Animal Farm; his correspondence with his first translator, R. N. Raimbault (with English translations of the French originals); and the moving encomium written about Orwell by his BBC head of department after his service there. The volume concludes with a fearless account of the painful illness that took Orwell’s life at age forty-seven. His last letter concerns his son and his estate and closes with the words, «Beyond that I can’t make plans at present.»
Meticulously edited and fully annotated by Peter Davison, the world’s preeminent Orwell scholar, the volume presents Orwell “in all his varieties” and his relationships with those most close to him, especially his first wife, Eileen. Combined with rare photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, George Orwell: A Life in Letters offers «everything a reader new to Orwell needs to know…and a great deal that diehard fans will be enchanted to have» (New Statesmen).