Reading is an indulgence in black humour. His novels have followed the life of Patrick Melrose, who has been the victim of an abusive childhood, and his struggles thereafter to stay sane. Because the reader knows from where Patrick's troubles stem, his erratic behaviour manages to evoke sympathy. is a true stylist whose light, easy touch and savage humour makes Patrick's adventures very compelling.
The early novels, Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (nominated for the Booker Prize in 2006) are now collected and have been re-released as The Patrick Melrose Novels. And now we have a fifth installment in the life of Patrick in At Last, a novel set during the funeral of Patrick's mother. Now Patrick begins to sense the prospect of release from the extremes of his childhood. At the end of the day, alone in his room, appears the promise of some form of safety ... at last.
Categories: New Releases, Literature, Book of the DayBehind the Beautiful Forevers has been generating a lot of positive reviews and media buzz. Pulitzer Prize-winning author, , has written a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities.
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter -- Annawadi's "most-everything girl" -- will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call "the full enjoy."
But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.
With intelligence, humour, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.
Categories: New Releases, Book of the Dayhas written almost every day of his long life (he's now 91 years old): notebooks, jottings, drafts of letters to heads of state; and perhaps most movingly of all, letters from his long imprisonment on Robben Island. Conversations with Myself is a very personal book, a book of private thoughts and lessons learned. But, as we have come to expect from , this book shines with hope and gentle wisdom. These letters and diaries give readers a chance to share recollections of a long life, fully lived.
Categories: New Releases, Book of the DayBody Trade by is a road novel that follows Rosie and Tanya, two Canadian women who leave the Northwest Territories and head south on an ill-conceived road trip through California, Mexico and Central America. The haunting story takes a life-defining twist when their search for freedom and adventure brings them into contact with predators of the Central American sex trafficking trade. Finding themselves in a hell on earth, they are forced to make life-and-death choices in this "sophisticated, substantive and poetic" novel
Categories: New Releases, Literature, Book of the DayWe first became aware of when he won the Impac Dublin Award for his novel Ingenious Pain. Set at the beginning of the Enlightenment, that novel made the rounds of MR booksellers amid much conversation and enthusiasm. So it came as no surprise to us when was awarded this year's Costa Book Award in the UK for his newest novel Pure. Here goes back to the Enlightenment, deep in the heart of Paris, where its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it.
At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.
Take a chance on . You won't be disappointed.
Categories: Awards, New Releases, Literature, Book of the Day| < Newer - 1 ... 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 ... 38 - Earlier > |
