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Administrator
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Long Ashton
Country: United Kingdom
Posts: 1,502
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| Love in the Present Tense
Catherine Ryan Hyde
For five years Pearl has managed to keep the past from catching up to her and her bright, frail five-year-old son. Life has given her every reason to mistrust people, but circumstances force her to trust her neighbour Mitch with watching Leonard while she goes off to work. Then one day Pearl drops her son off and never returns.
They are an unlikely pair: Mitch is a young, unattached business owner, and Leonard is a precocious, five-year-old boy. But together they must find a way to move forward in the wake of Pearl's unexplained disappearance. Their bond as parent and child shifts and endures, even as Mitch must eventually surrender Leonard to a two-parent home. Is it possible to love the people who can't always be there for us? The answers will surprise and move you. As their lives unfold, profound questions emerge about the nature of love and family. Ultimately, this novel's richest reward is watching Mitch and Leonard grow up together, through the power and the magic of the human heart.
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| Semi-Detached
Griff Rhys Jones
In Semi-detached Griff Rhys Jones recreates his suburban childhood and adolescence in precise and evocative detail; every young trauma, embarrassment and joyous rebellion, hazily-remembered summer afternoons released into the wild of the woods and forming feral gangs. He relives the freezing bus journeys to school and the impulsive stealing of half-a-crown from Charlie Hume's money box; holidays in the dreary exile of Weston-Super-Mare or outside Butlins at Clacton, longing to be in - images that are fixed in his consciousness, utterly fuzzy at the edges like a Mivvi but even more concentrated at the centre, frozen into a gooey sweet jam of pure recollected emotion.
A confident middle child, Griff adored his mother Gwen and father Elwyn - a shy doctor and woodwork fanatic who loathed the tedium of English social ritual but had a penchant for sweeties and ice-cream and was constantly battling with his weight. These two people were the centre of Griff's young world, and so when he finally left the bosom of his loving, irascible, eccentric, solid, all engulfing family it was no easy process. If he hadn't moved around so much as a child, would Griff have felt less like an outsider? Less willing all his life to be a voyeur, looking in on the lighted window across the square, the Georgian house glowing in the sun, the blink of glasses and the bray of public school certainties?
A real treat for anyone who remembers or want to know about Britain in the late 60's and 70's, laugh aloud at Griff's self-deprecating, elegant, affectionate prose, or understand a little bit better how on earth they got from there to here.
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| This Book Will Save Your Life
A. M. Homes
This is an uplifting story, set in Los Angeles about one man's effort to bring himself back to life. Richard is a modern day everyman; a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill, until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day, he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time, a wide sinkhole appears outside his living room window, threatening the foundations of his house.
A vivid novel about compassion and transformation, This Book Will Save Your Life reveals what can happen if you are willing to open up to the world around you. Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years.
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| Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This is the sweeping new novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award.
This highly anticipated new novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel get swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And, the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events.
This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
Immensely powerful and with a sweeping pace, this novel will be one of the most talked-about books of the year.
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Blackwell's
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AbeBooks.co.uk |
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