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Driving Blind
Driving Blind
Ray Bradbury
¥72.99
One of Ray Bradbury’s classic short story collections, available in ebook for the first time. Over the course of a long and celebrated career, Ray Bradbury has traveled many roads: cruising down country highways that wound through the unseen heart of small-town America; exploring rutted backwoods paths that led to dark and dangerous places; racing at mach-speed along shimmering celestial turnpikes as limitless and exciting as the unbound imagination. DRIVING BLIND is a stunning collection of short fiction. With a steady hand on the wheel, the master once again transports us to remarkable places – and to warm and achingly familiar destinations of the heart, revealed as we've never seen them before in the brilliance of day or gloom of night. Here are unforgettable excursions to the fantastic, glorious grand tours through time and memory – interspersed with strange, unexpected side trips to the disturbing and eerie – where surprises are waiting around every curve and just beyond each mile marker. These are new roads we have never ridden before – sprawling interstates and lush, twisting rural routes fraught with dangers and delights of all manner, shape and substance. With Ray Bradbury in the driver's seat, the journey promises to be a memorable one. Come along and enjoy the ride.
Let’s All Kill Constance
Let’s All Kill Constance
Ray Bradbury
¥72.99
On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. An aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge -- and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be dead, with Constance's name included among them. And so begins an odyssey as dark as it is wondrous, as the writer sets off in a broken-down jalopy with his irascible sidekick Crumley to sift through the ashes of a bygone Hollywood -- a graveyard of ghosts and secrets where each twisted road leads to grim shrines and shattered dreams ... and, all too often, to death.
The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal
The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal
Sean Dixon
¥72.99
An original, mischievous rites of passage novel which will delight fans of offbeat fiction such as ‘Salmon Fishing in the Yemen’ and ‘A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’. The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club is THE foremost book club in Canada, no, in the world. Priding themselves on their good taste, intelligent discussions and impeccable opinions, they are a group of misfits and oddballs, living on the edge of normality. There are only two rules: what Missy says goes (ok, there is a nod to democracy but let's be honest here) and NO BOYS. EVER. Of course, the premier book club in the world must read the first book ever written: 'The Epic of Gilgamesh'. But this monumental book leads them to break all their rules, shed members who end up missing out on EVERYTHING, and travel across the open seas to Bahrain in search of a wise man who'll hopefully have all the answers. Original, funny, quixotic and ultimately very moving,The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is set in a time of upheaval: the Iraq war is exploding and people across the world are marching in protest. It's the story of a group of friends who find a family of sorts within their book group, who learn to cope with love, and the lack of it, loss, and the lack of that, and with growing up in a world that is falling apart.
Lovers and Newcomers
Lovers and Newcomers
Rosie Thomas
¥72.99
From the bestselling author of Iris and Ruby comes a novel in which a group of old friends reunite to start a new stage of their lives. Miranda Meadowe decides a lonely widowhood in her crumbling country house is not for her. Reviving a university dream, she invites five of her oldest friends to come and join her to live, and to stave off the prospect of old age. All have their own reasons for accepting. To begin with, omens are good. They laugh, dance, drink and behave badly, as they cling to the heritage they thought was theirs for ever: power, health, stability. They are the baby boomers; the world is theirs to change. But as old attractions resurface alongside new tensions, they discover that the clock can’t be put back. When building work reveals an Iron Age burial site of a tribal queen, the outside world descends on their idyllic retreat, and the isolation of the group is breached. Now the past is revealed; and the future that beckons is very different from the one they imagined.
The Villa on the Riviera
The Villa on the Riviera
Elizabeth Edmondson
¥72.99
*PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED AS The Art of Love* Absorbing and escapist, The Villa on the Riviera is perfect summer reading for fans of Santa Montefiore and Rachel Hore. Polly Smith is struggling to make a living as an artist when her friend and patron, Oliver, invites her to the south of France. But her world is unexpectedly turned upside down when she digs out her birth certificate to apply for a passport. Her parents are not who she believed them to be - even her name is different. Fleeing to the Riviera, Polly finds that the serenity and sunshine brings her art to life as never before. But all is not well in the grand house. Oliver’s father was forced to leave England in a cloud of scandal and his past is about to catch up with him. And Polly’s own future begins to take on a new and fascinating shape…
Running Blind / The Freedom Trap
Running Blind / The Freedom Trap
Desmond Bagley
¥72.99
Double action thrillers by the classic adventure writer about a notorious Russian double agent, Slade, set in Iceland and Malta. RUNNING BLIND The assignment begins with a simple errand - a parcel to deliver. But to Alan Stewart, standing on a deserted road in Iceland with a murdered man at his feet, it looks anything but simple. The desolate terrain is obstacle enough. But when Stewart realises he has been double-crossed and that the opposition is gaining ground, his simple mission seems impossible… THE FREEDOM TRAP The Scarperers, a brilliantly organised gang which gets long-term inmates out of prison, spring a notorious Russian double agent. The trail leads Owen Stannard to Malta, and to the suave killer masterminding the gang. Face to face at last with his opponents, Stannard must try to outwit both men - who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by his death… Includes a unique bonus - A Matter of Months, a previously unpublished short story about a murder in a casino.
Eating Mammals
Eating Mammals
John Barlow
¥72.99
Three wonderfully original, linked novellas based on true stories from the winner of the Paris Review's Discovery Award. A new voice from Yorkshire, John Barlow has been compared to Michel Faber and T.C. Boyle. This is his first book. A winged cat wreaks havoc in a Yorkshire workhouse. An autumnal romance between two pork pie makers is celebrated with a donkey wedding. The strange career of Michael 'Cast Iron' Mulligan is revealed by his unlucky apprentice Captain Gusto, both men who eat – and eat anything – for a living. These are the stories that mark the debut of one of fiction's most original and assured new voices. And, remarkably, they all are based on fact. Gypsies, Victorian businessmen, servants, masters and unwise children come together in three gothic and moving novellas of magic and deception. Largely set in the nineteenth century, they combine the satisfactions of the finest novels with a playfulness that does not forfeit humanity. With the comic sensibility of Dickens and a taste for the macabre worthy of Irvine Welsh, John Barlow is a storyteller with a unique imagination who will continue to amaze and entertain us for many years to come.
Angel Rock
Angel Rock
Darren Williams
¥72.99
A beautiful, haunting, engrossing, terrifying, enchanting novel destined to win prizes and storm the bestseller lists. To read this book is a total immersion experience. Since it was first acquired in a hot auction, Darren Williams’ novel has attracted comparisons – Picnic at Hanging Rock, To Kill a Mockingbird, Stand By Me, to name but a few (and no coincidence that all three have been made into major movies, because Angel Rock is a feast for all the senses) – but it is also a completely unique and original novel. The setting is Australia, 1969. Two half-brothers get lost in the wild wooded countryside around the small town of Angel Rock. Only the eldest, 13-year-old Tom, finds his way home. At about the same time, a 16-year-old girl goes missing from the town and is found in Sydney. She has killed herself. The policeman who gets the case in the city follows the trail back to Angel Rock. In searching for a meaning in this tragic death, he is searching for nothing less than a meaning in his own troubled life. The tales of the policeman, Gibson, and the boy, Tom, converge in the mystical back-country of Angel Rock, in a story that is part coming-of-age, part detective thriller, of redemption both individual and communal, and altogether one story that you will never forget.
Book Lover
Book Lover
Jennifer Kaufman,Karen Mack
¥72.99
One woman’s passion for books and search for romance lie at the heart of this touching and funny novel about literature and longing in Los Angeles. ‘Women do different things when they’re depressed. Some smoke, others drink, some call their therapists, some eat…And I do what I have always done – go off on a book bender that can last for days.’ Whenever she’s in crisis – her marriage ends, her career stalls, her fantasy man shows signs of human frailty – Dora (named after Eudora Welty) escapes into not one, not two, but a carefully selected stack of books, shutting the door on the outside world until she emerges from her book binge strong enough to face her problems. Books have always been her saving grace, sheltering her during a difficult childhood and arming her with lessons and epigrams that are right for nearly every situation. But life is more complicated than a-book-a-day, and people – like her ex-alcoholic mother and judgmental sister – aren’t as compliant as beloved characters in a novel… Whether she’s being seduced by a quotation-quipping Quixote, or explaining death to a child by reading from ‘Charlotte’s Web’, Dora is Every-reader, and her charming story, shot through with humour and humanity, will delight anyone who’s ever sought solace in the pages of a book.
Someone to Watch Over Me
Someone to Watch Over Me
Bausch, Richard
¥72.99
Richard Bausch is a master of the intimate moment, of the ways we seek to make lasting connections to one another and to the world. Gew writers evoke the complexities of love as subtly, and few capture the poignancy of the sudden insight or the rhythms of ordinary conversation with such delicacy and humor. To read these twelve stories--of love and loss, of families and strangers, of small moments and enormous epiphanies--is to be reminded again of the power of short fiction to thrill and move us, to make us laugh, or cry. In these profound glimpses into the private fears, joys, and sorrows of people we know, we find revealed a whole range of human experience, told with extraordinary force, clarity, and compassion.
Falling Water
Falling Water
Koethe, John
¥72.99
"As a poet who is a teacher of philosophy, John Koethe knows better than most of us the uses and dissatisfactions of both disciplines, if indeed they are disciplines. In this ravishing and haunted book he comes face to face with the time when 'more than half my life is gone,' and must try to find the meaning of 'a childish/dream of love, and then the loss of love,/and all the intricate years between.' As funny and fresh as it is tragic and undeceived, Falling Water ranks with Wallace Stevens' Auroras of Autumn as one of the profoundest meditations on existence ever formulated by an American Poet." --John Ashbery "To describe with unpromising candor the inner life of a man adrift in the waning of the 20th century is one thing, but to do it without a shred of self-pity is another. The poems of his new book, Falling Water, are like no one else's. In them, even the most extreme exertions of consciousness are transformed into the luminous measures of beautiful speech." --Mark Strand "In this ambitious volume, the magnificent poet who gave us The Late Wisconsin Spring moves ever more swiftly and surefootedly into the deepest regions of self-invention: the past -- few poets write more accurately and painfully about that uncanny estranged place that never finds its way out of us; the present, or idea of the present, as mere projection, and yet a projection so poignantly, materially, tenderly touched it gleams with all its claustrophobic distances; and the future...'I wish that time could bring the future back again/And let me see things as they used to seem to me/Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state--/Alone and free and filled...' With its low-key blank verse, its apparently casual manner of speech, its digressions, asides, recollections -- with all its taking its time -- this is a poetry of magnificent undertow, all proximity of thought, singularity of contemplation, protest, pretext, reflection -- all disenchantment and then, suddenly, blazing re-enchantment, with the newly, lovingly, seen-through real." --Jorie Graham
Past Forgetting
Past Forgetting
Robinson, Jill
¥72.99
A love story, a mystery, and a memory guide, Past Forgetting shows a writer's determination to re-create her life.Jill Robinson, novelist and author of Bed/Time/Story, wakes from a coma to discover she's lost her memory and just about any sense of who she was.And is.She likes the look of the man standing next to her bed, but doesn't recognize that he's her husband, Stuart. What matters is that she feels safe around him. As she searches the house for her children, she is reminded that her son and daughter are both grown with families of their own--how well did she ever know themCan You make up for a past you don't really remember?It is Stuart who begins to fill in the details for Jill, including the fact that she's a well-known writer, although when she meets with her doctors, they say she may never write again.Against all odds, Jill Robinson retrieved her unique writing voice, and in this engaging memoir shows how she does it. She takes us with her on her exploration of'tlie connections between memory and creativity, celebrity and anonymity, and loss and discovery. From her first tentative steps outside her house on Wimpole Street to London's sleek West End. From a trip to Oxford to discuss memory with a professor to her amazing voyage to Los Angeles on an assignment for Vanity fair which takes her back to the sixties world of Hockney, Polanski, and Hopper, Jill forges new paths to memory.In Past Forgetting, Jill Robinson rediscovers friendships she doesn't know she had: Robert Redford tells her stories about her childhood; at John Lahr's London literary teas, she's reintroduced to the writer's world, and Cary Grant offers her memories of her father, Dore Schary. And being with Barbra Streisand reminds her of a time she doesn't quite remember: when her father was running MGM.In her urgent voyage to redefine herself, Jill asks all the questions you've ever asked on the nature of memory. Is recollection shadowed by emotionIs memory an act of reinventionDo people reinvent rather than recollectIn Past Forgetting you'll find the answers and you'll meet a writer you won't want to forget.
What You Will
What You Will
Katherine Bucknell
¥72.99
An intimate portrait of London intellectual life, the breakdown of a marriage and the friendship between two women, ‘What You Will’ draws the reader into a spellbinding world of beauty and tension. Gwen, an American painter, lives in London with her English husband, Lawrence, an Oxford don. When Gwen’s friend Hilary arrives from New York bruised by a broken engagement, a lost job and an unsuitable love affair, Gwen is determined to find her someone to marry. But will he be another Oxford intellectual, a member of London's bohemia, or a professional from the scandal-ridden New York museum world? But with Gwen’s arrival the bonds of friendship, love, and marriage are severely tested. Pressure builds in the household, affecting Gwen and Lawrence’s small son as he struggles to engage with the sophistication and savagery around him. Tackling deep and unsetttling questions – Are we slaves to our impulses or to one another? Is it possible to have both love and freedom? Can the artist or the intellectual illuminate such questions?, ‘What You Will’ is a subtly wrought, multi-layered, and hypnotically suspenseful tale about how we handle our most intimate relationships.
Resurrectionist
Resurrectionist
James McGee
¥72.99
Hawkwood, the Regency James Bond, returns in this gripping, action packed sequel to the bestselling ‘Ratcatcher’. Matthew Hawkwood. Soldier, spy, lover – a man as dangerous as the criminals he hunts. The tough Bow Street Runner is back where he's not wanted, in the most forbidding places London has to offer: its graveyards and the rank, sinister halls of Bedlam, the country’s most notorious lunatic asylum. There are missing bodies all around – dead and alive. 'Resurrection men' serve the demands of the city's surgeons by stealing corpses – and creating a few of their own along the way. Far more worrying is the escape from Bedlam of a very unusual inmate: one Colonel Titus Xavier Hyde, an obsessive, gifted surgeon whose insanity is only matched by his dark intelligence. And this twisted genius has a point to prove. Which will mean plenty more work for the gravediggers…
The October Country
The October Country
Ray Bradbury
¥72.99
One of Ray Bradbury’s classic short story collections, available for the first time in ebook. The October Country is a classic collection of nineteen macabre short stories from the modern master of the fantastic. It is many places: a picturesque Mexican village where death is a tourist attraction; a city beneath the city where drowned lovers are silently reunited; a carnival midway where a tiny man's most cherished fantasy can be fulfilled night after night. The book’s inhabitants live, dream, work, die – and sometimes live again – discovering, often too late, the high price of citizenship…
Every Home Needs A Balcony
Every Home Needs A Balcony
Rina Frank
¥72.99
Hailed as the “Israeli ‘Kite Runner’”, this international bestseller tells the bittersweet story of one family, one home, and the surprising arc of one woman's life, from the poverty of her youth, to the intense love and painful losses of her adult years. Braiding together the past and present, ‘Every Home Needs a Balcony’ relays the life story of a young Jewish girl, the child of Romanian immigrants, who lives with her family in the poverty-stricken heart of 1950s Haifa, Israel. Eight-year-old Rina, her older sister, and her parents inhabit a cramped apartment with a narrow balcony that becomes an intimate, shared stage on which the joys and dramas of the building's daily life are played out. It also a window through which Rina witnesses the emergence of a strange new country, born from the ashes of World War II. While her mother cleans houses and her father drifts from job to job, as the years pass Rina becomes desperate to escape her crowded, dirty surroundings. Eventually she falls in love with a wealthy Spaniard and moves to a luxury apartment in Barcelona. Yet although she enjoys money and status in her new land, it is not Israel. Longing for the past, Rina, now pregnant, returns to the simple life she has missed - a move that soothes her soul, but destroys her marriage. Alone, raising a new baby, her pain is compounded by the death of her sister - her best friend - and the realization that no matter how much she yearns for the past, the old Haifa of her boisterous youth has gone. Told with the light touch of a humorous, incredibly dexterous writer, ‘Every Home Needs a Balcony’ reveals how our choices shape us - and how we learn to survive life's most surprising turns.
Summer Morning, Summer Night
Summer Morning, Summer Night
Ray Bradbury
¥72.99
Green Town, Illinois stands at the very heart of Ray Bradbury Country. A lovingly re-imagined version of the author's native Waukegan, it has served as the setting for such modern classics as Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Farewell Summer. In Summer Morning, Summer Night, Bradbury returns to this signature locale with a generous new collection of twenty-seven stories and vignettes, seventeen of which have never been published before. Together, they illuminate some of Green Town's previously hidden corners, and reaffirm Bradbury's position as the undisputed master of a unique fictional universe.
Death Lives Next Door
Death Lives Next Door
Gwendoline Butler
¥72.99
One of 12 selected crime story reprints bound in white Linson with silver blocking on front and spine. Originally published in 1960 this book marked the first appearance in print of Inspector John Coffin.
Feed My Dear Dogs
Feed My Dear Dogs
Emma Richler
¥72.99
A warm, dark novel of family, distance & time from the author of the much-loved, highly-praised, prize-nominated SISTER CRAZY. An English novel of real brilliance. Feed My Dear Dogs is a book with its telescopic gaze part-turned toward outer space, and like the sky at night it dazzles with a myriad points of light, but the longer you look at it the more you become all too aware of the defining darkness between. It has a strange,compelling narrative sensibility that begins in outright observational comedy and slides into ever darker regions, while never losing its sharp tongue and wicked wit. Jem Weiss (her again!), the middle child of five, inhabits a family too fantastic to leave lightly, and experiences childhood more acutely, more joyously and more entertainingly than most. The five Weiss siblings crackle with intelligence, camaraderie, competitiveness and individuality; they have their own running gags, jargon, skits and power struggles; and they share a bearlike but adored father and an unflappable and omnicompetent mother. Jem's life hums with Shackleton and supernovas, boxing and cowboys and cars, binocular doughnuts, naval underwear, satchels and knights, telescopes and travel: and at the center of this galaxy of delights is her shining family. And as Jem runs all her childhood memories through her fingers, she entrances the reader with her sharp observations, casual wisdom and tender wit. However, there's always something else looming, and then and again it sneaks up, like her mother out of time in a red dress, with some pressing tidings to impart – a child's terror at the prospect of moving on, growing up, leaving Home.
The Hidden Assassins
The Hidden Assassins
Robert Wilson
¥72.99
The gripping new psychological thriller featuring Javier Falcon, the tortured detective from ‘The Silent and the Damned’ and ‘The Blind Man of Seville.’ As Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon investigates a faceless corpse unearthed on a municipal dump, Seville is rocked by a massive explosion. An apartment block is destroyed, and when it's discovered that its basement housed a mosque everybody's terrorist fears are confirmed. Panic sweeps the city, more bodies are dragged from rubble, the climate of fear infects everyone and terror invades the domestic life of flamboyant judge Calderon and the troubled mind of Consuelo, Falcon's one-time lover. With the media and political pressure intensifying, Falcon realizes all is not as it appears. But as he comes close to cracking a conspiracy, he discovers an even more terrifying plot – and the race is on to prevent a catastrophe far beyond Spain's borders.
The Second Life of Sally Mottram
The Second Life of Sally Mottram
David Nobbs
¥72.99
The wonderfully entertaining new novel from bestselling author of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin. Long-time Potherthwaite resident Sally Mottram cannot stand the decline of her town. The bookshop is about to close, abandoned buildings line the canal and Potherthwaite’s residents seem stuck in a disheartened rut. Something has to be done, but what? And who will do it? When an unexpected tragedy shatters Sally’s life, she bravely takes on the task herself. Supported by a group of locals, including thrice-married Marigold Boyce-Willoughby, who is forever looking for love, and married couple Jill and Arnold Buss, who might both be falling for their new neighbours, Sally embarks on her ambition to bring the town back to life. But can one woman rally a whole community to save itself? David Nobbs’ much-anticipated new novel is a hilarious, heartwarming tale about what keeps our community spirits alive.