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Stealing Into Winter (Shadow in the Storm, Book 1)
Stealing Into Winter (Shadow in the Storm, Book 1)
Graeme K. Talboys
¥66.22
A breathtaking tale of adventure, survival and loyalty. When the thief Jeniche finds her prison cell collapsing around her, she knows it is not going to be a good day. Certainly, the last thing she wanted once she escaped was to become involved with a group of monks and nuns being hunted by the Occassan soldiers who have invaded the city. Nor did she want to help the group flee by being their guide through the desert and mountains. Unfortunately, Jeniche’s skills are their only hope of making it out alive. But the soldiers are not the only danger waiting for them in the mountains.
Among Wolves (Wolves of Llisé, Book 1)
Among Wolves (Wolves of Llisé, Book 1)
Nancy K. Wallace
¥66.22
Young Devin Roché is about to graduate as an Archivist from the prestigious Llisé’s University, and there is just one more task he wants to complete – to preserve a complete history of Llisé. The history of Llisé and its fifteen provinces are a peaceful affair, filled with harmony, resolution and a rich oral tradition of storytelling. Nothing untoward ever happens in this peaceful land. Or does it? Trainee archivist Devin Roché has just taken his finals at the prestigious Académie. As the sixth son of the ruler of Llisé, his future is his own, and so he embarks on an adventure to memorize stories chronicling the history of each province. As Devin begins his journey with only his best friend Gaspard and their guardian Marcus, he hears rumors of entire communities suddenly disappearing without a trace and of Master Bards being assassinated in the night. As the three companions get closer to unearthing the truth behind these mysteries, they can’t help but wonder whether it is their pursuit that has led to them. But if that is the case, what do Llisé and Devin’s father have to hide?
Broken Crowns (Internment Chronicles, Book 3)
Broken Crowns (Internment Chronicles, Book 3)
Lauren DeStefano
¥66.22
War rages everywhere and Morgan is caught in the middle in the haunting conclusion of The Internment Chronicles, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Chemical Garden trilogy. The city is falling out of the sky… Morgan always thought it was just a saying. A metaphor. The words of the dying. But as they look up at the floating island that was their home, Pen and Morgan make a horrible discovery – Internment is sinking. And it’s all Morgan’s fault. Corrupted from the inside by one terrible king and assailed from the outside for precious resources by another, Internment could be destroyed because Morgan couldn’t keep a secret. As two wars become one, Morgan must find a way to bring her two worlds together to stop the kings that wage them… Or face the furthest fall yet.
Snow in May
Snow in May
Kseniya Melnik
¥66.22
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE The stories of Kseniya Melnik’s debut collection are small-town miracles, each a miniature epic. Their focus is Magadan, a town in the Northern Far East of Russia, and the unvisited lives of its inhabitants and emigrants – schoolchildren, doctors, teachers, mothers, daughters. Some characters span several stories. Some of their stories span decades and continents. The measure of their telling, though, is invariably the measure of everyday existence. Their dramas, too, are made of quotidian stuff, each life with its own sly or suppressed tragedies, and its brief, often unexpected ecstasies. Kseniya Melnik’s sensibility is sober and humorous; her stories are moving and funny. In their patient, deliberate unfolding – at once surprising and convincing – and in the fitness of their details – vital because they are suggestive – we sense, above all, an assurance that is dazzling.
Infinite Home
Infinite Home
Kathleen Alcott
¥66.22
An utterly charming and tender story of the disparate tenants of a Brooklyn brownstone and the community they form around their ageing landlord when their home is suddenly threatened. Within a charming, if dilapidated, Brooklyn brownstone live a family of sorts: beautiful agoraphobe Adeleine, who surrounds herself with the past; Thomas, an artist who has shut away his materials in the wake of a stroke; Edward, a cynical stand-up comedian mired in depression and Paulie, a young man with William’s Syndrome, a disease that grants him the irrepressible cheerfulness of a six-year-old. Brought together by ageing landlady Edith, the tenants all live safely in tune with each other, even if they do keep to themselves. But when their home is suddenly and violently threatened, they are shocked into action. Infinite Home is a poignant story of how a community is built and torn apart, and how when lives interweave a beautiful and unusual tapestry is made.
Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf
Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf
Terry Newman
¥66.22
CSI in the land of elves, but they aren’t cute and christmassy, they’re sometimes sinister, and definitely deceased… Private eye Nicely Strongoak is your average detective-for-hire, if your average detective is a dwarf with a Napoleon complex. In a city filled with drug-taking gnomes, goblins packing heat and a serious case of missing-persons, Strongoak might just be what’s needed. But things are about to turn sour. When on the trail of the vanished surfer, Perry Goodfellow, Nicely receives a sharp blow to the head, is burgled by goblins and awakes in a narcotic-induced haze on the floor of a steamwagon with an extremely deceased elf, who just happens to have Nicely’s axe wedged in his head. Nicely must enter the murky world of government politics if he is going to crack his toughest case yet. He’ll have to find Perry, uncover who the dead elf is and leave no cobblestone unturned…
The Machinery (The Machinery Trilogy, Book 1)
The Machinery (The Machinery Trilogy, Book 1)
Gerrard Cowan
¥66.22
The Machinery knows all. For ten millennia, the leaders of the Overland have been Selected by the Machinery, an omnipotent machine gifted to the world in darker days. The Overland has thrived, crushing all enemies. But the Machinery came with a prophecy: it will break in its ten-thousandth year, Selecting just one leader who will bring Ruin to the world. That time has arrived. Katrina Paprissi is an Apprentice Watcher, charged with seeking out any who doubt the power of the Machinery. But as the Machinery nears breaking point, her own doubts begin to surface. She must travel to its home in the depths of the mysterious Underland, to see if Ruin really is coming for them all…
Borderlines
Borderlines
Michela Wrong
¥66.22
The debut novel by a British writer with nearly two decades of African experience – a compelling courtroom drama and a gritty, aromatic evocation of place, inspired by recent events. British lawyer Paula Shackleton is mourning a lost love when a small man in a lemon-coloured suit accosts her over breakfast in a Boston hotel. Winston Peabody represents the African state of North Darrar, embroiled in a border arbitration case with its giant neighbour. He needs help with the hearings in The Hague, Paula needs to forget the past. She flies to the state’s capital determined to lose herself in work, but soon discovers that even jobs taken with the purest intentions can involve moral compromise. Taking testimony in scorching refugee camps, delving into the colonial past, she becomes increasingly uneasy about her role. Budding friendships with a scarred former rebel and an idealistic young doctor whittle away at her pose of sardonic indifference, until Paula finds herself taking a step no decent lawyer should ever contemplate. Michela Wrong has been writing about Africa for two decades. In this taut legal thriller, rich with the Horn of Africa’s colours and aromas, she probes the motives underlying Western engagement with the continent, questioning the value of universal justice and exploring how history itself is forged. Above all her first novel is the story of a young woman’s anguished quest for redemption.
American Innovations
American Innovations
Rivka Galchen
¥66.22
A short-story collection from one of America’s brightest young talents. In one of these intensely imaginative stories a young woman’s furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled to deliver a takeout order that has incorrectly been phoned in to her. In a third, the petty details of a property transaction illuminate the complicated dependences and loves of a family. Following spiralling paths towards utterly logical, entirely absurd conclusions, Galchen’s creations occupy a dreamlike dimension, where time is fluid and identities are best defined by the qualities they lack. The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, allowing the reader the pleasure of discovering familiar favourites in new guises. Here ‘The Lost Order’ covertly recapitulates James Thurber’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, while ‘The Region of Unlikeness’ playfully mirrors Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Aleph’. By turns realistic, fantastical and lyrical, all these marvellously uneasy stories share a deeply emotional core and are written in dryly witty, pitch-perfect prose. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen is a writer of eye-opening ingenuity.
Lost Days (Emily the Strange)
Lost Days (Emily the Strange)
Rob Reger
¥66.22
Emily is not your average thirteen year-old girl. She wears the same black dress every day. She loves maths and science. Her best friends are four black cats and she's into old rock and punk music. Emily is anything but typical and so is this exciting new series of novels about her life. 13 elements you will find in the first Emily the Strange novel: ? Mystery ? A beautiful golem ? Souped-up slingshots ? Four black cats ? Amnesia ?Calamity Poker ? Angry ponies ? A shady truant officer ? Top-13 lists ? A sandstorm generator ? Doppelgangers ? A secret mission ?Earwigs
Vulgar Things
Vulgar Things
Lee Rourke
¥66.22
The second novel from Lee Rourke, author of the cult hit ‘The Canal’. Jon Michaels – a divorced, disaffected and fatigued editor living a nonde* life in North London – wakes one morning to a phone call informing him that his uncle has been found dead in his caravan on Canvey Island. Dismissed from his job only the day before and hung-over, Jon reluctantly agrees to sort through his uncle’s belongings and clear out the caravan. What follows is a quixotic week on Canvey as Jon, led on by desire and delusion, purposeful but increasingly disorientated, unfolds a disturbing secret, ever more enchanted by the island – its landscape and its atmosphere. Haunted and haunting, ‘Vulgar Things’ is part mystery, part romance, part odyssey: a novel in which the menial entrances and the banal compels.
All the Days And Nights
All the Days And Nights
Niven Govinden
¥66.22
From the author of ‘Black Bread White Beer’ The East Coast of America, 1980. Anna Brown, a dying artist, works on her final portrait. Obsessive and secretive, it is a righting of her past failures; her final statement. John Brown, her husband and life-long muse, has left; walked out of their home one morning to travel cross-country in search of the paintings he has sat for. As their stories unfold – independently, for the first time in many years – a passionate unconventional relationship is revealed, between two people living through the most tumultuous decades of modern history. All the Days and Nights is the story of an art hunt during a twilight period of painting. It lays bare two relationships that are ever changing and incomparable: of the artist and the muse, and of lovers. It is an exploration of what it means to create, what it means to inspire, what it means to live.
In the Approaches
In the Approaches
Nicola Barker
¥66.22
‘Open yourself up again to all that terrible light and savage bliss and deafening reverberation …’ In the Summer of 1971, a charismatic family seeks refuge in the quiet, English coastal backwater of Pett Level. Bran Cleary is a controversial Irish muralist; his fractious and promiscuous wife (and muse) 'Lonely' Allaway is half Aboriginal; their strange, sickly daughter, Orla Nor, is almost a Saint. Thirteen years later, a shifty individual turns up in Pett Level, apparently determined to get to the bottom of the bizarre and ultimately tragic events which unfolded in the aftermath of that arrival. But does he really want to understand, or is he just way too close to the story to make any clear sense of it? And what of the locals who seem so determined to resist and undermine his investigations? ‘In The Approaches’ is a fabulously twisted comedy of very bad manners which starts out as a seaside idyll and ends up as a pilgrimage – sometimes sacred, sometimes profane, and frequently both at once. Set in a 1984 which seems almost as distantly located in the past as Orwell’s was in the future, Nicola Barker’s tenth novel offers a captivating glimpse of something more shocking than any dystopia – the possibility of faith.
The King’s List
The King’s List
Peter Ransley
¥66.22
What price betrayal? The bloody saga of revolution and republicanism reaches its climax in the final instalment of the Tom Neave trilogy. 1659. Tom Neave, now Lord Stonehouse and feared spymaster for the republic, must do what he can to maintain the reins of power. With Oliver Cromwell dead, a ruthless struggle for control of the country begins. A Royalist rebellion is easily put down, but is of concern for Tom – his son Luke is among those imprisoned. Having been freed by his father and back with his family, Luke claims he is disillusioned with the Royalist cause. But can Tom trust him? Pre-occupied by his son’s uncertain allegiance, by the distant, manipulative behaviour of his beloved wife Anne, and by rumours of his treacherous father Richard, Tom is ill at ease. His own long-buried secrets threaten to erupt, with irrevocable consequences. As the struggle for power in England becomes more urgent, rumours abound of the return of the exiled king. Copies of the ‘King’s List’ are in circulation – the names of those who signed the death warrant of the late king, of which Tom is one. While an army marches on London, the fate of the nation – and that of Tom and his family – lies at stake.
Dear Committee Members
Dear Committee Members
Julie Schumacher
¥66.22
Finally a novel that puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary." Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville's Bartleby. In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies. We recommend Dear Committee Members to you in the strongest possible terms.
Ordinary Joe
Ordinary Joe
Jon Teckman
¥66.22
A brilliant, fast-paced comedy about life behind the scenes in the film business, and how to survive when your greatest fantasy comes true and threatens to wreck your perfectly ordinary life. After the movie, when the credits roll up you might see his name flash past: ‘Joseph West’ and think nothing of it. Not an actor, not a director, Joe is just one of the money men, kept at arms distance from the talent. Until one night in New York the talent comes calling. Olivia Finch is lit from within, an actress who was born to it but can’t stand the superficiality anymore. Now all she wants is a real conversation with an ordinary guy – and Olivia Finch always gets what she wants. Cue Joe, married, ordinary accountant, Joe. And then cue a snowball of deception, acting and confusion that puts Joe in the limelight, his marriage in trouble and a dead body on the ground in this hilarious caper.
The Museum of Things Left Behind
The Museum of Things Left Behind
Seni Glaister
¥66.22
Escape into this hugely enjoyable, big-hearted and beautifully written novel, set in Vallerosa, a European country you’ve never heard of before. FIND YOURSELF IN VALLEROSA, A PLACE LOST IN TIME Vallerosa is every tourist’s dream – a tiny, picturesque country surrounded by lush valleys and verdant mountains; a place sheltered from modern life and the rampant march of capitalism. But in isolation, the locals have grown cranky, unfulfilled and disaffected. In the Presidential Palace hostile Americans, wise to the country’s financial potential, are circling like sharks … Can the town be fixed? Can the local bar owners be reconciled? Can an unlikely visitor be the agent of change and rejuvenation this broken idyll is crying out for? Full of wisdom, humour and light, THE MUSEUM OF THINGS LEFT BEHIND is a heart-warming fable for our times that asks us to consider what we have lost and what we have gained in modern life. A book about bureaucracy, religion and the people that really get things done, it is above all else a hymn to the inconstancy of time and the pivotal importance of a good cup of tea.
From Stress to Success
From Stress to Success
Xandria Williams
¥66.22
Although we often feel that stress is caused by external factors - ... my boyfriend makes me stressed!...my sales targets are making me stressed! - it's actually more useful in the long term for us to recognize that stress is something that comes from within ourselves - it's a response.
Foxlowe
Foxlowe
Eleanor Wasserberg
¥66.22
A chilling, compulsive debut about group mentality, superstition and betrayal – and a utopian commune gone badly wrong We were the Family, and Foxlowe was our home. There was me – my name is Green – and my little sister, Blue. There was October, who we called Toby, and Ellensia, Dylan, Liberty, Pet and Egg. There was Richard, of course, who was one of the Founders. And there was Freya. We were the Family, but we weren’t just an ordinary family. We were a new, better kind of family. We didn’t need to go to school, because we had a new, better kind of education. We shared everything. We were close to the ancient way of living and the ancient landscape. We knew the moors, and the standing stones. We celebrated the solstice in the correct way, with honey and fruit and garlands of fresh flowers. We knew the Bad and we knew how to keep it away. And we had Foxlowe, our home. Where we were free. There really was no reason for anyone to want to leave.
Age of Consent
Age of Consent
Marti Leimbach
¥66.22
Thirty years ago, June was a young widow with a hopeless crush on a Craig Kirtz, a disc jockey at a local rock station. To her surprise, the two struck up a friendship that seemed headed for something more. But it was June’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Bobbie, whom Craig had wanted all along. Bobbie thought her secret life—the sex, the drugs, the illicit relationship itself—could remain safely buried in the past. But when she discovers that Craig had similarly pursued any number of other young girls, Bobbie returns home after a long absence with one purpose in mind:to bring Craig to trial. Her decision is greeted with mixed feelings. Some people think that bringing charges against someone for a crime committed so many years ago is unjustified. She’s called a “middle-aged woman with a vendetta.” She’s accused of waging war against her own family. June remembers things differently from the way Bobbie does. Craig insists he has done nothing wrong. But the past has a way of revealing itself, and some relationships lay dormant through the years, ready to stir to life at the slightest provocation. While their traumatic history is relived in the courtroom, Bobbie and June must face the choices they made and try to make sense of the pain they endured while seeking justice at long last. Told with warmth and compassion, this is a moving, deeply absorbing story of a family in crisis.
Dog Soldiers: Love, loyalty and sacrifice on the front line
Dog Soldiers: Love, loyalty and sacrifice on the front line
Isabel George
¥66.22
Dog Soldiers tells the story of two brave young ‘dog soldiers’ (Army bomb dog handlers), killed in action in Afghanistan with their dogs by their side, through the inspirational words of their mothers. Lance Corporal Kenneth Rowe and Lance Corporal Liam Tasker were both dog lovers from boyhood and went on to do the job they had always wanted to do. Through the soldiers’ mothers – Lyn Rowe and Jane Duffy – the book will take the reader on a journey and a celebration of the young men’s lives that begins with the two young boys growing up and fulfilling their dream to serve Queen and country as Army dog handlers – Ken Rowe with his dog, Sasha, and Liam Tasker with his canine partner, Theo. Both mothers acknowledge that their sons signed up to do the job they loved best and fell with their loyal and trusted best friend beside them. Jane Duffy said of her son, Liam Tasker: ‘I know my son died doing the job he loved. And he loved that dog as I loved my son, with every ounce of his being. To lose Liam was and still is unbearable. But for Liam to have survived without Theo? Unthinkable.’