Inspired by Vietnam War classics like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, First with Guns is a thought-provoking exploration of personal identity set amidst a war and an era that forever altered American identity. The novel follows William Dougherty’s journey into manhood from a disturbing childhood in rural Nebraska to aerial combat in Vietnam. Early in his deployment, Dougherty commits a notorious blunder that destroys his Commanding Officer’s Huey. The young...
The Great Fire (Today Show Book Club, #16) (Picador Modern Classics)
by Shirley Hazzard
The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard?s first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that...
World War II may be over but Polly Pride feels as though the fighting has moved to her own home. Her son, Benny, is mixed up with some very shady characters and trying to pull the wool over his mother's eyes about it. Daughter Lucy is carrying on with a fancy man behind her husband's back and leaving her children to run riot. And Charlie, Polly's beloved husband, is battling ill health and doesn't want her interfering. Polly sees she risks losing all she's worked so hard to achieve, but refus...
An unforgettable and sweeping interwar love story, from the Costa-shortlisted and bestselling Irish author of Life Sentences 'Imaginative, beautifully told... Superb' SPECTATOR 'The best book yet by a truly gifted Irish writer' GABRIEL BYRNE, author of Walking with Ghosts 1980s Cork. Jack Shine discovers a shoe box full of love letters in his mother's belongings. Rebekah came to Cork alone as a young Jewish refugee from Vienna when the Second World War broke out. She died soon after, and Jack...
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION ‘A mighty achievement’ OCEAN VUONG ‘Beautiful, brilliant’ R. F. KUANG ‘Dazzling’ OBSERVER ‘Will shatter your heart’ GLAMOUR ‘Powerful’ SUNDAY TIMES An extraordinary story of the journey of one young family through love, loss and unwavering hope....
Continuing the saga begun in Annie Murray's Chocolate Girls, and set in 1960s Birmingham, The Bells of Bournville Green is a story of families whose lives are entwined, of belonging and loss . . . and of a young woman's search for transforming love.Pretty seventeen-year-old Greta has never known a stable family life. With no father, and loathing her mother's latest boyfriend, Greta finds life hard at home and is happiest at work with her friends at the Cadbury factory.Greta soon decides that her...
1955. Vivien Lowry's latest play, the only female-authored in London's West End that winter, opened to a rapturous reception from the audience. However, the critics' savage reviews have forced its closure and called into question her entire career. So, when then the opportunity arises for her to work as a script doctor on a film shooting in Rome's Cinecittà Studios, a world populated with the likes of Ava Gardner and Sophia Loren, she takes it. What Vivien doesn't count on is the greatest male b...
Across countries and decades, The Wanderers weaves a captivating tapestry of human lives, exploring the enduring—and sometimes contradictory—duties of blood and country. Ruru’s father, a South African freedom fighter, was exiled to Tanzania before she was born, leaving Ruru and her mother to fend for themselves in the township they called home. So when a fatal bus accident claims her mother’s life, Ruru is adrift. Haunted by her mother’s absence, another loss sits heavy on Ruru’s heart: that o...
Abandoned and alone, you'll do anything to survive… The dramatic novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author. ABANDONED On the cold stone steps of an orphanage, only a few hours old and clutching the object which was to give her name, Pearl Button had a hard start to life. ALONE Now 16, she's finally managed to escape the cruel confines of the orphanage. Finding work at a...
It is the summer of 1960. The times, they are a'changing. The social conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower is about to give way to the progressive ambitions of John F. Kennedy. And three brothers, brought up in a suburb community in upstate New York, are travelling across the Atlantic to Austria, which only 15 years earlier had been part of the German Reich, to spend part of the summer with one of their grandfathers for the first time. Michael Ladner's new novel is an exploration of changing cultura...