_________________If your life was going to end tomorrow, what would you do today?''Quirky, funny and hugely readable, this is a story about the power of friendship and sisterhood, as well as love and loss.' FabulousJennifer Cole has just been told that she has three months to live -- ninety days to say goodbye and put her affairs in order. Trying to focus on the positives she realises she has one overriding regret: the words she’s left unsaid. So Jennifer writes letters to three significant peo...
I've probably lied to you. That's habit. I lie to everyone about my family - Daniel Laird has returned to his remote family home in Norfolk to care for his ailing artist father. Living an isolated existence - - with his father unable to speak and only their brusque housekeeper, Maggie, for company - Daniel describes the strangeness of coming home after an eight-year absence in a series of vivid and passionate letters to his sister, his boss and to Alice, his one true love. But it is not unti...
At 8:17 on a Friday night, the Illumination commences. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer. And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a private journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely. I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love your lopsided smile. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you...
A woman tries to heal old wounds and make sense of the world the only way she knows how—through letters—in this charming, laugh out loud debut novel about a life fully lived. “Subtly told and finely made, The Correspondent is a portrait of a small life expanding. Virginia Evans shows how one woman changes at a point when change had seemed impossible. That change, like this novel, turns out to be a cause for celebration.”—Ann Patchett “Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the l...
Andrea Bajani's "beautiful, original, and deeply moving" (Michael Cunningham) novel, which Jhumpa Lahiri asserts "accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm." A prismatic novel that records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she's building in Romania. Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life - when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out...
The Moonstone is a 19th-century novel by the master of sensation fiction, Wilkie Collins. It is considered, with The Woman in White, to be his best work, and is also commonly seen as the first English detective novel. Many of the standard ground rules for detective fiction can be found in this work, as well as examples of Collins' forward-thinking approach to the treatment of Indians and servants.
Written as an extended letter from a black Zimbabwean mother to her daughter leaving for a university place in America, this refreshing and poignant first novel draws back a veil to reveal life in Africa today. Using the lyrical African tradition of dialogue through storytelling, she weaves her tales into a complex fabric of experiences and so reveals the texture of her culture and the rich colours of her own life. The stories, a blend of traditional African folklore, personal tragedy and candi...
On Thanksgiving Day a freegan couple living off the grid in Manhattan, a once prominent linguist struggling with midlife, and a New Jersey debt-collection magnate with a second chance at getting things right randomly and briefly collide as the weight of their desires ultimately undoes each of them, leaving them to pick up the pieces from what's left behind.
The eagerly awaited sequel to "Love Virtually"--2011's wittiest, most compelling love story. ""How will this go on, Leo? The same as before? But where will it go? Nowhere, just on. You live your life, I live mine. And the rest we'll live together." " "Love Virtually" ended as Leo abruptly departed for a new life in the United States, determined to end once and for all the intense cyber-exchange that threatened Emmi's marriage and his own happiness. But shouldn't these unconventional lovers--inti...
*DEBBIE JOHNSON'S GORGEOUSLY ROMANTIC AND UNMISSABLE NEW NOVEL, FOREVER YOURS, IS AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW!*'A laugh-cry book from first page to last' MILLY JOHNSON'Simply brilliant' JANE LINFOOT'Moving, beautiful and heart-wrenching' CATHY BRAMLEY'Humour, tears and above all, hope. Bring tissues' CATHERINE ISAACWhat if you had the chance to find a lost love? Jess still thinks about the man who disappeared from her life seventeen years ago, and the tragedy that tore them apart. So when she dis...
Radically imaginative and intense, challenging language to be slow and fast, soft and hard, drunk and sober, What Are You performs its own destruction and recreation. Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. Addressed to an amorphous you, Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction—going deep into th...
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (The Works of Tobias Smollett) (Classics)
by Tobias Smollett, Thomas R. Preston, and O. M. Brack
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett's last published novel and most celebrated work, appeared in June 1771, three months before the author's death. A classic in the history of the English novel, it takes the form of a collection of letters written by various members of Mr. Matthew Bramble's family (for whom Humphry Clinker is a general servant) during their eight months of travel in England and Scotland in the 1760s. The wanderings of the Bramble party result in a series of amusin...
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Vintage Classics)
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Be on your guard … and take care not to fall in love!" Visiting an idyllic German village, Werther, a sensitive and romantic young man, meets and falls in love with sweet-natured Lotte. Although he realizes that Lotte is to marry Albert, he is unable to subdue his passion for her and his infatuation torments him to the point of absolute despair. The first great ‘confessional’ novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther draws both on Goethe’s own unrequited love for Charlotte Buff and on the death of h...
'Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I could keep reading' Jonathan Lethem 'Full of clever postmodern flourishes, self-referential winks and riotous set pieces. It's funny, smart and beautifully written' Alex Preston, The Guardian'I absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imag...
The last novel by one of the best-known Japanese writers, Junichiro Tanizaki who died in 1965 at the age of 79. Tanizaki studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial University and in his youth he was strongly influenced by Poe, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, but after the earthquake of 1923 he moved to the gentler, more cultured Kyoto region and there became absorbed in the Japanese past and abandoned his superficial Westernization. By 1930 he had gained such recognition that his "Complete works"...
An emotionally raw and resonant story of love, loss, and the enduring power of friendship, following the lives of two young women connected by a home for “fallen girls,” and inspired by historical events. “Home for Erring and Outcast Girls deftly reimagines the wounded women who came seeking a second chance and a sustaining hope.”—Lisa Wingate, author of Before We Were Yours In turn-of-the-20th century Texas, the Berachah Home for the Redemption and Protection of Erring Girls is an unprecede...
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (Adrian Mole, #1) (The Originals)
by Sue Townsend
Re-issued with the charming original artwork from 1982, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 will rouse the nostalgia of a nation who have Sue Townsend firmly in their hearts.Tuesday January 1stBank Holiday in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. These are my New Year's resolutions: 1. I will help the blind across the road; 2. I will hang my trousers up; 3. I will put the sleeves back on my records; 4. I will not start smoking; 5. I will stop squeezing my spots; 6. I will be kind to the...
'Touching . . . a quiet, gentle, moving novel' Observer Queenie thought her first letter would be the end of the story. She was wrong. It was the beginning.When Queenie Hennessy discovers that Harold Fry is walking the length of England to save her, and all she has to do is wait, she is shocked. Her note had explained she was dying. How can she wait? A new volunteer at the hospice suggests that Queenie should write again; only this time she must tell Harold everything. In confessing to secrets s...
From the no. 1 bestselling author of PS, I Love You comes an enchanting novel about two childhood friends whom fate and destiny can't help toying with… From naughty children to rebellious teenagers, Rosie and Alex have stuck by each other through thick and thin. But just as they're discovering the joys of teenage nights on the town and dating disasters, they're separated. Alex's family moves from Dublin to America – and Alex goes with them. For good. Rosie's lost without him....