It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. For Sethe, Paul D. Halle and the others, the benign imprisonment of Sweet Home is destroyed. By the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Song of Solomon" and "Tar Baby".
It begins with a letter from a woman Frank has never met. A pleading letter. A letter that closed his throat. 'Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.' And that is it all it takes.
Auggie wants to be an ordinary ten-year-old. He does ordinary things - eating ice cream, playing on his Xbox. He feels ordinary - inside. But ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. Ordinary kids aren't stared at wherever they go.
The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates she will, like all dissenters, be hanged or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.
JO NESBO: #1 Sunday Times bestseller, #1 New York Times bestseller, 40 million books sold worldwide He''s the best cop they''ve got. When a drug bust turns into a bloodbath it''s up to Inspector Macbeth and his team to clean up the mess. He''s also an ex-drug addict with a troubled past. He''s rewarded for his success. Power. Money. Respect. They''re all within reach. But a man like him won''t get to the top. Plagued by hallucinations and paranoia, Macbeth starts to unravel. He''s convinced he won''t get what is rightfully his. Unless he kills for it.
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities he is expected to apologize to save his job, but instead he refuses and resigns, retiring to live with his daughter on her remote farm.
A novel set in a small town in Ohio, focusing on two girls, Nell and Sula, both black, both poor, who share their dreams until Sula escapes to live a vagrant city life for ten years. When she returns, the bond of their friendship is broken.
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year 'Outstanding...a stunningly good read' Observer 'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwan The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.
The police urgently need Harry Hole A killer is stalking Oslo''s streets. Police officers are being slain at the scenes of crimes they once investigated, but failed to solve. The murders are brutal, the media reaction hysterical. But this time, Harry can''t help anyone For years, detective Harry Hole has been at the centre of every major criminal investigation in Oslo. His dedication to his job and his brilliant insights have saved the lives of countless people. But now, with those he loves most facing terrible danger, Harry can''t protect anyone. Least of all himself.
Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone in feeling discontent. Harbouring an unnatural desire for solitude, and a perverse distaste for the pleasures of compulsory promiscuity, Bernard has an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress-Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece.
In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history's most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces . Dante's Inferno. Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle. By the author of The Da Vinci Code .
It's the year 2044, and the real world has become an ugly place. Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where you can be anything you want to be, where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.
How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical - and sometimes devastating - breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?
Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future.
*Hardback out NOW!* Celebrating her 45th birthday at her local pub, podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie is also celebrating her 45th birthday. They are, in fact birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix''s children''s school. Josie has been listening to Alix''s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for Alix''s series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Alix agrees to a trial interview. Josie''s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can''t quite resist the temptation to keep digging.
Slowly Alix starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it Josie has inveigled her way into Alix''s life - and into her home.
Soon she begins to wonder who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
Nine-years-old Bruno has a lot of things on his mind. Who is the Fury? Why did he make them leave their nice home in Berlin to go to 'Out-With'? And who are all the sad people in striped pyjamas on the other side of the fence? The grown-ups won't explain so Bruno decides there is only one thing for it - he will have to explore this place alone.
A novel which describes the dissolution of the once aristocratic Compson family in the American South, told through the eyes of three of its members. In different ways they prove unable to deal with either the responsibility of the past or the imperatives of the present.
Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, this is the story of an old man, a young boy, and a giant fish. This text won for Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The chronicle of the tragic lives of a poor black family in 1940s America. Every night Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays for blue eyes like those of her white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty.
Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's sole surviving son, and an introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, this edition includes a number of Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son Jack and his first wife, Hadley.
A story that tells about the confession of Alexander Portnoy who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood.
A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolution.
An all-new edition of the tragicomic smash hit which stormed the New York Times bestseller charts, now featuring an introduction from Markus Zusak.
In his first book for young adults, Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist who leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white high school. This heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written tale, featuring poignant drawings that reflect the character's art, is based on the author's own experiences. It chronicles contemporary adolescence as seen through the eyes of one Native American boy.
'Excellent in every way' Neil Gaiman Illustrated in a contemporary cartoon style by Ellen Forney.
DISCOVER the BESTSELLING DYSTOPIAN NOVEL behind the AWARD-WINNING TV SERIES Second season now airing on Channel 4 starring Elisabeth Moss The official TV tie-in edition of The Handmaid's Tale, with a new introduction from Margaret Atwood 'I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.' Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state in what was formerly known as the United States. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford - her assigned name, Offred, means 'of Fred'. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire. As she recalls her pre-revolution life in flashbacks, Offred must navigate through the terrifying landscape of torture and persecution in the present day, and between two men upon which her future hangs.
Masterfully conceived and executed, this haunting vision of the future places Margaret Atwood at the forefront of dystopian fiction.
'As relevant today as it was when Atwood wrote it...no television event has hit such a nerve ...The Handmaid's Tale is more relevant one year after the first season' - Guardian 'Don't expect to be gripped by a more potent or involving drama this year' - Telegraph
