Literature

A love born during the years of the Occupation reaches a peak of intensity. As the two young people grow up, in love, thousands of people are dying of hunger, the innocent are being tortured and patriots executed. Love does not triumph, however, but is brought to an end. The Germans begin to round up the Jews, including Gioconda ... A true story, of one of the most beautiful but tragic adolescent experiences.

Opening in 1995 with 'A Second Home', Mantel describes the death of her stepfather which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of her childhood.
In 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' Mantel takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating in the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelight ceremony of her mother's 'churching'. In 'Smile', an account of teenage perplexity, Mantel describes a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Finally, at the memoir's conclusion, Mantel explains how through a series of medical misunderstandings and neglect she came to be childless and how the ghosts of the unborn like chances missed or pages unturned, have come to haunt her life as a writer...

'Vital... [Erpenbeck] is asking a compelling and timely question' Sally Rooney, Irish TimesRichard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas. Recently retired, he steps into the streets of his city, Berlin, and discovers a new community. A tent city has grown up on Oranienplatz, established by African asylum seekers. Hesitantly getting to know the people there, Richard finds his life changing, as he begins to question his own sense of belonging in a city that once divided its citizens into them and us. At once a passionate contribution to the debate on race, and a beautifully written examination of an ageing man's quest for meaning, Go, Went, Gone showcases one of the great contemporary European novelists at the height of her powers. 'Profound, beautiful and deeply affecting... [An] extraordinary novel, bearing unflinching testament to history as it unfolds' Neel Mukherjee, New Statesman'One of Europe's most highly regarded writers... Erpenbeck's most significant work to date' Financial Times

More than three thousand years have passed since the first events recorded in DUNE. Only one link survives with those tumultuous times: the grotesque figure of Leto Atreides, son of the prophet Paul Muad'Dib, and now the virtually immortal God Emperor of Dune.

He alone understands the future, and he knows with a terrible certainty that the evolution of his race is at an end unless he can breed new qualities into his species.

But to achieve his final victory, Leto Atreides must also bring about his own downfall ...

Read the series which inspired the 2021 Denis Villeneuve epic film adaptation, Dune, starring Oscar Isaac, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Josh Brolin.

It is the eve of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and Chrysovalantis—a chronically unsuccessful but enthusiastic employee of the publishing industry—has been put out of work yet again. He begins a vitriolic monologue, taking aim at his many persecutors, from cruel bosses to opportunistic women to embar­rassing, crippling illnesses. An ageing relic of a bygone era, hounded by the challenges of a fast-changing city, he nonetheless sees the irony of his plight. Vice-ridden yet God-fearing, family-loving yet swindled even by his own sisters, this repentant anti-hero will set his record straight once and for all. And God is his witness.

A magnificent and triumphant debut.” Dhonielle Clayton, New York Times bestselling author For fans of Twin Crowns and TikTok sensations To Kill a Kingdom and This Woven KingdomThe royal court of Galla is as dangerous as it is glamorous... Kalothia will need every ounce of courage and wit, if she is to avenge those she loves ... and stay alive. Kalothia has grown up in the shadows of her kingdom, hidden away in the East after her parents were outed as enemies of the king. When assassins attack her home on her sixteenth birthday, she must flee to the king’s court – a beautiful but lethal nest of poison, plots and danger, overseen by an entrenched patriarchy. Can Kalothia navigate this most worldly of places to find her own role? What if she must choose between her country and her heart? A fast-paced, romantic and feminist YA fantasy full of danger and courtly intrigue.

God's Pauper is an imaginative retelling of the life of St. Francis. Kazantzakis' writings are an anguished expression of the eternal struggle between the spirit and flesh, and he uses the story of St. Francis to draw us into the Maelstrom. The story is dramatically unfolded to us by the Saint's constant companion, Frate Leone, who takes us through agonies of physical and spiritual humiliation. We accompany the Saint before the Pope to establish his Brotherhood; to Damietta and the Saracen armies; and in solitary vigils on Mount Alvernia. The minutest and the mightiest elements of nature form the backcloth to the drama of events. Hate, compassion, jealousy and fear are among the principal ingredients in the drama, fused together with infinite subtlety.

The protagonist in each of these stories is a solitary individual, alienated from society, haunted Dy memurira, fascinated by the disgusting, obsessed with the relationship between love and death, and fetishistically attached to certain objects that bear the traces of traumatic experiences. Ioannou brilliantly highlights the discrepancy between intimate acts of sex and violence, and the way people pretend in public that life can be lived withoutphysicality. In "Good Friday Vigil"- his last book of stories before his untimely death in 1985 - Ioannou departs from the conversational tone of his earlier work and develops an intricate style whose wanderings evoke the associative meanderings of the memory.

'Made me laugh while punching me in the gut. Loved this book' AISLING BEA 'This is the greatest. You'll cry and laugh. I read it though the night. And I never, ever avoid sleep' CLAUDIA WINKLEMAN 'I award it 13/10 on my QWJ scale (stands for Queasy With Jealousy that I didn't write it)' MARIAN KEYES --- Every relationship has one beginning. This one has two endings. Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped. Now he is. . . 1. Without a home 2. Waiting for his stand-up career to take off 3. Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak at a time when everything he thought he knew about women, and flat-sharing, and his friendships has transformed beyond recognition, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of their broken relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story. From the bestselling author of Ghosts and Everything I Know About Love: a sharply funny, beautifully observed and exquisitely relatable story of heartbreak and friendship, and how to survive both. 'The most book-based fun I had this year ... It's the most I've laughed while reading about heartbreak since Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. A complete delight' The Sunday Times, Critics' favourite books of the year