Literature

"Come, have another hand, Burgoyne." "I'll have my revenge to-morrow, old fellow," I replied. "Why not to-night?" "It's past two, and I've a long walk home, remember." "Very well; as you wish." My friend, Robert Nugent, a journalist, was young man, tall and dark, twenty-seven at the outside, with a pleasant, smiling face. His wavy hair, worn rather long, and negligence of attire gave him a dash of the genial good-for-nothing. It was in the card-room of that Bohemian-but, alas, now defunct-institution, the Junior Garrick Club, where we had been indulging in a friendly hand. Having finished our game, we ordered some refreshment, and seated ourselves upon the balcony on Adelphi Terrace, smoking our last cigarettes, and watching the ripple of the stream, the broken reflection of the stars, and many lights that lined the Thames. All was dark in the houses on the opposite shore; the summer wind whispered in the leafy boughs on the Embankment, and a faint cold grey in the east showed that night was on the edge of morn.

To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his facade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger and bigger all the time.

See, cash is tight, especially with all those instalment plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace at the furniture store, Ray doesn't see the need to ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweller downtown who also doesn't ask questions.

Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa - the 'Waldorf of Harlem' - and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do, after all. Now Ray has to cater to a new clientele, one made up of shady cops on the take, vicious minions of the local crime lord, and numerous other Harlem lowlifes.

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he starts to see the truth about who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

Harlem Shuffle is driven by an ingeniously intricate plot that plays out in a beautifully recreated Harlem of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

"A wildly enjoyable book; the 85-year-old Vargas Llosa is as sharp and mordantly funny as ever." Financial Times

Guatemala, 1954. A CIA-supported military coup topples the government. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changed the development of Latin America: that those in power encouraged the spread of Soviet communism in the Americas.

Mario Vargas Llosa has written a drama on a world stage, in which some persecutors end up as victims of the very plot they helped construct. Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.

A New York real estate tycoon plunges to his death on a Manhattan sidewalk. A trophy wife with a past survives a narrow escape from a brazen attack. Mobsters and moguls with no shortage of reasons to kill trot out their alibis. And then, in the suffocating grip of a record heat wave, comes another shocking murder and a sharp turn in a tense journey into the dirty little secrets of the wealthy.

Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world. She may be the most beautiful woman ever. This beauty is a curse as much as a blessing, however, as men fight over her wherever she goes, even kidnapping her in order to possess her. She becomes the most hated woman in all of Greece for the war she sparks when she is abducted by Paris, favourite of Aphrodite. But is Helen really to blame? Is she a willful seductress with no care for the consequences of her actions or a mere plaything of the gods? GREAT WOMEN OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY is a series of short books for young and old introducing readers to the ancient world through its heroines. These books aim to bring readers on a journey filled with excitement, drama, death and love, all while focussing on the women that have played such an important role in our history yet are still remembered as mere bystanders.

This is a complex story of flight. A woman tearing herself away from a major love affair is driven by the pain of her decision to take a long journey. She leaves the town of Patras, her friends, the bar she worked at, her self as she knew it and hitch-hikes to Epirus in winter, along deserted roads, catching rides with the men who drive these roads. Yiannena in Epirus leads her eventually to the island of Patmos where the battle to save her life reaches a climax. Feeling she is on the verge of losing her soul she rediscovers herself in the form of a sleeping child.Though hounded by failure, fear and silence, she discovers the true grandeur of love and with it a sense of her own self. Her mind and emotions are honed to such an exceptional degree that the pain she suffers becomes the way to self-realization. Because love, for the strong and the daring, always leads to the most inaccessible and divine parts of our being.

Kesariani, once you were a star; for a moment you shone in the firmament and then, you vanished for ever into the void of history... There's nothing left. Now you're plastering the last traces of gunshots on your forehead, like an old dog licking its wounds, where the scar has healed." Marios Hakkas lived almost all his tragically short life close to the Athenian neighbourhood of Kesariani, in the shadow of Mount Hymettos. Throughout the Nazi Occupation of Greece, this district was the symbol of Greek Resistance and Hakkas' stories are indelibly marked by the blood-stained events of the Kesariani "Skopeftirio" (Shooting-Ground), where at least a thousand Greek Partisans sacrificed their lives. With sharp irony, but also occasional flashes of elegiac lyricism, Hakkas laments the loss of this valiant spirit. Wrathfully, he imagines the once heroic Shooting-Ground being sold out to land-grabbers, interested only in profiteering and money-grubbing shop-owners. The acquisition of a newfangled "elegant toilet" becomes the symbol of this new Kesariani, where disappointed ex-idealists are no longer able to dream or even to remember their recent struggles. However, the last story in the last book records the voice of a single lad, killed while resisting, and this outcry remains vibrantly alive, demanding justice from future generations.