Literature

The lives of an aging painter and his doppelganger converge and diverge in an elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, in the first volume of the celebrated Norwegian writer's Septology.

An exciting re-launch of the classic Earthsea Cycle, by fantasy literature legend Ursula K. Le Guin, winner of a Newbery Honor, the National Book Award, Pushcart Prize, and six Nebula Awards. This item is Returnable

'My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.'In The Outsider (1942), his classic existentialist novel, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach near Algiers, his lack of remorse compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and the law. Yet he is as much a victim as a criminal. Albert Camus' portrayal of a man confronting the absurd, and revolting against the injustice of society, depicts the paradox of man's joy in life when faced with the 'tender indifference' of the world. Sandra Smith's translation, based on close listening to a recording of Camus reading his work aloud on French radio in 1954, sensitively renders the subtleties and dream-like atmosphere of L'Etranger. Albert Camus (1913-1960), French novelist, essayist and playwright, is one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. His most famous works include The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947), The Just (1949), The Rebel (1951) and The Fall (1956). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and his last novel, The First Man, unfinished at the time of his death, appeared in print for the first time in 1994, and was published in English soon after by Hamish Hamilton. Sandra Smith was born and raised in New York City and is a Fellow of Robinson College, University of Cambridge, where she teaches French Literature and Language. She has won the French American Foundation Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize, as well as the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.

A wonderful novel celebrating the power of books and libraries to change people's lives' JILL MANSELL'Heart-breaking and heart-lifting and always enchanting' RUTH HOGAN'An irresistible and utterly compelling novel that will appeal to bibliophiles and historical fiction fans alike' SUNDAY EXPRESS'I devoured The Paris Library in one hungry gulp . . . charming and moving' TATIANA DE ROSNAY'An irresistible, compelling read' FIONA DAVIS'Paris and libraries. What's not to love?!' NATASHA LESTER'Compelling' WOMAN & HOME'Delightful, richly detailed' PUBLISHER'S WEEKLYPARIS, 1939Odile Souchet is obsessed with books, and her new job at the American Library in Paris - with its thriving community of students, writers and book lovers - is a dream come true. When war is declared, the Library is determined to remain open. But then the Nazis invade Paris, and everything changes. In Occupied Paris, choices as black and white as the words on a page become a murky shade of grey - choices that will put many on the wrong side of history, and the consequences of which will echo for decades to come. MONTANA, 1983Lily is a lonely teenager desperate to escape small-town Montana. She grows close to her neighbour Odile, discovering they share the same love of language, the same longings. But as Lily uncovers more about Odile's mysterious past, she discovers a dark secret, closely guarded and long hidden. Based on the true Second World War story of the heroic librarians at the American Library in Paris, this is an unforgettable novel of romance, friendship, family, and of heroism found in the quietest of places.

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for France. But glamorous Jazz Age Paris, full of artists and writers, fuelled by alcohol and gossip, is no place for family life and fidelity. Ernest and Hadley's marriage begins to founder, and the birth of a beloved son serves only to drive them further apart. Then, at last, Ernest's ferocious literary endeavours begin to bring him recognition - not least from a woman intent on making him her own . .

One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Books by Women G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black, dusty, prehistoric - crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector's spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly, and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works. Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. References to her literary work pervade the music and literature of Brazil and Latin America. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually sailed to Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graca Aranha Prize for the best first novel. Many felt she had given Brazillian literature a unique voice in the larger context of Portuguese literature. After living variously in Italy, the UK, Switzerland and the US, in 1959, Lispector with her children returned to Brazil where she wrote her most influential novels including The Passion According to G.H. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

'Beautiful and deep ... a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent'Food for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times*A major celebration of the French short story and Spectator Book of the Year*The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. The first volume spans four hundred years, taking the reader from the sixteenth century to the 'golden age' of the fin de siècle. Its pages are populated by lovers, phantoms, cardinals, labourers, enchanted statues, gentleman burglars, retired bureaucrats, panthers and parrots, in a cacophony of styles and voices. From the affairs of Madame de Lafayette to the polemic realism of Victor Hugo, the supernatural mystery of Guy de Maupassant to the dark sensuality of Rachilde, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old. Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.

This first novel in an exciting new series takes readers to ancient Greece to follow the adventures of Nicolaos, son of a minor sculptor, as he becomes embroiled in murder and political intrigue.

“Alice is trapped by her misreading of love in a marriage that stifles her passion and independence. The “person” of her husband
is driven by ambition – his own material advantage. With uncompromising rationality Alice analyses the beliefs and actions that underlie their marital relationship. Their drama plays out against a background of Oxford university and village life where Alice comes to realise that love is more easily recognised than understood.”
“Nikos Athanasou probes into the lives of his characters with forensic skill, revealing how emotional insecurities can trigger dysfunctional philosophies of love.” Rhyll McMaster
The Person of the Man is an exploration of love and possession set against the backdrop of university and country life in Oxford. It analyses the pathological marriage between an Oxford academic of Australian origin and his English wife. The basis of this marriage is essentially the universal Hobbesian dictum that “what most people regard as love is really just approval or more precisely the absence of disapproval”. When Martin's betrayal and the tragedy that follows reveal the true Person of the Man Alice discovers that love cannot be analysed, it can only be understood.