With an introduction by novelist David Vann In April 1992, Chris McCandless set off alone into the Alaskan wild. He had given his savings to charity, abandoned his car and his possessions, and burnt the money in his wallet, determined to live a life of independence. Just four months later, Chris was found dead. An SOS note was taped to his makeshift home, an abandoned bus. In piecing together the final travels of this extraordinary young man''s life, Jon Krakauer writes about the heart of the wilderness, its terribly beauty and its relentless harshness. Into the Wild is a modern classic of travel writing, and a riveting exploration of what drives some of us to risk more than we can afford to lose.
Siddhartha, sorti en France en 1925, est une profession de foi individualiste contre toutes les doctrines, une condamnation de la puissance, de l'argent, un éloge de la vie contemplative en Inde. Avec ce roman initiatique, Hesse est devenu dans les années 1960 l'un des maîtres à penser de la jeunesse occidentale.
DAY ONEThe Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb.News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%.WEEK TWOCivilization has crumbled.YEAR TWENTYA band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe.But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild. STATION ELEVENMoving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: famous actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan - warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend Clark; Kirsten, a young actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed 'prophet'. Thrilling, unique and deeply moving, this is a beautiful novel that asks questions about art and fame and about the relationships that sustain us through anything - even the end of the world.
Bret Easton Ellis is most famous for his era-defining novel American Psycho and its terrifying anti-hero, Patrick Bateman. With that book, and many times since, Ellis proved himself to be one of the world's most fearless and clear-sighted observers of society - the glittering surface and the darkness beneath.In White, his first work of non-fiction, Ellis offers a wide-ranging exploration of what the hell is going on right now. He tells personal stories from his own life. He writes with razor-sharp precision about the music, movies, books and TV he loves and hates. He examines the ways our culture, politics and relationships have changed over the last four decades. He talks about social media, Hollywood celebrities and Donald Trump. Ellis considers conflicting positions without flinching and adheres to no status quo. His forthright views are powered by a fervent belief in artistic freedom and freedom of speech. Candid, funny, entertaining and blisteringly honest, he offers opinions that are impossible to ignore and certain to provoke. What he values above all is the truth. 'The culture at large seemed to encourage discourse,' he writes, 'but what it really wanted to do was shut down the individual.' Bret Easton Ellis will not be shut down.
A bestseller in China, Brothers is an epic and wildly unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running amok.yes'>#160;Here is China as we've never seen it before, in a sweeping, Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of roughandrumble Chinese history, from the madness of the Cultural Revolution to the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Yu Hua, awardwinning author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two comically mismatched stepbrothers, Baldy Li, a sexobsessed ne'erdowell, and the bookish, sensitive Song Gang, who vow that they will always be brothersyes'>mdash;a bond they will struggle to maintain over the years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love and making and losing millions in the new China.yes'>#160;Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a fascinating vision of an extraordinary place and time.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history, he's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another.
In the dazzling summer of 1926, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley travel from their home in Paris to a villa in the south of France. They swim, play bridge and drink gin. But wherever they go they are accompanied by the glamorous and irrepressible Fife. Fife is Hadley's best friend. She is also Ernest's lover. Hadley is the first Mrs. Hemingway, but neither she nor Fife will be the last. Over the ensuing decades, Ernest's literary career will blaze a trail, but his marriages will be ignited by passion and deceit. Four extraordinary women will learn what it means to love the most famous writer of his generation, and each will be forced to ask herself how far she will go to remain his wife... Luminous and intoxicating, Mrs. Hemingway portrays real lives with rare intimacy and plumbs the depths of the human heart.
Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups.
1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot''s flightbag, the plane''s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit - by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.
B>The multi-million copy number one Bestseller/b>A dazzlingly urban satire on modern relationships?br>An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family?br>Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?As Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), she turns for support to four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.Welcome to Bridget's first diary: mercilessly funny, endlessly touching and utterly addictive.Helen Fielding's first Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, sparked a phenomenon that has seen three books, newspaper columns and the smash-hit film series Bridget Jones' Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Bridget Jones's Baby.
B>What would you change if you could go back in time?/b>In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe's time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . . Toshikazu Kawaguchi's beautiful, moving story - translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot - explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia''s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger , a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
From Booker-prizewinner Douglas Stuart an extraordinary, page-turning second novel, a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in the hyper-masculine and violently sectarian world of Glasgow''s housing estates. They should be sworn enemies if they''re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they find themselves falling in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo works especially hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo''s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future. Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in literary fiction, Douglas Stuart''s Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.
Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar - an outsider - when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. For two years he tried to make intellectual sense of the troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create.
The sequel to Jessie Burton''s million-copy bestseller The Miniaturist . In the golden city of Amsterdam, in 1705, Thea Brandt is turning eighteen, and she is ready to welcome adulthood with open arms. At the city''s theatre, Walter, the love of her life, awaits her, but at home in the house on the Herengracht, all is not well - her father Otto and Aunt Nella argue endlessly, and the Brandt family are selling their furniture in order to eat. On Thea''s birthday, also the day that her mother Marin died, the secrets from the past begin to overwhelm the present. Nella is desperate to save the family and maintain appearances, to find Thea a husband who will guarantee her future, and when they receive an invitation to Amsterdam''s most exclusive ball, she is overjoyed - perhaps this will set their fortunes straight. And indeed, the ball does set things spinning: new figures enter their life, promising new futures. But their fates are still unclear, and when Nella feels a strange prickling sensation on the back of her neck, she remembers the miniaturist who entered her life and toyed with her fortunes eighteen years ago. Perhaps, now, she has returned for her . . . The House of Fortune is a glorious, sweeping story of fate and ambition, secrets and dreams, and one young woman''s determination to rule her own destiny.
Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's.An extraordinary novel from Don DeLillo about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II explores a world in which the novelist's power to influence the inner life of a culture now belongs to bomb-makers and gunmen. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.
B>A major film starring Brie Larson, /b>b>winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Best Actress BAFTA/b>br>b>Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize,/b>b> the Orange Prize and a Richard and Judy Book Club selection./b>Jack is five. He lives with his Ma. They live in a single, locked room. They don't have the key. Jack and Ma are prisoners.Room by Emma Donoghue is an extraordinarily powerful story of a mother and child kept in isolation, and the desire for, and price of, freedom.
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time... From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold comes a story of four new customers each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Cafe Funiculi Funicula's time-travelling offer. Among some faces that will be familiar to readers of Kawaguchi's previous novel, we will be introduced to: The man who goes back to see his best friend who died 22 years ago The son who was unable to attend his own mother's funeral The man who went back to see his girl who he could not marry The old detective who never gave his wife that gift... This beautiful, simple tale tells the story of people who must face up to their past, in order to move on with their lives. Kawaguchi once again invites the reader to ask themselves: what would you change if you could travel back in time?
