NEW RELEASES
Treacle Walker by Alan Garner $25
"When Treacle Walker appears off the Cheshire moor one day – a wanderer, a healer – an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined. Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore, an exploration of the fluidity of time, a mysterious, beautifully written and affecting glimpse into the deep work of being human. Treacle Walker confronts the issues that anyone who ever lived has had to confront. The transition out of childhood. The transition into old age. The gaining and loss of personal agency. What we can expect to know about the world – and our life in it – and what we can’t; and how we face up to that. One of the central themes of the book is how – and from whom – we get our knowledge: that would seem to be a very important question, given the information environment in which people now live. Alan Garner’s novel draws you relentlessly into its echoing metaphysical and emotional space." —judges' citation
Short-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize.
"Treacle Walker crams into its 150-odd pages more ideas and imagination than most authors manage in their whole careers." —Alex Preston, The Guardian
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. As an adult, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
"Lessons marks a significant new phase in McEwan's already astonishingly productive career — and may well be remembered as one of the finest humanist novels of its age." —New Statesman
"The author has woven multiple versions of himself into his 500-page masterpiece." —The Times
Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living in the suburbs of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment of desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Celebrated for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable.
"Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months." —Sheila Heti
"Annie Ernaux writes memoir with such generosity and vulnerable power that I find it difficult to separate my own memories from hers long after I’ve finished reading." —Catherine Lacey
Medusa is the only mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her sisters, she quickly realizes that she is the only one who gets older, experiences change, feels weakness. Her mortal lifespan gives her an urgency that her family will never know. When the sea god, Poseidon, commits an unforgivable act in her sacred temple the goddess, Athene, takes her revenge on an innocent — and Medusa's life is changed forever. Appalled by her own reflection: snakes have replaced her hair and she realises that her gaze can now turn any living creature to stone. Medusa can no longer look upon anyone she loves without destroying them, and so condemns herself to a life lived in shadow and solitude to limit her murderous rage. That is, until Perseus embarks upon a fateful quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon. From the author of A Thousand Ships.
"Brilliant and compellingly readable." —Guardian
"Brilliant and compellingly readable." —Guardian
1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past. Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a violent argument between Henry's mother and his domineering father, one that threatens Gretel's hard-won, self-contained existence. Gretel is faced with a chance to expiate her guilt, grief and remorse and act to save a young boy — for the second time in her life. But to do so, she will be forced to reveal her true identity to the world. Will she make a different choice this time, whatever the cost to herself? Boyne's insightful new novel follows the life of Gretel from The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, and shows how the experiences of childhood are very difficult to escape in adulthood.
"Compulsively readable." —Irish Independent
First published in 1972, Ann Quin's fourth and final novel was a radical break from the introspective style she had developed in Three and Passages : a declaration of independence from all expectations. Brashly experimental, ribald, and hilarious, Tripticks maps new territories for the novel. Splattering its pages with the story of a man being chased across a nightmarish America by his 'first X-wife', and her 'schoolboy gigolo', Tripticks was ground zero for the collision of punk energy with high style.
"Quin's spare prose line—delphic, obscure and hauntingly suggestive-—creates a comparably vertiginous kind of enchantment. To submit to this unique book's spell is to experience, in language, a 'fantastic dance of images, shapes, forms'." —Sam Sack, Wall Street Journal
"Quin works over a small area with the finest of tools. Every page, every word gives evidence of her care and workmanship." —New York Times
"I suspect that Ann Quin will eventually be viewed, alongside B. S. Johnson and Alexander Trocchi, as one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter." —Tom McCarthy
"Rare enough is a book that begins by stating its intention--rarer still one that proceeds to do seemingly everything it can to avoid following the path its intention has laid." —Danielle Dutton
>>Read Thomas's review of Three.
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP — and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father's consent; struggled to feed a family of ten children; and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.
"To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness." —Guardian
Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results. The renowned translator's first novel is based on her own life.
“Jennifer Croft writes with an extraordinary intensity that ensures this exceptional Bildungsroman will stay etched in the reader’s mind for a very long time to come.” —Olga Tokarczuk
"Stunning and surprising." —New York Times
"A tribute to the deep bond of sisterhood: how, over years navigating life, it stretches apart and snaps back." —The Scotsman
The jaw-dropping sequel to the remarkable fantasy Mordew. Nathan Treeves is dead, murdered by the Master of Mordew, his remains used to create the powerful occult weapon known as the Tinderbox. His companions are scattered, making for Malarkoi, the city of the Mistress, the Master's enemy. They are hoping to find welcome there, or at least safety. They find neither — and instead become embroiled in a life and death struggle against assassins, demi-gods, and the cunning plans of the Mistress. Only Sirius, Nathan's faithful magical dog, has not forgotten the boy, and, bent on revenge, he returns to the shattered remains of Mordew, newly deformed into an impossible mountain, swarming with monsters. He senses something in the Manse at its pinnacle — the Master is there, grieving the loss of his manservant, Bellows — and in the ruins of the slums he finds a power capable of destroying his foe, if only he has the strength to use it.
Nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives on Hook Farm in the village of Underwhelem. Next to the farm is Gore Woods, Ira's sanctuary, overseen by Orlam, the all-seeing lamb's eyeball who is Ira-Abel's guardian and protector. Here, drawing on the rituals, children's songs, chants and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world. Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of Underwhelem month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. P.J. Harvey's poem sequence is the first book published in the Dorset dialect for several decades.
>>'To Bring You My Love'.
The Himalayas meander through five very different countries, where the world religions of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism are mixed with ancient shamanic religions. Countless languages and vastly different cultures live in the secluded mountain valleys. Modernity and tradition collide, while the great powers fight for influence. We have read about mountain climbers on their way up Mount Everest and about travellers on the spiritual quest for Buddhist monasteries. But how much do we know about the people living in the Himalaya? Fatland invites us into close encounters with the many peoples of the region, and at the same time takes us on a dizzying journey at altitude through incredible landscapes and dramatic, unknown world histories - all the way to the most volatile human conflicts of our times.
After almost dying and spending over a month in an induced coma after being admitted to hospital with coronavirus, Michael Rosen had to learn to walk again. With the support of doctors and nurses and a walking stick he named 'Sticky McStickstick', he managed to embark on the slow steps to recovery. A moving picture book about the importance of persistence, support, and caring about and for others.
10th April 2019: a global sensation. Heino Falcke, a person "working at the boundaries of his discipline and therefore at the limits of the universe" had used a network of telescopes spanning the entire planet to take the first picture of a black hole. Light in the Darkness examines how mankind has always looked to the skies, mapping the journey from millennia ago when we turned our gaze to the heavens, to modern astrophysics. Falcke and Romer chart the breakthrough research of the team, an unprecedented global community of international colleagues developing a telescope complex enough to look directly into a black hole — a hole where light vanishes, and time stops.
WHAT IF... one person decided to answer all the unanswerable questions, using science? Randall Munroe is here to provide the best answers yet to the important questions you probably never thought to ask. The people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Planning to ride a fire pole from the moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer doors at the same time? Maybe it's time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-storey building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Read Munroe's advice before you try these things yourself.
What is it like to be a plant? It's not a question we might think to contemplate, even though many of us live surrounded by plants. Science has long explored the wonderful ways in which plants communicate, behave and shape their environments: from chemical warfare to turning their predators to cannibalism. But they're nevertheless often just the backdrop to our frenetic animal lives. While plants may not have brains or move around as we do, cutting-edge science is revealing that they have astonishing inner worlds of an alternate kind to ours. They can plan ahead, learn, recognise their relatives, assess risks and make decisions. They can even be put to sleep. Innovative new tools might allow us to actually see them do these things — from electrophysiological recordings to MRI and PET scans. Calvo challenges us to make an imaginative leap into a world that is so close and yet so alien. It is one that will expand our understanding of our own minds.
It is an ordinary Thursday and things should finally be returning to normal. Except trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club is concerned. A decade-old cold case leads them to a local news legend and a murder with no body and no answers. Then, a new foe pays Elizabeth a visit. Her mission? Kill . . . or be killed. As the cold case turns white hot, Elizabeth wrestles with her conscience (and a gun), while Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim chase down clues with help from old friends and new. But can the gang solve the mystery and save Elizabeth before the murderer strikes again?
Otele uncovers the untold history of Europeans of African descent, from Saint Maurice who became the leader of a Roman legion and Renaissance scholar Juan Latino, to abolitionist Mary Prince and the activist, scholars and grime artists of the present day. Tracing African European heritage through the complex, and often brutal experiences of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary, she sheds new light not only on the past but also on questions very much alive today — about racism, identity, citizenship, power and resilience. African Europeans is a landmark celebration of this integral, vibrantly complex slice of European history, and will redefine the field for years to come.
"This is a book I have been waiting for my whole life. It goes beyond the numerous individual black people in Europe over millennia, to show us the history of the very ideas of blackness, community and identity on the continent that has forgotten its own past. A necessary and exciting read." —Afua Hirsch
Bernhard's writings and indeed his own biography reflect Austria's fraught efforts to define itself as a nation following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy and the trauma of World War II. His novels, plays, and public statements exposed the convoluted ways Austrians were attempting to come to terms with their Nazi past—or defiantly avoiding doing so. While Bernhard was the scourge of his native culture, Honegger explains, he was also a product of that same culture.
>>Read Thomas's reviews of some of Bernhard's novels.
>>Read Thomas's reviews of some of Bernhard's novels.
>>Three Days.
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