The Marlowe Papers

Author	Michèle Roberts
ISBN	1408816008

A stunning war-time novel set in France from Booker-shortlisted author Michèle Roberts.

After every war there are stories that are locked away like bluebottles in drawers and kept silent. But sometimes the past can return: in the smell of carbolic soap, in whispers darting through a village...

Author	Kitty Aldridge
ISBN	0224096435

After the disappearance of their father and the sudden death of their mother, Lee Hart and his deaf brother, Ned, imagine all is lost until Lee lands a traineeship at their local funeral home and discovers there is life after death. Here, in the company of a crooning ex-publican, a closet pole vaulter,...

Author	Emily Perkins
ISBN	0385663730

Dorothy Forrest is immersed in the sensory world around her; she lives in the flickering moment. From the age of seven, when her odd, disenfranchised family moves from New York City to the wide skies of Auckland, to the very end of her life, this is her great gift and possible misfortune. Through the wilderness...

Author	Carrie Tiffany
ISBN	1742610765

On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door...

Author	Bonnie Nadzam
ISBN	1590514378

Winner of the 2011 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize

Lamb traces the self-discovery of David Lamb, a narcissistic middle aged man with a tendency toward dishonesty, in the weeks following the disintegration of his marriage and the death of his father. Hoping to regain some faith in his own...

Author	Jo Shapcott
ISBN	0571254705

Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott...

Author	Don Paterson
ISBN	0571249574

In this, his first volume of original verse since the award-winning Landing Light, Don Paterson is found writing at his most memorable and direct. In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within...

Author	Lorraine Hansberry
ISBN	0679755322

Bumped this to four stars for the raw talent of Hansberry, but overall what's presented is a 3.

Les Blancs is a fascinating play, particularly considering how forward thinking it was (Hansberry was a true visionary, in my opinion). It's a story about the clash of civilizations, expectations,...

Author	Michèle Forbes
ISBN	0143189395

During the hot Irish summer of 1969, tensions rise in Belfast, where Katherine, a former actress, and George, a firefighter, struggle to keep buried secrets from destroying their marriage. In this emotionally acute debut novel, Michèle Forbes immerses the reader in a colourful tapestry of life....

Author

Clare Clark

London 1887. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year to make something of herself. A self-proclaimed Chilean heiress educated in Paris, she is torn between poetry and the new art of photography. But it is soon plain that Maribel’s choices are...

Author	Rupert Thomson
ISBN	1847087655

It is Florence, 1691. The Renaissance is long gone, and the city is a dark, repressive place, where everything is forbidden and anything is possible. The Enlightenment may be just around the corner, but knowledge is still the property of the few, and they guard it fiercely. Art, sex and power - these,...

Author	Meg Clothier
ISBN	1846058201

Georgia, 1177
For twenty years King Giorgi has defended the throne of his fragile kingdom against all comers. Now on the threshold of old age he faces a grave new threat: he has no son to succeed him. There is only his daughter, Tamar; a clever, indomitable and fearless girl.

When a revolt...

Author	Stella Tillyard
ISBN	0805094571

A Library Journal Top Ten Best Books of 2011

An epic novel about love and war, set in Regency England and Spain during the Peninsular War (1812-15), by the acclaimed historian and bestselling author of Aristocrats

Tides of War opens in England with the recently married, charmingly...

Author	Deirdre Madden
ISBN	0571175511

 
Home

I grew up in Northern Ireland, in the quiet seaside town of Bangor, County Down. Although I had moved away before the Troubles started in 1968, I came back occasionally, and happened to be shopping in downtown Belfast during the bombings on "Bloody Friday" in July 1972. My wife and...

Author	Joanna Kavenna
ISBN	0805091548

From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writers, an epic novel of childbirth—past, present, and future

The year is 1865. In Vienna, Dr. Ignasz Semmelweiss has been hounded into an asylum by his medical peers, ridiculed for his claim that doctors' unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed...

Author	W. Paul Anderson
ISBN	0786715413

On a frigid winter's night, a man escapes from an apartment in which a young woman lies bleeding. In his hands he clutches a box he has found there. He is Donald Gregory, a once-respected college professor and serial adulterer, whose last affair has left his career in ruins. She is Beulah Limosneros, one...

Author	Mike Bartlett
ISBN	1848423977

"The most spectacular, gripping and wickedly entertaining piece of lèse-majesté that British theatre has ever seen... blessed with wit, clarity and moments of deeper feeling. Outstanding and provocative... There is barely a moment when the fizz goes out of the writing and the narrative keeps...

Author	Jonathan Grimwood
ISBN	0857868799

Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout is many things. Orphan, soldier, diplomat, spy, lover. And chef.

This is his story.

We meet Jean-Marie d’Aumout as a penniless orphan eating beetles by the side of a road. His fate is changed after an unlikely encounter finds him patronage and he is...

Author	John Crowley
ISBN	0060556595

One of our most accomplished literary artists, John Crowley imagines the novel the haunted Romantic poet Lord Byron never penned ...but very well might have. Saved from destruction, read, and annotated by Byron's own abandoned daughter, Ada, the manuscript is rediscovered in our time -- and almost...

Author

Jon Sopel

'You see, if only they didn’t speak English in America, then we’d treat it as a foreign country – and probably understand it a lot better’ ‘the sanest man in America’ – Bill Bryson
‘Jon Sopel nails it’ – Emily Maitlis

**With a brand new chapter, charting Trump's...

Author

Gyles Brandreth

Oscar Wilde makes a triumphant return in the fifth novel in the critically acclaimed historical mystery series, featuring Wilde as the detective aided by his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In 1892 Arthur Conan Doyle, exhausted by his creation Sherlock Holmes, retires to the spa at Bad Homburg....

Author

Lloyd Shepherd

It's 1814 and the streets of London's Covent Garden are at the centre of a dark trade, enticing rich and poor alike with a cocktail of gin and beer and sex. Behind their own fashionable private doors in the surrounding parishes a group of aristocratic young men are found murdered, all of them wearing the...

Author	Georgina Harding
ISBN	1408821125

Speed dating with books 4/6
Since I am moving my books from one room to another and building a new bookcase I realized (again) that I have way too many unread books. I decided to choose 6 (for the beginning) of the ones waiting on my shelves for a long time or that I do not know if I would like, read 50 pages...

Author	Simon Armitage
ISBN	0571169821

'A firework display of technique, versatility and passion.' Independent on Sunday

'The crafted sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.' Times Literary Supplement

'The...