Diaboliad

Diaboliad

Mikhail Bulgakov

Fiction / Short Stories / Memoir

The five, irreverant, satirical and imaginative stories contained in Diaboliad caused an uproar upon the book's first publication in 1925. Full of invention, they display Bulgakov's breathtaking stylistic range, moving at dizzying speed from grotesque satire to science fiction, from the plainest realism to the most madcap fantasy. Diaboliad is a wonderful introduction to literature's most uncategorisable and subversive genius.
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Mammon

Mammon

Robin Gilbert

Memoir / Biography / Literature & Fiction

A spinster devotes herself to a shamefully selfish form of charity work, until the day a stranger enters her world...A tainted love…Iris is a seventeen year old experiencing her first signs of love. She was your average teenage girl who had a secret crush on the most popular guy in school and her best friend. Typical.Axel Rotterdam was sick. There was something lurking inside him and it wanted out. He was terrified of it and afraid of what it would do. It had set its sights on a new target. It wanted Iris McDerman…and it would take her kicking and screaming.Torn between her heart desires, Iris would make a decision that will alter the course of her life and change it forever.
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Non-Combatants and Others

Non-Combatants and Others

Rose Macaulay

Fiction / Memoir / Religion

Rose Macaulay's anti-war writing collected in one fascinating and thought-provoking volume. Non-Combatants and Others (1916) is a classic of pacifist writing and was one of the first novels to be written and published in Britain during World War I that set out the moral and ideological arguments against war. Scathing and heart-breaking, it finds a way for pacifists to work for an end to conflict. Also included is some of Macaulay's journalism for The Spectator, Time & Tide, The Listener and other magazines from the mid-1930s to the end of World War II, detailing the rise of fascism and the civilian response to the impending war. Witty, furious and despairing in turn, these forgotten magazine columns reveal new insights into how people find war and its tyrannies creeping up on them. These are supported by Macaulay's two inter-war essays on pacifism and a short story narrating a devastating account of the loss of her flat and all her possessions...
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I Wish You More

I Wish You More

Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Children's / Memoir

Some books are about a single wish. Some books are about three wishes. The infallible team of Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld have combined their extraordinary talents to create this exuberant book of endless good wishes. Wishes for curiosity and wonder, for friendship and strength, laughter and peace. Whether celebrating life's joyous milestones, sharing words of encouragement, or observing the wonder of everyday moments, this sweet and uplifting book is perfect for wishers of every age.
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A Mad Desire to Dance

A Mad Desire to Dance

Elie Wiesel

Memoir / Fiction

From Elie Wiesel, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and one of our fiercest moral voices, a provocative and deeply thoughtful new novel about a life shaped by the worst horrors of the twentieth century and one man's attempt to reclaim happiness. Doriel, a European expatriate living in New York, suffers from a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a member of the Resistance, survived World War II only to die in an accident, together with his father, soon after. Doriel was a child during the war, and his knowledge of the Holocaust is largely limited to what he finds in movies, newsreels, and books--but it is enough. Doriel's parents and their secrets haunt him, leaving him filled with longing but unable to experience the most basic joys in life. He plunges into an intense study of Judaism, but instead of finding solace, he comes to believe that he is possessed by a dybbuk. Surrounded by ghosts, spurred on by demons, Doriel finally turns to Dr. Therese Goldschmidt, a psychoanalyst who finds herself particularly intrigued by her patient. The two enter into an uneasy relationship based on exchange: of dreams, histories, and secrets. Despite Doriel's initial resistance, Dr. Goldschmidt helps to bring him to a crossroads--and to a shocking denouement. In Doriel's journey into the darkest regions of the soul, Elie Wiesel has written one of his most profoundly moving works of fiction, grounded always by his unparalleled moral compass. "From the Hardcover edition."
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The Touch

The Touch

Colleen McCullough

Historical Fiction / Romance / Memoir

'Fast-moving and immensely readable ... a page turner from start to finish' - Maeve Binchy Alexander Kinross is remembered in his native Scotland only as a shiftless boilermaker's apprentice. But when he writes from Australia to summon his bride, his relatives realize he is now a man to be reckoned with. Arriving in Sydney after a difficult voyage, sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Drummond meets her husband-to-be and discovers that he frightens and repels her. And, isolated in Alexander's great house, Elizabeth finds that marriage does not prompt her husband to enlighten her about his past life - nor his present one, in which his mistress, the sensuous, tough, outspoken Ruby Costevan, still plays a part...
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Auguries of Innocence

Auguries of Innocence

Patti Smith

Poetry / Memoir

Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and striking: Blake, Rimbaud, Picasso, Arbus, and Johnny Appleseed. Smith is an American original; her poems are oracles for our times.
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Sun Horse, Moon Horse

Sun Horse, Moon Horse

Rosemary Sutcliff

Fiction / Children's Books / Memoir

Sun Horse, Moon Horse is the story of Lubrin Dhu, third son of the Chieftain of the Iceni - the Early Iron Age horse people, who live by their skill in breeding and driving their great horse herds on the high chalk downs. As a child, Lubrin sees the patterns of a private magic in his mind's eye - in the vision of a galloping white mare leading her herd over the crest of a hill. This picture-magic he returns to again and again as he grows up, to the puzzlement and ridicule of his fellows. In the end it is his gift that releases his tribe from their own conquerors and gives them the freedom to start their clan life anew. In this interpretation of how the White Horse of Uffington, in Berkdhire, might have been made, Rosemary Sutcliff has created a story of great sensitivity and understanding.
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Ogg

Ogg

James Gault

Autobiography / Memoir / Nonfiction

You're seventeen, and studying hard for your A levels. How would you like it if you were suddenly adopted by a Great Being, who had been around for ever and knew everything? 'Pretty useful, with all that knowledge and the exams coming up', would be your first reaction, I expect. But then the Great Being lets slip that the end of the world is just around the corner.Tom Fletcher is a worried man. Middle aged and balding, he hasn't sold a house in weeks and his job is on the line. His wife is cheating on him and he is falling in love with his secretary.He is bewildered by the world. Animate and inanimate objects take on personalities and behaviours in his fertile imagination which make even the commonplace events of daily life into battlegrounds where misunderstanding and confusion reign.All he asks is to be loved, -- but not by the intimidating Carole who contrives and schemes to get him into her bed.In his mind there is a simple solution. Kill his wife and marry his secretary. But where to get the gun?Pausing only to reflect on topology and the meaning of life, Tom pursues a single minded route through a minefield populated by topless dancers and hippopotami, only slightly phased by a tendency to see people as donuts, and use Exchange and Mart as his guide.Frogs, Pizzas, Water Beds, Pygmies, Licorice Flavoured Condoms and an Ostrich all have key parts to play in this drama of everyday folk.This is a love story, or perhaps a murder story, or maybe it's just a tale about a man who doesn't own a decent jacket..... and in the background lurks the mysterious Geoffrey, without whom the story would be incomplete.
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The Boston Girl

The Boston Girl

Anita Diamant

Literature & Fiction / Religion / Memoir

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Red Tent and Day After Night, comes an unforgettable coming-of-age novel about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine - a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love. Eighty-five-year-old Addie tells the story of her life to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, who has asked her "How did you get to be the woman you are today?" She begins in 1915, the year she found her voice and made friends who would help shape the course of her life. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, Addie recalls her adventures with compassion for the naïve girl she was and a wicked sense of humor. Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made Anita Diamant's previous novels bestsellers, The Boston Girl is a moving portrait of one woman’s complicated life in twentieth-century America, and a fascinating look at a generation of women finding their places in a changing world.
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Ghost

Ghost

Alan Lightman

Literature & Fiction / Science / Memoir

A stunning novel about an ordinary man's encounter with the extraordinary, from the bestselling author of Einstein's DreamsDavid Kurzweil, a quiet man with modest ambitions, was taking a break at his new job, when he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Something no science could explain. Suddenly David's life is changed, and he soon finds himself in the middle of a wild public controversy over the existence of the supernatural. As David searches for an explanation, we embark on a provocative exploration of the delicate divide between the physical and the spiritual, between science and religion as only Alan Lightman could provide. Combining a beautiful narrative with provocative ideas, Ghost investigates timeless questions that continue to challenge the truth as we know it.
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Men at Arms

Men at Arms

Evelyn Waugh

Fiction / Biography / Memoir

Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade which seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. Men at Arms is the first book in Waugh’s brilliant trilogy, Sword of Honour, which chronicles the fortunes of Guy Crouchback. The second and third volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, are also published in Penguin. Sword of Honour has recently been made into a television drama series, with screenplay by William Boyd.
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One Generation After

One Generation After

Elie Wiesel

Memoir / Fiction

Twenty years after he and his family were deported from Sighet to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel returned to his town in search of the watch—a bar mitzvah gift—he had buried in his backyard before they left. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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