In a lush meadow, bounded by dense forest and a sparkling river, the flags of several tents flutter in the breeze, rich with the promise of halcyon days.
Yet all is not as tranquil as it may seem: the balance of power wrought between the occupants of The Great Field, as it is properly known, is a delicate one, and relationships are stretched to breaking point when a new, large and disciplined group offers to share its surplus of milk pudding. Only the narrator acknowledges the gesture, but by forging links with the newcomers he becomes a conduit for change, change that threatens The Great Field.
A moving meditation on home, home-coming and belonging from Francophone Africa's most important writer
Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When at last he returns home to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on Congo's south-eastern coast, he finds a country that in some ways has changed beyond recognition: the cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture has become a Pentecostal temple, and his secondary school has been re-named in honour of a previously despised colonial ruler.But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture which still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Mabanckou though, now a decorated French-Congolese writer and esteemed professor at UCLA, finds he can only look on as an outsider at the place where he grew up. As Mabanckou delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to Congo, he slowly builds a stirring exploration of the way home never leaves us, however long ago we left home.
Ross Macdonald (1915–1983) was, according to , the author of "the finest detective novels ever written by an American." His detective, Lew Archer, investigates character and place and the tensions and conflicts that form America. In Ross Macdonald's hands, Lew Archer's home turf, southern California, becomes symbolic and (perhaps more important) emblematic of the human struggle to make things right, to make sense of who we are.
In an important literary discovery, Macdonald biographer, Tom Nolan, unearthed three previously unpublished private-eye stories by Ross Macdonald. "Death by Water," written in 1945, features Macdonald's first detective Joe Rogers, and two novelettes from 1950 and 1955, "Strangers in Town" and "The Angry Man," are detailed cases of Lew Archer.
These 'lost' stories help the reader to understand why also said that "classify him how you will, Ross Macdonald is one of the best American novelists now operating."
For the first time in six years, Easy Rawlins is back working a case on the streets of Los Angeles, looking for justice and sometimes managing to create his own.
Easy Rawlins’s old friend John shows up at his door one morning, looking for the kind of help only Easy can provide. John’s stepson, Brawly Brown, has left home and John has reason to think this well-meaning boy is caught up in a situation that’s more dangerous than he knows. It doesn’t take Easy long to find Brawly and to learn that John is right — but getting Brawly to see things that way is another matter.
Brawly has joined a political group that he believes is out to make things better for the residents of Compton. With years of seeing how things really work, Easy recognizes that young Brawly is just a pawn in a battle between forces as old and hard as the city’s streets.
Through it all, Easy’s old friend Mouse is there to help him — even though the last time Easy saw Mouse he was lying still and cold, and Easy is certain he’s dead. Still, the memory and reputation of Mouse accompany Easy everywhere, earning him second looks from beautiful women and respect from hardened men. And in a world where logic is only a small element in life-or-death calculations, it is something Mouse once said to him that could help Easy save Brawly’s life — without costing him his own.
The worldliness, relentlessness, and passion of Easy Rawlins have been sorely missed from the world of fiction. This thriller is proof that Walter Mosley is one of the masters of crime fiction, and as original a voice as any writing in America today.
The world of the child is a world where things aren't what they always seem to be. In , Peter Markus brings us back inside that not-so-simple space and its slippery way of seeing and saying, a place that is primal and mythic in its re-making.
A short novel featuring Aberdeen’s finest investigative duo, Acting DI Logan McRae and DCI Robert Steel.
CID isn’t what it used to be...
It’s a been a bad week for acting Detective Inspector Logan McRae. Every time his unit turns up anything interesting, DCI Steel’s Major Investigation Team waltzes in and takes over, leaving CID with all the dull and horrible jobs.
Like dealing with Mrs Black — who hates her neighbour, the police, and everyone else. Or identifying the homeless man who drank himself to death behind some bins. Or tracking down the wife and kids of someone who’s just committed suicide.
But when the dead bodies start turning up, one thing’s certain — Logan’s week is about to get a whole lot worse...
"The most startling, discomforting, complicated, ungovernable, hilarious, and heartrending of memoirs" (, london) — the story of a celebrated writer's sudden descent into blindness, and the redemptive journey into the past that her loss of sight sets in motion.
In 2006 the acclaimed novelist Candia McWilliam began losing her sight, a gradual onset of blindness that seemed like an assault cruelly tailored for someone whose life consisted of reading and writing. Propelled to look inward and into the past, McWilliam embarked on a painful personal voyage through a waste of snows punctuated by shards of ice as she attempted to write her life back. What followed was a flow of memory: her childhood in Edinburgh, her devastating alcoholism, finding and losing her bearings in Cambridge and London, her marriages, her children, and, overshadowing it all, her mother's suicide.
A personal story of love and loss, addiction and reclamation, her piercing memoir is also a celebration of friendship, reading, children, and the consolations of landscape. In , McWilliam riffles through her many incarnations to find her true self and discover how she may come to see once more.
In this first-ever book of letters by novelist David Markson — a quintessential “writer’s writer” whose work David Foster Wallace once lauded as “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country”—readers will experience Markson at his wittiest and warmest. Laura Sims shares her correspondence with him, which began with an impassioned fan letter in 2003 and ended with his death in 2010, finally allowing a glimpse into the personal world of this solitary man who found his life's solace in literature.
The letters trace the growth of a genuine and moving friendship between two writers at very different stages; in them we see Markson grapple, humorously, with the indignities of old age and poor health, and reminiscence about his early days as a key literary figure in the Greenwich Village scene of the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, he sincerely celebrates Sims’s marriage and the first milestones of her career as a poet. The book is full of engaging commentary on life, love, and the writing life:
On old age: “Did I say I was 117? Now that the humidity has finally lifted, I sometimes don’t feel a day over 109.”
On critics: “If I’d run into the guy…I would have punched him in the mouth.”
On blogs: “I would rather spend an hour and a half trying to solve the roughest first draft of a note for the new book…than ever ever ever read another word of the Internet.”
On politics: “I hope neither of you slashed your wrists after the election. I was gonna jump off the roof here, but my sciatica hurt too much for me to get over the railing.”
Markson reveals himself to be casually erudite, caustically funny, lovably cantankerous, and entertaining. This volume marks a significant contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Markson’s indubitably important and affecting body of work and will be a delight for his long-time fans as well as those just now discovering him.
Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents’ wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there’s Violet Devohr, Zee’s great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room.
Rebecca Makkai’s first two novels, and , have established her as one of the freshest and most imaginative voices in fiction. Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart.
A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, even as her own relationship falls apart. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young boy has a revelation about his father’s past when a renowned Romanian violinist plays a concert in their home. When the prized elephant of a traveling circus keels over dead, the small-town minister tasked with burying its remains comes to question his own faith. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women from a village on the brink of destruction.
These transporting, deeply moving stories — some inspired by her own family history — amply demonstrate Makkai’s extraordinary range as a storyteller, and confirm her as a master of the short story form.
On June 13, 1974, Shagara, a low-level employee at the Alexandria shipyard, is charged with taking workers to cheer for the motorcade of Egyptian President Sadat and his guest President Nixon. Instructed to pay each worker half a pound at the end of Nixon’s visit, Shagara pays them half that, spares them the festivities, and pockets the difference. So begins The House of Jasmine, which follows Shagara, a loner who yearns for female companionship, as he traverses the city of Alexandria and tries to parse his feelings toward its changing landscape. With moving candor and refreshing humor, The House of Jasmine is Shagara’s intimate account of life in the Sadat era — the comic and the tragic, the surreal and the absurd.
Within the humor of this novel is nestled an indicting eyewitness account of this essential period of Egyptian history. “Abdel Meguid has invented a narrative form that is highly effective in capturing the absurdity of social and political life in Egypt during the seventies,” as one critic has written. In his classic work The House of Jasmine, one can observe the social changes and popular sentiments that comprise the prologue for the Egyptian revolution of January 2011.
It is 1988 and Hargeisa waits. Whispers of revolution travel on the dry winds but still the dictatorship remains secure. Soon, and through the eyes of three women, we will see Somalia fall.
Nine-year-old Deqo has left the vast refugee camp she was born in, lured to the city by the promise of her first pair of shoes.
Kawsar, a solitary widow, is trapped in her little house with its garden clawed from the desert, confined to her bed after a savage beating in the local police station.
Filsan, a young female soldier, has moved from Mogadishu to suppress the rebellion growing in the north.
And as the country is unravelled by a civil war that will shock the world, the fates of the three women are twisted irrevocably together.
Intimate, frank, brimming with beauty and fierce love, The Orchard of Lost Souls is an unforgettable account of ordinary lives lived in extraordinary times.