Tamara Goodwin has always lived in the here and now, never giving a second thought to tomorrow. Until a travelling library arrives in her tiny village, bringing with it a mysterious, large leather-bound book locked with a gold clasp and padlock. What she discovers within the pages takes her breath away and shakes her world to its core.
One of the best books of 2008. Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman--these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.
In the words of The Washington Post, "With 2666, Roberto Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals."
When a physicist is murdered in LA it seems the killer has no fear of publicity, leaving the body on The Mulholland overlook, a site with a stunning view over the city. And when it's discovered that the victim turned over a quantity of a lethal chemical to his killer before he died, Harry knows he has more than just a single death to worry about. Alongside the forces of Homeland Security, Harry realises he must solve the murder or face unimaginable consequences.
“Please sir, I want some more.” In the figure of the half-starved Oliver in the workhouse asking for “more”, Dickens created the nineteenth century’s most famous image of protest against cruelty. Yet Oliver Twist develops from a topical satire on the inhumanity of the New Poor Law into something greater. What unfolds is a powerful and violent struggle between Good and Evil, as Oliver becomes ensnared in the labyrinth of London and the nightmare world of Fagin.
With its macabre humour, its starkly rendered contrasts, and above all the unforgettable depiction of Fagin, Oliver Twist is the most compelling of Dickens’s early novels.
This edition of the carefully revised text of 1846 includes Dickens’s Preface of 1841, the fullest early revelation of his artistic conceptions, and all of Cruikshank’s illustrations. Comprehensive annotations is supported by appendices on the 1834 New Poor Law; the Newgate School of Fiction controversy; Dickens and Cruikshank,; and the language of thieves.
Elizabeth George's masterly new novel brings Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley back onto centre stage in an intricate crime drama. While DI Thomas Lynley is still on compassionate leave after the murder of his wife, Isabelle Ardery is brought into the Met as his temporary replacement.
The discovery of a body in a Stoke Newington cemetery offers Isabelle the chance to make her mark with a high profile murder investigation. Persuading Lynley back to work seems the best way to guarantee a result: Lynley's team is fiercely loyal to him and Isabelle needs them - and especially Barbara Havers - on side.
The Met is twitchy: a series of PR disasters has undermined its confidence. Isabelle knows that she'll be operating under the unforgiving scrutiny of the media, so is quick ' perhaps too quick ' to pin the murder on a convenient suspect.
The murder trail leads Lynley and Havers to the New Forest, and the eventual resolution of the case. Its roots are in a long-ago act of violence that has poisoned subsequent generations and its outcome is both tragic and shocking.
Worldwide No.1 bestseller John Grisham takes you into the heart of America's Deep South with a collection of stories connected by the life and crimes of Ford County: a place of harsh beauty where broken dreams and final wishes converge. From a hard-drinking, downtrodden divorce lawyer looking for pay-dirt, to a manipulative death row inmate with one last plea, "Ford County" features a vivid cast of attorneys, crooks, hustlers, and convicts.
Through their stories he paints a unique picture of lives lived and lost in Mississippi. Completely gripping, frequently moving and always entertaining, "Ford County" brims with the same page-turning quality and heart-stopping drama of his previous bestsellers, and is proof once more why John Grisham is our most popular storyteller.
Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, bestselling author Dennis Lehane’s extraordinary eigth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads where past meets future.
Filled with a cast of richly drawn, unforgettable characters, The Given Day tells the story of two families – one black, one white – swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power.
Coursing through the pivotal events of a turbulent epoch, it explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself.
“Command the murderous chalices! … Drink ye harpooners! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow – death to Moby Dick!” So Captain Ahab binds his crew to fulfil his obsession – the destruction of the great white whale. Under his lordly but maniacal command the Pequod’s commercial mission is perverted to one of vengeance. To Ahab, the monster that destroyed his body is not a creature, but the symbol of “some unknown but still reasoning thing.” Unowed by natural disasters, ill omens, even death, Ahab urges his ship towards “the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale.”
An assured, inspiring debut which demonstrates the power of the human spirit to give comfort in times of hardship. In 1931 Carbon Hill, a small Alabama coal-mining town, nine-year-old Tess Moore watches from the darkness of her back porch as a strange woman lifts the cover off the family well and tosses a baby in without a word.
It is the height of the Depression; while Tess's father, Albert, performs backbreaking and dangerous work at the mine, her mother, Leta, makes do without meat on her table. But the family are luckier than most; the food they can grow on their plot of land has so far saved them from the crippling poverty and near-starvation that besets their neighbours. As Tess tries to unravel the mystery of the woman at the well, a portrait emerges of a family and a community struggling to survive the darkest of times.
Resonant, vivid and clear-eyed in its portrayal of both the best and the worst of human nature, The Well and the Mine is a stunning novel about love, hope and the importance of doing the right thing.
'Mustn't complain' - but people always do... Nobody likes The Complaints - they're the cops who investigate other cops. Complaints and Conduct Department, to give them their full title, but known colloquially as 'The Dark Side', or simply 'The Complaints'.
It's where Malcolm Fox works. He's just had a result, and should be feeling good about himself. But he's a man with problems of his own. He has an increasingly frail father in a care home and a sister who persists in an abusive relationship - something which Malcolm cannot seem to do anything about.
But, in the midst of an aggressive Edinburgh winter, the reluctant Fox is given a new task. There's a cop called Jamie Breck, and he's dirty. The problem is, no one can prove it. But as Fox takes on the job, he learns that there's more to Breck than anyone thinks. This knowledge will prove dangerous, especially when a vicious murder intervenes far too close to home for Fox's liking.
Deadlier than the Mafia, the Camorra never forget, and never forgive. She is an Italian accountancy student in London, and her boyfriend Eddie teaches at a language school. But the prime reason Immacolata Borelli came to Britain was to look after her gangster brother, wanted for multiple murders back home in Naples. For the Borelli clan are major players in the Camorra, a crime network more close-knit and ruthless than the Sicilian Mafia.
Mario Castrolami is a senior Carabinieri investigator of the Camorra, his career dedicated to destroying the corruption and violence of the clans. When Immacolata calls from London to say she is prepared to collaborate with justice - to betray her own family - he knows she is setting in motion a terrifying and unpredictable series of events.
The Borellis will not lose their criminal empire without a vicious fight. They will use anything and anyone to prevent her from giving evidence against them. Even Eddie, and Eddie's life.
Inspiration
