Эдвард Хоган0.0 Beth is an albino, half blind, and given to looking at the world out of the corner of her eye. Her neighbours in the Derbyshire town of Blackmoor have always thought she was 'touched', and when a series of bizarre happenings shake the very foundations of the village, they are confirmed in their opinion that Beth is an ill omen. The neighbours say that Beth eats dirt from the flowerbeds, and that smoke rises from her lawn. By the end of the year, she is dead.
A decade later her son, Vincent, treated like a bad omen by his father, George, is living in a pleasant suburb miles from Blackmoor. There, the bird-watching teenager stumbles towards the buried secrets of his mother's life and death in the abandoned village. It's the story of a community that fell apart, a young woman whose face didn't fit, and a past that refuses to go away.
Анна Ричардс0.0 An adventure, a fairy tale of sorts, a black comedy and a love story, "Little Gods" is the story of Eugenia (Jean) Clocker, whose birth challenges the balance of nature and her mother's capacity for punitive cruelty. Though her name is swiftly shortened, Jean's body resists all attempts to curb it and she grows into a girl of unusual size and strength. With the unwitting power to upset the order of things, as well as most people, it takes the chaos of war to bring the rest of the world up to Jean's level of disorientation. When the accidental bombing of her house leaves her orphaned, extravagantly scarred, but brilliantly alive, she finds herself ready to relish life, and all the strangeness and opportunity her unique appearance brings . . . Reminiscent of the work of John Irving and Michael Chabon, yet also entirely original, this is one of the most moving and inventive novels of recent years.
Чарльз Элтон0.0 When the author of The Hayseed Chronicles, Arthur Hayman, is mown down by a concrete truck in Soho, his legacy passes to his widow, Martha, and her children - the fragile Rachel, and Luke, reluctantly immortalised as Luke Hayseed, the central character of his father`s books. But others want their share, particularly Laurie.
Дэвид Гаффни0.0 This house of maxed-out cards is about to come crashing down
Eric is a debt counselor whose days at the Cleator Moor Money Advice Shop in the run-down urban badlands of West Cumbria are spent helping anxious debtors avoid making payments. However, he not only doles out survival tips about the 'fascinating worm-holes' of the banking and benefits system to the chronically indebted—he practices what he preaches, through an elaborate maze of scams designed to keep him ahead of collectors and out of the courts. Mired in more debt than most of the clients he counsels, Eric maintains a façade of easy solvency for his girlfriend, Charlotte, while sneaking off to Manchester to feel alive again, borrowing cash from various shady characters, and having peculiar sexual encounters with his first love, Julie.
Гейнор Арнольд0.0 At the end of her life, Catherine, the cast-off wife of Charles Dickens, gave the letters she had received from her husband to their daughter Kate, asking her to donate them to the British Museum, “so the world may know that he loved me once.” The incredible vulnerability and heartache evident beneath the surface of this remark inspired Gaynor Arnold to write Girl in a Blue Dress, a dazzling debut novel inspired by the life of this tragic yet devoted woman. Arnold brings the spirit of Catherine Dickens to life in the form of Dorothea “Dodo” Gibson–a woman who is doomed to live in the shadow of her husband, Alfred, the most celebrated author in the Victorian world.
Поппи Адамс0.0 From her lookout in the crumbling mansion that was her childhood home, Ginny watches and waits for her younger sister to arrive. Vivien has not set foot in the house since she left nearly fifty years ago; the reclusive Ginny has rarely ventured out, retreating into the precise routines that define her days, carrying on her father’s solitary work studying moths.
As the sisters revisit their shared past, they realize that their recollections differ in essential and unsettling ways. Before long, the deeply buried resentments that have shaped both their lives rise to the surface, and Vivien’s presence threatens to disrupt Ginny’s carefully ordered world.
Told in Ginny’s unforgettable voice, this subtle and chilling debut novel tells an extraordinary story of how families are capable of undoing themselves—especially in the name of love.
Shona MacLean0.0 Is the young man merely drunk or does his tottering walk suggest something more sinister? When he collapses in front of two sisters on that dark, wet night, they guess rightly that he's been murdered by poisoning. So begins this tale set in the town of Banff, Scotland in the 1620s.
Тим Тортон0.0 What do you do if you’re a failed music fanzine writer in your early thirties with a dead-end job, and the best moment of your life occurred when you went to your first Thieving Magpies gig as a teenager and suddenly you belonged in a way you never had before, and the worst moment of your life occurred about six years later when Lance Webster, the Magpies’ lead singer, self-destructed on stage before your eyes—basically taking you with him—and just today you’ve discovered that Lance lives down the street from you?
If you’re Clive Beresford—the haplessly obsessed guy at the center of Tim Thornton’s wildly comic and energetic debut novel—you get remarkably drunk and write and deliver a note to your idol (the contents of which you can’t remember the next morning), which causes two very large bouncer types to appear at your door warning you to back off, which, in turn, causes you to hide your true identity when you do finally meet Lance, totally by accident (he’s come a long way since the Magpies, but he is still LANCE F**CKING WEBSTER!)…none of which deters you from believing—really believing—that he could still save your life if only you could get that “earth-shattering exclusive” interview with him.
With the story shifting between Clive’s life-changing Magpies past and his frantic present, we get a headlong, boisterous coming-of-age (if-not-quite-growing-up) romp and a warmhearted, hilarious view of friendship, hero worship, and the full-blast power of music to help us become, at the very least, who we would like to think we are.
