Никита Лалвани0.0 Rumi Vasi is 10 years, 2 months, 13 days, 2 hours, 42 minutes, and 6 seconds old. She’s figured that the likelihood of her walking home from school with the boy she likes, John Kemble, is 0.2142, a probability severely reduced by the lacy dress and thick woolen tights her father, and Indian émigré, forces her to wear. Rumi is a gifted child, and her father, Mahesh, believes that strict discipline is the key to nurturing her genius if the family has any hope of making its mark on its adoptive country.
Four years later, a teenage Rumi is at the center of an intense campaign by her parents to make her the youngest student ever to attend Oxford University, an effort that requires an unrelenting routine of study. Yet Rumi is growing up like any other normal teen: her mind often drifts to potent distractions . . . from music to love.
Rumi’s parents want nothing other than to give Rumi an exceptional life. As her father outlines ever more regimented study schedules, her mother longs for India and forcefully reminds Rumi of her roots. In the end, the intense expectations of a family with everything to prove will be a combustible ingredient as an intelligent but naive girl is thrust into the adult world before she has time to grow up.
In her stunningly eloquent debut novel, Nikita Lalwani pits a parent’s dream against a child’s. Deftly pondering the complexities and consequences that accompany the best intentions, Gifted explores just how far one person will push another, and how much can be endured, in the name of love.
Advance praise for Gifted
“A triumph . . . fluid, original, clever, glitteringly vivid, funny . . . All the conventional pieties and forms of Indian immigrant identity and trauma are so wittily preempted, and yet there’s a sure grasp, at the serious core of the novel, of the deep reverberations of politics and history. I couldn’t bear it when it ended.”
–Tessa Hadley, author of The Master Bedroom
“This is an outstanding piece of writing–rich, vivid, fluent, and well paced–with a wonderful cast of well-developed, engaging characters and a constantly surprising story line.”
–Gerard Woodward, author of A Curious Earth
Том Роб Смит3.8 1933 год, разгар голодомора. Братья Павел и Андрей ловят кота, чтобы хоть чем-то набить пустые желудки. Старший из них домой не вернется, а младший…лучше бы он умер! Ведь спустя годы 44 ребенка, нарушив простое правило никогда не разговаривать с незнакомцами, станут жертвами его жестокости!
Джон Уолш0.0 A kaleidoscopic journey through post-World War I London in the footsteps of the real-life Rector of Stiffkey – a story by turns funny, moving and scandalous.
It's 1930, and the long post-war party has ended in a giant collective hangover. The flappers have hung up their dancing shoes. The streets of London are teeming with homeless and desperate men and women, the flotsam left in the wake of the General Strike. The bars and cafes are full of seedy chancers and girls who will forget their mothers' warnings for the price of a mutton-chop supper.
Through this moral wasteland strides Harold Davidson: clergyman, social worker, impulsive saver of souls. With his white hair, 16-pocket overcoat and his eye for ladies poised on the edge of perdition, he is an unlikely Messiah; but no London park, no Holborn public house or Drury Lane brothel is a stranger to his mission: to find girls who have strayed, or are about to stray, down the primrose path to Hell, and pull them back by any means at his disposal. Meanwhile, in the little parish of Stiffkey on the Norfolk coast, his Irish wife Moyra is trying to feed her family and stop the local Major from wrecking her husband's reputation. Her letters to a Dublin confidante reveal the extraordinary journey that has brought her marriage to its present, dire state.
When Harold meets Barbara Harris, a 16-year-old London prostitute who confounds his ethical certainties, it's the start of a chain of events that will pitch all their lives into disarray: a clanging chorus that involves bishops and circus strongmen, Indian princelings and Fleet Street hacks, lurking private eyes and reeking Islington stews, and will lead inexorably to a sensational trial and a notorious defrocking…
John Walsh has taken the few known facts surrounding the real-life Rector of Stiffkey – England's first media anti-celebrity – and fashioned from them a sparkling fantasia of altruism and indulgence, decency and sinfulness. In these fictional journals he presents a Victorian idealist confronted by a modern world he both abhors and embraces. The result is an entertainment by turns farcical, shocking and tragic.
Дэниел Клей4.3 You thought your neighbours were bad? Wait till you meet the Oswalds. They're crass, cruel and seemingly untouchable. Until, that is, they go one step too far – and the results begin to tear an entire community apart.
Skunk Cunningham is an eleven-year-old girl in a coma. She has a loving dad, an absent mother and a brother who plays more XBox than is good for him. She also has the neighbours from hell: the five Oswald girls and their thuggish dad Bob are vicious bullies whose reign of terror extends unchallenged over the otherwise quiet suburban square in which the two families live.
And yet, terrifying though they are, the cider-swilling, dope-smoking Oswald girls are also happy to put it about – so when Saskia asks shy, virginal Rick Buckley for a ride in his new car, he can’t believe his luck. Too bad, then, that Saskia can’t keep her big mouth shut. When, after a disastrous fumble, she broadcasts Rick’s sexual deficiencies to anyone who’ll listen, it puts an idea into her younger sister’s head – an idea that sees Rick arrested for a crime he never committed.
From her hospital bed, Skunk tries to make sense of the events that follow, as Saskia’s small act of cruelty spreads through the neighbourhood in a web of increasing violence. As we inch closer to the mystery behind her coma, Skunk’s innocence becomes a beacon by which we navigate a world as comic as it is tragic, and as effortlessly engaging as it is ultimately uplifting, in this brilliant and utterly original debut novel.
Джон Нивен4.0 It's not dog-eat-dog around here...it's dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known.
Meet Steven Stelfox.
London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where 'no one knows anything' and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public - 'Yeah, those animals'.
Fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine Stelfox blithely criss-crosses the globe ('New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn') searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.
But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.
Kill Your Friends is a dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved - as long as you want it badly enough.
Энн Зуруди0.0 Idyllic but remote, the Greek island of Thiminos seems untouched and untroubled by the modern world. So when the battered body of a young woman is discovered at the foot of a cliff, the local police - governed more by archaic rules of honor than by the law - are quick to close the case, dismissing her death as an accident.
Then a stranger arrives, uninvited, from Athens, announcing his intention to investigate further into the crime he believes has been committed. Refusing to accept the woman's death as an accident or suicide, Hermes Diaktoros sets out to uncover the truths that skulk beneath this small community's exterior.
Hermes's methods of investigation are unorthodox, and his message to the islanders is plain - tell the truth or face the consequences. Before long, he's uncovering a tale of passion, corruption and murder that entangles many of the island's residents. But Hermes brings his own mystery into the web of dark secrets and lies - and as he travels the rugged island landscape to investigate, questions and suspicions arise amongst the locals. Who has sent him to Thiminos, and on whose authority is he acting? And how does he know of dramas played out decades ago?
Rich in images of Greece's beautiful islands and evoking a life unknown to most outsiders, this wonderful novel leads the reader into a world where the myths of the past are not forgotten and forbidden passion still has dangerous consequences.
Сэди Джонс4.1 1957 год. Молодой Льюис Олдридж возвращается домой, отсидев два года за преступление, которое шокировало сонное графство Суррей. Льюису суждено пройти путь разочарований и потерь, не рассчитывая на поддержку окружающих, подвергаясь опасности быть сломленным. И только на грани отчаяния ему снова будет дарована любовь, любовь как спасение...
Adam Foulds0.0 Ten year-old Saul Dawson-Smith has an extremely impressive memory, so much so that he can remember every conversation he's ever had. Howard McNamee is a lonely, poorly educated and overweight twenty-eight year old. Struggling to pay his rent with a succession of menial jobs, he finds himself thrust into an unlikely friendship with Saul when he is taken under the wing of his parents. While Howard is having to cope with the demands of London and accidentally acquiring himself a Russian internet fiancee, Saul is focussed on the World Memory Championships, an event he has been training for his whole life. With Howard realising he has to save his friend from a lifetime of unbearable expectations, the pair embark on an extraordinary road trip and voyage of dicovery as they attempt to escape their lives.
Джо Данторн3.6 Как начать с поцелуя и дойти до всего остального? Что делать с мамой, занимающейся бог знает чем со знакомым престарелым хиппи в отсутствие папы? Как спасти этого самого папу от депрессии, а брак собственных, вполне взрослых и самостоятельных родителей, - от развала? Как быть с отдельными частями своего тела, бурно реагирующими на любую красотку с журнальной картинки? И главное - как поскорее стать крутым парнем?
Мэри Филлипс3.5 Being a Greek god is not all it once was. Yes, the twelve gods of Olympus are alive and well in the twenty-first century, but they are crammed together in a London townhouse--and none too happy about it. And they've had to get day jobs: Artemis as a dog-walker, Apollo as a TV psychic, Aphrodite as a phone sex operator, Dionysus as a DJ.
Even more disturbingly, their powers are waning, and even turning mortals into trees--a favorite pastime of Apollo's--is sapping their vital reserves of strength.
Soon, what begins as a minor squabble between Aphrodite and Apollo escalates into an epic battle of wills. Two perplexed humans, Alice and Neil, who are caught in the crossfire, must fear not only for their own lives, but for the survival of humankind. Nothing less than a true act of heroism is needed-but can these two decidedly ordinary people replicate the feats of the mythical heroes and save the world?
