''A page-turner ... nothing less than magical'' Observer ''An extraordinary slice of suburban noir'' Daily Mail From one of America''s most renowned storytellers comes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a background of child abductions in the affluent suburbs of Detroit.
In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together, with tragic consequences. There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit. As Babysitter continues his rampage of killings, these individuals intersect with one another in startling and unexpected ways.
Suspenseful, brilliantly orchestrated and engrossing, Babysitter is a starkly narrated exploration of the riskiness of pursuing alternate lives, calling into question how far we are willing to go to protect those whom we cherish most. In its scathing indictment of corrupt politics, unexamined racism, and the enabling of sexual predation in America, Babysitter is a thrilling work of contemporary fiction.
''Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going, as far as I''m concerned'' Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl ''Joyce Carol Oates is a writer who always takes your breath away'' Mail on Sunday ''A writer of extraordinary strengths'' Guardian
Set in a historical moment of moral crisis, Crossroads is the stunning foundation of a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigate the political and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years ''His best novel yet ... A Middlemarch -like triumph'' Telegraph ''Crossroads is the spiritual successor to The Corrections . . .It is a testament to Franzen''s authorial habits of empathy, his curiosity about the lives of others, his efforts in a land of cliche to add twists to easy assumptions, that you are likely to find yourself caring about how things turn out for each of the Hildebrandts equally '' Observer It''s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless - unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem''s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who''s been selling drugs to seventh-graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.
Jonathan Franzen''s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and their keen-eyed take on the complexities of contemporary America. Now, for the first time, in Crossroads , Franzen explores the history of a generation. With characteristic humour and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that feels no less immediate.
A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a historical moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen''s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.
''A mellow, marzipan-hued ''70s-era heartbreaker . Crossroads is warmer than anything [Franzen has] yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect'' New York Times
SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM, STARRING ANA DE ARMAS, ADRIEN BRODY, BOBBY CANNAVALE AND JULIANNE NICHOLSON, DIRECTED BY ANDREW DOMINIK ''A torrentially imaginative, compulsively readable tour de force'' Sunday Telegraph ''A fabulous reinvention of the life of a fabulous reinvention, and a cracking page-turner to boot'' Evening Standard Blonde is a mesmerising novel about the most enduring and evocative cultural icon of the 20th century: the woman who became Marilyn Monroe. A fragile and gifted young woman, Norma Jeane Baker makes and remakes her identity: she is the orphan whose mother is declared mad; the woman who changes her name to be an actress; the fated celebrity, lover and muse. Told in her voice, Blonde shows a culture hypnotised by its own myths, and the devastating effects it had on Hollywood''s greatest star.
''This masterpiece about Marilyn Monroe''s life is audacious, gripping and clever'' Rose Tremain ''If you haven''t read Joyce Carol Oates before, start here, and now'' Independent
Etouffée par la boue : voilà comment aurait du finir la petite « Mudgirl », si un couple de Quakers ne l'avait pas sauvée in extremis des griffes de sa mère démente. Pendant des années, ses parents adoptifs la protègeront des conséquences de son ignoble passé. Adulte, devenue présidente d'une université de renom, elle doit retourner sur les lieux de son enfance. Confrontée à ses origines et à des angoisses professionnelles qui la rongent de manière imprévisible, elle sombre peu à peu dans la folie.
This is the story of the Berglunds, their son Joey, their daughter Jessica and their friend Richard Katz. It is about how we use and abuse our freedom; about the beginning and ending of love; teenage lust; the unexpectedness of adult life; why we compete with our friends; how we betray those closest to us; and why things almost never work out as they `should''. It is a story about the human heart, and what it leads us to do to ourselves and each other.
'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974.'
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer''s moving and addictive masterpiece of European identity, nostalgia and the end of an era.
''A masterpiece: grandiose style, brilliant and rich. It will defy the ages'' Trouw (The Netherlands) ''The love of my life lives in my past. That is, despite the alliteration, a terrible sentence to write. I do not want to come to the conclusion that, as it is the case for the hotel where I am staying and the continent after which it is named, the best time is behind me and that I have little more to expect from the future than to live on my past.'' A writer takes residence in the illustrious but decaying Grand Hotel Europa, to think about where things went wrong with Clio, with whom he fell in love in Genoa and moved to Venice. He reconstructs a compelling story of love in times of mass tourism, about their trips to Malta, Palmaria, Portovenere and the Cinque Terre and their thrilling search for the last painting of Caravaggio. Meanwhile, he becomes fascinated by the mysteries of Grand Hotel Europe and gets more and more involved with the memorable characters who inhabit it, and who seem to come from a more elegant time. All the while, globalisation seems to be grabbing hold even on this place frozen in time.
Grand Hotel Europa is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer''s masterly novel on the old continent, where so much history resides that there is no place left for a future and where the most realistic future perspectives are offered in the form of exploiting the past in the shape of tourism.
A young girl's disappearance rocks a community and a family, in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice and the atrocities of war, from literary legend Joyce Carol Oates.
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE A GUARDIAN NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 From the award-winning author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and Even the Dogs. Reservoir 13 tells the story of many lives haunted by one family''s loss. Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must. As the seasons unfold there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together or break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. Bats hang in the eaves of the church and herons stand sentry in the river; fieldfares flock in the hawthorn trees and badgers and foxes prowl deep in the woods - mating and fighting, hunting and dying. An extraordinary novel of cumulative power and grace, Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a stranger''s tragedy refuse to subside.
The definitive cult, post-modern novel - a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism. When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man''s wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash - a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity. First published in 1973 ''Crash'' remains one of the most shocking novels of the second half of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenburg.
A haunting tale of an Africa and an adolescence undergoing tremendous changes from the talented bestseller and award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Fifteen-year-old Kambili''s world is circumscribed by the high walls of her family compound and the frangipani trees she can see from her bedroom window. Her wealthy Catholic father, although generous and well-respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Her life is lived under his shadow and regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer. She lives in fear of his violence and the words in her textbooks begin to turn to blood in front of her eyes. When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili''s father, involved in mysterious ways with the unfolding political crisis, sends Kambili and her brother away to their aunt''s. The house is noisy and full of laughter. Here she discovers love and a life -dangerous and heathen -beyond the confines of her father''s authority. The visit will lift the silence from her world and, in time, reveal a terrible, bruising secret at the heart of her family life.
This first novel is about the promise of freedom; about the blurred lines between the old gods and the new; between childhood and adulthood; between love and hatred. An extraordinary debut, ''Purple Hibiscus'' is a compelling novel which captures both a country and an adolescence at a time of tremendous change.
Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America''s most acclaimed writers.
A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as ''mother.'' In the collection''s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with ''drafts'' of his own suicide. In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates''s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure''s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.
In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.
Doerr''s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.
In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters - beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys - commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year.
As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family''s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death.
Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humour and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. ''The Virgin Suicides'' was adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola.
The new novel from the Women''s Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Power, The Future is a white-knuckle tour de force and dazzling exploration of the world we have made and where we are going.
The Future - as the richest people on the planet have discovered - is where the money is.
The Future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers.
The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons.
The Future is a handful of friends-the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet-famous survivalist-hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization.
The Future is what you see if you don''t look behind you.
The Future is the only reason to do anything, the only object of desire.
The Future is here.
The bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich , Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , and Synecdoche, New York . ''Riotously funny'' New York Times ''Just as loopy and clever as his movies'' Washington Post B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider - a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete. Convinced that the film will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core, that it might possibly be the greatest movie ever made, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: the film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius. All that''s left is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the work of art that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of ''likes'' and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bete noire and his raison d''etre . A searing indictment of the modern world, Antkind is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself - the grain of truth at the heart of every joke.
A devastating essay on loss and the people we love from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun .
''Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language'' On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria.
In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy''s girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter''s fierce love for a parent, and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.
The landmark novel of the Sixties - a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal, political and professional identity while facing rejection and betrayal.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize The second book in Hilary Mantel''s award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, with a stunning new cover design to celebrate the publication of the much anticipated The Mirror and the Light An astounding literary accomplishment, Bring Up the Bodies is the story of this most terrifying moment of history, by one of our greatest living novelists. ''Our most brilliant English writer'' Guardian Bring Up the Bodies unlocks the darkly glittering court of Henry VIII, where Thomas Cromwell is now chief minister. With Henry captivated by plain Jane Seymour and rumours of Anne Boleyn''s faithlessness whispered by all, Cromwell knows what he must do to secure his position. But the bloody theatre of the queen''s final days will leave no one unscathed. ''A great novel of dark and dirty passions, public and private. A truly great story'' Financial Times ''In another league. This ongoing story of Henry VIII''s right-hand man is the finest piece of historical fiction I have ever read'' Sunday Telegraph
Two families. Two faces of America. One violent crime that will bitterly divide them - and yet bind them together forever. ''A magnificent story of two broken families'' Independent ''A masterpiece'' Washington Post ''Page-turning, gripping, full of unexpected twists'' Observer
A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking . Benny called for a round of Cuba Libres and I gave him some chips to play for me and went to the ladies'' room and never came back. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth''s life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to pain and please, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires and motives - the epitome of a generation made ill by too much freedom.
The Mulvaneys are scemingly blessed by everything that makes life sweet. They live together in the picture-perfect. High point farm, just outside Mr. Ephraim, New York, where they are respected and liked by everything.
Yet something happens on Valentine's Day, 1976. An incident involving Marianne Mulvaney, the pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, is hushed up in the town and never discussed within the family. The impact of this event reverberates throughout the lives of the characters.
As told as Judd, years later, in an attempt to make sense of his own past, the unspoken truths of that night rend the fabric of the family life with tragic consequences. In "We were the Mulvaneys", Joyce Carol Oates masterfully weaves an unforgettable story of the rise, fall and ultimate redemption of an american family.
From the Pultizer Prize-winning author of ''The Hours'', comes the story of a marriage thrown off course by a moment of mistaken identity.Peter Harris is forty-four, prosperous, the owner of a big New York apartment and a player in the contemporary art scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close to twenty years. Their marriage is sound, in the way marriages are. Peter might even describe himself as happy. But then Rebecca''s much younger brother Mizzy shows up for a visit. Beautiful, twenty-three years old, with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his marriage, his desires, his career - the entire world he has so carefully constructed for himself.Making us think deeply about the uses of beauty and the place of love in our lives, By Nightfall is heartbreaking look at the way we live now.
