• Kafka on the Shore (Hardcover)

    A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizingly surreal classic, now with a new introduction by the author

    Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father’s dark prophesy.

    The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down.

    As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle – one of many which combine to create an elegant and dreamlike masterpiece.

    ‘Wonderful… Magical and outlandish’ Daily Mail

    ‘Hypnotic, spellbinding’ 
    The Times

    ‘Cool, fluent and addictive’ Daily Telegraph

  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Hardcover)

    A special hardback edition of Murakami’s epic, magical masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, now with a new introduction from the author

    Toru Okada’s cat has disappeared.

    His wife is growing more distant every day.

    Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving.

    As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada’s vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

    ‘Visionary…a bold and generous book’ New York Times

    ‘Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original’ The Tim

  • Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix

    You are sharing the Dark Lord’s thoughts and emotions. The Headmaster thinks it inadvisable for this to continue. He wishes me to teach you how to close your mind to the Dark Lord.’

     

    Dark times have come to Hogwarts. After the Dementors’ attack on his cousin Dudley, Harry Potter knows that Voldemort will stop at nothing to find him. There are many who deny the Dark Lord’s return, but Harry is not alone: a secret order gathers at Grimmauld Place to fight against the Dark forces. Harry must allow Professor Snape to teach him how to protect himself from Voldemort’s savage assaults on his mind. But they are growing stronger by the day and Harry is running out of time …

  • Study for Obedience

    A haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction.

     

    A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.

     

    Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs – collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies ‘just beyond the garden gate.’ And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.

     

    With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

    Study for Obedience

     1,280.00
  • First Person Singular

    A mindbending new collection of short stories from the unique, internationally acclaimed author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

     

    The eight masterly stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From nostalgic memories of youth, meditations on music and an ardent love of baseball to dreamlike scenarios, an encounter with a talking monkey and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Murakami himself is present. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides.

     

    Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory. . . all with a signature Murakami twist. A GUARDIAN AND SUNDAY TIMES ‘BOOKS OF 2021’ PICK

    First Person Singular

     1,280.00
  • 1Q84: Books 1, 2 & 3: The Complete Trilogy

    The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that.

    But in this world, there are two moons in the sky.

    In this world, the fates of two people, Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined. They are each, in their own way, doing something very dangerous. And in this world, there seems no way to save them both.

    Something extraordinary is starting.

     

  • Lust For Life

    The classic, bestselling biographical novel of Vincent Van Gogh

     

    Since its initial publication in 1934, Irving Stone’s Lust for Life has been a critical success, a multimillion-copy bestseller, and the basis for an Academy Award-winning movie.

     

    The most famous of all of Stone’s novels, it is the story of Vincent Van Gogh—brilliant painter, passionate lover, and alleged madman. Here is his tempestuous story: his dramatic life, his fevered loves for both the highest-born women and the lowest prostitutes, and his paintings—for which he was damned before being proclaimed a genius.

     

    The novel takes us from his desperate days in a coal mine in southern Belgium to his dazzling years in the south of France, where he knew the most brilliant artists (and the most depraved whores). Finally, it shows us Van Gogh driven mad, tragic, and triumphant at once. No other novel of a great man’s life has so fascinated the American public for generations.

    Lust For Life

     1,120.00
  • The Museum of Innocence

    The Museum of Innocence – set in Istanbul between 1975 and today – tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul’s richest families, and of his obsessive love for a poor and distant relation, the beautiful Füsun, who is a shop-girl in a small boutique. In his romantic pursuit of Füsun over the next eight years, Kemal compulsively amasses a collection of objects that chronicles his lovelorn progress – a museum that is both a map of a society and of his heart.

     

    The novel depicts a panoramic view of life in Istanbul as it chronicles this long, obsessive love affair; and Pamuk beautifully captures the identity crisis experienced by Istanbul’s upper classes that find themselves caught between traditional and westernised ways of being. Orhan Pamuk’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize is a stirring love story and exploration of the nature of romance.

     

    Pamuk built The Museum of Innocence in the house in which his hero’s fictional family lived, to display Kemal’s strange collection of objects associated with Füsun and their relationship. The house opened to the public in 2012 in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul.

  • I Want To Die But I want to eat tteokbokki

    PSYCHIATRIST: So how can I help you?

     

    ME: I don’t know, I’m – what’s the word – depressed? Do I have to go into detail?

     

    Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her – what to call it? – depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, performing the calmness her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can’t be normal. But if she’s so hopeless, why can she always summon a desire for her favorite street food: the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?

     

    Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a twelve-week period, and expanding on each session with her own reflective micro-essays, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions, and harmful behaviors that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness. It will appeal to anyone who has ever felt alone or unjustified in their everyday despair.

  • What You Are Looking for Is in the Library

    For fans of The Midnight Library and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this charming Japanese novel shows how the perfect book recommendation can change a reader’s life.

     

    What are you looking for?

     

    This is the famous question routinely asked by Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. Like most librarians, Komachi has read every book lining her shelves—but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of her library guests. For anyone who walks through her door, Komachi can sense exactly what they’re looking for in life and provide just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.

     

    Each visitor comes to her library from a different juncture in their careers and dreams, from the restless sales attendant who feels stuck at her job to the struggling working mother who longs to be a magazine editor. The conversation that they have with Sayuri Komachi—and the surprise book she lends each of them—will have life-altering consequences.

     

    With heartwarming charm and wisdom, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a paean to the magic of libraries, friendship and community, perfect for anyone who has ever found themselves at an impasse in their life and in need of a little inspiration.

  • The Lincoln Highway

    THE INSTANT NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
    FROM THE AUTHOR OF 
    RULES OF CIVILITY AND A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW

    ‘Deserves a place alongside Kerouac, Steinbeck and Wolfe as the very best of the genre’ 
    OBSERVER

    ‘An absolute beauty of a book. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to read it again’ TANA FRENCH

    ‘Welcome to the enormous pleasure that is The Lincoln Highway . . . in which the miles fly by and the pages turn fast’ ANN PATCHETT

    The Lincoln Highway

     1,120.00
  • The Island of Missing Trees: A Novel

    A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK “A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times.” ―David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.

  • The Women In The Purple Skirt

    “A taut and compelling depiction of loneliness and obsession.” –Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train “[It] will keep you firmly in its grip.” –Oyinkan Braithwaite, bestselling author of My Sister, the Serial Killer “The love child of Eugene Ionesco and Patricia Highsmith.” –Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get in Trouble A bestselling, prizewinning novel by one of Japan’s most acclaimed young writers, for fans of Convenience Store Woman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, and the movies Parasite and Rear Window

  • Catch-22 (Vintage Classics)

    WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD JACOBSON

     

    Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him. Joseph Heller’s bestselling novel is a hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man’s efforts to survive it.

  • Penguin Select Classics: Anna Karenina

    “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”

     

    Anna Karenina, a beautiful, sensuous, and rebellious young woman, is unhappily married to the wealthy but cold aristocrat Alexey Alexandrovitch. Restless in her passionless marriage, she lives in a society and times where Church rules the order for the wealthy; one wrong can bring down the entire family. Thus, she was floating through life until she met Count Vronsky. They fell passionately in love, convinced they met their soulmates. The story goes through their struggles to get approval for divorce, and their desire to live together in a complex society.

     

    Tolstoy uses his characters to raise complex questions about family’s, egos that become a handcuff, and a society that becomes limiting to individual happiness. His famous novel is seemingly ahead of its times as it questions the inherent bias within people.

  • Penguin Select Classics: Mansfield Park

    “Drama is to life what ships are to the sea. A means to traverse it. To plumb its depths, breadth, and beauty.”

     

    At the age of ten years old, Fanny Price was removed from her poverty stricken home to live with her rich cousins in Mansfield Park. Fanny was beautiful but not seeking beauty, quite but not weak, sensible but not proud. The residents of Mansfield couldn’t get themselves to show her the fondness she deserved. In the midst of it, she had only one ally in her cousin Edmund.

     

    When the cousins grow older, suddenly the Crawfords family takes residence in the neighbourhood, and the sister-brother duo set off events of romantic encounters and heartbreak.

     

    Will Fanny defend her bonds and protect the life she has built in Mansfield Park? Will she hide her love for Edmund or come forth?

     

    Mansfield Park is touted as Austen’s most mature and sensitive novel, mostly in credit to her heroin who is both sensitive and brave.

  • Penguin Select Classics: Emma

    “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk and show it more.”

     

    In the world of Emma, love, self-discovery, and matchmaking intertwine in a charming countryside town. Emma is Austen’s most vivid heroine : beautiful, spoilt, generous, and exceptionally witty.

     

    While caring for her demanding father, life in the quaint town becomes tiresome. Seeking amusement, Emma immerses herself in the art of matchmaking, set to unite her orphaned friend, Harriet Smith with the eligible clergyman Mr. Elton.

     

    However, her astute neighbor, Mr. Knightley calls her out for seeking her own interest and not her friend’s. Both Emma and Mr.Knightly are attracted to one another, primarily because only they can match each other’s wit and intelligence.

     

    Emma’s path towards maturity and self-awareness is a poignant story. A captivating exploration of personal growth, as she navigates the consequences of her meddling.

  • Penguin Select Classics: Pride And Prejudice

    ‘But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.’

     

    A sensitive story about the loves and lives of the five Bennet sisters, especially Elizabeth Bennet the unusual heroine. Elizabeth is neither too pretty nor too talented but has a strong sense of self; it was fireworks when she met Mr. Darcy who finally clashed with someone as strong-willed as him.

     

    Mrs Bennet wants to marry her daughters off and devises schemes to set them up with prosperous men at the ball hosted by the Bingley family. All her daughters find love, but not the easiest route to marriage.

     

    Their journeys take them through unexpected betrayals and surprises. As life pits Darcy and Elizabeth against each other, Darcy is the saviour at every turn squashing every reason for Elizabeth’s hesitance. Can Elizabeth overcome her pride to seek love?

  • Prophet Song

    A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning author

     

    On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

     

    Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

     

    How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?

     

    Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.

    Prophet Song

     960.00
  • The Armor of Light (Kingsbridge #4)

    The long-awaited sequel to A Column of FireThe Armor of Light, heralds a new dawn for Kingsbridge, England, where progress clashes with tradition, class struggles push into every part of society, and war in Europe engulfs the entire continent and beyond.

     

    The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1770, and with that, a new era of manufacturing and industry changed lives everywhere within a generation. A world filled with unrest wrestles for control over this new world order: A mother’s husband is killed in a work accident due to negligence; a young woman fights to fund her school for impoverished children; a well-intentioned young man unexpectedly inherits a failing business; one man ruthlessly protects his wealth no matter the cost, all the while war cries are heard from France, as Napoleon sets forth a violent master plan to become emperor of the world. As institutions are challenged and toppled in unprecedented fashion, ripples of change ricochet through our characters’ lives as they are left to reckon with the future and a world they must rebuild from the ashes of war.

     

    Over thirty years ago, Ken Follett published his most popular novel, The Pillars of the Earth. Now, with this electrifying addition to the Kingsbridge series we are plunged into the battlefield between compassion and greed, love and hate, progress and tradition. It is through each character that we are given a new perspective to the seismic shifts that shook the world in nineteenth-century Europe.

  • Snow

    A spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings – for love, art, power, and God – set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order; by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature.

     

    From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings–for love, art, power, and God–set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.

     

    No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka’s motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka’s youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka’s frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness.

     

    Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties

     

    Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother’s funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer’s curiosity–a frozen sea these many years–leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides.

    Snow

     960.00
  • The Woman Who Climbed Trees

    A young bride must leave her life in India behind when she moves to Nepal with her new husband and his family in this incandescent, poignant debut novel which examines the sorrow and deep sense of loss experienced when we abandon our former selves and our dreams.

     

    “Is this a ghost story?” Meena asked the barber’s wife who told the tale. “I don’t want to hear scary stories one night before I marry.”

     

    “Not all ghost stories are scary,” said the barber’s wife, laughing at Meena. “Besides, we have a long time before us, and stories are little baskets to carry time away in.”

     

    Exquisitely written, a blend of ghost stories, myths, and song, The Woman Who Climbed Trees is a haunting, deeply felt multi-generational story that illuminates the transitional nature of women’s lives and the feeling of loss they experience, as they give up one home and family to become part of another.

     

    When she marries a man from Nepal, Meena must leave behind her family and home in India and forge a new identity in a strange place. The Woman Who Climbed Trees follows her, the women who surround her, and the daughter she eventually raises, as they carefully navigate the uncertain tides of their diasporic lives. Smriti Ravindra beautifully captures these women’s pain and nostalgia for the past–of a country left behind, of innocence lost, of a former self, of dreams forsaken.

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