• The Odyssey (Penguin Black Classics)

    Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
    driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
    the hallowed heights of Troy.

     

    So begins Robert Fagles’ magnificent translation of the Odyssey.

     

    If the Iliad is the world’s greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature’s grandest evocation of everyman’s journey though life. Odysseus’ reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.

     

    In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer’s original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

     

    Renowned classicist Bernard Knox’s superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles’ translation.

     

    This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer’s students.

     

    Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer’s best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning new modern-verse translation.

  • 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.

  • 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
  • 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 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.

  • The Black Book

    From the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed author of My Name is Red —a brilliantly unconventional mystery of a missing wife, and a provocative meditation on identity.

     

    “A glorious flight of dark, fantastic invention.” — The Washington Post

     

    Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel–loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl’s identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

     

    With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.

     

    A Translation and Afterword by Maureen Freely

    The Black Book

     800.00
  • 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.

  • Before Your Memory Fades

    The third novel in the international bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, following four new customers in a cafe where customers can travel back in time.

     

    In northern Japan, overlooking the spectacular view Hakodate Port has to offer, Cafe Donna Donna has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

     

    From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Cafe comes another story of four new customers, each of whom is hoping to take advantage of the cafe’s time-travelling offer. Among some familiar faces from Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s previous novels, readers will also be introduced to:

     

    A daughter who couldn’t say ‘You’re an idiot.’
    A comedian who couldn’t ask ‘Are you happy?’
    A younger sister who couldn’t say ‘Sorry.’
    A young man who couldn’t say ‘I like you.’

     

    With his signature heart-warming characters and immersive storytelling, in Before Your Memory Fades, Toshikazu Kawaguchi once again invites the reader to ask themselves: what would you change if you could travel back in time?

  • Seeing Like a Feminist

    THE WORLD THROUGH A FEMINIST LENS For Nivedita Menon, feminism is not about a moment of final triumph over patriarchy but about the gradual transformation of the social field so decisively that old markers shift forever.

     

    From sexual harassment charges against international figures to the challenge that caste politics poses to feminism, from the ban on the veil in France to the attempt to impose skirts on international women badminton players, from queer politics to domestic servants’ unions to the Pink Chaddi campaign, Menon deftly illustrates how feminism complicates the field irrevocably. Incisive, eclectic and politically engaged, Seeing like a Feminist is a bold and wide-ranging book that reorders contemporary society.

  • Maneki Neko: The Japanese Secret to Good Luck and Happiness

    What does “good luck” look like and how do you achieve it?

     

    Lucky symbols, lucky numbers, lucky charms and luck-creating rituals–how is it that a disciplined and hard-working country like Japan is so invested in the idea of luck? And what, exactly, does “good luck” mean?

     

    This insightful book–by a leading expert on the subject–explores the ways in which “good luck” symbols and rituals in Japan are used in tandem with diligence and a positive attitude to help people overcome life’s many twists, turns and bad patches.

     

    It explores how customs and beliefs play a vital role in creating positive expectations and outcomes–and includes practical exercises for bringing good fortune and happiness into your own life.

     

    Author Nobuo Suzuki acquaints us with beloved Japanese icons of luck, prosperity, and goal-setting and explains what they truly represent–including Maneki Neko (the “Lucky Cat”), Daruma (the “Lucky Buddha”) and the Seven Lucky Gods of Good Fortune. We even meet some quirky and much beloved modern Japanese symbols of luck like the “Golden Poop” (yes, you read that right!). And we learn how these symbols all foster a sense of community which contributes to the happiness and well-being of all individuals in Japan.

     

    With this book, luck becomes a matter of self-understanding and connection to others rather than something that exists outside of ourselves and other people. It is an integral part of life and learning to shape out a destiny for ourselves that we can view with pride and contentment.

  • Everything Under (Paperback)

    The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries.

     

    One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it.

  • 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.

  • Frankenstein

    Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a combination of Gothic novel and science fiction. It unfolds the story of a scientist Victor Frankenstein who creates a hideous monster from pieces of corpses and brings it to life. But the monster eventually becomes the source of his misery and demise.

     

    The plot of the novel is epistolary. The story is narrated through the first-person accounts of Captain Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster himself. Moreover, Frankenstein is also a frame story. It means a story framed or surrounded by another story or a series of stories.

    Frankenstein

     640.00
  • A Farewell to Arms

    A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield – the weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion—this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep. Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote his ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right.

    A Farewell to Arms

     640.00
  • Othello

    “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.” A fatal tale of love, jealousy and betrayal, the play revolves around, Othello, a general in Venetian army and Iago, his ensign. Othello traverses through a series of unfortunate events from Iago’s plotting, the misinterpreted image of Desdemona, Othello’s fatal error and his end as a tragic hero! Twisting its way through manipulations and bloodsheds, the story creates a sense of awe and fear in the readers. Considered as the most powerful and moving of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, Othello has enjoyed popularity among the readers from the Jacobean period to the present day.

    Othello

     240.00
  • 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

  • Interpreter of Maladies

    Pulitzer-winning, scintillating studies in yearning and exile from a Bengali Bostonian woman of immense promise.A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal, he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily and send her spiralling into nostalgia for her homeland…Jhumpa Lahiri’s prose is beautifully measured, subtle and sober, and she is a writer who leaves a lot unsaid, but this work is rich in observational detail, evocative of the yearnings of the exile (mostly Indians in Boston here), and full of emotional pull and reverberation.

  • White Teeth

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.

     

    At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith.

    White Teeth

     800.00
  • The Originals : A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

    How is this book unique? Unabridged (100% Original content) Formatted for e-reader Font adjustments & biography included About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A Künstlerroman in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology.

  • The Originals: To The Lighthouse

    “And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves. Virginia Woolf’s most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse (1927) revolves around the Ramsay family and their life in the summer home situated at a distance from a lighthouse, in the Hebrides, Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.

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