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books tagged “english fiction”
books tagged “english fiction”
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland : And, Through the Looking Glassby Lewis Carroll, Jenny ThorneISBN 0361028008 (0-361-02800-8)
Hardcover, Purnell, Alice Kelly
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland : And, Through the Looking Glass'Book summary:That Alice. When she's not traipsing after a rabbit into Wonderland, she's gallivanting off into the topsy-turvy world behind the drawing-room looking glass. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's masterful and zany sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she makes more eccentric acquaintances, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, and a somewhat grumpy Humpty Dumpty. Through a giant and elaborate chess game, Alice explores this odd country, where one must eat dry biscuits to quench thirst, and run like the wind to stay in one place. As in life, Alice must stay on her toes to learn the rules of this game. Through the Looking Glass immediately took its rightful place beside its partner on the shelf of eternal classics. And luckily for generations of enraptured children, Carroll was again able to persuade John Tenniel to create the fantastic woodblock engravings that have become so indelibly associated with the Alice stories. For almost 130 years, Alice's curious adventures have amused, perplexed, and delighted readers, young and old. This gorgeous, deluxe boxed set of both volumes contains engravings from Tenniel's original woodblocks that were discovered in a London bank in 1985, and reproduced for the first time here. "'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures?'" What indeed? (All ages) [via]
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass, and the Hunting of the Snarkby Lewis CarrollISBN 0370109279 (0-370-10927-9)
Hardcover, Random House of Canada Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass, and the Hunting of the Snark'Book summary:, 292 pages including Prefatory Notes at rear, illustrated throughout with numerous black and white illustrations within the text [via]
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Belovedby Toni MorrisonISBN 0375704140 (0-375-70414-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beloved'Book summary:In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.
A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law.
Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix Wilber [via]
The Borriblesby Michael De LarrabeitiISBN 0370108981 (0-370-10898-1)
Hardcover, Bodley Head
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Broken Bodiesby Sally EmersonISBN 0349115125 (0-349-11512-5)
Softcover, Trafalgar Square
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The Charioteer: A Novelby Mary RenaultISBN 0375714189 (0-375-71418-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Charioteer: A Novel'Book summary:After enduring an injury at Dunkirk during World War II, Laurie Odell is sent to a rural veterans hospital in England to convalesce. There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance. Then one day, Ralph Lanyon, a mentor from Lauries schoolboy days, suddenly reappears in Lauries life, and draws him into a tight-knit social circle of world-weary gay men. Laurie is forced to choose between the sweet ideals of innocence and the distinct pleasures of experience.
Originally published in the United States in 1959, The Charioteer is a bold, unapologetic portrayal of male homosexuality during World War II that stands with Gore Vidals The City and the Pillar and Christopher Isherwoods Berlin Stories as a monumental work in gay literature. [via]More editions of The Charioteer: A Novel:
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Charlotte Grayby Sebastian FaulksISBN 0375704558 (0-375-70455-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Charlotte Gray'Book summary:Faulks's first novel since the extraordinary success of Birdsong is written with the same passion, power and breadth of vision. Set in England and France during the darkest days of World War II, Charlotte Gray, like Birdsong, depicts a complex love affair that is both shaped and thwarted by war.
It is 1942. London is blacked out, but France is under a greater darkness, as the occupying Nazi forces encroach ever closer in a tense waiting game. Charlotte Gray, a volatile but determined young woman, travels south from Edinburgh. Working in London, she has a brief but intense love affair with an RAF pilot. When his plane is lost over France, she contrives to go there herself to work in the Resistance and to search for him--but then is unwilling to leave as she finds that the struggle for the country's fate is intimately linked to her own battle to take control of her life.
Faulks's novel is an examination of lost paradises, politics without belief, the limits of memory, the redemptive power of art and the existence of hope beyond reason. It is also a brilliant evocation of life in Occupied France and, more significantly, a revelation of the appalling price many Frenchmen paid to survive in unoccupied, so-called Free France. As the men, women and children of Charlotte's small town prepare to meet their terrible destiny, the truth of what took place in wartime France is finally exposed.
When private lives and public events fatally collide, the roots of the characters' lives are torn up and exposed. These harrowing scenes are presented with the passion and narrative force that readers will recall from Birdsong. Charlotte Gray will attract even more readers to Faulks's remarkable fiction. [via] -
Chattertonby Peter AckroydISBN 0345358228 (0-345-35822-8)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chatterton'Book summary:Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), apparently a suicide at 18, posthumously astonished literary England when he was revealed as the author of a sequence of famous and influential "medieval" poems he claimed to have discovered. An authentic talent as well as a literary counterfeiter, he is the guiding spirit of Peter Ackroyd's brilliant novel. In today's London, a young poet and an elderly novelist engage the mystery of Chatterton by trying to decode the clues found in an old manuscript, only to discover that their investigation discloses other riddles for which there are no solutions. Chatterton is at once a hilariously witty comedy; a thoughtful and dramatic exploration of the deepest issues of authenticity in both life and art; and a subtle and touching story of failed lives, parental love, doomed marriages, and erotic passions.[via]More editions of Chatterton:
Christopher and His Kindby Christopher IsherwoodISBN 0374520364 (0-374-52036-4)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Christopher and His Kind, 1929-1939by Christopher IsherwoodISBN 0374312567 (0-374-31256-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Christopher and His Kind, 1929-1939'Book summary:Christopher and His Kind is an intriguing slice of autobiography. It covers ten years in the writer's life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to sp a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to the beginning of 1939, when he arrived in New York to start a life in the States.[via]
The book revealingly contrasts fact with fiction-the real people Isherwood met in Germany with the portraits of them in his two Berlin novels, who then appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.But one does not need to be familiar with his body of work to appreciate the powerful and compelling story he tells here. Isherwood left Berlin in 1933, after Hitler came to power. For the next four years, he wandered around Europe-through Greece, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France-with a German boy named Heinz.
The characters in the book include W.H. Auden, Stephen Sper, and E.M. Forster as well as the literary circles of Somerset Maugham and Virginia Woolf. Chronicling German refugees and the British colony in Portugal, the Group Theatre company (which performed the three Auden-Isherwood plays) and the film studio where he worked and which he used as the setting for Prater Violet, Christopher and His Kind is an engrossing and powerfully rered portrait of a decade in the life of a major writer.More editions of Christopher and His Kind, 1929-1939:
The Da Vinci Codeby Dan BrownISBN 0375432302 (0-375-43230-2)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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A Demon in My Viewby Ruth RendellISBN 0375704914 (0-375-70491-4)
Softcover, Black Lizard Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Demon in My View'Book summary:She waits for him in the dark, her mind and body perfect, passive, until one day, when he goes to the cellar, and she is gone . . .
In A Demon in My View, Ruth Rendell creates a character as frightening as he is fascinating. Mild-mannered Arthur Johnson has never known how to talk to women. And his loneliness has perverted his desire for love and respect into a carefully controlled penchant for violence. One floor below him, a scholar finishing his thesis on psychopathic personalities is about to stumblequite literallyupon one of Arthur's many secrets. Haunting and intelligent, A Demon in My View shows the startling results of this chilling alchemy of two very disparate mindsone pathological and the other obsessed with pathology. [via]More editions of A Demon in My View:
Double Visionby Pat BarkerISBN 0374209057 (0-374-20905-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Down There on a Visitby Christopher IsherwoodISBN 0374520526 (0-374-52052-6)
Softcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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The Eagle of the Ninthby Rosemary SutcliffISBN 0374419302 (0-374-41930-2)
Softcover, Sunburst
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Eagle of the Ninth'Book summary:In a.d. 125, a young Roman centurion must recover the infamous Ninth Legion's missing symbol of honor, the eagle standard.[via]More editions of The Eagle of the Ninth:
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England, Englandby Julian BarnesISBN 0375705503 (0-375-70550-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'England, England'Book summary:Imagine being able to visit England--all of England--in a single weekend. Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall, Harrods, Manchester United Football Club, the Tower of London, and even the Royal Family all within easy distance of the each other, accessible, and, best of all, each one living up to an idealized version of itself. This fantasy Britain is the very real (and some would say very cynical) vision of Sir Jack Pitman, a monumentally egomaniacal mogul with a more than passing resemblance to modern-day buccaneers Sir Rupert Murdoch or Robert Maxwell: "'We are not talking theme park,' he began. 'We are not talking heritage centre. We are not talking Disneyland, World's Fair, Festival of Britain, Legoland or Parc Asterix.'" No indeed; Sir Jack proposes nothing less than to offer "the thing itself," a re-creation of everything that adds up to England in the hearts and minds of tourists looking for an "authentic" experience. But where to locate such an enterprise? As Sir Jack points out,
England, as the mighty William and many others have observed, is an island. Therefore, if we are serious, if we are seeking to offer the thing itself, we in turn must go in search of a precious whatsit set in a silver doodah.
Soon the perfect whatsit is found: the Isle of Wight; and a small army of Sir Jack's forces are sent to lay siege to it. Swept up in the mayhem are Martha Cochrane, a thirtysomething consultant teetering on the verge of embittered middle age, and Paul Harrison, a younger man looking for an anchor in the world. The two first find each other, then trip over a skeleton in Sir Jack's closet that might prove useful to their careers but disastrous to their relationship. In the course of constructing this mad package-tour dystopia, Julian Barnes has a terrific time skewering postmodernism, the British, the press, the government, celebrity, and big business. At the same time his very funny novel offers a provocative meditation on the nature of identity, both individual and national, as the lines between the replica and the thing itself begin to blur. Readers of Barnes have learned to expect the unexpected, and once again he more than lives up to the promise in England, England. But then, that was only to be expected. --Alix Wilber [via] 
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate: The Sunday Philosophy Clubby Alexander McCall SmithISBN 0375422994 (0-375-42299-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Friends, Lovers, Chocolate: The Sunday Philosophy Club'Book summary:The delightful second installment in Alexander McCall Smiths already hugely popular new detective series, The Sunday Philosophy Club, starring the irrepressibly curious Isabel Dalhousie editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics and her no-nonsense housekeeper, Grace.
When Isabels niece, Cat, asks Isabel to run her delicatessen while she attends a wedding in Italy, Isabel meets a man with a most interesting problem. He recently had a heart transplant, and is suddenly plagued with memories of events that never happened to him. The situation appeals to Isabel as a philosophical question. Is the heart truly the seat of the soul? And it piques her insatiable curiosity: could the memories be connected with the donors demise? Grace, of course, thinks it is none of Isabels business. Add to the mix the lothario Cat brings home from the wedding in Italy, who, in accordance with all that Isabel knows about lotharios, shouldnt be trusted . . . but goodness, he is charming.
That makes two mysteries of the heart to be solved just the thing for Isabel Dalhousie. [via]More editions of Friends, Lovers, Chocolate: The Sunday Philosophy Club:
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Gileadby Marilynne RobinsonISBN 0374153892 (0-374-15389-2)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gilead'Book summary:In 1981, Marilynne Robinson wrote Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and became a modern classic. Since then, she has written two pieces of nonfiction: Mother Country and The Death of Adam. With Gilead, we have, at last, another work of fiction. As with The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzards's return, 22 years after The Transit of Venus, it was worth the long wait. Books such as these take time, and thought, and a certain kind of genius. There are no invidious comparisons to be made. Robinson's books are unalike in every way but one: the same incisive thought and careful prose illuminate both.
The narrator, John Ames, is 76, a preacher who has lived almost all of his life in Gilead, Iowa. He is writing a letter to his almost seven-year-old son, the blessing of his second marriage. It is a summing-up, an apologia, a consideration of his life. Robinson takes the story away from being simply the reminiscences of one man and moves it into the realm of a meditation on fathers and children, particularly sons, on faith, and on the imperfectability of man.
The reason for the letter is Ames's failing health. He wants to leave an account of himself for this son who will never really know him. His greatest regret is that he hasn't much to leave them, in worldly terms. "Your mother told you I'm writing your begats, and you seemed very pleased with the idea. Well, then. What should I record for you?" In the course of the narrative, John Ames records himself, inside and out, in a meditative style. Robinson's prose asks the reader to slow down to the pace of an old man in Gilead, Iowa, in 1956. Ames writes of his father and grandfather, estranged over his grandfather's departure for Kansas to march for abolition and his father's lifelong pacifism. The tension between them, their love for each other and their inability to bridge the chasm of their beliefs is a constant source of rumination for John Ames. Fathers and sons.
The other constant in the book is Ames's friendship since childhood with "old Boughton," a Presbyterian minister. Boughton, father of many children, favors his son, named John Ames Boughton, above all others. Ames must constantly monitor his tendency to be envious of Boughton's bounteous family; his first wife died in childbirth and the baby died almost immediately after her. Jack Boughton is a ne'er-do-well, Ames knows it and strives to love him as he knows he should. Jack arrives in Gilead after a long absence, full of charm and mischief, causing Ames to wonder what influence he might have on Ames's young wife and son when Ames dies.
These are the things that Ames tells his son about: his ancestors, the nature of love and friendship, the part that faith and prayer play in every life and an awareness of one's own culpability. There is also reconciliation without resignation, self-awareness without deprecation, abundant good humor, philosophical queries--Jack asks, "'Do you ever wonder why American Christianity seems to wait for the real thinking to be done elsewhere?'"--and an ongoing sense of childlike wonder at the beauty and variety of God's world.
In Marilynne Robinson's hands, there is a balm in Gilead, as the old spiritual tells us. --Valerie Ryan [via]
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The Girl at the Lion D'orby Sebastian FaulksISBN 0375704531 (0-375-70453-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Golden Compassby Philip PullmanISBN 0345413350 (0-345-41335-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Golden Compass'Book summary:Some books improve with age--the age of the reader, that is. Such is certainly the case with Philip Pullman's heroic, at times heart-wrenching novel, The Golden Compass, a story ostensibly for children but one perhaps even better appreciated by adults. The protagonist of this complex fantasy is young Lyra Belacqua, a precocious orphan growing up within the precincts of Oxford University. But it quickly becomes clear that Lyra's Oxford is not precisely like our own--nor is her world. For one thing, people there each have a personal daemon, the manifestation of their souls in animal form. For another, hers is a universe in which science, theology, and magic are closely allied:
As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins. She had formed the notion that it was concerned with magic, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny particles of matter, but that was guesswork, really. Probably the stars had daemons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them.
Not that Lyra spends much time worrying about it; what she likes best is "clambering over the College roofs with Roger the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war." But Lyra's carefree existence changes forever when she and her daemon, Pantalaimon, first prevent an assassination attempt against her uncle, the powerful Lord Asriel, and then overhear a secret discussion about a mysterious entity known as Dust. Soon she and Pan are swept up in a dangerous game involving disappearing children, a beautiful woman with a golden monkey daemon, a trip to the far north, and a set of allies ranging from "gyptians" to witches to an armor-clad polar bear.In The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman has written a masterpiece that transcends genre. It is a children's book that will appeal to adults, a fantasy novel that will charm even the most hardened realist. Best of all, the author doesn't speak down to his audience, nor does he pull his punches; there is genuine terror in this book, and heartbreak, betrayal, and loss. There is also love, loyalty, and an abiding morality that infuses the story but never overwhelms it. This is one of those rare novels that one wishes would never end. Fortunately, its sequel, The Subtle Knife, will help put off that inevitability for a while longer. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Goodnight, Nebraskaby Tom McNealISBN 0375704299 (0-375-70429-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Goodnight, Nebraska'Book summary:Randall Hunsacker, the protagonist of Tom McNeal's first novel, Goodnight, Nebraska, is only 17, but already he has two strikes against him: his father's death when Randall was thirteen led to a succession of "stepfathers" moving through his life and the last one, Lenny, Randall has shot. The shooting, a suicide attempt, and a stint in juvenile hall is what brings Randall to the small town of Goodnight, Nebraska--a place where he hopes to start over. He gets a job, earns a place on the high school football team and even starts dating one of the cheerleaders; things are looking up for Randall. But in a town like Goodnight--Hicksburg, to Randall, or ShitdeVille--what goes up must eventually come down. And so it is for Randall--he gets injured during a football game and his girlfriend, thinking he's dead, announces they are engaged, and before he knows it, he is married, living in a trailer, facing a life that seems to have dead-ended before it even got started.
Appearances can be deceiving, however. To Randall and his wife, Marcy, Goodnight seems like the last place on earth; he never imagined himself coming here, she never stopped dreaming about getting out. Much of McNeal's novel has to do with the gradual disintegration of Randall and Marcy's marriage; at the same time it limns a warm portrait of a middle-American town that may not be very exciting to live in, but one where people know they can count on each other in a pinch. It takes Marcy leaving--and Randall going after her--to finally teach them both that there's really no place like Goodnight. [via]
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The Hammer of Edenby Ken FollettISBN 0375704191 (0-375-70419-1)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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A Handful of Dustby Evelyn WaughISBN 0375414207 (0-375-41420-7)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Handful of Dust'Book summary:"All over England people were waking up, queasy and despondent."
Few writers have walked the line between farce and tragedy as nimbly as Evelyn Waugh, who employed the conventions of the comic novel to chip away at the already crumbling English class system. His 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust, is a sublime example of his bleak satirical style: a mordantly funny exposé of aristocratic decadence and ennui in England between the wars.
Tony Last is an aristocrat whose attachment to an ideal feudal past is so profound that he is blind to his wife Brenda's boredom with the stately rhythms of country life. While he earnestly plays the lord of the manor in his ghastly Victorian Gothic pile, she sets herself up in a London flat and pursues an affair with the social-climbing idler John Beaver. In the first half of the novel Waugh fearlessly anatomizes the lifestyles of the rich and shameless. Everyone moves through an endless cycle of parties and country-house weekends, being scrupulously polite in public and utterly horrid in private. Sex is something one does to relieve the boredom, and Brenda's affair provides a welcome subject for conversation:
It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone.
Tony's indifference and Brenda's selfishness give their relationship a sort of equilibrium until tragedy forces them to face facts. The collapse of their relationship accelerates, and in the famous final section of the book Tony seeks solace in a foolhardy search for El Dorado, throwing himself on the mercy of a jungle only slightly more savage than the one he leaves behind in England. For all its biting wit, A Handful of Dust paints a bleak picture of the English upper classes, reaching beyond satire toward a very modern sense of despair. In Waugh's world, culture, breeding, and the trappings of civilization only provide more subtle means of destruction. --Simon Leake [via]More editions of A Handful of Dust:
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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage : Storiesby Alice MunroISBN 0375413006 (0-375-41300-6)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage : Stories'Book summary:Readers know what they are going to get when they pick up an unfamiliar Alice Munro collection, and yet almost every page carries a bounty of unexpected action, feeling, language, and detail. Her stories are always unique, blazing an invigorating originality out of her seemingly commonplace subjects. Each collection develops her oeuvre in increments, subtly expanding her range.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is, of course, no exception. It is a fairly conservative collection of nine stories, none of which move far beyond Munro's favored settings: the tiny towns and burgeoning cities of southern Ontario and British Columbia. There are glimpses of youth here--in the title story, an epistolary prank by two teenage girls leads to a one-sided cross country elopement and, seemingly, a happy marriage, and in "Nettles," disrupted childhood affection fleetingly returns through a chance meeting--but most of these pieces are stories of aging women and men, confronting the twin travails of death and late love. As is always the case with Munro, their plots are too elegantly elaborate to summarize, and their unsentimental power is a given; baroque praise would be futile. Read these stories--it is the only way to really understand the miracles that Munro so regularly performs. --Jack Illingworth [via]
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxyby Douglas AdamsISBN 0345391802 (0-345-39180-2)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'Book summary:Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.
Together, this dynamic pair began a journey through space aided by a galaxyful of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed, ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian (formerly Tricia McMillan), Zaphods girlfriend, whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; and Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens hes bought over the years.
Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? For all the answers, stick your thumb to the stars! [via]More editions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
The Houdini Girlby Martyn BedfordISBN 0375704760 (0-375-70476-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Human Factorby Graham GreeneISBN 0370300432 (0-370-30043-2)
Hardcover, Bodley Head
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Human Factor'Book summary:From the author of THE COMEDIANS and DOCTOR FISCHER OF GENEVA OR THE BOMB PARTY, a novel in which a leak is traced back to a small sub-section of the SIS, and Maurice Castle decides it is time to retire and live peacefully with his wife. In the VINTAGE CLASSICS series. [via]
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Human Tracesby Sebastian FaulksISBN 0375502262 (0-375-50226-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Human Traces'Book summary:What is it to be human? This question, as in Birdsong, is at the heart of Human Traces.
The story begins in Brittany where a young, poor boy somehow passes his medical exams and goes to Paris, where he attends the lectures of Charcot, the Parisian neurologist who set the world on its head in the 1870s. With a friend, he sets up a clinic in the mysterious mountain district of Carinthia in south-east Austria.
If The Girl at the Lion dOr was a simple three-movement symphony, Birdsong an opera, Charlotte Gray a complex four-movement symphony and On Green Dolphin Street a concerto, then Human Traces is a Wagnerian grand opera. [via]More editions of Human Traces:
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Instances of the Number 3by Salley VickersISBN 0374177023 (0-374-17702-3)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Instances of the Number 3'Book summary:When a man dies and leaves behind a wife and a mistress, we expect certain responses to follow. But as the narrator of Salley Vickers's second novel explains, "this is not an account of feminine jealousy, or even revenge, and not all human beings (not even women) conform to the attitudes generally expected." Indeed, in this ironic and witty novel nothing is quite as we expect to find it. Telling the story of Bridget Hansome and Frances Slater, Vickers brings to life a loving marriage and a love affair that exist side by side for years - and continue to reverberate after secretive, generous, sexually prodigal Peter Hansome dies suddenly in a car accident, on his way home from an assignation with yet another lover, about whom neither woman knows.[via]
While Frances, a London art dealer and sometime artists' model, gradually makes friends with the older, Shakespeare-loving Bridget, these two unconventional women start to learn the whole truth (or almost the whole truth) about the man whose death brought them together and whose ghost watches over them still.
Wise, wry, and intellectually playful, Instances of the Number 3 explores the mysterious power of triangles in love, art, and theology. It confirms Salley Vickers as one of the most intelligent new voices in British fiction.More editions of Instances of the Number 3:
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Ladysmithby Giles FodenISBN 0375708375 (0-375-70837-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ladysmith'Book summary:In the dying days of the 19th century, the world's eyes turned to the small South African town of Ladysmith, whose inhabitants spent 118 days besieged by Boer forces while waiting for General Buller's army. Giles Foden tells his tale through a host of characters. There's the Irish hotelier Leo Kiernan and his daughters, Bella and Jane; the barber Antonio Torres, from Portuguese East Africa; the various British war correspondents, including a young Winston Churchill; the Indian stretcher bearers, among them Mohandas Gandhi; a Zulu named Muhle Maseku, his wife, Nandi, and their son, Wellington; and two young English soldiers, Tom and Perry Barnes, whose letters home--in which straightforward description approaches the surreal--were inspired by those of Foden's great-grandfather. Early on, Perry and his fellows capture one woman hiding in a farmhouse:
When we got to her, she was crouched in a shed with her arms round a goose. Seeing us approach, she buried her head in its feathers and started crying. As we surrounded her, she kept repeating something in Dutch. An African scout who spoke the language said what she was saying was: "Leave me my man-goose! Do not take my man-goose! Do not hurt my man-goose!" We had to take her in of course, but we let her keep the goose. As she was a farmer, I felt sorry for her, but they have plenty of our fellows in Pretoria, so there.
Ladysmith is a busy book, and it's not always clear what's going on. But that's Foden's point. At heart it is a novel about the writing of history, set on the verge of modernity, where old ways of assessing the truth are being cruelly questioned. So correspondent George Steevens still reads his Greek historians and Gibbons, while his messages are being sent (and censored) by the newfangled heliograph. "Sieges are out of date," Steevens realizes. "To the man of 1899 ... with five editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousandfold a hardship. We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the news--news that concerns us not at all!" With such pressures to provide news, news, news, it's no surprise when the correspondents end up producing the Ladysmith Lyre, full of fake news. And on the margins, there's the unnamed Biographer, eschewing words in favor of visual images with his Biograph, but soon finding that he too can't tell the whole story.In its considerable range and ambition--Churchill and Gandhi's encounter prefiguring events of the 1940s, Bella's personal rebellion standing in for the advance of women, the place of Ireland in Britain's colonial plans, Wellington's experiences informing his work with the ANC--Ladysmith sometimes falls short. But in his battle scenes and evocation of the town's drawn-out suffering, Foden is very good, producing some startling images: the town's mockingbirds, for instance, "take to imitating the whine and buzz of shells." This is never anything less than a fascinating, ambitious novel, and to see a young author taking on the huge question of how to write history is inspiring indeed. --Alan Stewart [via]
Loitering With Intentby Muriel SparkISBN 0370309006 (0-370-30900-6)
Hardcover, Bodley Head
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A Long Finishby Michael DibdinISBN 0375704019 (0-375-70401-9)
Softcover, Black Lizard Books
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Love, Etcby Julian BarnesISBN 0375411615 (0-375-41161-5)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Lying Awakeby Mark SalzmanISBN 0375706062 (0-375-70606-2)
Softcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lying Awake'Book summary:In his third novel, Lying Awake, Mark Salzman breaks the primary rule of fiction by creating a protagonist who has virtually no external life. Sister John of the Cross, a middle-aged nun cloistered in a Carmelite monastery in contemporary Los Angeles, languished for years in a spiritual drought--"her prayers empty and her soul dry"--until she suddenly received God's grace in the form of intense mystical visions. So vivid have her visions become that they burn a kind of afterglow into her mind that she transcribes into crystalline (and highly popular) verse. The only downside is that they are accompanied by excruciating headaches that cause her to black out.
The story hinges on Sister John's discovery that her visions are in fact the result of mild epileptic seizures. As she learns from her neurologist, temporal-lobe epilepsy commonly brings about "hypergraphia (voluminous writing), an intensification but also a narrowing of emotional response, and an obsessive interest in religion and philosophy." Dostoyevsky, the classic victim of this condition, wrote of his raptures: "There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of eternal harmony.... If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear." An exact description of Sister John's visions. The question she now faces is whether to go ahead with surgery--and risk obliterating both her spiritual life and her art--or cling to a state of grace that may actually be a delusion ignited by an electrochemical imbalance.
Using a very limited palette, Mark Salzman creates an austere masterpiece. The real miracle of Lying Awake is that it works perfectly on every level: on the realistic surface, it captures the petty squabbles and tiny bursts of radiance of life in a Los Angeles monastery; deeper down it probes the nature of spiritual illumination and the meaning and purpose of prayer in everyday life; and, at bottom, there lurks a profound meditation on the mystery of artistic inspiration. Salzman made a highly auspicious debut in 1986 with Iron and Silk, a memoir of his years in China, and since then he has dramatically changed key in every book--most recently from the absurdist American suburban chronicle of Lost in Place to the artistic-crisis-cum-courtroom-drama novel The Soloist. Lying Awake is quieter and more sober than Salzman's previous narratives, but it is also more accomplished, more thought-provoking, and more highly crafted. --David Laskin [via]
Making Things Betterby Anita BrooknerISBN 0375508880 (0-375-50888-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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A Meeting by the Riverby Christopher IsherwoodISBN 0374520763 (0-374-52076-3)
Softcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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The Memorial: Portrait of a Familyby Christopher IsherwoodISBN 0374520674 (0-374-52067-4)
Softcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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Moon and Sixpenceby W. Somerset MaughamISBN 0375724567 (0-375-72456-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Mostly Harmlessby Douglas AdamsISBN 0345379330 (0-345-37933-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mostly Harmless'Book summary:Douglas Adams is back with the amazing, logic-defying, but-why-stop-now fifth novel in the Hitchhiker Trilogy. Here is the epic story of Random, who sets out on a transgalactic quest to find the planet of her ancestors. Line drawings.
From the Hardcover edition. [via] -
Mr Golightly's Holidayby Salley VickersISBN 0374214891 (0-374-21489-1)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mr Golightly's Holiday'Book summary:1. holiday: a period in which a break is taken from work or studies for rest, travel, or recreation. [literally: holy day][via]
Many years ago, Mr. Golightly wrote a work of dramatic fiction that grew to be an astonishing international bestseller. But his reputation is on the decline and he finds himself badly out of touch with the modern world. He decides to take a holiday and comes to the historic village of Great Calne, hoping to use the opportunity to bring his great work up to date. But he soon finds that events take over his plans and that the themes he has written on are being strangely replicated in the lives of the villagers around him.
As he comes to know his neighbors better, Mr. Golightly begins to examine his attitude toward love and to ponder the terrible catastrophe of his only son's death. And we begin to learn the true, and extraordinary, identity of Mr. Golightly and the nature of the secret sorrow that haunts him and links him to his new friends.
Mysterious, light of touch, witty, and profound, Mr Golightly's Holiday confirms Salley Vickers's reputation as a writer of "fiction that entertains even as it considers serious questions of sin and redemption, love and loss" (Francine Prose, People).More editions of Mr Golightly's Holiday:
The Mulberry Empireby Philip HensherISBN 0375414886 (0-375-41488-6)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The New Confessionsby William BoydISBN 0375705031 (0-375-70503-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Newlywedsby Elizabeth BevarlyISBN 0373613938 (0-373-61393-8)
Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Newlyweds'Book summary:Follow the investigation by a "husband and wife" team as true crime turns to true love. . .
Known more for her work ethic than for her romantic history, FBI agent Bridget Logan landed an assignment that involved issues too close to home-and a "husband" as part of the sting. If Agent Samuel Jones weren't so sexy, Bridget would have had no problem handling this case. But he was, and for the first time in her career, Bridget had trouble keeping a cool head under fire. A lot was at stake, though, and Bridget was determined to solve this case and move on, no harm done. But then her "husband" made love to her. . .and suddenly their role as a devoted couple transformed into a passion over which neither had control! [via]
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The Night Managerby John Le CarreISBN 0345385764 (0-345-38576-4)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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On the Beachby Nevil ShuteISBN 0345420195 (0-345-42019-5)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Other Side of Youby Salley VickersISBN 0374221901 (0-374-22190-1)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Our Gameby John Le CarreISBN 0345400003 (0-345-40000-3)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Our Game'Book summary:At forty-eight, Tim Cranmer is a secret servant in premature retirement to deepest rural England. His Cold War is fought and won, and he is free to devote himself to his stately manor house, his vineyard, and his beautiful young mistress, Emma.
But no man can escape his past, and Tim's lives twenty miles away, in the chaotic person of Larry Pettifer: bored radical don, philanderer, and for twenty years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanquished Communist threat. Between the two stands an unresolved rivalry.
As the story opens, Larry and Emma have disappeared. Setting off in pursuit of them, Tim discovers that he too is being pursued, by his former masters. The hunter becomes the hunted. Raiding his own past like a thief, he follows Larry and Emma into the minefield -- physical and emotional -- of their new allegiance.
Our Game is John le Carre at his incomparable best. [via]-
The Paper Menby William GoldingISBN 0374526397 (0-374-52639-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Paper Men'Book summary:English novelist Wilfred Barclay, who has known fame, success, and fortune, is in crisis. He faces a drinking problem slipping over the borderline into alcoholism, a dead marriage, and the incurable itch of middle age lust. But the final, unbearable irritation is American Professor of English Literature Rick L. Tucker, who is implacable in his determinition to become The Barclay Man: authorized biographer, editor of the posthumous papers and the recognized authority.[via] -
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Clubby Charles DickensISBN 0375405488 (0-375-40548-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Charles Dickenss satirical masterpiece, The Pickwick Papers, catapulted the young writer into literary fame when it was first serialized in 183637. It recounts the rollicking adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club as they travel about England getting into all sorts of mischief. Laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly entertaining, the book also reveals Dickenss burgeoning interest in the parliamentary system, lawyers, the Poor Laws, and the ills of debtors prisons. As G. K. Chesterton noted, Before [Dickens] wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision . . . a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was Pickwick. [via]
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The Powerbookby Jeanette WintersonISBN 0375725059 (0-375-72505-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Powerbook'Book summary:While many other novels are still nursing hangovers from the 20th century, The PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new millennium. Set in cyberspace, Jeanette Winterson's seventh novel (or eighth, if you count her disowned Boating for Beginners) travels with ease, casting the net of its love story over Paris, Capri, and London. Its interactive narrator, Ali, is a "language costumier" who will swathe your imagination in the clothes of transformation: all you have to do is decide whom you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in a networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to inhabit the story--any story--you wish to be told. As in all the best video games, you can choose your location, your character, even the clothes you want to wear. Beware: you can enter and play, but you cannot determine the outcome.
Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age, moving across time and through transmutations of identity, weaving her stories with "long lines of laptop DNA" and shaping herself to the reader's desire. She wants to make love as simple as a song, but even in cyberspace there is no love without pain. Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen the opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story.
The PowerBook is rich with historical allegory and literary allusion. Winterson's dialogue crackles with humor, snappy dialogue, and good jokes, several of which are at her own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary crossing, and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plot of life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the phallus. Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the night to escape from themselves. On the hard drive of The PowerBook are stored a variety of stories that the reader can download and open at will, complete stories that loop through the central narrative. The tale of Mallory's third expedition, the disinterring of the Roman Governor of London in Spitalfields Church, or the contemplation of "great and ruinous lovers" are capsules of narrative compression. In Winterson's compacted meaning, language becomes a character in its own right--it is one of the heroes of the novel.
"What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," Winterson has written. The PowerBook does just that. Her prose has found a metaphor for its linguistic forms of creation that feels almost invented for her, "a web of coordinates that will change the world." There will be a virtual rush of Internet-themed books in the networked naughties. With The PowerBook Winterson has triumphantly gotten there first. --Rachel Holmes [via]
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Prater Violetby Christopher IsherwoodISBN 0374520534 (0-374-52053-4)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Prater Violet'Book summary:Prater Violet concerns the filming of an unashamedly romantic and commercial musical about old Vienna. It is a stinging satirical novel about the film industry, trifling studio feuds, and the fatuous movie Prater Violet, which, ironically, counterpoints the tragic events on the world stage as Hitler's lengthening shadow falls over the real Vienna of the thirties. At its center are vivid portraits of the mocking genius Friedrich Bergmann, the imperious, dazzlingly witty Austrian director, and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter-the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood.
When it first appeared in 1945, Prater Violet caused a fury of critical speculation and acclaim. Edmund Wilson called it "a deliberate historical parable," and Diana Trilling's Nation review said, "Prater Violet is the most charming novel I have read in a long time... It is a book written in the author's own person, yet utterly without ego; it is a novel about movie writers which is yet a novel about the life of every serious artist; it is a book without a political moral, but a profound moral-political statement; it is gay, witty, sophisticated, but wholly responsible." [via]
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Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climateby Nancy MitfordISBN 0375718990 (0-375-71899-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate'Book summary:Few aristocratic English families of the 20th century have enjoyed quite the delicious notoriety that the Mitford sisters courted in the years bracketed by two world wars. For a start, two of the girls, Unity and Diana, were Fascists (the former was a friend of Hitler and Goebbels, and the latter married Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists). Two others took the writing route: Jessica ran away from home and became a famous muckraking journalist, and Nancy composed maliciously witty--and transparently autobiographical--novels as well as several biographies. The Pursuit of Love (1945), her greatest fictional success, and its companion, Love in a Cold Climate (1949), keep closely to the spirit (and details) of their youthful amusements and more grown-up adventures.
Seen through the adoring eyes of Fanny Logan, the self-effacing cousin who records their shenanigans with a wicked sincerity, the Radletts of Alconleigh shine with Gloucestershire glamour: apoplectic Uncle Matthew; Lord Alconleigh (modeled to a fine nuance after Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale, who like Uncle Matthew used to hunt his children with bloodhounds); his kind, rather vague wife, Aunt Sadie; as well as Fanny's favorite cousin Linda and the other six Radlett children. The Radlett daughters and Fanny wait impatiently for life to become interesting. Because of their station, however, nothing but marriage is expected of them, so they hurl themselves at love like crusaders, with varied and always fascinating results. At one point Fanny recounts:
A few minutes only after Linda had left me to go back to London, Christian and the comrades, I had another caller. This time it was Lord Merlin...."This is a bad business," he said, abruptly, and without preamble, though I had not seen him for several years. "I'm just back from Rome, and what do I find--Linda and Christian Talbot. It's an extraordinary thing that I can't ever leave England without Linda getting herself mixed up with some thoroughly undesirable character. This is a disaster--how far has it gone? Can nothing be done?"
The Pursuit of Love follows the romantic fortunes of Linda Radlett, while Love in a Cold Climate ventures further afield with the story of Polly Hampton's shocking love affair and its unexpectedly funny aftermath. Fanny's inexhaustible narration is a pleasant buffer for Mitford's deft teasing, which dances along just this side of mockery. The author of U and Non-U, a famous tongue-in-cheek treatise on the shibboleths of upper-class mores, Mitford often leaves the reader wondering just where she stands in the class wars, and much of her humor arises in the fine distinctions of aristocratic manners and speech. Still, there's an inimitable tart sweetness to these stories of true love and its pallid imitators, making them perfect snapshots of a vanished world. --Barrie Trinkle [via]More editions of Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate:
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Restaurant at the End of the Universeby Douglas AdamsISBN 0345391810 (0-345-39181-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe'Book summary:Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons? Time for a cup of tea! Join the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his uncommon comrades in arms in their desperate search for a place to eat, as they hurtle across space powered by pure improbability.
Among Arthurs motley shipmates are Ford Prefect, a long-time friend and expert contributer to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the three-armed, two-headed ex-president of the galaxy; Tricia McMillan, a fellow Earth refugee whos gone native (her name is Trillian now); and Marvin, the moody android. Their destination? The ultimate hot spot for an evening of apocalyptic entertainment and fine dining, where the food speaks for itself (literally).
Will they make it? The answer: hard to say. But bear in mind that The Hitchhikers Guide deleted the term Future Perfect from its pages, since it was discovered not to be! [via]More editions of Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
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Rough Musicby Patrick GaleISBN 0345442377 (0-345-44237-7)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rough Music'Book summary:Beautifully written and deeply compassionate, Rough Music is a novel of one family at two defining points in time. Seamlessly alternating between the present day and a summer thirty years past, its twin stories unfold at a cottage along the eastern coast of England.
Will Pagett receives an unexpected gift on his fortieth birthday, two weeks at a perfect beach house in Cornwall. Seeking some distance from the married man with whom he's having an affair, he invites his aging mother and father to share his holiday, knowing the sun and sea will be a welcome change for. But the cottage and the stretch of sand before it seem somehow familiar and memories of a summer long ago begin to surface.
Thirty-two years earlier. A young married couple and their eight year-old son begin two idyllic weeks at a beach house in Cornwall. But the sudden arrival of unknown American relatives has devastating consequences, turning what was to be a moment of reconciliation into an act of betrayal that will cast a lengthy shadow.
As Patrick Gale masterfully unspools these parallel stories, we see their subtle and surprising reflections in each other and discover how the forgotten dramas of childhood are reenacted throughout our lives.
Deftly navigating the terrain between humor and tragedy, Patrick Gale has written an unforgettable novel about the lies that adults tell and the small acts of treason that children can commit. Rough Music gracefully illuminates the merciful tricks of memory and the courage with which we continue to assert our belief in love and happiness. [via] -
The Small House at Allingtonby Anthony TrollopeISBN 0375400672 (0-375-40067-2)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Small House at Allington'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) [via]
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Snow Falling on Cedarsby David GuttersonISBN 037570437X (0-375-70437-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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So I Am Gladby A. L. KennedyISBN 0375707247 (0-375-70724-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fishby Douglas AdamsISBN 0345391837 (0-345-39183-7)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish'Book summary:Back on Earth with nothing more to show for his long, strange trip through time and space than a ratty towel and a plastic shopping bag, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription, the mysterious disappearance of Earths dolphins, and the discovery of his battered copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy all conspire to give Arthur the sneaking suspicion that something otherworldly is indeed going on.
God only knows what it all means. Fortunately, He left behind a Final Message of explanation. But since its light-years away from Earth, on a star surrounded by souvenir booths, finding out what it is will mean hitching a ride to the far reaches of space aboard a UFO with a giant robot. But what else is new? [via]More editions of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:
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The Spy Who Came in from the Coldby John Le CarreISBN 0345377370 (0-345-37737-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'Book summary:It would be an international crime to reveal too much of the jeweled clockwork plot of Le Carré's first masterpiece, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But we are at liberty to disclose that Graham Greene called it the "finest spy story ever written," and that the taut tale concerns Alec Leamas, a British agent in early Cold War Berlin. Leamas is responsible for keeping the double agents under his care undercover and alive, but East Germans start killing them, so he gets called back to London by Control, his spy master. Yet instead of giving Leamas the boot, Control gives him a scary assignment: play the part of a disgraced agent, a sodden failure everybody whispers about. Control sends him back out into the cold--deep into Communist territory to checkmate the bad-guy spies on the other side. The political chessboard is black and white, but in human terms the vicinity of the Berlin Wall is a moral no-man's land, a gray abyss patrolled by pawns.
Le Carré beats most spy writers for two reasons. First, he knows what he's talking about, since he raced around working for British Intelligence while the Wall went up. He's familiar with spycraft's fascinations, but also with the fact that it leaves ideals shaken and emotions stirred. Second, his literary tone has deep autobiographical roots. Spying is about betrayal, and Le Carré was abandoned by his mother and betrayed by his father, a notorious con man. (They figure heavily in his novels Single & Single and A Perfect Spy.) In a world of lies, Le Carré writes the bitter truth: it's every man for himself. And may the best mask win. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Starter for Ten: A Novelby David NichollsISBN 0345498127 (0-345-49812-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Starter for Ten: A Novel'Book summary:Now a major motion picture
Utterly charming . . . a big-hearted, flawless coming-of-age tale, as scary and funny as your yearbook picture.
People (****/Critics Choice)
The year is 1985. Brian Jackson, a working-class kid on full scholarship, has started his first term at university. He has a dark secreta long-held, burning ambition to appear on the wildly popular British TV quiz show University Challengeand now, finally, it seems the dream is about to become reality. Hes made the school team, and theyve completed the qualifying rounds and are limbering up for their first televised match. (And, whats more, hes fallen head over heels for one of his teammates, the beautiful, brainy, and intimidatingly posh Alice Harbinson.) Life seems perfect and triumph inevitablebut as his world opens up, Brian learns that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Fresh, edgy and very funny . . . [Nicholls] has a talent for droll dialogue and a wonderful sense of the ridiculous.
USA Today
Starter for Ten has that elusive Hornby-factor. . . . Its wincingly funny . . . a prospect to savour.
Arena [via]More editions of Starter for Ten: A Novel:
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A Taste for Deathby P. D. JamesISBN 0345430581 (0-345-43058-1)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Taste for Death'Book summary:When the quiet Little Vestry of St. Matthew's Church becomes the blood-soaked scene of a double murder, Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh faces an intriguing conundrum: How did an upper-crust Minister come to lie, slit throat to slit throat, next to a neighborhood derelict of the lowest order? Challenged with the investigation of a crime that appears to have endless motives, Dalgliesh explores the sinister web spun around a half-burnt diary and a violet-eyed widow who is pregnant and full of malice--all the while hoping to fill the gap of logic that joined these two disparate men in bright red death. . . .
From the Paperback edition. [via] 
The Tenth Manby Graham GreeneISBN 037030831X (0-370-30831-X)
Hardcover, Bodley Head and Anthony Blond
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The Towers of Trebizondby Rose MacaulayISBN 0374278547 (0-374-27854-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Towers of Trebizond'Book summary:This story describes the experiences of a group of people on a trip to Turkey. Aunt Dot is set on the emancipation of Turkish women through the encouragement of a wider use of the bathing hat, whilst Laurie's only object is pleasure. [via]
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Trumpetby Jackie KayISBN 0375704639 (0-375-70463-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Trumpet'Book summary:"It was our secret. That's all it was. Lots of people have secrets, don't they? The world runs on secrets. What kind of place would the world be without them? Our secret was harmless. It did not hurt anybody."
The secret that Millicent Moody, widow of jazz great Joss Moody, refers to may have been harmless in life, but when Joss dies and the truth is exposed, it ends up affecting more people than she ever imagined. It gives nothing away to reveal right off that Millicent's late husband was, in fact, a woman--something Millie has known all along but that the Moodys' adopted son, Colman, only discovers after his father's death. Titillating as the subject matter initially seems, in Jackie Kay's capable hands Joss's gender-bending becomes almost a side issue in a novel that is, at its heart, concerned with the essential nature of love.
Kay tells her story from many different perspectives--the doctor who signs the death certificate, the mortician who prepares the body, the opportunistic biographer looking to make a buck and a name for herself, the musicians who knew Joss--but it is Millicent and Colman who bear the brunt of both the pain and the responsibility for telling the tale. Millie Moody is a tremendously sympathetic character; her love for Joss is so powerful, so right that the reader never questions the decisions this odd couple made in life. "I didn't feel like I was living a lie," Millie tells us. "I felt like I was living a life." Colman, on the other hand, is more difficult to like. Though it's easy to understand his anger and confusion upon suddenly learning that the man he regarded as his father for 30 years was actually a woman, one also has the sneaking suspicion that he wasn't a particularly lovable guy before the revelation, either. Still, by the end of Trumpet, there's hope for Colman, peace of mind for Millie, and a satisfying rendering of love in all its permutations for the reader. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxyby Douglas AdamsISBN 0345453743 (0-345-45374-3)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'Book summary:At last in paperback in one complete volume, here are the five classic novels from Douglas Adamss beloved Hitchiker series.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Facing annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat.
Life, the Universe and Everything
The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription conspires to thrust him back to reality. So to speak.
Mostly Harmless
Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself? [via]More editions of The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
Undue Influenceby Anita BrooknerISBN 0375707344 (0-375-70734-4)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Way I Found Herby Rose TremainISBN 0374286663 (0-374-28666-3)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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White Teeth: A Novelby Zadie SmithISBN 0375703861 (0-375-70386-1)
Softcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'White Teeth: Reader's Companion'Book summary:On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie--working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt--is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel. Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families--one headed by Archie, the other by Archie's best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for "no problem"). Samad--devoutly Muslim, hopelessly "foreign"--weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope.Zadie Smith's dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant café, a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut in every respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes--faith, race, gender, history, and culture--and triumphs. [via]
The Wonder Workerby Susan HowatchISBN 0375401024 (0-375-40102-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Woodlandersby Thomas Hardy, Margaret DrabbleISBN 0375400826 (0-375-40082-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Woodlanders'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
Set in the secluded forest community of Little Hintock, Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders inextricably links the dramatic English landscape with the story of a woman caught between two rivals of radically different social statures. Grace Melbury is promised to her longtime companion, Giles Winterborne, a local woodlander and a gentle, steadfast man. When her socially motivated father pressures her to wed the ambitious doctor Edred Fitzpiers, Graces loyalties shiftand her decision leads to tumultuous consequences. With its explorations of class and gender, lust and betrayal, The Woodlanders is one of Hardys most vivid and powerful works.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1912 Wessex edition and includes Hardys map of fictional Wessex. [via]More editions of The Woodlanders:
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World and Other Placesby Jeanette WintersonISBN 0375702369 (0-375-70236-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'World and Other Places'Book summary:Her first short story collection exhibits the multitude of talents that have made English novelist Jeanette Winterson not just admired but beloved by her many fans. There are the surprising, fresh little phrases minted expressly to convey the delicate realities of the made-up world. There's the humor, fierce and sly but always kind. There's the imagination that changes gender and historical epoch at whim, and does so convincingly; and the characters themselves, a sundry bunch of men and women not necessarily successful or commendable but always, somehow, likable. Best of all, by their very diversity, these stories reveal glimpses of the smart and enigmatic woman behind the work.
In "Atlantic Crossing," Winterson becomes a middle-aged businessman of the mid-20th century, accidentally assigned to share his second-class cabin with a young black woman on a transatlantic crossing. In the realm of event, little happens, but in its depth of perception and what it tells of the nuances of regret, the story is as rich as a novel in another writer's hands. A few scant pages later, Winterson becomes a kind of lost female Homer, telling Orion's story from Artemis's point of view: "When she returned she saw this huge rag of a man eating her goat, raw.... His reputation hung about him like bad breath." In "The Poetics of Sex," she creates a lesbian love story that evokes her characters' personalities as explicitly as their erotic pleasures. "The 24-Hour Dog," the story of a woman writer returning a puppy she had thought to adopt, is remorseless as a psychological thriller in the squirmy depths it plumbs: "I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated: his heart and mine." Read The World and Other Places twice, once for instruction, once for joy. --Joyce Thompson [via]
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