Arcade and Daffodil are bright things, twins born one minute apart who swore to always protect each other. Together, Arc and Daffy forge a world shot through with colour and wonder: a patch of grass becomes an archaeologist''s dig; the toxic fumes emerging from the local paper mill are the dust rising from wild horses gallopping in the factory''s basement; an abandoned 1950s convertible is a time machine that can take them and their friends anywhere. Their bond is an escape from their struggling family, their imaginations a reprieve from the failing, lusterless streets of Chillicothe, Ohio. As the legacy of addiction that has long plagued their mother tightens its grip, Arc and Daffy try to build a new life for themselves. But when a local prostitute is found tangled in the banks of the river, Arc is drawn to the mystery, determined to find the truth and protect the only family she''s ever known. But as more familiar bodies are found and with the killer circling closer and closer, Arc''s mission to keep herself and her sister safe becomes increasingly desperate - and the powerful riptides of the savage side ever more difficult to resist. Drawing from the true story of six women killed in her native state, acclaimed novelist and poet Tiffany McDaniel has written a haunting, singular portrait of small town America and an elegy for missing women everywhere.
Buenos Aires, 1981. Inspector Alzada's work in the Buenos Aires police force during the Dirty War exposes him to the many realities of life under a repressive military regime: desperate people, angry people and - most of all - missing people. Personally, he prefers to stay out of politics, favouring a steady job and domesticity with his wife Paula over the path taken by his hot-headed revolutionary brother, Jorge. But when Jorge is disappeared, Alzada knows he will stop at nothing to recover him. Buenos Aires, 2001 . Argentina is in the midst of yet another devastating economic crisis. Alzada is still an inspector: he's burnt out, frustrated that he hasn't been able to affect real change, and convinced of the futility of yet another doomed Argentinean attempt at democracy. This time he is determined to remain a detached bystander, to keep his head down in anticipation of a peaceful retirement with Paula and the nephew they've raised together. However, all his plans are derailed as the riots gain traction and a young woman's dead body lands in the dumpster behind the morgue on the same day a woman from one of the city's wealthiest families goes missing.
' WHAT A TREAT. GLAMOROUS AND NOSTALGIC AND VERY SEXY, CAPE MAY IS A NOVEL ABOUT MARRIAGE, LUST, SHABBY SEASIDE TOWNS AND LOTS OF GIN. BRILLIANTLY UNSETTLING - ONE OF THOSE BOOKS THAT STAYS WITH YOU' Paula Hawkins Cape May, New Jersey. September 1957. Newlyweds Henry and Effie arrive from Georgia for their honeymoon. It's the end of the summer season, and as they tentatively discover each other - walking on the deserted beach overlooking the vast, darkening Atlantic, clumsily making love in the dusty rooms of a distant relative's house - they begin to realize that everyday married life might be disappointingly different from their happy-ever-after fantasy. Just as they get ready to cut the trip short and leave Cape May, a light goes on in one of the houses on their street. In that one moment their destiny is altered forever. A glamorous set suddenly disrupt their newly-formed married life and sweep them up into their drama: there's Clara, a beautiful socialite who feels her youth slipping away; Max, a wealthy playboy and Clara's lover; and Alma, Max's aloof and mysterious half-sister, to whom Henry is irresistibly drawn. The empty town becomes their playground, and as they sneak into abandoned summer homes, go sailing, walk naked under the stars, marvel at the power and beauty of their bodies, experiment with love and sex, and drink massive amounts of gin, Henry and Effie slip from innocence into betrayal, with consequences that reverberate through the rest of their lives.
A moving and invigorating complication of the Western, highlighting chosen family, love, and survival among outcasts in another American timeline. As she mines the genre for vital new stories, North beautifully shines a light on our real past and conveys a warning for the future.
Ava , newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children. Julian is a banker who likes to spend money on Ava but when she asks whether he loves her, cannot say more than 'I like you a great deal'. Enter Edith, a lawyer, who Ava meets while Julian is away for work and has an urge to talk very fast to. Ava doesn't tell Edith about Julian, and she doesn't tell Julian about Edith, and by the time Edith is Ava's girlfriend it's too late. And then Julian writes to tell Ava he's coming back. Will she return to the safety of the quarantined, witty dynamic with Julian, or risk facing love-vulnerable and exposed for the first time-with Edith?
The legendary Academy award-winning writer and director takes the reader on a unique joyride of personal memoir, cultural criticism and Hollywood history. For the first time, in his own words, explore the mind, the myth, and the movie magic of the one and only Quentin Tarantino.
@2@@20@YOU CAN TRY TO OUTRUN NATURE...@21@@16@@20@BUT WILL YOU SURVIVE A MAN'S FURY?@21@@3@@2@Wynn and Jack meet on a hiking trip during their Dartmouth College orientation week and become instant best friends. They both love hunting, fishing and books and thus it feels only natural that they'd take off a term from their lvy League college and spend it canoeing down the lakes and rivers on the border with Canada.@3@@2@@20@@18@BUT THERE IS DEATH IN THE AIR...@19@@21@@3@@2@A megafire is spreading quickly, the smell of smoke becoming more pungent by the day. The nights are getting colder and the river wilder with the approaching autumn. There are rapids to navigate, and miles of river to paddle through before making it to a safe harbour. @16@And when a distraught man suddenly appears, asking for Wynn and Jack's help to find his missing wife, the race against time and the fight against nature's destructive power become entangled with a deadly game of cat and mouse.@3@
After the Second World War, new international rules heralded an age of human rights and self-determination. Supported by Britain, these unprecedented changes sought to end the scourge of colonialism. But how committed was Britain? In the 1960s, its colonial instinct ignited once more: a secret decision was taken to offer the US a base at Diego Garcia, one of the islands of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, create a new colony (the ''British Indian Ocean Territory'') and deport the entire local population. One of those inhabitants was Liseby Elyse, twenty years old, newly married, expecting her first child. One suitcase, no pets, the British ordered, expelling her from the only home she had ever known. For four decades the government of Mauritius fought for the return of Chagos, and the past decade Philippe Sands has been intimately involved in the cases. In 2018 Chagos and colonialism finally reached the World Court in The Hague. As Mauritius and the entire African continent challenged British and American lawlessness, fourteen international judges faced a landmark decision: would they rule that Britain illegally detached Chagos from Mauritius? Would they open the door to Liseby Elyse and her fellow Chagossians returning home - or exile them forever? Taking us on a disturbing journey across international law, THE LAST COLONY illuminates the continuing horrors of colonial rule, the devasting impact of Britain''s racist grip on its last colony in Africa, and the struggle for justice in the face of a crime against humanity. It is a tale about the making of modern international law and one woman''s fight for justice, a courtroom drama and a personal journey that ends with a historic ruling.
As Governor of Galicia, SS Brigadesfuhrer Otto Freiherr von Wachter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed. By the time the war ended in May 1945, he was indicted for 'mass murder'. Hunted by the Soviets, the Americans and the British, as well as groups of Poles and Jews, Wachter went on the run. He spent three years hiding in the Austrian Alps before making his way to Rome and being taken in by the Vatican where he remained for three months. While preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline' he died unexpectedly, in July 1949, a few days after having lunch with an 'old comrade' whom he suspected of having been recruited by the Americans. In THE RATLINE Philippe Sands offers a unique account of the daily life of a Nazi fugitive, the love between Wachter and his wife Charlotte, who continued to write regularly to each other while he was on the run, and a fascinating insight into life in the Vatican and among American and Soviet spies active in Rome at the start of the Cold War. Using modern medical expertise, the door is unlocked to a mystery that continues to haunt Wachter's youngest child - what was Wachter doing while in hiding, and what exactly caused his death?
'Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life...' Gabriel Garcia Marquez In 1999, after publishing three cult novels, famous author Nathan Fawles announces the end of his writing career and withdraws to Beaumont, a wild and beautiful island off the Mediterranean coast. Autumn 2018. Over the past twenty years, Fawles has not given a single interview. As his novels continue to captivate readers, Mathilde Monney, a young Swiss journalist, arrives on the island, determined to unlock his secrets. That same day, a woman's body is discovered on the beach and the island is cordoned off by the authorities. And so, begins a dangerous face off between Mathilde and Nathan, in which the line between truth and fiction becomes increasingly blurred...
Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. Many regard this savage civil war as the most influential event of the modern era. An incompatible White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky''s Red Army and Lenin''s single-minded Communist dictatorship. Terror begat terror, which in turn led to even greater cruelty with man''s inhumanity to man, woman and child. The struggle became a world war by proxy as Churchill deployed weaponry and troops from the British empire, while armed forces from the United States, France, Italy, Japan, Poland and Czechoslovakia played rival parts. Using the most up to date scholarship and archival research, Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed international bestseller Stalingrad, assembles the complete picture in a gripping narrative that conveys the conflict through the eyes of everyone from the worker on the streets of Petrograd to the cavalry officer on the battlefield and the woman doctor in an improvised hospital.
We join San in 1970s rural South Korea, a young girl ostracised from her community. She meets a girl called Namae, and they become friends until one afternoon changes everything. Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation. We next meet San, aged twenty-two, as she starts a job in a flower shop. There, we are introduced to a colourful cast of characters, including the shop''s mute owner, the other florist Su-ae, and the customers that include a sexually aggressive businessman and a photographer, who San develops an obsession for. Throughout, San''s moment with Namae lingers in the back of her mind. A story of desire and violence about a young woman who everyone forgot, VIOLETS is a captivating and sensual read, full of tragedy and beauty. "[VIOLETS] binds a spell around the reader until the very end" Park Wanseo "I always find myself acting out the main character in my mind when I read Kyung-Sook Shin''s novels. Reading VIOLETS is like she''s writing a script written perfectly for me" Doona Bae, actor (Netflix''s SENSE8, CLOUD ATLAS) "The story of thwarted desires and the isolated individuals that harbor them... clean prose filled with Shin''s trademark rich descriptions" Korea Economic Daily
The story begins with a parting of the sands - the construction of the Suez Canal in 1869 that united the Mediterranean with the Arabian Sea. It opened the door of opportunity for people living insecurely on the fringes of a turbulent Europe. The Middle East is understood today through the lens of unending conflict and violence. Lost in the litany of perpetual strife and struggle are the layers of culture and civilisation that accumulated over centuries, and which give the region its cosmopolitan identity. It was once a region known poetically as the Levant - a reference to the East, where the sun rose. Amid the bewildering mix of races, religions and rivalries, was above all an affinity with the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Today any mixing of this trinity of faiths is regarded as a recipe for hatred and prejudice. Orthodox Jews in Israel seize land that belongs to Sunni Muslim Arabs; Sunni Muslim Egyptians burn down churches that Egyptian Copts have worshipped in for centuries. It all seems hopelessly irreconcilable. Yet it was not always this way. There was a time, in the last century, when Arabs and Jews rubbed shoulders in bazaars and teashops, worked and played together, intermarried and shared family histories. Michael Vatikiotis''s parents and grandparents were a product of this forgotten pluralist tradition, which spanned almost a century from the mid-1800s to the end of the Second World War in 1945. Following the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the establishment of the European colonial order, deep divisions between sects intensified and Vatikiotis''s family found themselves caught between clashing faiths and contested identities. This is the story of his family - consummate outsiders and people set adrift - who built new lives and prospered in holy lands, only to be caught up in conflict and tossed on the waves of a violent history.
''We are taught that medicine is the art of solving our body''s mysteries. And as a science, we expect medicine to uphold the principles of evidence and impartiality. We want our doctors to listen to us and care for us as people, but we also need their assessments of our pain and fevers, aches and exhaustion to be free of any prejudice about who we are, our gender, or the colour of our skin. But medicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. The history of medicine, of illness, is a history of people, of their bodies and their lives, not just physicians, surgeons, clinicians and researchers. And medical progress has always reflected the realities of a changing world, and the meanings of being human.'' In Unwell Women Elinor Cleghorn unpacks the roots of the perpetual misunderstanding, mystification and misdiagnosis of women''s bodies, and traces the journey from the ''wandering womb'' of ancient Greece, the rise of witch trials in Medieval Europe, through the dawn of Hysteria, to modern day understandings of autoimmune diseases, the menopause and conditions like endometriosis. Packed with character studies of women who have suffered, challenged and rewritten medical orthodoxy - and drawing on her own experience of un-diagnosed Lupus disease - this is a ground-breaking and timely expose of the medical world and woman''s place within it.
There''s something in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, a monster. To the newly minted corporate owners of the island, an opportunity. To the team of three sent to study and protect, a revelation. Here developed, for an unknown number of years, the first known sentient species beyond humans in the modern era. Their minds are unlike ours. Their bodies are malleable, transformable, shifting. They can communicate. And they want us to leave. When pioneering marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen is offered the chance to travel to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a highly intelligent, dangerous octopus species, she doesn''t pause long enough to look at the fine print. She will be the only scientist to have access to these octopuses, who just may hold the key to extrahuman intelligence. DIANIMA- a transnational tech corporation best known for its groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence - has purchased the islands, evacuated their population and sealed the archipelago off from the world so that Nguyen can attempt to understand the octopuses'' sophisticated communications. But she may not have much time. Forces larger and more powerful than DIANIMA want access to the octopuses and are ruthless and innovative in their pursuit. And meanwhile, of course, the octopuses themselves may have something to say about it...
The World by Simon Sebag Montefiore is an accessible fresh history of the world told through families: some famous, some obscure, spanning all eras and all continents. Starting with the first footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago, Montefiore steers us through an interconnected world via palace intrigues, love affairs and family lives. Following history''s themes - war, migration, plague, religion, medicine and technology, it is tethered to the people at the heart of human drama: a cast of extraordinary span and diversity - empresses and conquerors, artists and doctors, husbands, wives and children. There''s Sargon who built the Akkadian empire and his daughter Enheduanna, the first published female poet; Alexander the Great, more ruthless dictator than chivalrous warrior of myth; Hongwu who started as a beggar and founded the Ming dynasty; Ewuare the Leopard-King whose capital Benin rivalled any in Europe; King Henry of Haiti who forged an enlightened realm from a rebel slave colony; Kamehameha conqueror of Hawaii who took on the Europeans; as well as Attila, Genghis Khan, Columbus, Ivan the Terrible, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Freud, Bolivar, Bismarck, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. We meet extraordinary women: Zenobia, the Arab empress who defied Rome, Wu, the self-made empress of China, Lady Murasaki, the first female novelist, Sayyida al-Hurra, Moroccan pirate-queen; Maria Theresa who saved her empire and Sally Hemings the enslaved woman with whom Thomas Jefferson had six children; as well as Thatcher and Indira Gandhi. Here are the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockerfellers, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads - up to Putin and Zelenskyy. All human life is here. A rare, dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World is the story of humanity in all its complexity, told in a single narrative by a master storyteller.
The echo of the great characters and motifs of the novels of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series resonates in the stories of Carlos Ruiz Zafon. A boy decides to become a writer when he discovers that his inventions hold the power to entice the rich girl who has stolen his heart... An architect flees Constantinople with plans for an impregnable library... A strange gentleman tempts Cervantes to write a book that has never existed... And Gaudi, sailing to a mysterious rendezvous in New York, delights in a spectacle of light and steam, the stuff that cities should be made of. Gathered here for the first time - and some never before published in English - these stories showcase the talents of Carlos Ruiz Zafon , a writer beloved by millions of readers and a master who has left us too soon.
This is a visual memoir of Alice Walker's remarkable life as a novelist, essayist, poet and activist in candid photographs, manuscript drafts - including handwritten drafts of The Color Purple - letters and other selections from the personal archive she started keeping when she was 14. These records are framed by an intimate first-person narrative that will make readers feel as though they are having a cup of tea with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author as she shares - in her own unguarded, opinionated and singular voice - the story behind each letter, document and snapshot. Escorting readers on a fascinating journey through five decades of American social history, this literary scrapbook captures important public and private moments from an illustrious and inimitable life.
Five billion people, two-thirds of the world's mega-cities, one-third of the global economy, two-thirds of global economic growth, thirty of the Fortune 100, six of the ten largest banks, eight of the ten largest armies, five nuclear powers, massive technological innovation, the newest crop of top-ranked universities. Asia is also the world's most ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse region of the planet, eluding any remotely meaningful generalization beyond the geographic label itself. Even for Asians, Asia is dizzying to navigate. Whether you gauge by demography, geography, economy or any other metric, Asia is already the present - and it is certainly the future. It is for this reason that we cannot afford to continue to get Asia so wrong. Our Asian Future accurately shows Asia from the inside-out, telling the story of how this mega-region is coming together and reshaping the entire planet in the process.
