Caught between her beloved father, the Merlin of Britain, and Arthur Pendragon, the old ways and the new, Wren must find a way to balance the forces of Chaos with peace. She nurtures the land and the people, creating a haven for anyone displaced by the turbulence. And for the safety of all she must guard her heart against the deep love she shares with Arthur, a married king who holds the future of all the Britons in his hands with his sword.
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s stunning internationally acclaimed bestseller, is set in mid-1970s India. It tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a “State of Internal Emergency.” Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances – and their fates – become inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen. Mistry’s prose is alive with enduring images and a cast of unforgettable characters. Written with compassion, humour, and insight, A Fine Balance is a vivid, richly textured, and powerful novel written by one of the most gifted writers of our time.
"Balancing acts," writes Adam Phillips, "are entertaining because they are risky, but there are situations in which it is more dangerous to keep your balance than to lose it." In these exhilarating and casually brilliant essays, the philosopher and psychoanalyst examines literature, fairy tales, works of art, and case studies to reveal the paradoxes inherent in our appetites and fears. How do we know when enough is enough? Are there times when too much is just right? Why is Cinderella's biggest problem not the prince but other women? What can Richard III's furious sense of his own helplessness tell us of our own desires? On Balance shows Phillips's bravura gift for linking disparate ideas and the dreamers that dreamed them into something beautiful, revelatory, and essential.
15-year-old Zahra has lived in England most of her life, but she is haunted by memories of her early childhood in Africa: the warm sun, the loud gunfire, and happy days playing with her older sister before "the visitors" came. It is hard for Zahra to make sense of everything that happened, and the terrible events are impossible to talk about, but when three familiar women arrive unexpectedly for tea, Zahra realises that the dangers of the past could still destroy her. What Was Never Said is the powerful story of a girl navigating the demands of two very different and conflicting worlds; a tale of surviving loss and overcoming fears.
Winner of the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice Award Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award Shortlisted for the 2018 Pigott Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2018 Roehampton Poetry Prize Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability, Sinéad Morrissey's sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance and inbalance that have shaped our history. The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland - the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane - celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in 'Articulation' we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon s horse, Marengo, 'whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz', suspended in time 'for however long he lasts before he crumbles'.
For actor Toby Flood, Brighton is the final week of a long tour. One night he is visited at the theatre by his estranged wife, Jenny, who, visibly scared, thinks she is being stalked. She asks Toby, for old times' sake, to find out what is going on. Alarmingly he discovers a sinister connection with Jenny's new partner. Spurred on by a desire to win Jenny back, Toby begins to ask some difficult questions. Before he fully understands the risks he is running, he finds himself caught up in a mysterious - and dangerous - tangle of family rivalries and murderous intent. Suddenly the prospects for his survival start to look very far from good...
Banned from the Valley of the Kings, Amelia Peabody and her distinguished husband have returned to England with their 19-year-old son Ramses and their foster daughter, Nefret. Ramses is secretly in love with Nefret and plans to flee to Germany to avoid temptation. Then a mysterious visitor changes the plan for the whole family. Set in the Sudan, this is another exciting adventure which follows the Peabody family as they confront all the forces against them armed only with a crumbling map and an important letter...
With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.
"Quite simply, one of those books that will make this world - our world, our daily chemical-preservative, plastic-wrapped bread - a little more tolerable, a little more human." - Frank McConnell, Los Angeles Times Book Review “Later than usual one summer morning in 1984 . . .” On California’s fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of sixties survivors and refugees from the “Nixonian Reaction,” still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches that his old nemesis, sinister federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed Justice Department strike force. Zoyd instantly disappears underground, but not before dispatching his teenage daughter Prairie on a dark odyssey into her secret, unspeakable past. . . . Freely combining disparate elements from American popular culture—spy thrillers, ninja potboilers, TV soap operas, sci-fi fantasies—Vineland emerges as what Salman Rushdie has called in The New York Times Book Review “that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years.”
A BuzzFeed "Best Book of June 2021" From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it. Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of a year in Dara’s Northern Ireland home patch. Beginning in spring?when “the sparrows dig the moss from the guttering and the air is as puffed out as the robin’s chest?these diary entries about his connection to wildlife and the way he sees the world are vivid, evocative, and moving. As well as Dara’s intense connection to the natural world, Diary of a Young Naturalist captures his perspective as a teenager juggling exams, friendships, and a life of campaigning. We see his close-knit family, the disruptions of moving and changing schools, and the complexities of living with autism. “In writing this book,” writes Dara, “I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child’s eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.” Winner of the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing and already sold into more than a dozen territories, Diary of a Young Naturalist is a triumphant debut from an important new voice.
