Summer, 1972: In the claustrophobic heat, eleven-year-old Byron and his friend begin 'Operation Perfect', a hapless mission to rescue Byron's mother from impending crisis. Winter, present day: As frost creeps across the moor, Jim cleans tables in the local cafe, a solitary figure struggling with OCD.
Conner Raige's ancestors were on the front lines of victory against the Skrel, a long defeated enemy. Now he is one of the United Ranger Corps' most promising young cadets, despite his brash confidence and tendency to act on instinct. But when the Skrel return, a deadly ground war will test him to the limit.
In this tragicomic study of deception and disappointment, Italo Svevo - who himself was an undiscovered writer until his old age - parodies elements of his own life and offers an insightful psychological portrait of a person who has lost touch with reality.
Three years ago Bella Castle left her home town nursing a broken heart over Dominic Thane. Now she's made a new life for herself in the country, working as an estate agent. Bella loves her job and she loves her boyfriend Nevil. And when Dominic turns up unexpectedly, she begins to wonder if home is really where the heart is.
First published in 1997, the story of a great Atlantic storm from the accounts of individual fishing boats, their families waiting anxiously for their return and the rescue services scrambled to save them. High pressure from the Great Lakes, storm winds over Sable Island and a Hurricane from the Caribbean combine to produce the Perfect Storm.
The worst storm in history seem from the wheelhouse of a doomed fishing trawler; a mesmerisingly vivid account of a natural hell from a perspective that offers no escape.
With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, superbly translated by Sophie Hughes, is a brilliantly scathing sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, impossibly bleak.
Los Angeles, December 6, 1941. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. War fever and race hate grip the city and the internment of Japanese Americans begins. When a Japanese family is found brutally murdered, three men and one woman are summoned.
Welcome to Edmundsbury, a small town in England, some time in the recent future. As tensions mount, lives begin to unravel. Jess Ellis's research into internet misogyny pushes her relationship with her over-exposed opinion columnist boyfriend Robert Townsend to breaking point.
In eighteenth-century France there lived a man Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.
A chemist by training, the author became one of the witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In these haunting reflections inspired by the elements of the periodic table, he ranges from young love to political savagery; from the inert gas argon - and 'inert' relatives like the uncle who stayed in bed for twenty-two years - to life-giving carbon.
Flynne Fisher lives in rural near-future America where jobs are scarce and veterans from the wars are finding it hard to recover. She scrapes a living doing some freelance online game-playing, participating in some pretty weird stuff. Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse.
The #1 Catalan bestseller and winner of the Llibreter booksellers prize, Baltasar's novel is a forthright and wickedly funny novel of family relationships and one woman's search for freedom