The year is 1858. Thomas Glover is a gutsy eighteen-year-old who grasps the chance of escape to foreign lands and takes a posting as a trader in Japan. Within ten years he amasses a great fortune, learns the ways of the samurai, and, on the other side of the law, brings about the overthrow of the Shogun. Yet beneath Glover's astonishing success lies a man cut to the heart. His love affair with a courtesan – a woman who, unknown to him, woul ...
This volume gathers together some of the real and the imagined lives of Willa Muir, one of the finest and fiercest intellectuals of her generation. Her writing is rich with paradox – although obsessively Scottish in subject and style, she resented Scotland; although a trenchant champion of feminism, she voluntarily sacrificed her identity to that of the 'poet's wife'; and although she was a committed reformer, she never al ...
Punchy, acerbic, sharp-witted and above-all, acutely observed, Born Free tells the story of an ordinary family who are all trying to escape from something – and each other. The interactions between Jake, Joni, Angie and Vic reveal a hellish cocktail of adolescent and mid-life crises; the savagery of sibling rivalry; the waking nightmare of a marriage gone cold – and, naturally, the unbridgeable, infernal chasm between the generations. It's ...
Ida has a secret: she is in love with her best friend. But any time she gets close to intimacy, Ida faints or loses her voice. She needs a shrink. Or so her philandering father thinks. Immediately wise to the head games of her new shrink, Siggy, Ida – and alter-ego Dora – hatch a plan to secretly film him. But when the film goes viral, Ida finds herself targeted by unethical hackers. Dora: A Headcase is a contemporary coming-of-a ...