Sex, money, and politics are the driving forces of society in this new novel from bestselling author Alaa Al Aswany.A medley of Egyptian and American lives collides on the campus of the University of Illinois Medical Center in a post-9/11 Chicago, and crises of identity abound. Among the players are an atheistic anti-establishment American professor of the sixties generation, whose relationship with a younger African-American woman becomes a mov ...
This Booker Prize-winning novel from the author of ‘The Blue Flower’ is set among the houseboat community of the Thames.‘Offshore’ is a dry, genuinely funny novel, set among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither…Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom all the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can’ ...
’A contemporary masterpiece’ GuardianTHE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY – NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAACFor thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border – an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has s ...
Robert Maitland, a 35 year-old architect, is driving home from his London offices when a blow-out sends his speeding Jaguar hurtling out of control. Smashing through a temporary barrier he finds himself, dazed and disorientated, on a traffic island below three converging motorways. But when he tries to climb the embankment or flag-down a passing car for help it proves impossible – and he finds himself imprisoned on the concrete island. In this t ...
The book John Kelly reads every time he gets a promotion to remind him of ‘the perils of hubris, the pitfalls of patriotism and duty unaccompanied by critical thinking’The most vivid, moving – and devastating – word-portrait of a World War One British commander ever written, here re-introduced by Max Hastings.C.S. Forester’s 1936 masterpiece follows Lt General Herbert Curzon, who fumbled a fortuitous early step on the path to glory in the Boer W ...
The bestselling novel, now in ebook, from international literary phenomenon Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist.A chance meeting in Rio takes Maria to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune, yet ends up working the streets as a prostitute. In Geneva, Maria drifts further and further away from love while at the same time developing a fascination with sex.Eventually, Maria's despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets ...
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2000. Part travel diary, part philosophy, part love story, ‘Soul Mountain’ is an elegant, unforgettable novel that journeys deep into the heart of modern-day China.In 1982 Chinese playwright, novelist and artist Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer, the very disease that had killed his father. For six weeks Gao inhabited a transcendental state of imminent death, treating himself to the finest foods ...
As he searches for the truth behind the Heathrow bomb that killed his ex-wife, psychologist David Markham infiltrates a shadowy protest group based in the comfortable Chelsea Marina.Led by a charismatic doctor, it aims to rouse the docile middle classes and to free them from the burdens of civic responsibility. Soon Markham is swept up in a campaign that spirals out of control – as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing pa ...
The new book from Alaa Al Aswany, author of the international bestsellers The Yacoubian Building and ChicagoFriendly Fire is a novella and collection of short stories from Alaa Al Aswany, author of the bestselling The Yacoubian Building. As in that novel, Al Aswany dissects modern Egyptian society and reveals with skill and detachment the hypocrisy, violence and abuse of power characteristic of a world in moral crisis. Here, though, the focus ha ...