Weather, Jenny Offil ( paperback Jan 2021)
£9.99
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
An obligatory note of hope, in a world going to hell. Lizzie Benson, a part-time librarian, is already overwhelmed with the crises of daily life when an old mentor offers her a job answering mail from the listeners of her apocalyptic podcast, Hell and High Water. Soon questions begin pouring in from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of Western civilization. Entering this polarized world, Lizzie is forced to consider who she is and what she can do to help: as a mother, as a wife, as a sister, and as a citizen of this doomed planet.
* Linda's note : the blurb for this book is not very encouraging! But it's actually full of hope, humour and just the absurdity of the everyday. I enjoyed it!
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Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy ( paperback Nov 2025)
£9.99
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL
A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A storm gathering force.
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world's largest seed bank. As Shearwater risks being lost to rising sea levels, the island's researchers have fled, and only the Salts remain. Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore.
The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn't telling the whole truth about why she's there. And when Rowan stumbles upon sabotaged radios and a recently dug grave, she realises that she's not the only one on the island with a secret. A novel of breathtaking twists and dizzying beauty, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love.
On the Road, Jack Kerouac ( paperback 2018, first written 1951)
£9.99
Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins his hero, the mystical traveller Dean Moriarty, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream.
A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilarating novel swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion. One of the most influential and important novels of the 20th century, this is the book that launched the Beat Generation and remains the bible of that literary movement.
Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre ( paperback 2003)
£9.99
Won the Booker Prize in 2003!
The riotous adventures of fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little' begins the blurb. You would be mistaken for believing the pages contain a merry, light-hearted tale of an adolescent boy's stereotypical adventures. In fact, DBC Pierre's debut proves a much subtler, darkly comic affair.
Although the reader does indeed get to witness the protagonist's passing into manhood, Pierre's style is far from the typical `romance of youth' story. Most striking throughout the book is the superb use of language, which happily grasps at the fact that modern day teenagers are not as eloquently spoken as yester generations may wish. Most pages contain a good dose of foul language, executed maturely for the most part.
The vernacular of central Texas, not just foul, is excellently represented. You are immediately thrown into trying to make sense of the strong southern accent Pierre so faithfully writes in; "I'll remind you that, stuss-tistically...", "Don't tell me you weren't close to the Meskin boy.". At first this a little hard to get to grips with, sounding the word out in your mind being the quickest way of grasping certain words or phrases. However by the end of first chapter Pierre has provided the reader with a firm vocabulary base and the faithful language truly adds to the depth and general roundedness of the inhabitants of Martirio, Texas.
We are introduced to the `barbecue sauce capital of central Texas' town by Vernon himself. A fifteen going on sixteen year old boy. The first person narrative stays true to the mind of an adolescent boy throughout the book, with persistent, imaginative off shoots from Vernon's hormone filled brain. Such tangents include all the typical things a young boy is concerned with; drugs, money, Taylor Figueroa's bikini `panties' and the `knife' of humiliation his mother has placed firmly in his back. Not so typical are the haunting memories of his deceased `Meskin' friend Jesus Navarro.
One Tuesday, tragedy strikes Martirio. Jesus Navarro shoots dead sixteen of his classmates before turning the gun on himself. When developments are made into the investigation in the form of an alleged second firearm linked to Vernon, his world spirals. The whole country seems ignorant of his innocence, from his mother and her overweight `Desperate Housewives' wannabe friends, to the sinister reporter who sees the young boy as his ladder to the top, Eulalio Ledesma.
The subsequent plot at first develops fairly slowly. The majority of the book consists of Vernon describing the life and characters of his hometown. Not until the final third of the pages does the story develop into some form of real excitement in Vernon's bid for Mexico and the life of a fugitive on the run. Tackling difficult issues as death, adolescence and depression, managing to layer it with a good helping of comedy is refreshing and makes for a read well worth a few hours of anybody's time.
I write to find out what I am thinking,Joan Didion ( Everyman Classic Hardback, August 2025)
£17.99
This hardcover omnibus edition of Didion's collected nonfiction contains her final four books: Blue Nights, South and West, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and her bestselling and most famous work, The Year of Magical Thinking In her essay “Why I Write” (included in this volume), Joan Didion explained what lies behind her iconic nonfiction writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” Across her long and prolific career, readers have been blessed time and again by her brilliance as a prose stylist and a social commentator. Form her unforgettable reckonings with grief (for her husband in The Year of Magical Thinking and for her daughter in Blue Nights), to her exploration of two iconic regions of America in South and West, through the indelible pieces of reporting collected from across her career in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the books collected here show Didion at her best: bearing witness to our history, illuminating our culture, and shedding light on the human condition.
