The City Changes Its Face, Eimear McBride ( hardback Feb 2025)
£20.00
'Eimear McBride does extraordinary things with language . . .she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it.' GUARDIAN
'A typical McBride work. Praise doesn't come much higher.' FINANCIAL TIMES
So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while.
Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine. It's 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by.
But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love.
Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen's teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun.
Now they face a reckoning for all that's been left unspoken - emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud?Love rallies against life. Time tells truths.
The city changes its face.
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The House of Broken Bricks, Fiona WIlliams (paperback Jan 2025)
£9.99
A clever, heartbreaking, heartwarming depiction of family love, grief and the possibility of hope.'JO BROWNING WROE, author of A Terrible Kindness'
Ain't nothing wrong with being broken. Nothing at all. You're like these houses, not a whole brick in em and look how strong they are. As Tess traces the sunrise over the floodplains, light that paints the house a startling crimson, she yearns for the comforting chaos of life as it once was. Instead of Max and Sonny tracking dirt through the kitchen - Tess and Richard's 'rainbow twins' - Tess absorbs the quiet.
The nights draw in, the soil cools and Richard fights to get his winter crops planted rather than deal with the discussion he cannot bear to have. Secrets and vines clamber over the broken red bricks and although its inhabitants seem to be withering, in the damp, crumbling soil Sonny knows that something is stirring . .
As the seasons change, and the cracks let in more light, the family might just be able to start to heal. This is the story of a broken family, what they see and what they cannot say laid bare in their overlapping perspectives.
Fiona Williams' stunning nature-writing and poetic prose, turns a relatively simple story into a hauntingly beautiful experience. ( Paperback from January 2025)
After A Dance, Bridget O’Connor (paperback Feb 2025)
£10.99
After a Dance is the compiled collection of short stories from acclaimed writer Bridget O'Connor, with an exclusive preface from the author's daughter, Constance Straughan. Bridget O'Connor was one of the great short story writers of her generation. She had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday.In After A Dance, we meet a selection of O'Connor's most memorable characters often living on the margin of their own lives: from the anonymous thief set on an unusual prize to the hungover best man clinging to what he's lost, to the unrepentant gold-digger who always comes out on top. From unravelling narcissists to melancholy romantics all human life is here - at its best and at its delightful worst.
The Women, Kristin Hannah ( paperback Feb 2025)
£9.99
The Women is a story of devastating loss and epic love. It would be the journey of a lifetime. . .. ‘Women can be heroes, too’. When twenty-year-old nursing student, Frances “Frankie” McGrath, hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation.
Raised on California’s idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different path for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurses Corps and follows his path.
As green and inexperienced as the young men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed America.
Martyr! Kaveh Akbar (paperback from 6 Feb 2025)
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This book is thrilling. It's like watching the novel itself be reinvented' - Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake'This book vibrates with love of life, beauty and language. I’m in awe...' - Natalie Portman
Cyrus Shams is lost. Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life. When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past – an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an Angel of Death, a haunting work of art by an exiled painter – he finds himself once again caught up in the story of his mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed.
As Cyrus searches for meaning in the scattered clues of his life, a final revelation transforms everything he thought he knew. Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! was an instant New York Times bestseller w/c 27/1/24
