General

Native Tongue: A hilarious black crime comedy starring PR man Joe Winder, who winds up on the trail of some butter-fingered thugs who’ve stolen his precious blue-tongued mango voles… Strip Tease: When corrupt and lecherous congressman Dave Dilbeck throws himself at stripper Erin Grant on stage at the tastefully named Eager Beaver, little does he realise that he’s opening himself up to blackmail. Can Malcolm ‘Moldy’ Moldowsky save Dilbeck’s face? Erin has other plans…

Alice Marlowe accepts her life the way it is. She is single, lives with a cat called Sampson, and has imaginary conversations with her dead twin brother. As a sign language interpreter for the deaf, she is used to standing between people, facilitating their conversations with each other. But then a late night phone call brings a beautiful, scared six-year-old girl into her life. And seeing herself through a child’s eyes for the first time, she discovers that love is a universal language.

“Fairly crackles with the static charge of childish sexuality…a delightful and poignant masterpiece of narrative control. Chase understands and honours the deepest and most unutterable of human passions, the dangerous desires that drive the heart to crave the company of wolves. This extraordinarily beautiful novel conveys them perfectly” – Rachael Kerr, Literary Review

John Grisham’s _A Painted House” describes, in his own words, the life of 7 year old Luke Chandler, an Arkansas farm boy growing up in the midst of the cotton fields. Luke is full of curiosity and mischief, as he witnesses life around him, causing him to make very adult decisions about keeping secrets. You will fall in love with the characters. This book will make you laugh and make you cry.

After a tragic accident involving his mother, and the disappearance of his father, young Davie flees his hometown of Blackburn, unsure of what the future holds. Devastated, he must escape the haunting memories of the worst night in his young life. With little more than the shirt on his back and a fierce determination to find his father, he sets off on a lonely, friendless road. Back home, those Davie has left behind wait anxiously; Kathleen, his childhood friend who has held a secret close to her heart these past few years, and Joseph, his grandfather whose guilt at the events that dreadful night burns right to his soul. Will they ever see Davie again?

A novel based on real diaries and interviews with survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima, Black Rain probes deeply into the emotional significance of nuclear attack on ordinary people. A serious-minded Japanese businessman, his gentle childless wife, and their beloved niece, Yasuko, remember with understated horror the day that changed their lives and the world.

Rob Fleming is a London record store owner in his 30s whose girlfriend, Laura, has just left him. At the record shop — named Championship Vinyl — Rob and his employees Dick and Barry spend their free moments discussing mix-tape aesthetics and constructing “top-five” lists of anything that demonstrates their knowledge of music.
Rob, recalling his five most memorable breakups, sets about getting in touch with the former girlfriends. Eventually, Rob’s re-examination of his failed relationships and the death of Laura’s father bring the two of them back together. Their relationship is cemented by the launch of a new purposefulness to Rob’s life in the revival of his disc jockey career.
Also, realizing that his fear of commitment (a result of his fear of death of those around him) and his tendency to act on emotion are responsible for his continuing desires to pursue new women, Rob makes a symbolic commitment to Laura.

In India, in 1575, Thomas Coryat, English surgeon and rationalist, searches for a cure for his dying wife. With him is his boyhood friend, Frog, a lustful priest seeking to save the souls of those he loathes. Confronting them is an alien world: the exotic, violent India of the Mogul Empires, a world of peasants and lords, courts and villages, warriors and travelling players, warlords and princesses.

It is the turn of the twentieth century and war is razing the Boer Republics of South Africa to the ground. Kitchener’s army has intensified its most barbarous campaign: to burn down the homes of thousands of obstinate Boers, forcing a desperate migration to disease-ridden concentration camps. Yet the vastly outnumbered Boers still will not surrender to the British. The arena of war is considered to be no place for a lady, but in the midst of these horrors is a group of women, each fighting their own battle. Sarah Palmer is an angelically pretty nurse who arrives from England with her plump, madcap friend Louise, intending to work with wounded British soldiers, but also to escape the constraints of home. Their relationship is threatened when Sarah falls deeply in love with a sick Colonial trooper of humble origin as Louise cannot help but become painfully jealous of her friend’s natural magnetism and beauty. And then arrives the dynamic Englishwoman, Emily Hobhouse, who has come to bring succour to the destitute and dying women and children and to stir the consciences of Britain over the holocaust of the camps. As their dramas unfold, so too does the history of the war – the events that turned what was intended to be a quick annexation of the Boer Republics into a protracted, savage conflict; the involvement of the South African blacks promised the vote if they joined the British side; and the injustices and deep inequalities in South Africa which lie at the heart of the story. No Place for a Lady is historical fiction at its finest. Ann Harries has drawn unforgettable characters and made the period with all its complexities come vividly alive. This is a thrilling, beautifully written, utterly compelling novel.

Released from a prison sentence for manslaughter, Sidney returns home to West Virginia, where, to exorcise the memory of the lover he killed, he must keep his appointment with destiny in the shape of the man known as “the Renderer”. A cult book that Derek Jarman planned to film, this “dark and splendid affair by an authentic American genius” (Gore Vidal) is a shattering novel of sexual passion in the remote Appalachians, and a journey into the dark night of the American soul.