Literary Fiction Political

Set against the backdrop of Argentina's Dirty War and infused with magical realism, The Blue Line is a breathtaking story of love and betrayal by one of the world's most renowned writers and activists. Ingrid Betancourt, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Even Silence Has An End, draws on history and personal experience in this deeply felt portrait of a woman coming of age as her country falls deeper and deeper into chaos.

The unexpected discovery in 2009 of a completed manuscript of Claude McKay's final novel was celebrated as one of the most significant literary events in recent years. Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay's life and work, this colorful, dramatic novel centers on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history.

Life in a Palestinian refugee camp is filled with poverty, and hopeless frustration at the best of times - and 2001 is far from the best of times. Muhammad, already scarred by violence and tragedy, is plunged into depression when the frequent curfews make it impossible for him to find work. He can no longer face the thought of crossing the military checkpoint, but all available jobs are on the other side. His inability to provide for his family drives him to despair.

When Beth arrives in DC, she hates everything about it: the confusing traffic circles, the ubiquitous Ann Taylor suits, the humidity that descends each summer. At dinner parties, guests compare their security clearance levels. They leave their BlackBerrys on the table. They speak in acronyms. And once they realize Beth doesn't work in politics, they smile blandly and turn away.

Jamie McAlister has resigned herself to the fact that in this job market, her painfully expensive degree might only get her a position at Starbucks, when she suddenly lands a prestigious internship at the White House. Although she doesn’t hit it off with the other interns, she is eager to work hard and make the best of the opportunity while it lasts. An unexpected encounter late one evening with the charismatic President Gregory Rutland seems like just a fleeting flirtation, but when he orchestrates clandestine meetings and late-night phone calls, their relationship quickly escalates....

Wry, moving, beautifully observed and politically astute, this latest audiobook from one of New Zealand's finest chroniclers pinpoints universal truths through very NZ lives. Life isn't always like it appears in the movies. In 1952 Irene Sandle takes her young daughter to Motueka. Irene was widowed during the war and is seeking a new start and employment in the tobacco fields. There, she finds the reality of her life far removed from the glamour of the screen.

Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako's ship is captured, it is not long before the atmostphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on the cello....

In one story we follow a group of starving, near-feral Eurasian refugees on a harrowing quest for survival; in the other we follow Pontus Beg, a policeman from a small border town on the steppe, as he investigates the death of a rabbi, one of the town's two remaining Jews. What follows is a gripping saga in which the two stories race toward each other, and Beg will be shaken to his core by what each one reveals about man's dark nature and the possibility - or impossibility - of his own redemption.

This is the story of five marriages and one gun. A British couple wonders at the unknowable city beyond their guarded compound while they build walls between themselves. An American suspects his new home is having an insidious effect on his "African queen" and their young daughter. An enthusiastic young intellectual follows his wife to the city and finds only disillusion. An intelligence officer loses a crucial piece of evidence. It will cost him his marriage, his girlfriend, and maybe his life.

Layla James, a recent graduate and budding photographer, never knew anything about her father except that he named her for the iconic song by Eric Clapton. Her mother - steeped in a political activism that Layla rejects - kept their past shrouded in secrecy, and when she dies of cancer, she leaves only an enigmatic letter - the first in a series that will lead Layla through a cross-country network of '60s radicals and closer to the bombshell at the heart of her parents' past.

Roaming India in 1939 and the early 1940s, two flawed but extraordinary men latch onto each other with shocking consequences as each follows an ill-fated quest for “enlightenment.” Moses, a Polish Jew, is fleeing both the Nazis and his own failed marriage; Sahadeva, an itinerant Hindu monk, is trying to resolve his crisis of religious belief. Both men find themselves embroiled in hardship, shame, and chaos, stumbling into scandal and ultimately tragedy.

Set in a fictitious post-colonial African nation, the discovery of the body of a drowned prostitute leads to an exploration of the conflict between an individual and the modern African state. A gripping study of truth, silence, and the abuse of power. A young woman runs into the sea and drowns. The last man who spoke to her, a curious individual known as Bukuru, is asked to account for her suicide. His shocking revelations land him in court.

She is a painter. He is a poet. Their art bridges time.

It is 1978. Merle is in her first year at the Corcoran School of Art, catapulted from her impoverished Appalachian upbringing into a sophisticated, dissipated art scene. It is also 1870. The teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud is on the verge of breaking through to the images and voice that will make his name. The meshed power of words and art thins the boundaries between the present and the past—and allows these two troubled, brilliant artists to enter each other’s worlds.

Timely and unique, Jia is the first novel about present-day North Korea to be published in the West. It is easily a YA crossover novel as Jia follows the adventures of an orphaned young woman, Jia in the 1970s and 1980s - bitterly tumultuous times for North Korea and China. Jia has the grace of a dancer but the misfortune of coming from a politically suspect family.

Published at the height of the McCarthy era, Norman Mailer's audacious novel of socialism is at once an elegy and an indictment, a sinuous moral thriller and an intellectual slugfest. Wounded during World War II, Mike Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But when Lovett rents a room in Brooklyn, he finds that his housemates have secrets of their own: one betrays a husband no one ever sees; another may have been a Communist executioner.

The year is 2002. Weekly news magazines dominate the political agenda in New York and Washington. A young journalist named Michael M. Hastings is an intern at The Magazine, wet behind the ears, the only one in the office who has actually read his coworkers' books. He will stop at nothing to turn his internship into a full-time position and has figured out just who to impress: Nishant Patel, the international editor, and Sanders Berman, managing editor - both vying for the job of editor-in-chief.

Set in Iran at the end of the 19th century in the Persian royal court of the Qajars, In the Palace of Flowers is an atmospheric historical novel about Jamila, an Abyssinian slave who stands at the funeral of a Persian nobleman, watching the rites with empty eyes. In that very moment, she realizes that her life will never be acknowledged or mourned with the same significance. The fear of being forgotten, of being irrelevant, sets her and Abimelech, a fellow Abyssinian slave and a eunuch, on a path to find meaning.

1964. Ceylon is on the brink of change. But Kairo is at a loose end. School is closed, the government is in disarray, the press is under threat and the religious right are flexing their muscles. Kairo’s hard-working mother blows off steam at her cha-cha-cha classes; his Trotskyite father grumbles over the state of the nation between his secret flutters on horseraces in faraway England. All Kairo wants to do is hide in his room and flick over second-hand Westerns and superhero comics, or escape on his bicycle and daydream.

June 26, 1947. Headlines across America report that an aviator from Idaho witnessed nine pulsating lights flying over the Cascade Mountains at speeds surpassing any aircraft built by humankind. Days later, a desperate Chicago pool hustler, inspired by the news, hitchhikes west in a fever-dream search for a possible extraterrestrial sign. From those he inspires along the way to the Cascades comes a new community - “The Seekers” - devoted to creating a society where divisions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are a thing of the past.

Yada wächst als Bürgerin einer schwimmenden Stadt in der Ostsee auf. Ihr Vater, ein libertärer Tech-Unternehmer, hat die Seestadt als Rettung vor dem Chaos entworfen, in dem die übrige Welt versinkt. In den Jahren seit ihrer Gründung ist ihr Glanz vergangen, Algen und Moos überwuchern die einst spiegelnden Flächen. Yadas Vater fürchtet, sie könne das Schicksal ihrer Mutter ereilen, die vor ihrem Tod an einer rätselhaften Krankheit litt. Und Yada macht eines Tages eine Entdeckung, die alles ins Wanken bringt.