Literary Fiction Political

When the great Thomas Hardy published this heart-wrenching novel, he had no idea it would be his last. But the book stirred so much controversy and protest, Hardy vowed to never write fiction again. Jude the Obscure tells the story of a stonemason, tricked into a loveless marriage, who craves a formal education and a finer existence. Separated from his wife, Jude begins a new life with his cousin, and the couple defies social convention at every turn.

On Friday, May 1st, 2015 a bomb detonates in the infamous Positano Luxury Resort and Casino, a mammoth hotel (and exact replica of the Amalfi coast) on the Las Vegas Strip. Six months prior, a crop of strivers converge on the desert city, attempting to make a home amidst the dizzying lights. By chance and by design, they find themselves caught up in backroom schemes for personal and political power, and are thrown into the deep end of an even bigger fight for the soul of the paradoxical town.

When Alabine Rivers, a politically active young woman with a bright career and romance ahead of her, finds out the devastating news that she has terminal cancer, the only thing that gives her solace is the possibility of a second life through the emerging field of cryogenics.

The first of two-part novel, Itzel I tells the story of three disparate characters swept up in the drama of the Mexican student movement of 1968 whose ending in the Massacre in Tlatelolco on October 2nd, a date now always commemorated in Mexico, changed their lives forever. Broad in scope and exuberant in style in the best tradition of Latin American literature, this book roots its readers in the ebullience of Mexico's daily life and language, even as they are made to confront the horrors of history, to examine the difficulties of friendship and family.

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.

Egypt, 1914. It is the beginning of the war and Gareth Owen, Mamur Zapt and Head of Cairo’s Secret Police, is given the unhappy task of rounding up enemy aliens. But, in a land where adoption of foreign nationality is a popular means of avoiding trial by an Egyptian court, determining who counts as German proves contentious. And then there’s the face in the cemetery.

The Mexican American War has ended, but in a California divided between two nations, Anglo squatters continue to antagonize citizens of Mexican descent by making claims on their land. Against this charged backdrop, the lives of the Alamar family - the rightful owners of a San Diego ranch - become politically, economically, and romantically entwined with a family of New England settlers, the Darrells. Inspired by experiences in her own life, Ruiz de Burton insightfully captured a troubling time in American history - a period of intense corruption, greed, racism, and classism.

Set against the rise and fall of the radical antiwar group the Weather Underground, The Company You Keep is a sweeping American saga about sacrifice, the ecstatic righteousness of youth, and the tension between political ideals and family loyalties. When Jason Sinai, one of the last Vietnam-era fugitives still wanted on murder charges for a robbery gone wrong in 1974, encounters a young newspaper reporter in search of a story, he must abandon years of safe underground life for the dangerous life of the road.

Somewhere in the United Kingdom, an eight year old boy is removed from his home in the middle of the night. He is a victim of an extraordinary experiment. In an attempt to reform society, the government has divided the population into four groups, each group representing a different personality type.

It was morning and the power was not yet on. Zach and Renee lay in the heat of the bed listening to the city wake outside the building’s windows. Water rations are down to one gallon per person per day...the mayor is proposing digging a trench to the Pacific Ocean...dried out West Coast cities are crumbling and being abandoned by the east...and in Portland, Oregon, water is declared a communal right but hoarding and riots persist. Amidst this, a young water activist nicknamed Maid Marian becomes a hero.

A dazzling, compassionate and deeply moving audiobook from one of world literature's rising stars. A mesmerising literary novel, Questions of Travel charts two very different lives. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events. Around these two superbly drawn characters, a double narrative assembles an enthralling array of people, places and stories.

A wonderful, warm novel from a major new American voice. In The Art of Fielding, we see young men who know that their four years on the baseball diamond at Westish College are all that remain of their sporting careers. Only their preternaturally gifted fielder, Henry Skrimshander, seems to have the chance to keep his dream – and theirs, vicariously – alive, until a routine throw goes disastrously off course, and the fates of five people are upended.

In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family's generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president of the United States.

At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose’s suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village. Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives....

Matthew Stone has inherited a troubling legacy: a gangster grandfather and a distant father - who is also a disgraced judge. After his father's death, Matthew is a young man alone. He turns to his father's beloved books for comfort, perceiving within them guidance that leads him to connect with a group of religious extremists. As Matthew immerses himself in this unfamiliar world, the FBI seeks his assistance to foil the group's violent plot.

Il romanzo narra la storia di Pablo, un giovanotto piccolo-borghese che trascorre tutto il suo tempo dietro il banco di un negozio dove si vendono tabacchi e alla sera suona la chitarra con gli amici. Pablo però si sente solo soprattutto dopo che l'amico Amelio ha avuto un grave incidente con la moto insieme a Linda, la sua ragazza, e non può più muovere le gambe.

Road Trip Feeling, Romance & US-WahlkampfClarissa ist vor 10 Jahren nach Europa ausgewandert. Weil es mit dem russischen Ivan nicht klappte, flieht sie in ihre amerikanische Heimat, wo sie sich vom Liebeskummer erholen will. In Miami ist von Erholung allerdings keine Spur: Denn Clarissa findet sich mitten im amerikanischen Wahlkampf wieder, in den sie sich mehr und mehr (romantisch) verstrickt. Wunderbar ironisch zeichnet Irene Dische das Portrait einer jungen Emigrantin, die von sich selbst sagt: "Sich verlieben können ist eine Begabung, und ich habe sie."

Prague in the 1950s is a city of numerous small terrors, of political tyranny, corruption, and surveillance. There is no way of knowing whether one's neighbor is spying for the government, or what one's supposed friend will say under pressure to a state security agent. A loyal party member might be imprisoned or executed as quickly as a traitor; innocence means nothing for a person caught in a government trap.

Samuel has lived alone on an island off the coast of an unnamed African country for more than two decades. He tends to his garden, his lighthouse, and his chickens, content with a solitary life. Routinely, the nameless bodies of refugees wash ashore, but Samuel—who understands that the government only values certain lives, certain deaths—always buries them himself. One day, though, he finds that one of these bodies is still breathing.

For years, Amira—a recent convert to Islam living in Rome—has gone to work, said her prayers, and struggled to piece together her husband’s redacted letters from the Moroccan black site where he is imprisoned. She moves as inconspicuously as possible through her modest life, doing her best to avoid the whispered curiosity of her community.