Pigeon English
990 kr.Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on a London housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers – the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen – blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him.
With equal fascination for the local gang – the Dell Farm Crew – and the pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival.
But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe.
A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, Pigeon English is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way he falls.
Who Will Tell My Story?: A Gaza Diary
3.990 kr.It was a sleepless night full of tears and fear . . .
I am not sure – if I make it out alive – if I will still possess what makes me, me. And I wonder: will I be there in the future, or will I be someone to be remembered in a diary or over a cup of tea by a friend after I am gone?
Who Will Tell My Story? presents an ordinary existence interrupted by unfathomably seismic and unjust events.
On the ground during the first months of the assault on Gaza following the events of 7 October, the author of this diary – first published in The Guardian – maps out the physical and psychological terrain of a life under siege. Traversing the bombed ruins of his country, we see him as he searches for foodstuffs and power to charge devices, maintaining contact with the outside world, checking in with his friends and family along the way; we see his heart swing between despair and faith, fear and optimism, his mind imagining different futures and confronting the brutal truth of his present. Shining a light on the fate of all those living through war and occupation, Who Will Tell My Story? conveys with astonishing clarity how seeds of hope might linger amid the most trying of times.
Memories of the Future
3.490 kr.Fresh from Minnesota and hungry for all New York has to offer, twenty-three-year-old S.H. embarks on a year that proves both exhilarating and frightening – from bruising encounters with men to the increasingly ominous monologues of the woman next door.
Forty years on, those pivotal months come back to vibrant life when S.H. discovers the notebook in which she recorded her adventures alongside drafts of a novel. Measuring what she remembers against what she wrote, she regards her younger self with curiosity and often amusement.
Anger too, for how much has really changed in a world where the female presidential candidate is called an abomination?
Madame Bovary
3.490 kr.This is the story of Emma, trapped in a disappointing marriage with a dull country doctor, she dreams for a life more like the sentimental novels she reads. In an attempt to break from the drab reality of her provincial life in Normandy, Emma takes a lover, and disaster soon follows. Greedy, delusional and selfish, the character of Emma Bovary scandalised readers from the novel’s first publication in 1857, yet her magnetism is undeniable.
A landmark work in modern realism, Madame Bovary vibrates with the inner life of a woman hungry for more. Meet ten of literature’s most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world.
The History of Love
990 kr.Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother’s loneliness. Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author.
Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the love lost that sixty years ago in Poland inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn’t know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives. . .
Death at the Sanatorium
3.490 kr.High up in the mountains stands a sanatorium. Once a hospital dedicated to treating tuberculosis, it now sits haunted by the ghosts of its past.
One wing of the hospital remains open and houses six employees: the caretaker, two doctors, two nurses and a young research assistant. Despite the wards closing decades ago, they remain at the hospital to conduct research. But the cold corridors, draughty windows and echoey halls are constant reminders of the building’s dark history.
When one of the nurses, Yrsa, is found brutally murdered, they discover that death has never left this place – and neither did its secrets. None can escape this terrifying legacy. Despite just four suspects the case is never solved and remains open for two decades.
Until a young criminologist named Helgi Reykdal attempts to finally lay the ghosts of the hospital’s past to rest . . .
Slags
4.390 kr.Once a slag, always a slag?
It’s the 1990s. Sarah is 15, obsessed with boy bands, sex and getting drunk on Malibu. Most of all, she’s hung up on her teacher, Mr Keaveney.
Fast forward 26 years. Sarah is 41, the last of the party girls. But the mad nights out are losing their shine. And her teenage dreams are now distant, queasy memories.
There’s only one thing for it: an adventure. So, Sarah sets off with her sister Juliette on a whisky-fuelled campervan trip across Scotland.
The sisters have never been alike, but they know all the dark corners of each other’s history – and it’s time to dig up some demons, kicking and screaming.
Because the things that once defined us shouldn’t define us forever, should they?
Your Absence is Darkness
3.690 kr.When a local woman offers to reunite him with her sister, he realises he’s lost not only his bearings, but his memory as well: he doesn’t recognise either woman, and as their stories unfold, he is plunged into a history spanning centuries and lives: a city girl drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze; a farmer’s wife whose essay on the humble earthworm changes the course of lives; a pastor who writes to dead poets and falls in love with a stranger; a musician plagued by cosmic loneliness, who discovers that his life has been a lie; and an alcoholic transfixed by the night sky.
Faced with the violence of destiny and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between lives, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart. An incandescent, audacious novel about the misfortune of mortality and the strange salve of time, Your Absence is Darkness is a spellbinding story of death, desire and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton
Happiness Forever
4.390 kr.A hilarious and utterly original debut novel following a woman trying to make sense of her life and herself as she falls in love with her therapist. Sylvie is only happy when she is at therapy. This is because Sylvie is in love with her therapist.
She wants to kiss her and roll around on the floor with her. She thinks about her every second they’re not together (roughly 167 hours and 10 minutes per week). She’s aware she has an obsession, but whether it is – as her therapist suggests – a case of extreme ‘erotic transference’, or a lost person’s need to connect, Sylvie isn’t sure.
Beyond therapy, Sylvie has what she considers to be a small life: a job as a veterinary nurse, her little brain-damaged dog, Curtains, and a new friend Chloe who she met on the beach. When the therapist delivers some devastating news, Sylvie has to imagine new and lasting ways of coping (that don’t include being adopted by the therapist). Her world has begun to open up, inching beyond the fear that has confined her until now, and she must decide whether she’s ready for a bravery of feeling.
In this stunning debut novel, Adelaide Faith encapsulates the great vulnerability, difficulty and joy of being alive.
hum it on the phone
3.490 kr.The poems in hum it on the phone are made up of fragments from interdisciplinary artist Audrey Roger’s diary entries, notebooks, descriptions of dreams she has had, as well as from a range of found material clipped from exhibition reviews and press releases, national park guidelines, tarot and palmistry readings, walking guides, song lyrics, lifestyle/relationship web articles, fortune teller machine cards, film scripts, breathing techniques from a yoga manual, occult books, and immigration guidelines.
Things in Nature Merely Grow
4.690 kr.A remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James. ‘There is no good way to say this,’ Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. ‘There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged.
My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.’ There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, ‘a single point in a timeline’.
Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving.
As Li writes, ‘The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James.