Big Swiss
3.490 kr.Greta liked knowing people’s secrets. That wasn’t a problem. Until she met Big Swiss. Big Swiss. That’s Greta’s nickname for her – she is tall, and she is from Switzerland.
Well that’s how Greta imagines her; they haven’t actually met in person. Nor has Greta actually ever been to Switzerland. What Greta doesn’t know is that she’s about to bump into Big Swiss in the local dog park. A new – and not entirely honest – relationship is going to be born.
A relationship that will transform both of their lives . . .
Ariel
4.690 kr.‘The world is blood-hot and personal’: in her moving and illuminating introduction, the poet Emily Berry remembers her own teenage encounters with Ariel and offers a personal way into this definitive collection. She shows us how Plath can crystallize our most volatile emotions, transforming them into images so potent and precise that they resonate with us all. Plath has been an inspiration to successive generations; her influence, enduring and profound.
‘If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.’ A. Alvarez, Observer, 1965
North
4.390 kr.This edition of Seamus Heaney’s seminal fourth collection North, reproduced in its elegant first setting and in its original jacket, marks fifty years since first publication in 1975. By conjuring aspects of a shared Northern European experience – its peculiar landscapes and weathers, its sea-faring incursions, the vernaculars of its buried and living peoples – Heaney found a way of articulating a vision of Ireland in which the disruptions and violences of the Troubles could be reflected too.
Parade
3.490 kr.Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down.
In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street.
A mother dies. A man falls to his death. Couples seek escape in distant lands.
The new novel from one of the most distinctive writers of the age, Parade sets loose a carousel of lives. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell a true story – about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves.
The Mark
3.490 kr.The Icelandic Psychological Association has prepared a test. They call it a sensitivity assessment: a way of measuring a person’s empathy and identifying the potential for anti-social behaviour.
In a few days’ time, Iceland will vote on whether to make the test compulsory for every citizen. The nation is bitterly divided. Some believe the test makes society safer; others decry it as a violation.
As the referendum draws closer, four people – Vetur, Eyja, Tristan and Ólafur – find themselves caught in the teeth of the debate. Each of them will have to reckon with uncomfortable questions: Where do the rights of society end and the rights of the individual begin? When does utopia become dystopia?No matter which side wins, they will all have to find a way to live with the result.
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
3.490 kr.In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow – antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter.
This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow – antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss gives way to memories, the little unit of three starts to heal.
Max Porter’s extraordinary debut – part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief – marked the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent. Ten years on, readers continue to discover and fall in love with Grief is the Thing With Feathers.
Intermezzo
3.490 kr.Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
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On the Calculation of Volume II
3.990 kr.Tara Selter is searching for a way back into time. Tara has been stuck in the 18th of November for over a year’s worth of days. She still wakes up to the same newspapers, and the same blank faces when she explains that she has seen this all before.
Until one morning, she boards a train and finds herself in a new day. It is still the eighteenth of November, but the faces are different, the weather is colder. She realises that she has found a way out of her endless autumn.
By moving across Europe rather than through time, she can collect the ingredients for the seasons: the thin film of ice on puddles, the fresh spring breeze, the blazing summer sun. As she travels, she begins to hope for a new future, one that will run in parallel to the eighteenth of November, one that she must build for herself.
On the Calculation of Volume I
3.990 kr.Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.
She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand – the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced. But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain.
As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape.
Molloy
3.190 kr.Molloy, a sordid, bedridden vagrant, recalls a long bicycle ride in search of his mother. He describes sucking on stones, falling in love, getting arrested, killing a dog. Moran, a private detective, sets out to look for Molloy. But as Moran’s physical and mental state deteriorate, his narrative starts to mirror Molloy’s in mysterious ways.
Molloy is the first of the three great novels Samuel Beckett produced during his ‘frenzy of writing’ in the late 1940s. The others are Malone Dies and The Unnamable.
Malone Dies
3.190 kr.Malone, a decrepit old man, lies naked in his bed, scrawling bitter observations in an exercise book. He is fed on a bed-table, his chamber pot is emptied, he hooks items with his stick, he looks out of the window. He tells the story of a man, looked after by nurses, taken for an ill-fated picnic on an island in the sea. As his mind disintegrates, so does the novel . . .
Malone Dies is the second of the three great novels Samuel Beckett produced during his ‘frenzy of writing’ in the late 1940s. The others are Molloy and The Unnamable.
The Unnamable
3.190 kr.The Unnamable is a voice. Is it curled up inside an urn, on the point of being born, or is it about to die? Haunted by visitors, it weeps. The Unnamable sifts disjointed memories, grapples with the problem of existence and ultimately perpetuates itself through an endless stream of fragmented words.
The Unnamable is the last of the three great novels Samuel Beckett produced during his ‘frenzy of writing’ in the late 1940s. The others are Molloy and Malone Dies.
Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake
4.590 kr.Have you ever wondered what your favourite classic authors cooked – whether as an intimate snack for one or as their showstopping dinner party special? Here’s your chance to wine and dine with the world’s most famous writers in a gorgeous new collection of their most-loved recipes, curated from their archives, letters and diaries. Whet your appetite: there are culinary treats and eccentricities in store …
