The Emperor of Gladness
3.490 kr.College dropout Hai doesn’t know how to face the future until a chance meeting with elderly widow Grazina changes his life.
One late summer evening in the town of East Gladness, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow.
From this moment, his second chance begins. Over the course of the year, Hai’s story takes new and unexpected turns, as his life-altering bond with Grazina transforms his relationship to the community, his family and, most powerfully of all, to himself.
Katabasis
3.690 kr.Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek. The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.
Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick.
But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him.
But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together.
That’s if they can agree on anything.
Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?
Boudoir
3.990 kr.Teddy lives with her parents on a farm in the Icelandic wilderness. It’s 1962, and the world is changing, although you wouldn’t know it from the stark quiet of the lava fields and mountains that mark the boundaries of the young woman’s existence. But after two chance encounters, Teddy’s dreams of a world beyond begin to crystallise, albeit in strange and unexpected ways, as we follow one woman’s life over five decades, from farm to city to the skies.With piercing clarity and dry, unsentimental wit, Sigrun Palsdottir – historian, novelist, and one of Iceland’s most compelling contemporary voices – brilliantly captures the dissonance between how we are seen and who it is we are. Taking us from grandeur of rural Iceland to the glossy, sticky world of 1970s air travel, via check fraud, thwarted ambition and lost astronauts, Boudoir is a novel about reinvention, dislocation, and the forceful gravity of the lives and selves we think we’ve left behind.
Lost Lambs
4.390 kr.Think your family is dysfunctional? Meet the Flynns.
For the three Flynn daughters, it’s been disastrous since their parents opened up their marriage. Abigail, the eldest, is dating an ex-soldier several years her senior nicknamed ‘War Crimes Wes’. Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist. And the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to a wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone – or something – is monitoring the town’s citizens.
Casting a shadow across their lives is Paul Alabaster, a nefarious local billionaire. Rumours of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with Alabaster’s machinations sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy – one that may just, finally, bring them closer together.
Yesteryear (stór kilja)
4.390 kr.Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle – and her followers are sick with envy. Her charming farmhouse on her working ranch is artfully cluttered, her husband is a handsome cowboy, her homemade sourdough boules are each more beautiful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers and industrial-grade ovens behind the scenes? What her followers don’t know won’t hurt them.
Then, one morning, Natalie wakes up in a strange, horrible version of reality. Her home, her husband, her children―they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Is this a hoax? A reality show? A test from God? Natalie knows just two things for sure: this isn’t her perfect life, and she must escape, by any means possible.
As darkly funny as it is shocking and gripping, Yesteryear is an electrifying examination of tradition, fame, faith and the grand performance of womanhood, from a thrilling new talent in fiction.
Transcription
3.990 kr.The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has travelled to Providence, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor, and the father of his college friend, Max. But after the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to each other, that store or obliterate the memories that make us who we are.
The News From Dublin
4.390 kr.In The News from Dublin, a beautiful collection of short stories from the bestselling author of Brooklyn and Long Island, Colm Tóibín delves into the days and nights of those living far from home: lives of great longing, at a great distance from past lives and past selves.
Ghost Stories
5.990 kr.Ghost Stories is Siri Hustvedt’s most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster.
It is a patchwork-quilt book that stitches together memories from over forty years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between November 2023 and 3 May 2024, the day of Paul’s funeral; emails Siri sent to friends during his cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son.
The book also contains Paul Auster’s last ever piece of writing – the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri’s and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1 January 2024.
Unflinching, tender and wise, this is the full-bodied story of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster’s life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday.
Light and Thread
3.990 kr.In this light-filled and multi-faceted book, her first since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang draws together the threads of her work and life, tracing the connections between her interior and exterior worlds through a sequence of essays, poems, photographs and diaries.
A book of reflections, of words and light, it has at its heart the tiny, north-facing courtyard garden at her home, cultivated solely through the reflected sunlight of the mirrors which she must move throughout the day, as the earth turns on its axis.
In a poem written at eight years old, Han Kang imagined a ‘gold thread’ of connection – an idea which she explores here with luminous attention, beginning with her Nobel Lecture. She writes of the wonder of following the thread we call language into the depths of other hearts, and her profound sense of an electric current which joins writer and reader.
Both intimate and illuminating, Light and Thread is a book for all readers of Han Kang’s unique body of work.
Heart The Lover
3.490 kr.Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules.
She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love.
Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.
Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love. This is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.
London Falling (kilja)
4.990 kr.In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.
In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac’s parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager’s world of make-believe drew him into the city’s terrifying underworld.
London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.’
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction
5.490 kr.Who was Gertrude Stein?
Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius — a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century.
And why does she matter?
The narrator of Deborah Levy’s latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights.
As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.
This is a book about how we put ourselves together— an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world.
Mjölnir – Hammer of Thor
3.990 kr.Historically, Viking Age pagan Scandinavians often wore amulets depicting the hammer of the beloved god Thor. This beautiful, art-filled, and scholarship-grounded book examines this phenomenon, highlighting and discussing a variety of examples from the historical record. It additionally contains discussion of the contemporary revitalization of this ancient practice far beyond Viking Age Scandinavia. Authored by folklorist Joseph S. Hopkins, thoroughly illustrated by artist Jacqui Alberts Lund, and introduced by scholar Katherine Beard, this book serves as a solid introduction to the topic that encourages readers to dig deeper.
A Shining
2.990 kr.A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and finally he gets stuck at the end of a forest road. Soon it gets dark and starts to snow, but instead of going back to find help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by Jon Fosse.
Aliss at the Fire
2.990 kr.In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of family and the battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle’s great-great-grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse’s vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on. Aliss at the Fire, is a visionary masterpiece, a haunting exploration of love and loss that ranks among the greatest meditations on marriage and human fate.
Praiseworthy
5.490 kr.In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both ecological disaster and a gathering of the ancestors, Cause Man Steel is chasing a mad vision: a national donkey transport scheme that will guarantee his people’s independence forever. He finds, however, as he bundles feral donkeys into his Ford Falcon and dumps them en masse in the cemetery, that not all of Praiseworthy agrees. Outrage ferments at his desecration of traditional land, while Cause’s wife Dance seeks refuge with butterflies and dreams of moving their family to China. Bad feelings reach fever pitch when citizens catch wind of the suicide of Aboriginal Sovereignty, Cause’s eldest son. All are distraught – all, that is, except eight-year-old Tommyhawk Steel, who, with his brother gone, gleefully pursues his dream of becoming white and powerful. Told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned, Praiseworthy is a marvel of explosive sentences, a shock to allegory, an outraged cry against oppression, and a biting satire for the end of days.
Lincoln in the Bardo
3.690 kr.The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.
From this seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling, supernatural domain both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself trapped in a transitional realm – called, in Tibetan tradition, the bardo – and as ghosts mingle, squabble, gripe and commiserate, and stony tendrils creep towards the boy, a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.
Unfolding over a single night, Lincoln in the Bardo is written with George Saunders’ inimitable humour, pathos and grace. Here he invents an exhilarating new form, and is confirmed as one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Deploying a theatrical, kaleidoscopic panoply of voices – living and dead, historical and fictional – Lincoln in the Bardo poses a timeless question: how do we live and love when we know that everything we hold dear must end?
Devotion (Why I Write)
3.490 kr.A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic—its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture’s beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections.
Patti Smith, a National Book Award–winning author, first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession—a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus’s house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard, where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil’s grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano’s novels. Whether writing in a café or on a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book.
The Why I Write series is based on the Windham–Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.
Benefactors
3.690 kr.Misty thought of them as friends, the three local boys from wealthy homes. Until upstairs at a house party an act of violence takes place, with lines drawn and repercussions for them all. On her side, Misty has her devoted father Boogie, and the formidable matriarch Nan D. On theirs, the boys have their mothers – Frankie, Bronagh and Miriam will use the considerable power at their disposal to protect their own children.
And all the while, anonymous voices across the city confide in us, sometimes offering us another perspective on what has happened, but more often telling their own stories – inviting us briefly into lives shaped by money and class, by family and love.
Son of Nobody
4.990 kr.The past is never done with: always the song continues…
Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.
In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea but known to all as ‘son of nobody’.
As sole translator and interpreter of the Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its modern footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the three-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition and grief.
In this masterpiece of myth and history, Son of Nobody explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them and how we live – then, now and always.