A kaleidoscopic masterpiece of empire and rebellion by Kamila Shamsie, the Orange Prize shortlisted and Granta Best of Young British Novelist In the summer of 1914 a young Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer, finds herself fulfilling a dream by joining an archeological dig in Turkey. Working alongside Germans and Turks, she falls in love with archaeologist, Tahsin Bey, and joins him in his quest to find an ancient silver circlet. The outbreak of war in Europe brings her idyllic summer to a sudden end, and her friends become her nation’s enemies. The following spring, in the battlefields of Europe, Qayyum Gul, a Lance Corporal from Peshawar fighting for the British, loses an eye, and is sent to recover in a Royal Pavilion in England, where he slowly begins to doubt his loyalties to the King. Returning home, Qayyum shares a train carriage with Vivian Rose whose search for the circlet has led her to Peshawar in the heart of the British Raj. Fifteen years later, they will meet again, and their loyalties will be tested once more amidst massacres, cover-ups, and the disappearance of a young man they both love.

A God in Every Stone: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

SHAMSIE, Kamila

Literary

Atavist Books

"You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy," writes the unnamed narrator of Dear Thief. The thief is Nina, or Butterfly, who disappeared eighteen years earlier and who is being summoned by this letter, this bomb, these recollections, revisions, accusations, and confessions. Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio.” Dear Thief is a letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, and a continuously surprising triangular love story. Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury and beauty about the need for human connection and the brutal vulnerability that need exposes. While I write my spare hand might be doing anything for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach.” Here is a rare novel that traverses the human heart in original and indelible ways.

Dear Thief: A Novel

Harvey, Samantha

In her tender portrait of a woman returning to the English village where she grew up to bury her mother and sell their dilapidated house, Lucy Wood conjures a ghost, three generations of women, and a mesmerizing story of love, solace, and home. Pearl doesn’t know how she’s ended up in the riverthe same cacophonous river in the same rain-soaked valley she’d been stuck in for years. Ada, Pearl’s daughter, doesn’t know how she’s ended up back in the house she fledwith no heating apart from a fire she can’t light and no way of getting around apart from an old car she’s scared to drive. But Pepper, Ada’s six-year old daughter, who is used to following her restless mother from place to place, is drawn to the house and fascinated by the scattering of people she meets, by the river that unfurls through the valley, and by the strange old woman who sits on the bank with her feet in the icy water; she doesn’t know why anyone would ever want to leave. Atmospheric and elegiac, Weathering is a lushly imagined first novel about family, homecoming, and the shimmering line between this world and the next.

Weathering: A Novel

Wood, Lucy

Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin

Poets like to elude their public, lead them a bit of a dance. They take them down untrodden paths, land them in unknown country where they have to ask for directions. In this personal anthology, Alan Bennett has chosen over a hundred poems by six well-loved poets, discussing the writers and their verse in his customary conversational style through anecdote, shrewd appraisal and spare but telling biographical detail. Speaking with candor about his own reactions to the work, Alan Bennett creates profound and witty portraits of Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Philip Larkin, all the more enjoyable for being in his own particular voice. Anybody writing poetry in the thirties had somehow to come to terms with Auden. Auden, you see, had got a head start on the other poets. He'd got into the thirties first, like someone taking over the digs.

Bennett, Alan.

World Literature

The Iceberg is an account of the eighteen months leading up to the author's husband’s death and asks us how we witness and experience death along with celebrating love, family, language, art, and life. In 2008 Marion Coutts’ partner, the art critic Tom Lubbock, was diagnosed with a brain tumor that was located in the area controlling speech and language. It would eventually rob him of the ability to speak and ultimately took his life in early 2011. In short bursts of beautiful, textured prose, Coutts describes a man, a woman, and a young child under assault, and how the three of them fight to keep their family unit intact. Written with extraordinary narrative force and power, The Iceberg is almost shocking in its raw honesty and the beauty of its sentences. It charts the deterioration of Tom’s speech even as it records the developing language of his child. Fury, selfishness, grief, indignity, and impotence are all examined and brought to light. Yet out of this comes a rare story about belonging along with an adventure of being and dying.

The Iceberg: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Coutts, Marion

Arts & Literature