The Silver River

Biographies & Memoirs

DAISY GOODWIN

Arts & Literature

Fourth Estate Ltd.

The 'Golden Child', Penelope Fitzgerald's first work of fiction, is a classically plotted British mystery, centred on the arrival of a new exhibit at a London museum. Whilst the exhibit lures thousands of spectators, it also becomes the focus for murder.

The Golden Child

Literature & Fiction

Fitzgerald, Penelope

Literary

Set in Germany at the end of the 18th century, this book tells the story of the brilliant young Fritz von Hardenberg, later to become the great romantic philosopher &amp; poet. He announces his engagement to a 12 year old girl, to his family's consternation.

The Blue Flower

A high-tech business park on the Mediterranean coast is the setting for crime of the most disturbing kind in this extraordinary new bestseller from the writer widely regarded as Britain's No 1 living novelist - author of Cocaine Nights.After over three decades at the forefront of modern British fiction writing, J.G. Ballard reached a new generation of readers with the bestselling Cocaine Nights (1996) - an intriguing murder mystery that was also an unnerving vision of a society with too much time on its hands. Now, in Super-Cannes, he delves into another closed community - where this time it is claimed that 'work is the new leisure.' A disturbing mystery awaits Paul and Jane Sinclair when they arrive in Eden-Olympia, a high-tech business park in the hills above Cannes. Jane is to work as a doctor for the executives who live in this ultra-modern workers' paradise. But what caused her apparently sane predecessor to set out one morning and murder ten people in a shooting spree that made headlines around the world? As Paul investigates his new surroundings, he begins to uncover a thriving subculture of crime that is spiralling out of control.

Super-Cannes

BALLARD,J.G.

Contemporary

A loving portrait of the other Majorca, and of a life there revolving around music and manana, that is as paradaisical as could be -- a book to savour, perfect for escaping those crowded beaches. 'I've used what's left of my eardrums to describe the culture I was born into, and to contrast it with the British culture I was educated in.' Tomas Graves was born in and belongs to Mallorca (even if he did go to boarding school in England as a teenager). His father, the great love poet Robert Graves, famously ended up in the beautiful Mediterranean island pretty much by accident, but it is the happiest accident of Tomas' life. His love and respect for the special beauties of Mallorcan culture shine on every page of this infectiously happy book. Not that there is any simplification or idealization. Graves looks at how the key elements of the island's history since the Spanish Civil War have had complicated consequences: the Francoists' retarding of growth which left the island a backward peasant economy until the 1960s; those same Francoists' sudden discovery that there was money in Majorca's beauty, resulting in the arrival of the holidaymakers, with all the construction and activity attending them; and the suppression, redirection and renaissance of the old, old native culture -- above all, its music. Music has always been important to all Spanish-speaking peoples. Under Franco's severe repressions, music was often the one form of public expression into which every restricted emotion could be poured. Once democracy was brought back to Spain, regional movements surged, taking their music with them. In this dancing, darting book, Graves traces the development and fusion of a host of styles, Spanish and imported -- flamenco, rock, jota, rumba, blues, salsa, punk. He is a musician himself, and his own musical escapades give the book its very individual architecture. A host of musical stars -- Jimi Hendrix, Kevin Ayers, Bob Geldof, Sinead O'Connor, Eurovision contestants, summer-anthem songwriters -- tarried in Majorca and provide the soundtrack to this rhythmic, irresistible tour around a magical island and its magical culture.

Tuning Up at Dawn : A Memoir of Music and Majorca

Problem: Best friends keep giving extremely generous gifts Solution: Give better ones in return

The Gift

David L. Flusfeder

From one of Britain's finest authors, a wry, shocking and beautifully-written memoir of childhood, ghosts (real and metaphorical), illness and family. 'Giving up the Ghost' is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's uniquely unusual five-part autobiography. Opening in 1995 with 'A Second Home', Mantel describes the death of her stepfather which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of her childhood. In 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' Mantel takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating in the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelight ceremony of her mother's 'churching'. In 'Smile', an account of teenage perplexity, Mantel describes a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Finally, at the memoir's conclusion, Mantel explains how through a series of medical misunderstandings and neglect she came to be childless and how the ghosts of the unborn like chances missed or pages unturned, have come to haunt her life as a writer.

Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir

HILARY MANTEL

From the author of THE FOWLER FAMILY BUSINESS comes a reissue of his infamous, intensely distilled epic, POMPEY.  This novel recounts scores of stories: of HoTLoVe, OMO, AO-1; of a pygmy hunt, an assassination, a crucifixion; of a human blood bank and a man with metal in his head and a dentist with nasty habits; of sick sex, ill winds, malignant diseases; of the Voys, the Halals, the Puppymen.  Most of all it tells the story of a flaky pyrotechnicist, Guy Vallender, and of his four progeny, chief among them Poor Eddie, who was quarry, whose gifts were otherwordly, whose gruesome fate was perhaps transcendent.  The action stretches seamlessly between the mid 40s and the mid 70s; its many topographies include Brussels, Salisbury, the Teutoburgerwald, the Congo, the industrial wastes of Lorraine. But the dominant setting is the titular city -- a nightmarish brick grid set on mud a populated by garish freaks. It is here that the characters move to their unique and inexorable ends, fuelled by the bad faith of the former comedian Ray Butt's Church Of The Best Ever Redemption and by the bad blood of the gerontophiliac Jean-Marie. POMPEY is a witty, gripping, emotionally harrowing work by our most viciously inventive writer -- part hallucinatory adventure, part unhappy family saga, part perverse tragedy of the fundamentalist delusion, it is persistently, hurtfully entertaining. And it includes footnotes. Heed the author's warning: 'After using this book please wash your hands.' That way you'll cleanse the stain of corruption, the reek of life as it's really lived (in Meades's fervid imagination).

Pompey

MEADES, JONATHAN

Paperback. Pub Date :2014-02-11 Pages: 400 Language: English Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd The long-awaited novel from the bestselling. award-winning author of 'Evening' is a literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa . The Lord's Resistance Army. led by warlord Joseph Kony. has terrorised northern Uganda for years. mutilating and murdering people as they raid villages. kidnapping and raping children to expand Kony's 'family'. This is the fate in store for Esther. She is one of 139 students abducted from St Mary's School When their headmistress tracks them down she must accept a dreadful bargain;.. most of the girls will be released. only if thirty remain with the rebels Esther is one of the thirty And eventually she will. have to learn to live with all she has seen and done to survive. Jane is an American writer. observing the glamour of Kenyan ex-pat life while she waits...

Untitled Novel

Susan Minot

'A book of such quality as to persuade you that historical novels are the true business of the writer.' Daily Telegraph A gripping, shocking story of history, enlightement and slavery from the bestselling author of THE FANATIC. JOSPEH KNIGHT confirms James Robertson as one of our foremost novelists. Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and re-establish the family name. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of his years in the Caribbean. Now, in 1802, Sir John Wedderburn is settling his estate, and has hired a solicitor's agent, Archibald Jamieson, to search for his former slave. The past has haunted Wedderburn ever since Culloden, and ever since he last saw Knight, in court twenty-four years ago, in a case that went to the heart of Scottish society, pitting master against slave, white against black, and rich against poor. As long as Knight is missing, Wedderburn will never be able to escape the past. Yet what will he do if Jamieson's search is successful? And what effect will this re-opening of old wounds have on those around him? Meanwhile, as Jamieson tries to unravel the true story of Joseph Knight he begins to question his own motivation. How can he possibly find a man who does not want to be found? James Robertson's second novel is a tour de force, the gripping story of a search for a life that stretches over sixty years and moves from battlefields to the plantations of Jamaica, from Enlightenment Edinburgh to the back streets of Dundee. It is a moving narrative of history, identity and ideas, that dramatically retells a fascinating but forgotten episode of Scottish history.

Joseph Knight

ROBERTSON, James

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