Burgundy, 1808. One night Sobran Jodeau, a young vintner, meets an angel in his vineyard: a physically gorgeous creature with huge wings that smell of snow, a sense of humour & an inquiring mind. They meet again every year on the midsummer anniversary of the date. Village life goes on, meanwhile, with its affairs & mysteries, marriages & murders, & the vintages keep improving
- though the horror of the Napoleonic wars & into the middle of the century, as science marches on, viticulture changes, & gliders fly like angels. Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
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After his son Pablo dies before his second birthday from a rare & aggressive form of infant leukemia, the author writes this poignant account of unending love & hope. The foreword is its best description: ” This book is a dictionary with a single entry. It is the search for a word that does not exist in my language-the word for a parent who has watched his child die. Children who lose their parents are orphans, & those who have to close their spouse`s dead eyes are widows & widowers. But we, the parents who sign the documents authorizing our children`s funerals, we have no name, no civil status. We remain parents forever. Parents to a ghost who does not grow, a ghost whom we will never pick up from school, who will never fall for a girl, who will never go to college, who will never leave home. A child who will never upset us & whom we will never have to scold. A child who will never read the books we dedicate to him. The fact that there is no word to describe us means we are condemned to live always in a violet hour. Our watches have not stopped, but they display the same time again & again. Whenever it seems that the second hand will force the hour hand to make the leap forward, instead it slips back again to where it started. We are stuck in no-man`s time, stuck in our own redundancy, within which we call up this fantastic & unlikely story, this cheap tragedy filled with all the tricks of an inexperienced screenwriter, the story that trapped us here in the first place. I evoke it in writing. I recall this year of my life in the hope of fixing the story in place, of making sure it never shrinks into a cliche. My son Pablo was ten months old when he was first admitted to the hospital, & was nearly two when we scattered his ashes. It is this stretch of time that makes up our violet hour. It is this stretch of time that makes up this book, which contains all the words I need to give a name to my condition.” ...

` There`s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, & our duty is to unravel it, & isolate it, & expose every inch of it`. Arriving in the wilderness of London & in need of lodgings, Dr John Watson finds himself living at 221b Baker Street with one Sherlock Holmes. When a corpse is discovered in a derelict house Watston, fascinated by his brilliant, eccentric companion, is soon drawn into Holmes` investigations. There`s no sign of a struggle, no wounds on the body, yet scrawled in blood across the walls is the word RACHE
- revenge. Watson is baffled but for Holmes the game is afoot...
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This reference offers useful information & practical advice on everything you need to consider for your time out
- whether before
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In The Visit (original title Der Besuch der alten Dame), Claire Zachanassian, now a multimillion heiress & an older woman, returns to the impoverished town of her youth with a dreadful bargain: in exchange for returning the town to prosperity through her vast wealth, she wants the townspeople to kill the man who jilted her. From its subtle exploration of parochial politics to its horrific climax, The Visit shows a population willing to sacrifice loyalty & scruples in the pursuit of riches. It is a drama of the absurd that reduces human nature to its most ridiculous depths. Durrenmatt was one of the most important figures of modern European drama & The Visit remains both a powerful critique of twentieth century civilisation & an outstanding piece of experimental theatre. ...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD It is the 1760s, the height of the Enlightenment. The young King of Denmark, Christian VII, is a half-wit. His queen, the English princess Caroline Mathilde, has fallen in love with his most trusted advisor, the court physician Struensee. Guldberg, a cold-blooded religious fanatic, is determined to annihilate the Enlightenment ideas Struensee is introducing to Denmark
- whoever prevails in their bitter ideological battle will control not only the king but the nation state. Adultery, insanity, back-stabbing & blue blood... Enquist brilliantly recasts a dramatic era of Danish history, weaving a wide range of historical characters
- Voltaire & Diderot, Catherine the Great & George III
- into a tale of ruthless political ambition & personal betrayal.


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` How to tell the story of a 500-page collection of stories spanning more than forty years? Especially when I really want to just exclaim, ” Oh, Oh, OH!” in a state of steadily mounting rapture` Geoff Dyer, Observer Williams` uniquely devastating portrayals of modern life have been captivating readers & writers for decades. Here, for the first time, Williams` thirty-three best stories are available in a single volume, together with thirteen new stories that show a writer continuing to mould the form into something strange & new. Bleak but funny, real but surreal, domestic but dangerous, familiar but enigmatic, Joy Williams` stories fray away the fabric at the edge of ordinary experience to reveal the loneliness at the heart of human life. In ` The Lover`, a girl suffers a spiritual & physical wasting away; in ` The Visiting Privilege`, a visitor finds refuge in her friend`s psychiatric ward; in ` Charity`, a woman gives a poor family gas money & finds herself marooned in their peculiar world; in ` Another Season` an itinerant man cleanses an island of roadkill; in ` Craving` an alcoholic couple head towards a car crash. The Visiting Privilege represents the culmination of Williams` career & cements her place as the most singular artist of short fiction writing today. ...

In this small but perfectly formed collection of supernatural short stories, Sophie Hannah takes the comforting scenes of everyday life & imbues them with a frisson of fear, then a gust of terror. Why is a young woman so unnerved by the presence of a visitors book in her boyfriend`s inner-city home? & whose spidery handwriting is it that fills the pages? Who is the strangely courteous boy still lingering at a child`s tenth birthday party when all the parents have gathered their children & left? & why does the presence of a perfectly ordinary woman in a post office queue leave another customer pallid & sweating with fear? Beware what you open this Christmas! ...

Aung San Suu Kyi is known for her courageous stand for democracy & human rights inside Burma (now Myanmar). Forced to endure many years of house arrest by the military junta, she continues to act as a focus for change inside the country now that she is free. Such is her determined action for the best interests of Burma that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. One of the very few people she has trusted enough to take her message to the wider world is Alan Clements. The Voice of Hope offers unquestionably the most wide-ranging collection of her views on the political situation inside Burma, her non-violent approach to democracy & human rights, her Buddhist beliefs, her family, & how she keeps a sense of meaning & purpose under the most difficult conditions. ...

The Terracotta Dog opens with a mysterious tete-a-tete with a Mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, & some dying words that lead Inspector Montalbano gives to a secret grotto in a mountain cave where two young lovers dead fifty years ago & still embracing are watched over by a life-size terracotta dog. Montalbano`s passion to solve this old crime takes him, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island`s past & into a family`s dark heart amid the horrors of World War II. ...