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The Sense Of An Ending
by Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes has been awarded the Man Booker prize 2011 for The Sense Of An Ending.
A brilliant short novel from a writer at the very height of his powers.
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.
Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove.
The Sense of an Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers.
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Nemesis
by Philip Roth
Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize in 2011
In 'the stifling heat of equatorial Newark', a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.
At the centre of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-three-year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and a weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground - and on the everyday realities he faces - Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain.
Moving between the smouldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos - whose 'mountain air was purified of all contaminants' - Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood.
Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth's late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and now, Nemesis: what choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?
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The Emperor of All Maladies
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
A comprehensive history of cancer - one of the greatest enemies of medical progress - and an insight into its effects and potential cures, by a leading expert on the illness. Siddhartha Mukherjee won the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2011
In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years.The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out 'war against cancer' .Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge. Riveting and magisterial, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.
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The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that's completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language.
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SOLO
by Rana Dasgupta
The highly anticipated new novel from the critically acclaimed author of Tokyo Cancelled. Solo recounts the life and daydreams of a reclusive one hundred year-old man from Bulgaria. Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way. Wondering if, unlike the hapless parrots, he has any wisdom to leave to the world, Ulrich embarks on an epic armchair journey through a century of violent politics, forbidden music, lost love and failed chemistry, finding his way eventually to an astonishing epiphany of tenderness and enlightenment.
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Wolf Hall
by Hillary Mantel
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009 'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money
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Masque of Africa
by V.S. Naipaul
For my travel books I travel on a theme. And the theme of The Masque of Africa is African belief. I begin in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, do Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and end at the bottom of the continent, in South Africa. My theme is belief, not political or economical life; and yet at the bottom of the continent the political realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account. Perhaps an unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the possibility of the subversion of old Africa by the ways of the outside world. The theme held until I got to the South, when the clash of the two ways of thinking and believing became far too one-sided. The skyscrapers of Johannesburg didn t rest on sand. The older world of magic felt fragile, but at the same time had an enduring quality. You felt that they would survive any calamity. I had expected that over the great size of Africa the practices of magic would significantly vary. But they didn t. The diviners everywhere wanted to throw the bones to read the future and the idea of energy remained a constant, to be tapped into by the ritual sacrifice of body parts. In South Africa body parts, mainly of animals, but also of men and women, made a mixture of battle medicine . To witness this, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book.
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Other Colours: Essays And a Story
by Orhan Pamuk
From Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, comes a personal selection of the best from twenty-five years' work. His original pieces have been sympathetically revisited by the author, and the result is a new work of great narrative richness and intensity. Other Colours ranges from lyrical autobiography to essays on literature and culture, from humour to political analysis, from delicate evocations of his friendship with his daughter to provocative discussions of Eastern and Western art.
Reflections on Pamuk's first passport, his first trip to Europe, his father's death, his recent court case, and the Istanbul earthquake share space with pieces on writers as various as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Nabokov and Mario Vargas Llosa. There are sections on Istanbul, New York - where Pamuk lived for two years - and on the writing of each of his novels. Interspersed among these are some of Pamuk's own black and white drawings, as well as his short story 'Looking Out the Window'.
'My Father's Suitcase', Pamuk's 2006 Nobel Lecture, a brilliant illumination of what it means to be a writer, completes the selection from one of literature's most eminent and popular figures
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The Gathering
by Anne Enright
The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.
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The Hungry Tide
by Amitav Ghosh
The settlers of the Sunderbans believe that anyone without a pure heart who ventures into the watery labyrinth will never return. It is the arrival of Piyali Roy, of Indian parentage but stubbornly American, and of Kanai Dutt, a sophisticated Delhi businessman, that disturbs the delicate balance of settlement life.
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Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life
by J.M. Coetzee
A rich, funny, and deeply affecting autobiographical new novel from one of the world's greatest living writers.
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on a period in the seventies when, the biographer senses, Coetzee was 'finding his feet as a writer'. He embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to Coetzee -- a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. Thus emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual, regarded as an outsider within the family. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, and rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.
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Three Novels
by Amit Chaudhuri
Three stories that detail everyday urban life with sensitivity and humour, whether it's America, England or an Indian city. Each story, individually, has won awards.
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The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
The incredible bestselling first novel from Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jhumpa Lahiri. 'When her grandmother learned of Ashima's pregnancy, she was particularly thrilled at the prospect of naming the family's first sahib. And so Ashima and Ashoke have agreed to put off the decision of what to name the baby until a letter comes!' For now, the label on his hospital cot reads simply 'Baby Boy Ganguli'. But as time passes and still no letter arrives from India, American bureaucracy takes over and demands that 'baby boy Ganguli' be given a name. In a panic, his father decides to nickname him 'Gogol' -- after his favourite writer. Brought up as an Indian in suburban America, Gogol Ganguli soon finds himself itching to cast off his awkward name, just as he longs to leave behind the inherited values of his Bengali parents. And so he sets off on his own path through life, a path strewn with conflicting loyalties, love and loss! Spanning three decades and crossing continents, Jhumpa Lahiri's much-anticipated first novel is a triumph of humane story-telling. Elegant, subtle and moving, 'The Namesake' is for everyone who loved the clarity, sympathy and grace of Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut story collection, 'Interpreter of Maladies'.
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