Blurb Estha and Rahel, seven-year-old twins, are growing up amidst waves of banana jam, mountains of peppercorns and scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. When their beautiful young cousin Sophie arrives, their world is shaken irrevocably. An illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional expose things that lurk unsaid in a country drifting dangerously towards
Blurb In a famine-stricken village on a dusty plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness… In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a
Blurb Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie’s mother Agnes walks a
Blurb A lifetime holding it together. One party will bring it crashing down. Malibu: August, 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party and anticipation is at fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other
Blurb Assassin’s Apprentice is a fantasy book and the first in Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy. The story follows a child named Fitz, the bastard son of Prince Chivalry, who is raised by his father’s royal family. He is trained as an assassin, and must keep his strange affinity with animals a secret. He must survive,
Blurb Margaret Prior has decided to become a ‘lady visitor’ to the female inmates in Milbank Prison. She is supposed to be an example of female virtue for the prisoners to aspire to. But inside she meets Selina Dawes, a disgraced spiritualist who weaves an enigmatic spell around her. Is Dawes a fraud, or a
Blurb Every empire demands revolution. Touraine is a soldier. Stolen as a child and raised to kill and die for the empire, her only loyalty is to her fellow conscripts. But now, her company has been sent back to her homeland to stop a rebellion, and the ties of blood may be stronger than she
Blurb A small and sadly untried coterie – the old assassin Chade, the serving-boy Thick, Prince Dutiful, and his reluctant Skillmaster, Fitz – sail towards the distant island of Aslevjal. There they must fulfil the Narcheska’s challenge to her betrothed: to lay the head of the dragon Icefyre, whom legends tell is buried there deep
Blurb A Wizard of Earthsea is the opening book in the Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K Le Guin and is considered to be a fantasy classic, a foundational text in the genre alongside Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by JR Tolkien. It tells the story of Ged’s youth, otherwise known as Sparrowhawk, and
Blurb As she races along Canada’s Douglas Channel in her speedboat – heading toward the place where her younger brother Jimmy, presumed drowned, was last seen – twenty-year-old Lisamarie Hill recalls her younger days. A volatile and precocious Native girl growing up in Kitamaat, the Haisla Indian reservation located five hundred miles north of Vancouver,