|
 Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,
Yiyun Li
The stories in this collection, like the stories in A Thousand Years of Good
Prayers, are mostly set in China. The country
portrayed here is the China of the 21st century, where
economic development has led to new situations unknown
to previous decades: residents in a shabby apartment
building witnessing in awe the real estate boom; a
local entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist sheltering
women in trouble in her mansion; a group of retired
women discovering fame late in their lives as private
investigators specialising in extramarital affairs; a
young woman setting up a blog to publicise the alleged
affair of her father.
Underneath the veneer of prosperity and opportunity,
however, lie the struggles of characters trying to
reorient themselves in the unfamiliar landscapes of
modern China: a widower, reminiscing about his wife,
confronts a young unmarried woman purchasing condoms
in a pharmacy; a new wife makes a plea to have a baby
with her husband who was to be executed only to
discover that she has become an instant celebrity; a
middle-aged couple in America, who, upon losing their
only daughter, return to their hometown in China to
hire a young woman as a surrogate mother. These
characters' fates are affected as much by the
historical moments in which they reside as by the
choices they make.
Yiyun Li's new collection of stories is a report from
the front-line of a changing world, and confirms Li to
be a writer not to be missed.
 Marry Or Burn,
Valerie Trueblood
From the author of Seven Loves comes this
austere, passionately shaped collection of stories
that courageously explores the dynamic nature of
modern marriage, the life-shattering heartbreak that
often accompanies its collapse, and the fickle way
in which the boundaries between us can be broken,
erased, and newly defined.
 The Empty Family,
Colm Toibin
In the captivating stories that make up The
Empty Family Colm Toibin delineates with a
tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or
unconscious longing, of individuals, often
willingly, cast adrift from their history.
From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some
kind of permanence in a strange town to the Irish
woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and
discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her
long absence each of Toibin's stories manage to
contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past
and returning home, of family threads lost and
ultimately regained.
|
 Death
Is Not An Option,
Suzanne Rivecca
In these stories, a teacher obsesses over a student who
comes to class with scratch marks on his face; a
Catholic girl graduating high school finds a warped kind
of redemption in her school’s contrived class rituals;
and a woman looking to rent a house is sucked into a
strangely inappropriate correspondence with one of the
landlords.
These are just a few of the powerful plotlines in
Suzanne Rivecca’s gorgeously wrought collection. From a
college student who adopts a false hippie persona to
find love, to a young memoirist who bumps up against a
sexually obsessed fan, the characters in these fiercely
original tales grapple with what it means to be honest
with themselves and the world.
 Light
Lifting,
Alexander MacLeod
Light Lifting, Alexander MacLeod’s long-awaited
first collection of short fiction, offers us a suite of
darkly urban and unflinching elegies. These are
elemental stories of work and its bonds, of tragedy and
tragedy barely averted, but also of beauty, love and
fragile understanding.
 **Winner**
Saints & Sinners,
A woman walks the streets of Manhattan and contemplates
with exquisite longing the precarious affair she has
embarked on, amidst the grandeur and cacophony of the
cityscape; a young Irish girl and her mother are
thrilled to be invited to visit the glamorous Coughlan's
but find - for all the promise of their green gorgette,
silver shoes and fancy dinner parties - they leave
disappointed; an Irishman in north London retraces his
life as a young lad with his mates digging the streets
and dreaming of the apocryphal gold, an outside both in
Ireland and England, yet he carries the lodestar of his
native land.
A collection characterised by all of Edna O'Brien's
trademark lyricism, powerful evocations of place and a
glorious and an often heart-breaking grasp of people and
their desires and contradictions.
|
|
New Titles
Recommended
Location
Hours
About Us
Best Sellers
Book
Clubs
