Canongate Books strana 3 z 27

'What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don't understand yet . . .' When retired Maths teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches Grace searches for answers about her friend's life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past. Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.

NOW WITH FAQS EXCLUSIVE TO THE PAPERBACK There is one key factor affecting health and long life that is more important than any other: social connection. When we form meaningful bonds with others, our wounds heal faster, our blood pressure drops and we are less likely to have Alzheimer's, heart attacks or strokes. We perform better on tests of mental focus, memory and problem solving. Strong social connection can even fuel creativity, increase our financial stability and enhance our work productivity. But making friends can also be daunting. In The Laws of Connection, David Robson unpacks the science behind this effect and introduces us to simple strategies to promote instant rapport and sustain lifelong, meaningful relationships.

Raw with grief, Aud Torvingen wants nothing to do with the world. She is rebuilding a log cabin in the middle of the Appalachians, refusing the efforts of anyone who wants to reach her. Until Dornan, Aud's only real friend, asks her to track down his runaway fiancée, Tammy. Aud has no love for or faith in Tammy, but she feels obliged to help—and first on the streets of New York City, and then deep in the woods of Arkansas, she finds herself up against Karp, a sociopath so artful that the law can't touch him. Fortunately, Aud has no love for or faith in the law, either—she prefers other tools. But perhaps even more dangerous to Aud than Karp are Aud's own demons. As arresting as a razor at the throat, Nicola Griffith's Stay is a ferocious masterpiece of literary noir, a stunning juxtaposition of beauty and brutality. In its pages Griffith fuses Aud's steely moral authority with a new, ever-evolving emotional depth.

Aud Torvingen is a rangy six-footer with eyes the color of cement and the tendency to hurt people who get in her way. Born in Norway, a land of ice and snow, she now lives in Atlanta, luxuriating in the lush heat and brashness of the New South, gliding easily between the worlds of the elegant elite and the criminal underbelly: beautiful and functional as a folded razor. On an April evening between thunderstorms, Aud turns a corner and collides with a running woman. She catches the scent of clean, rain-wet hair, thinks Today, you are lucky, and moves on—and behind her the house explodes in a tiger-lily of flames. When Aud turns back, the woman is gone. But the woman, Julia, returns, seeking Aud's protection in a deadly international game of art forgery, drugs, money laundering and murder. But Aud knows danger. When danger sits opposite and offers you the dice, you should walk away. Danger loads the dice, it cheats. But for Julia, Aud will play—and risk losing herself in that cool blue place where everything slows to crystal clarity and violence is bliss... Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place reshapes the noir suspense novel into something refreshing, and excitingly new.

Aud Torvingen has never worried about violence. To her it is simply a tool, one of many, to be used, as appropriate, with dispassion, speed, and precision. In Always, she takes on a new challenge: teaching a group of ordinary Atlanta women self-defense skills. It doesn't matter how well trained you are, how big, how fast, how strong; there will always be someone out there bigger or faster or stronger. Always. That's what Aud tells her students—but she never imagined the consequences of imparting that lesson, which shake her to the core. To regroup, she travels to Seattle to meet her Norwegian diplomat mother and her mother's new husband. She's also there to handle what looks to be a run-of-the-mill fraud at one of her investment properties, currently being used as a movie set. Big money is in play, and it seems someone is sabotaging the production. In intertwined Seattle and Atlanta narratives—seductive, and breathtakingly taut—Aud engages with the limits of self-reliance and faces the appalling—and appealing—prospect of allowing herself to need other people.

A semi-famous artist turns forty-five and gives herself a gift - a cross-country road trip from LA to New York, without her husband and child. But thirty minutes after setting off, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel - and embarks on the journey of a lifetime.

In 2020 protest movements across the world revealed the inequalities sewn into the fabric of society. The wildfires that ravaged Australia and California made it clear we are in the middle of a climate catastrophe. The pandemic showed us all just how precarious our economies really are, and the conspiracy theories surrounding the US election proved the same of our democracies. Those in charge do not have the answers. In fact, those in charge, more often that not, are the problem. So, what do we do? In Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now, award-winning political commentator Ece Temelkuran puts forward a compelling new narrative for our current moment, not for some idealised future but for right now, and asks us to make a choice. To choose determination over hope; to embrace fear rather the cold comfort of ignorance; to save our energy for an unwavering attention on those in power and the destructive systems they uphold, rather than wasting time spewing out anger and outrage online. Above all, this book asks you to choose to have faith in the other human beings we share this planet with.

Kathleen Lonsdale was a groundbreaking chemist who was instrumental in developing the science of crystallography. She was also a midlife convert to Quakerism who campaigned for peace and prison reform. Horrified by the dropping of the first atomic bombs, Lonsdale felt that the entire scientific community was now tainted by the violence it had enabled. Published in 1957, Is Peace Possible? was her attempt to make amends for this communal guilt by demonstrating that science can bring peace as well as war, and can address the 'big questions' generally left to the humanities. In crystalline language and logic honed from a lifetime of relying on the sharpness of her mind to cut through barriers of class and gender, Kathleen Lonsdale's Is Peace Possible? is a work of quiet, elegant sanity that refuses to be bullied by the received wisdom of war's inevitability. It is a snapshot of a particular moment in history, but its themes are eternally relevant, and even more necessary now than when it was written.

1959 saw Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the other members of Miles's sextet come together to record the seminal jazz album of all time Kind of Blue. 3 Shades of Blue is a magnificent, blended biography on the meandering paths which led Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and the aftermath. It's a book about music, business, race, addiction and the cities that gave jazz its home; from New York and LA to Philadelphia, Chicago and Kansas City. Kaplan meditates on creativity and the great forebears of this golden age who would take the music down strange new paths. Above all, this is a book about three very different men - their struggles, their choices, their tragedies, their greatness. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan's hands, an American Odyssey, with no direction home.

The world has been ravaged by a lethal virus and, with few exceptions, only the young have survived. Cities have been destroyed, and the natural world has reclaimed the landscape in surprising ways, with herds of wild camels roaming the American West and crocodiles that glow neon green lurking in the rivers. Against this perilous backdrop, Will Collins, the de facto caretaker of a Buddhist monastery in Colorado, receives an urgent and mysterious request: to deliver a potential cure to a scientist in what was once California. So Will sets out, haunted by dreams of the woman he once loved, in a rusted-out pickup pulled by two mules. A menacing thug is on his tail. Armed militias patrol the roads. And the only way he'll make it is with the help of a clever raven, an opinionated cat and a tough teenage girl who has learned to survive on her own. A highly original contribution to the canon of dystopian literature, The Way is a thrilling and imaginative novel, full of warmth, wisdom and surprises that reflect our world in unsettling, uncanny and even hopeful ways.

A marriage unravels in a Spanish hotel room as a young wife is haunted by a past love. A father travels to Paris to meet his scientist son and is exposed to his son's true nature. A woman attends a reading by a famous author and comes to some painful realisations about her own marriage. The stories in Barcelona reveal the underlying disquiet of modern life and the sometimes brutal nature of humanity. Whether on city streets, long car journeys or in suburban rooms, we glimpse characters as they approach those moments of desperation - or revelation - that change or reshape fate.

* New novel THE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE available in paperback now * 10th anniversary edition, revised and updated with a new introduction from the author THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD FOR NON-FICTION WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FEEL TRULY ALIVE? Aged 24, Matt Haig's world caved in. He could see no way to go on living. This is the true story of how he came through crisis, triumphed over an illness that almost destroyed him and learned to live again. It has helped millions of people do the same. Moving, funny and even joyous, these are the lessons Matt learned. His reasons to stay alive.

A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2023 This is a neglected history. Not a sweeping, definitive, exhaustive history of the world but something quieter, more intimate and particular. A journey, picked out in 101 objects, through the fascinating, too-often-overlooked, manifold histories of women. Open up this cabinet of curiosities and you'll find objects that have been highly esteemed and others that are humble and domestic. Some (like a sixteenth century glass dildo) are objects of female pleasure, some (a thumbscrew) of female subjugation. There are artefacts of women celebrated by history and of women unfairly forgotten by it; examples of female rebellion and of self-revelation; objects that are inspiring, curious or (like radium-laced chocolate) just fundamentally ill-conceived. In this compendium, Annabelle Hirsch reveals a new history - teeming, unexpected, witty and always illuminating.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West offered freedom and justice for all. Over the past twenty years he reported on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more. He won awards for his journalism and his fiction. But now, watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he comes to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. This powerful book is a chronicle of Omar's painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means - as a citizen, as a father - to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times. This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness. This is a book for everyone who wants something better.

It is 1966, and Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a café on the corner of a bustling Vienna market. He recruits a barmaid, Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress in search of a job, each bring their stories and their plans for the future. As Robert listens and Mila refills their glasses, romances bloom, friendships are made and fortunes change. And change is coming to the city around them, to the little café, and to Robert's dream. A story of the hopes, kindnesses and everyday heroism of one community, The Café with No Name has charmed millions of European readers. It is an unforgettable novel about how we carry each other through good and bad times, and how even the most ordinary life is, in its own way, quite extraordinary.

This celebratory anthology explores human connection through forty-four poems carefully curated by the host of the internationally acclaimed Poetry Unbound podcast. With an observant eye, Pádraig Ó Tuama shares an enlightening meditation on each poem, revealing the ways we relate to each other, the world around us and ourselves. Blending humour with insight, tension with tenderness, complexity with care, this collection articulates the power of poetry itself; it illuminates aspects of the human condition, particularly the ways we are inextricably linked to each other, and provides inspiration for grounded self-reflection. 44 Poems on Being with Each Other features a remarkable and refreshing range of exceptional poems from around the world including contributions from Wendy Cope, Constantine P. Cavafy, Chen Chen, Joy Harjo, Patricia Smith and many more. It is an anthology that will delight readers just as Pádraig's podcast has done for millions around the world.