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To read this book is to understand Afghanistan as it exists today. This haunting memoir traces the unimaginable odyssey of one family whose world has collapsed ...Poetic, powerful, and unforgettable.' Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner. Qais Akbar Omar was eleven when a brutal civil war engulfed Kabul. For Qais, it brought an abrupt end to a childhood filled with kites and cousins in his grandfather's garden: one of the most convulsive decades in Afghan history had begun. Ahead lay the rise of the Taliban, and, in 2001, the arrival of international forces. A Fort of Nine Towers is the story of Qais, his family and their determination to survive these upheavals as they were buffeted from one part of Afghanistan to the next. Drawing strength from each other, and their culture and faith, they sought refuge for a time in the Buddha caves of Bamyan, and later with a caravan of Kuchi nomads. When they eventually returned to Kabul, it became clear that their trials were just beginning.

Alice is back in the family house that has never felt like home, waiting out the last few days of her father's life and yearning to escape. Across the city, a homeless man named Daniel searches for the daughter he has always loved but never met. Connected by a secret, Alice and Daniel are about to cross paths in unexpected and life-changing ways ...Alice has just returned to London from months of travelling abroad. She is late to hear the news that her father is dying, and arrives at the family home only just in time to say goodbye. Daniel hasn't had a roof over his head for years, but to him the city of London feels like home in a way that no bricks and mortar ever did. He spends every day searching for his daughter; the daughter he has never met. Until now ...Heart-wrenching and life-affirming, this is a unique story of love lost and found, of rootlessness and homecoming and the power of the ties that bind. It is a story for fathers and daughters everywhere.

Crushed by a devastating scandal, university professor Oscar Amalfitano flees Barcelona for Santa Teresa - a Mexican city close to the US border. In this sprawling town, where women are being killed in staggering numbers, Amalfitano begins an affair with Castillo, a young forger of Larry Rivers paintings, while his daughter, Rosa, reeling from the weight of his secrets, seeks solace in a romance of her own. Featuring characters and stories from The Savage Detectives and 2666, Woes of the True Policeman explores the power of art, memory, and desire - and marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.

First published in 1999, The Edge of Reason is the sequel to Helen Fielding's number one best-selling Bridget Jones's Diary. It has been turned into a film starring Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is followed by Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. The Wilderness Years are over! But not for long. At the end of Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget hiccuped off into the sunset with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy. Now, in The Edge of Reason, she discovers what it is like when you have the man of your dreams actually in your flat and he hasn't done the washing-up, not just the whole of this week, but ever. Lurching through a morass of self-help-book theories and mad advice from Jude and Shazzer, struggling with a boyfriend-stealing ex-friend with thighs like a baby giraffe, an 8ft hole in the living-room wall, a mother obsessed with boiled-egg peelers, and a builder obsessed with large reservoir fish, Bridget embarks on a spiritual epiphany, which takes her from the cappuccino queues of Notting Hill to the palm- and magic-mushroom-kissed shores of ...Bridget is back. V.g.

Frog Music is a wonderfully evocative novel of intrigue and murder from Emma Donoghue, the author of the international bestseller Room, an emotive and powerful novel that was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker and Orange Prizes.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013. Shortlisted for the South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2014. Book of the Year in the Guardian, Spectator, Independent and Daily Mail. The Kills is an epic novel of crime and conspiracy. It starts with an explosion, a man on the run and the theft of over fifty million dollars. It moves from the Middle East to the Mediterranean, around mainland Europe via the sleazy underworld of Naples, and across America. It ends in a locked room. Brilliantly original, playful and ambitious, The Kills is a terrifying, awe-inspiring, mind-blowing sensation. 'A damn good book' Sunday Times 'A staggering achievement' Daily Mail 'A thrilling, overwhelming ride' Spectator.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013 and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2014 Home is a foreign country: they do things differently there ...In a tiny flat in West London, sixteen-year-old Marina lives with her emotionally delicate mother, Laura, and three ancient Hungarian relatives. Imprisoned by her family's crushing expectations and their fierce unEnglish pride, by their strange traditions and stranger foods, she knows she must escape. But the place she runs to makes her feel even more of an outsider. At Combe Abbey, a traditional English public school for which her family have sacrificed everything, she realises she has made a terrible mistake. She is the awkward half-foreign girl who doesn't know how to fit in, flirt or even be. And as a semi-Hungarian Londoner, who is she? In the meantime, her mother Laura, an alien in this strange universe, has her own painful secrets to deal with, especially the return of the last man she'd expect back in her life. She isn't noticing that, at Combe Abbey, things are starting to go terribly wrong.

Four families live in a beautiful stretch of English countryside in magnificent listed houses, built for the old aristocracy. They are the new aristocracy and the elite of their village: financiers, business tycoons, lawyers, doctors, magistrates. They leave their rural idyll only to commute first-class to London for meetings, deals and theatre outings or Heathrow flights to winter sun or half-term skiing. They and their children are protected by investments, pensions and expensive security systems. But the money is running out in Britain, and as tensions and relationships develop within the group of friends, finally, deep in the English winter, an unthinkable act of violence destroys these dream lives and demonstrates that the biggest threat may come from unexpected places. This horrific act happens on the first pages but Lawson provides dramatic twists and false turns and it is only by the end of the book that we discover who the victims are and who committed the crime. Mark Lawson's first novel in eight years is his most ambitious yet. Combining ingenious plotting with forensic social comedy, this is a dark and brilliant novel of life in twenty-first-century England.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD. Northern Iceland, 1829. A woman condemned to death for murdering her lover. A family forced to take her in. A priest tasked with absolving her. But all is not as it seems, and time is running out: winter is coming, and with it the execution date. Only she can know the truth. This is Agnes's story.

Brilliant' Stylist 'Unforgettable' Easy Living Emma used to have two brothers, but five years ago Kit died and on the day of his funeral Jamie left home and never came back. Their parents never talk about what happened. But now Emma is older she is beginning to ask questions - and she's never given up hope that she will see Jamie again ...Told with honesty and warmth, The View on the Way Down is the story of a devastating act of brotherly love that will open your eyes even as it breaks your heart. 'This is a book that leaves you contemplating many things. The complexity of sibling relationships, the hidden contagiousness of mental illness, the long shadows cast by childhood and the pain that is the price of love' Matt Haig, Guardian 'So compassionate, so heartbreaking ...the story wouldn't let me go' Shelley Harris 'A wonderfully moving portrayal of love and pain with a mystery right at its heart. I defy anybody to read this book and not be touched in some way' Sally Brampton.

Hilton Wise is the son of one of the most powerful and wealthy lawyers in the United States. When he falls for Savannah, a young black girl he meets on Cape Cod during the summer of 1952, he has no idea that his passion for her will lead to the exposure of his father's deepest secrets. The result will shatter his family, and hers. Years later, unable to forget, Hilton abandons his comfortable life on the east coast and sets out to find Savannah. But as he struggles to right the wrongs he set in motion he comes to realize that forgiveness doesn't have a price. Set in the last half of the twentieth century, years that changed America for ever, Wise Men is a sweeping story about love and regret, about the crushing weight of familial obligation, and about the difficulty of doing the right thing in an unjust world.

Imagine David Nicholls's One Day as retold by Woody Allen and you'll get a pretty good idea of what to expect with Gabriel Roth's The Unknowns. It's not easy to pursue the most alluring woman in North America when you're a misfiring circuit of over-analytical self-doubt and she has a way with a killer line and a perfectly raised eyebrow. Even, that is, when you've survived your teen years as an outcast in the school computer room to become a dot com millionaire. But as Eric Muller refines his email technique, his date patter, and his ability to shut up after sex, he finds there's more to Maya Marcom than meets the eye. Will our hero be driven to uncover the whole truth about his lover - or will they continue in bliss and wonder? Welcome to the hilarious, neurotic, and peculiarly perceptive world of The Unknowns.

The finest film critic in Britain at the absolute top of his form' Stephen Fry 'Entertainingly incendiary stuff' Empire A hatchet job isn't just a bad review, it's a total trashing. Mark Kermode is famous for them - Pirates of the Caribbean, Sex and the City 2, the complete works of Michael Bay. Beginning with his favourite hatchet job ever, Mark tells us about the best bad reviews in history, why you have to be willing to tell a director face-to-face their movie sucks, and about the time he apologized to Steven Spielberg for badmouthing his work. But why do we love really bad reviews? Is it so much harder to be positive? And is the Internet ruining how we talk about cinema? The UK's most trusted film critic answers all these questions and more in this hilarious, fascinating and argumentative new book. 'A wry, robust and developed defence of accountable critical voices' Total Film 'Very accessible, entertaining and relevant ...warmly recommended' Den of Geek.

Two weeks in a remote island villa with America's most dysfunctional family - what could possibly go wrong? The Posts are going on their first family vacation in years, and it's going to be a special one: Jim and Franny are taking their daughter Sylvia, son Bobby and his girlfriend, and Franny's best friend Charles and his husband, all the way to Mallorca for two weeks of the sort of relaxation, culture and cuisine that only Europe can offer. But there are problems. After a transgression with a twenty-three-year-old editorial assistant, Jim has been unceremoniously sacked from his job, and now his and Franny's marriage is on the rocks. Charles and Lawrence are feeling divided over their future, Bobby is mired in debt problems and stuck in a relationship that's pulling in opposite directions and his girlfriend Carmen, super-fit personal trainer and, at forty-something, far too old for Bobby, seems to have realized her mistake. As for Sylvia, she's eighteen, about to go to college, and determined to lose her virginity before she gets there ...

Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas--Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 'Cormac McCarthy's violent lyric masterpiece, Blood Meridian acquires an amoral, apocalyptic dimension through the Miltonic grandeur of the language ...It is a barbarously poetic odyssey through a hell without purpose' Irish Times 'McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect ...He is a great writer' Independent 'A bloody and starkly beautiful tale' Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times.

For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off – through luck, guile and sheer mulishness – any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere – indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without them. Simon Winder’s extremely funny new book plunges the reader into a maelstrom of alchemy, skeletons, jewels, bear-moats, unfortunate marriages and a guinea-pig village. Danubia is full of music, piracy, religion and fighting. It is the history of a dynasty, but it is at least as much about the people they ruled, who spoke many different languages, lived in a vast range of landscapes, believed in many rival gods and often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna. Readers who discovered Simon Winder’s genius for telling wonderful stories of middle Europe with Germania will be delighted by the eccentric and fascinating stories of the Habsburgs and their world. Danubia was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2013.