Unforgettable Books
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Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles
Few writers are as inextricably linked with a city as Raymond Chandler and Los Angeles. The neon-lit streets, mobbed-up joints and seedy rooming houses portrayed in his fiction were real places, familiar to Angelenos of the time, and in some cases recognisable today. This is a guide to the world of Raymond Chandler and his noble alter-ego, the private detective Philip Marlowe. It mixes locations from the books, the films and Chandler's personal life. There's the crummy dive where Moose Malloy went looking for Velma; the actual lounge where Marlowe and Terry Lennox ordered gimlets; the top-floor suite where oil executive Chandler got his priceless education in how a dirty, sun-drenched city really operated. This is the Los Angeles that Raymond Chandler carried in his heart. And now, you can too.
$13.00 $8.00
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The Ghost Women
A mysterious art academy in the woods, a deck of ancient tarot cards, a centuries-old secret On a hot August morning in 1972, the body of Abel Montague, a student at St. Luke's Institute of the Arts, is found hanging from a tree in the forest. An ancient Hanged Man tarot card is found in the back pocket of his pants and his body has been positioned into the exact pose illustrated on the card. When Detective Lola Germany arrives at St. Luke's--a former monastery that once housed a secret order of monks who carried out witch trials and executions--she believes they are dealing with a ritualistic murder. While interviewing school administrators and Abel's classmates, Lola discovers Abel's live-in girlfriend, Pearl, seems shaken but also might be hiding something--along with her group of friends who call themselves witches. When more students are found dead, each body arranged like a tarot card, Lola realizes she is trapped in a web of power and ambition that spans centuries. Soon the lines between past and present, spiritual and tangible, begin to blur, and the only way to survive is to seek answers from places she never imagined.
$35.00 $30.00
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Kin
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage--Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy. "Kin is the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I'm always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones's very best work." --Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother's death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life. A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
$37.00 $32.00
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Foreign Country
From the internationally acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of The Trinity Six, comes Charles Cumming's A Foreign Country, a compelling tale of deceit and betrayal, conspiracy and redemption. On the vacation of a lifetime in Egypt, an elderly French couple are brutally murdered. Days later, a meticulously-planned kidnapping takes place on the streets of Paris. Amelia Levene, the first female Chief of MI6, has disappeared without a trace, six weeks before she is due to take over as the most influential spy in Europe. It is the gravest crisis MI6 has faced in more than a decade. Desperate not only to find her, but to keep her disappearance a secret, Britain's top intelligence agents turn to one of their own: disgraced MI6 officer Thomas Kell. Tossed out of the Service only months before, Kell is given one final chance to redeem himself - find Amelia Levene at any cost. The trail leads Kell to France and Tunisia, where he uncovers a shocking secret and a conspiracy that could have unimaginable repercussions for Britain and its allies. Only Kell stands in the way of personal and political catastrophe.
$30.00 $25.00
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Trinity Six
A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the YearThe most closely-guarded secret of the Cold War is about to be exposed - the identity of a SIXTH member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring. And people are killing for it, in Charles Cumming's bestselling thriller The Trinity Six. London, 1992. Late one night, Edward Crane, 76, is declared dead at a London hospital. An obituary describes him only as a 'resourceful career diplomat'. But Crane was much more than that - and the circumstances surrounding his death are far from what they seem. Fifteen years later, academic Sam Gaddis needs money. When a journalist friend asks for his help researching a possible sixth member of the notorious Trinity spy ring, Gaddis knows that she's onto a story that could turn his fortunes around. But within hours the journalist is dead, apparently from a heart attack. Taking over her investigation, Gaddis trails a man who claims to know the truth about Edward Crane. Europe still echoes with decades of deadly disinformation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And as Gaddis follows a series of leads across the continent, he approaches a shocking revelation - one which will rock the foundations of politics from London to Moscow... "Cumming's novel is characterized by a gripping sense of realism. He displays a vast knowledge of spycraft and Cold War history, and the dense, three-dimensional world he crafts comes complete with seedy hotels and smoky nightclubs. The result is absolutely gripping. Taut, atmospheric and immersive--an instant classic." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) on The Trinity Six Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Thrillers.
$30.00 $25.00
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Typhoon
Typhoon, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Top Ten Thriller of the Year (London Times), further confirms what all the critics have been saying: Charles Cumming is a modern master of the classic espionage thriller, heir to le Carre and Deighton. In 1997, a few months before the British government is scheduled to return Hong Kong to Chinese rule, Joe Lennox, a brilliant young operative for SIS (MI6), loses both his girlfriend and his first high profile asset - a prominent defector who disappears from a safe house. The girlfriend, the ravishing Isabella Aubert, he lost to Miles Coolidge, a hard-bitten CIA agent; the asset to collusion between his bosses and the CIA. A decade later, Lennox is back in China, facing his old nemeses. With the CIA plotting to use an Islamic group to destabilize China, the SIS seeking to thwart them and his old asset the key to all of this, Lennox, Coolidge, and the girlfriend they shared are hopelessly intertwined in a plot where trust is impossible and truth is unknowable.
$33.00 $28.00
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Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
NOW A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop. "In my reckless and undiscouraged youth," Lillian Boxfish writes, "I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street..." She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy's to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, "in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it." Now it's the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It's chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier now--her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl--but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed--and has not. Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young. "Transporting...witty, poignant and sparkling."--People (People Picks Book of the Week)
$23.00 $18.00
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Heartburn
A 40th anniversary reissue of the national bestselling author's hilarious first novel that memorably mixed food, heartbreak, and revenge into a comic masterpiece--now with a new foreword by Stanley Tucci. - "Touching and funny.... Proof that writing well is the best revenge." --Chicago TribuneIs it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. In this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally... reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter. Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband, Mark, is in love with another woman. The fact that the other woman has "a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs" is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel writes cookbooks for a living. And in between trying to win Mark back and loudly wishing him dead, Ephron's irrepressible heroine offers some of her favorite recipes. Heartburn is a sinfully delicious novel, as soul-satisfying as mashed potatoes and as airy as a perfect soufflé.
$22.00 $17.00
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School of Night
London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all. Kristian Hadeland, young and ambitious, has moved to London to study photography; he knows that he and his art are destined for more. His family never understood him, and his fellow photography students bore him. But when he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist, the future he yearns for becomes possible--as long as he is willing to sacrifice everything and stop at nothing. Twenty-four years later, Kristian sees his dreams come to fruition when a major retrospective of his work is held in New York City. As his past catches up to him, Kristian's world begins to crumble. Success comes at a price, but is he prepared to pay it? In a thrilling twist on Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Karl Ove Knausgaard masterfully spins a cautionary tale about the lengths that we will go to achieve success--and how far we are willing to fall. His most daring and macabre novel yet, The School of Night is an indelible tale about dark temptations and moral depravity, and what we forget when we bargain with the devil.
$37.00 $32.00
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Every One Still Here: Stories
A searching, incisive, and profound debut collection of stories about people--mothers, fathers, sons, strangers, sisters--living in the aftermath of violence. What good is it to know what things are, what lies beneath the appearance of them? It is nothing until it is stated. It is nothing if it is not named. It is just blood, like you have never seen before. A young man studying anatomy looks at a cadaver. Flowers are found, left in bouquets, all over a museum. A mother dies, leaving a stain on the carpet: whether or not anyone acknowledges it, they know it's there. The searching and clear-eyed stories in Every One Still Here are set in Ireland under British occupation, a place where the past, grief, and guilt thrum behind every surface and refuse to stay buried. Liadan Ní Chuinn is a debut writer of uncommon power, clarity, and precision, whose characters in Every One Still Here stay lodged within us long after we leave them.
$22.00 $17.00
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Fields of Fire
"In my opinion, the finest of the Vietnam novels."--Tom WolfeThey each had their reasons for joining the Marines. They each had their illusions. Goodrich came from Harvard. Snake got the tattoo--"Death Before Dishonor"--before he got the uniform. Hodges was haunted by the ghosts of family heroes. They were three young men from different worlds, plunged into a white-hot, murderous realm of jungle warfare as it was fought by one Marine platoon in the An Hoa Basin, 1969. They had no way of knowing what awaited them. Nothing could have prepared them for the madness to come. And in the heat and horror of battle they took on new identities, took on one another, and were each reborn in fields of fire. Fields of Fire is James Webb's classic novel of the Vietnam War, a novel of poetic power, razor-sharp observation, and agonizing human truths seen through the prism of nonstop combat. Weaving together a cast of vivid characters, Fields of Fire captures the journey of unformed men through a man-made hell--until each man finds his fate. Praise for Fields of Fire "Few writers since Stephen Crane have portrayed men at war with such a ring of steely truth."--The Houston Post "A stunner . . . Webb gives us an extraordinary range of acutely observed people, not one a stereotype, and as many different ways of looking at that miserable war."--Newsweek "A novel of such fullness and impact, one is tempted to compare it to Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead."--The Oregonian "Webb's book has the unmistakable sound of truth acquired the hard way. His men hate the war; it is a lethal fact cut adrift from personal sense. Yet they understand that its profound insanity, its blood and oblivion, have in some way made them fall in love with battle and with each other."--Time
$15.99 $10.99
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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Written with a delightfully dry sense of humour and the wisdom of a born storyteller, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand explores the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of family obligation and tradition. When retired Major Pettigrew strikes up an unlikely friendship with Mrs. Ali, the Pakistani village shopkeeper, he is drawn out of his regimented world and forced to confront the realities of life in the twenty-first century. Brought together by a shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship on the cusp of blossoming into something more. But although the Major was actually born in Lahore, and Mrs. Ali was born in Cambridge, village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as a permanent foreigner. The Major has always taken special pride in the village, but will he be forced to choose between the place he calls home and a future with Mrs. Ali?
$23.00 $18.00
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