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Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbour who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outre rocker and Walter's old college friend and rival - still doing in the picture? ... more
A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained for. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn. Witnesses to Tracy's Faustian exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie who has returned to his home county in search of someone else's roots. All three characters learn that the past is never history and that no good deed goes unpunished.
Kate Atkinson dovetails and counterpoints her plots with Dickensian brilliance in a tale peopled with unlikely heroes and villains. Started Early, Took My Dog is freighted with wit, wisdom and a fierce ... more
An ever-present air of sensuality and danger haunts Kapka ... more
When a young woman loses her memory after a traumatic car accident, she decides to recuperate in her palatial family home - a gorgeous mansion set high on the cliffs - which is about to be sold. Seizing this as her last opportunity to enjoy summer there, and hoping it will stimulate her memory, which is alarmingly blank for large sections of her childhood, she moves in. But instead of the peace she is seeking, she begins to relive someone else's memories of the house, and her every movement stirs another presence. As the tension builds, her trust in both old and new relationships is tested, and tragic secrets begin to surface. A haunting image of a white wisplike veil winds through her dreams and into unfolding events - and the unveiling of the final secret leaves her changed forever.
Taking this searing moment as its springboard, Butterfly's Shadow sends its characters spinning into a future undreamed of in the original.At the centre of it all is the child, Joey, carried away by his father and new step-mother to a brighter future in America. But it's not that simple. Each is haunted in different ways by memories of what really happened that day - Joey thinks he heard screaming, his father can't seem to find peace, his step-mother has stumbled into a deceit that will destroy her happiness. But soon, they are caught in the shifting perspectives of a dramatic era - the Depression, Pearl Harbor, the horrors of war and, finally, the moment that time stopped in Nagasaki.When the deadly dust of the A-bomb has settled, Joey finds his way back to the ... more
Both an inspired reimagining of the greatest love story ever told and a romantic, heart-pumping thriller, Juliet intertwines the fates of two fascinating women who lived centuries apart into one unforgettable tale.
Gabriel Brockwell, aesthete, poet, philosopher, disaffected twenty-something decadent, is thinking terminal. His philosophical enquiries, the abstractions he indulges, and how these relate to a life lived, all point in the same direction. His destination is Wonderland. The nature and style of the journey is all that's to be decided.Taking in London, Tokyo and Berlin, Lights Out In Wonderland documents Gabriel Brockwell's remarkable global odyssey. Committed to the pursuit of pleasure and in search of the Bacchanal to obliterate all previous parties, Gabriel's adventure takes in a spell in rehab, a near-death experience with fugu ovaries, a sexual encounter with an octopus, and finally an orgiastic feast in the bowels of Berlin's majestic Tempelhof Airport. Along the way we see a character ... more
Feted for its electric chaos, the city of Bombay also accommodates pockets of calm. In one such enclave, Mohan, a middle-aged letter writer - the last of a dying profession - sits under a banyan tree in Fort, furnishing missives for village migrants, disenchanted lovers, and when pickings are slim, filling in money order forms. But Mohan's true passion is collecting second-hand books; he's particularly attached to novels with marginal annotations. So when the pavement booksellers of Fort are summarily evicted, Mohan's life starts to lose some of its animating lustre. At this tenuous moment Mohan - and his wife, Lakshmi - are joined in Saraswati Park, a suburban housing colony, by their nephew, Ashish, a diffident, sexually uncertain 19-year-old who has to repeat his final year in college. As Saraswati Park unfolds, the lives of each of the three characters ... more
