The People with the Dogs by Christina Stead

$10.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Series: Virago Modern Classics Ser. | Reading Level: very good

The People with the Dogs, first published in 1952, is set in America, and has been described as Christina Stead's 'most amiable novel and one of her least appreciated.' In Edward Massine it also boasts one of her 'most attractive male characters' who defines his condition appealingly as a state of 'unde fined hesitant anticipation.' Home from the Second World War Edward Massine rests contentedly in the ample bosom of his family: doting aunts, eccentric uncles and many cousins - comfortable, indolent Liberals of the old school. Theirs is a delightful world of holidays, animals and afternoon tea. Always complaisant, Edward is the last of the line, the perfect relative - to the Massines almost as precious a possession as their beloved dogs. But even benevolent love can suffocate and destroy: it takes death, betrayal and a new independent love for Edward to break the fetters of family life and assert himself as a passionate individual. Angela Carter described Christina Stead as 'a deeply accomplished and entirely individual writer', an accolade that is amply attested to in this fine, satiric but affectionate novel.It is a part of the Faber Finds Christina Stead reissue programme, the full list of titles being: The Beauties and Furies, For Love Alone, Letty Fox, The People with the Dogs, A Little Tea, A Little Chat, Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife), The Puzzleheaded Girl, The Salzburg Tales. ...Show more

The Three Sisters by May Sinclair

$8.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Series: Virago Modern Classics Ser. | Reading Level: very good

Howards End by David (INT) E. M.; Lodge Forster

$10.00 NZD

Category: Classic fiction | Series: Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, | Reading Level: very good

In "Howard's End", E.M. Forster unveils the English character as never before, exploring the underlying class warfare involving three distinct groups - a wealthy family bound by the rules of tradition and property, two independent, cultured sisters, and a young man living on the edge of poverty. The sou rce of their conflict - Howards End, a house in the countryside which ultimately becomes a symbol of conflict within British society. ...Show more

Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

$12.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Reading Level: very good

The English-language debut of Indonesia's rising star. Compulsively readable, Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour, and romance in an astonishing epic novel, in which the beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by every monstrosity. Kur niawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole is a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders, followed by three decades of Suharto's despotic rule. Drawing on local sources—folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit—and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Beauty Is a Wound is passionate and ironic, exuberant and confronting. Hailed as 'the next Pramoedya', Eka Kurniawan is an exciting new voice in contemporary literature. ...Show more

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (tr Philip Gabriel)

$12.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Reading Level: good- very good

At fifteen, Kafka Tamura runs away from home, either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister. And the aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his highly simplified life suddenly overturned. Their parallel odysseys, as mysterious to us as they are to them, are enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Fish tumble in storms from the sky; cats and people carry on conversations; a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle. Yet this, like everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own. ...Show more

A Love Song for India: Tales from East and West by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

$12.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Reading Level: very good

Taking us from a sweltering Indian rooftop at night to the marble halls of an ageing Bollywood star's palace, this is a new collection of short stories from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. A wedding is planned between two innocents at a crumbling mansion of a grand Hudson Valley estate, while among the white-sock ed convent girls of post-colonial New Delhi a mixed-race couple contemplate their son's alienation and the failure of hope. A young English girl infiltrates Fifth Avenue theatrical royalty and a lovely Broadway starlet exacts a clever, protracted revenge against her nemesis. Speaking of mortality and family rivalry, of the transfer of power from old to young, of love and the loss of innocence, A LOVESONG FOR INDIA is a delicious assortment of fairytales and parables. ...Show more

Mary Ursula Bethell by M H Holcroft

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Literature | Series: New Zealand Writers and Their Work Ser. | Reading Level: very good

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

$10.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Series: Bloomsbury Classics Ser. | Reading Level: very good

"Hana, the Canadian nurse exhausted by death and grieving for her own dead father; Caravaggio, the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper each is haunted in different ways by the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in an upsta irs room. His extraordinary knowledge and morphine-induced memories of the North African desert, of explorers and tribes, of history and cartography; and also of forbidden love, suffering and betrayal illuminate the story, and leave all the characters for ever changed." ...Show more

The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler; Charlotte Collins (Translator)

$10.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Reading Level: very good

From The Man Booker International Prize finalist Robert Seethaler comes a tender, heartbreaking story about one young man and his friendship with Sigmund Freud during the Nazi occupation of Vienna. Seventeen-year-old Franz Huchel journeys to Vienna to apprentice at a tobacco shop. There he meets Sigmun d Freud, a regular customer, and over time the two very different men form a singular friendship. When Franz falls desperately in love with the music hall dancer Anezka, he seeks advice from the renowned psychoanalyst, who admits that the female sex is as big a mystery to him as it is to Franz. As political and social conditions in Austria dramatically worsen with the Nazis' arrival in Vienna, Franz, Freud, and Anezka are swept into the maelstrom of events. Each has a big decision to make: to stay or to flee? ...Show more

At Last by Edward St. Aubyn

$10.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Series: The Patrick Melrose Novels 5 | Reading Level: very good

A New York Times Notable Book of 2012One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books 2011One of Esquire's Best Books of 2012One of TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2012 Here, from the writer described by The Guardian as "our purest living prose stylist" and whom Alan Hollinghurst has called "the most brilliant English novelist of his generation," is a work of glittering social comedy, profound emotional truth, and acute verbal wit. At Last is also the stunning culmination of one of the great fiction enterprises of the past two decades in the life of the English novel. As readers of Edward St. Aubyn's extraordinary earlier works--Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and the Man Booker Prize finalist Mother's Milk--are well aware, for Patrick Melrose, "family" has always been a double-edged sword. At Last begins as friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor. An American heiress, Eleanor married into the British aristocracy, giving up the grandeur of her upbringing for "good works" freely bestowed on everyone but her own son, who finds himself questioning whether his transition to a life without parents will indeed be the liberation he had so long imagined. The service ends, and family and friends gather for a final party. Amid the social niceties and social horrors, Patrick begins to sense the prospect of release from the extremes of his childhood, and at the end of the day, alone in his room, the promise some form of safety. . . at last. ...Show more

Shakespeare by Germaine Greer

$8.00 NZD

Category: Shakespeare | Series: Past Masters Ser. | Reading Level: very good

"[T]his slim volume...is committed to a description of Shakespeare's thought as it is evinced in the works which he has left us." Noted feminist and internationally bestselling author Germaine Greer explores Shakespeare as a thinker, unraveling the methods he used to dramatize moral and intellectual iss ues. Her astute and highly original look at the Bard covers his life, his poetics and politics, his characters (especially his "passionate and pure" females), his audience, and his theater--all placed in the larger context of Elizabethan society and culture. As long as Shakespeare's work remains central to the English-speaking world, Greer concludes, it will retain the values that make it unique. ...Show more

Dog Fox Field - Poems by Les A. Murray

$10.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: good-very good