ENGLISH BOOKS

In Girl in a Band Kim Gordon, a founding member of Sonic Youth and role model for a generation of women, tells her story.
She writes frankly about her route from girl to woman to pioneering icon within the music and art scene of New York City in the 1980s and 90s, as well as marriage, motherhood, and independence.

A Japanese mystery bestseller, revolving around a series of creepy drawings, in which the reader is the detective - from the Youtube sensation Uketsu.

Eleven strange buildings. One terrible secret. A lonely hut in the woods. A murder house. A hidden chamber. A mysterious shrine. A home in flames. A nightmarish prison...

A Japanese mystery bestseller, revolving around a series of unsettling floorplans, in which the reader is the detective - from the Youtube sensation Uketsu.


A sinister hidden room. A dead space between two walls. A sealed cellar. A child's face glimpsed at a window. Every house hides secrets. But some secrets are far darker than others.

When Tom Layward's wife had an affair he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned eighteen. Twelve years later, while taking her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact, and keeps driving West.

Japan's internationally celebrated storyteller returns with five stories of healing and hope. Effortlessly beautiful, nostalgic and melancholy, the stories in Dead-End Memories explore the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, find solace in the blissful moments in everyday life.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they explore the dazzling beaches, gorging fruit, seeking shelter, and ripping off their uniforms to swim in the lagoon. At night, in the darkness of the jungle, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast. Orphaned by society, they must forge their own; but it isn't long before their innocent games devolve into something far more dangerous . . .

The Sonic Youth frontman takes us from a 1960s childhood rock 'n' roll epiphany, through the subversive world of 1970s punk blasting forth from New York City, to traversing the globe with a band who changed the sound of modern alternative rock music and opened the minds of a generation of artists.

All Gates Open is the definitive story of the most influential and revered avant-garde band of the late twentieth century: Can.
This is the full biography and history of the band.

A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon: a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals, while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight - and we feel 'the unbearable lightness of being'.

After all what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the English countryside and into his past...

The book presents the highs and lows of both his personal and professional life, as Coppola sets out to transform the process of making movies.

There was a time, the darkest of times, when Eden thought the only person who could save her was Josh. He was everything that was good in the world - a trusting heart, a loving touch, a kind smile.

But he was never meant to be her saviour. Eden had to do that on her own. Now Eden has started college and faced up to her rapist, it seems like they might finally be in the right place at the right time to make a relationship work. But as the trial that will determine if Eden gets the justice she deserves looms, opening unhealed wounds, can their love withstand the pressure?

Erasure is an unforgettable, satirical but tender novel about race and cultural expectations in contemporary America.

Sylvia Plath is a major cultural icon who continues to inspire new generations of female readers.


Working as an intern for a New York fashion magazine in the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood is on the brink of her future. Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal. Esther's vision of the world shimmers and shifts: day-to-day living in the sultry city, her crazed men-friends, the hot dinner dances . . .

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, is partially based on Plath's own life. It has been celebrated for its darkly funny and razor sharp portrait of 1950s society, and has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Kamal lives a life of cosmopolitan glamour, exploring the restaurants and boutiques of Istanbul with his friends and fiance. In the newly modern city, they pride themselves on their liberal attitudes and Western style.

A chance encounter with Fusun, a working-class shop-girl, begins a long, obsessive love affair, one that draws him deep into Istanbul's complex history, and uncovers the forces of class and gender that still control its inhabitants' lives.

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they worry about sex and friendship and the times they live in. Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and observant. A student in Dublin and an aspiring writer, at night she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are interviewed and then befriended by Melissa, a well-known journalist who is married to Nick, an actor, they enter a world of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence, beginning a complex menage-a-quatre. But when Frances and Nick get unexpectedly closer, the sharply witty and emotion-averse Frances is forced to honestly confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.

Lose yourself in this classic 1950s Cold War spy thriller tracking a British secret agent in Communist Serbia by the celebrated of The Alexandria Quartet, perfect for fans of John le Carre.

Methuen is a seasoned British secret agent, weary of espionage missions and desperately in need of a break - but he can't resist an assignment to investigate dirty dealings in the Balkans. A fellow British spy has been murdered in Serbia by a guerrilla gang of underground royalists, the White Eagles - but when Methuen arrives, he soon finds himself in a life-and-death struggle, pursued by both the royalists and Communists alike ...

Twenty-three illustrated gothic tales from the dark corridors of the imagination of Tim Burton.
Burton - the creative genius behind Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and Nightmare Before Christmas, among others - now gives birth to a cast of gruesomely sympathetic children: misunderstood outcasts who struggle to find love and belonging in their cruel, cruel worlds. His lovingly lurid illustrations evoke both the sweetness and tragedy of these hopeful, yet hapless beings.

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING WORLDWIDE PHENOMENON
A RICHARD & JUDY, BETWEEN THE COVERS AND GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD FOR FICTION

Nora's life has been going from bad to worse. Then at the stroke of midnight on her last day on earth she finds herself transported to a library. There she is given the chance to undo her regrets and try out each of the other lives she might have lived. Which raises the ultimate question: with infinite choices, what is the best way to live?

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation - awkward but electrifying - something life-changing begins.

Normal People is a story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find they can't.

Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film.

When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller lists, then remained there for over a year and sold millions of copies.

Michael Jackson: provocateur, icon, enigma.

Who was he really? And how does his spectacular rise, his catastrophic fall, reflect upon those who made him; those who broke him; and those who loved him?

Almost ten years on from Jackson's untimely death, here is Margo Jefferson's definitive and dazzling dissection of the King of Pop: a man admired for his music, his flair, his performances; and censured for his skin, his erratic behaviour, and, in his final years, for his relationships with children.

The only in-depth biographical account of the legendary lead singer of Joy Division, written by his widow. Includes a foreword by Jon Savage and an introduction by Joy Division drummer, Steven Morris.

Revered by his peers and idolized by his fans, Ian Curtis left behind a legacy rich in artistic genius. Mesmerizing on stage but introverted and prone to desperate mood swings in his private life, Curtis died by his own hand on 18 May 1980.

Touching from a Distance documents how, with a wife, child and impending international fame, Curtis was seduced by the glory of an early grave. Regarded as the essential book on the essential icon of the post-punk era, Touching from a Distance includes a full set of Curtis's lyrics and a discography and gig list.

In the late eighties and early nineties, Moby, then an underground DJ and musician, was scraping out a living in New York City. In a scene popular chiefly among working-class African-Americans and Latinos, Moby - a poor, skinny, white Christian, vegan and teetotaller - looked like he would never make it. By the late nineties, contemplating the end of his music career, he released what he assumed would be his swansong, Play, which went on to become a multi-million-selling album, opening up an astonishing new phase in his life. Porcelain is an unfailingly honest, funny and brilliantly written memoir about making it, losing it, loving it, hating it and everything in between.

When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface he is forced to confront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others suffer from the same affliction and speculation rises among scientists that the Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates incarnate memories, but its purpose in doing so remains a mystery . . .

Solaris raises a question that has been at the heart of human experience and literature for centuries: can we truly understand the universe around us without first understanding what lies within?

'This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels.' The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the most secret of Kundera's novels. This new translation is the first to be fully authorized by Milan Kundera.