Showing results by publisher "John Murray" in Literature & Fiction

One summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes' and Nijinskys' gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester.

They say the Messiah is alive. He is living in New York. Sleeping with men. Impregnating women. Euthanasing the dying, healing the sick. Defying the government and condemning the holy. If you met him.... and he changed your life... would you believe?

A kiss, a touch. A smile and a beating heart. Love and sex and dreams, art and drugs and the madness of youth. Betrayal and heartbreak, regret and pain, the melancholy of age. Katerina, the explosive new novel by America's most controversial writer, is a sweeping love story alternating between 1992 Paris and Los Angeles in 2018. At its centre are a young writer and a young model on the verge of fame, both reckless, impulsive, addicted, and deeply in love.

Cezair-Thompson conjures the tragic glamour of golden age Hollywood against the backdrop of lusty, turbulent Jamaica in her dual generational coming-of-age saga. Ida Joseph is 13 years old when Errol Flynn is nearly shipwrecked off the coast of her hometown of Port Antonio in 1946. Flynn instantly loves Jamaica and, eager to find a refuge from stateside scandal, purchases an island across from the port. Navy Island becomes the setting for his glittering parties, movie projects

An unambitious 22 year-old, Darren lives in a Brooklyn brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Manhattan office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya and eating his mother's home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC's hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the 36th floor.

Reunions. Recriminations. Reckonings. Ireland. Great nationalists, bad mothers and a whole lot of secrets. Ryan Cusack is ready to deliver its soundtrack. Former sex-worker Georgie wants the truth about Ryan's past out there, but the journalist has her own agenda. Mel returns from Brexit Britain, ill-equipped to deal with the resurgence of a family scandal. Karine has always been sure of herself, until a terrible secret tugs the rug from under her. Maureen has got wind that things are changing, and if anyone's telling the story she wants to make sure it's her.

For over thirty years, Old Second and Bao Mei have cobbled together a meagre existence in New York City's Chinatown. But unlike other couples, these two share an unusual past. In rural Fuzhou, before they emigrated, they frequented The Workers' Cinema: a theatre where gay men cruised for love. While classic war films played, Old Second and his fellow countrymen found intimacy in the privacy of the Workers' Cinema's screening rooms. Elsewhere, in the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men - guarding their secrets and finding her own happiness with the projectionist.

Fifteen-year-old Ana Canción never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she must say yes. It doesn't matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year's Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights.

Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. Over the course of twelve sessions, Cara recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her biting and loving relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification and loss, and what really happened between her and her estranged son, Fernando.

London has changed a lot over the years. The Soho that Precious and Tabitha live and work in is barely recognisable anymore. And now, the building they call their home is under threat; its billionaire-owner Agatha wants to kick the women out to build expensive restaurants and luxury flats. Men like Robert, who visit the brothel, will have to go elsewhere.The collection of vagabonds and strays in the basement will have to find somewhere else to live.

The Kindred sisters - Ezra and Cinthy - grew up with an abundance of love. Love from their parents, who let them believe that the stories they tell on stars can come true. Love from their neighbours, the Junketts, the only other Black family in town. And love for their adopted hometown of Salt Point, a beautiful New England village perched high up on coastal bluffs. But as the girls hit adolescence, their white neighbours, including Ezra's best friend, Ruby, start to see their maturing bodies and minds in a different way.

Set in the decades between the two World Wars, the captivating story of one man who banishes himself to a solitary life in the Arctic Circle and is saved by good friends, a loyal dog and a surprise visit that changes everything.

Fiadh's life is turned completely upside down on a night out in Belfast. Pretty soon everyone has heard about what happened; it is impossible to keep the rumours from spreading, the gossip from spiralling out of control. And just as she was beginning to finally figure everything out: she was feeling positive about her move to Liverpool, she was starting to get on top of her uni work and had made some new friends. Now her life is in freefall and Fiadh is helpless to do anything about it.

A best-selling and award-winning debut collection from one of South Korea's most prominent young writers. In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In 'A Song from Afar', a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, travelling to Russia to search for information about the deceased.

In 1997 Anne's eighteen-year-old son Torran walked out of his hotel in the notorious Himalayan town of Manali - and disappeared. Seven years later Anne is still searching, haunted by the idea that someone must know something, following every tenuous lead, obsessed with potential sightings. She's ridden with guilt at the way she failed Torran as a mother. Though, unlike her husband, she's never stopped believing her son is alive. When her estranged niece Esther arrives with new information, Anne is convinced that her tenacity will finally be rewarded.

Agu is just a boy when war arrives at his village. His mother and sister are rescued by the UN while he and his father remain to fight the rebels. 'Run!' shouts his father when the rebels arrive. And Agu does run. Straight into the rebels' path. In a vivid, sparkling voice, Agu tells the story of what happens to him next - his life as a child soldier. His story is shocking and painful and completely unforgettable. Beasts of No Nation gives us an extraordinary portrait of the chaos and violence of war.

Follow the bank of the Koitogawa river until you reach the beach. From there a path of white seashells will lead you to the Chibineko Kitchen. Step inside, they'll be expecting you. These are the directions Kotoko has been given. She arrives at the tiny restaurant, perched right by the water, early in the morning. Still reeling from the sudden death of her brother, she's been promised that the food served there will bring him back to her, for one last time.

Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father's arrest. Fifteen years later, on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart.

For a whole year on his train to work, TLS editor Stig Abell read books from across genres and time periods. Then he wrote about them and their impact on our culture and his own life. The result is a work of many things: a brisk guide to the canon of Western literature; an intimate engagement with writers from Shakespeare to JK Rowling, Marcel Proust to Zora Neale Hurston; a wise and funny celebration of the power of words; and a meditation on mental unrest and how to tackle it.

After 25 years of conflict, the IRA and the British have agreed to an uneasy ceasefire, as a first step towards lasting peace. But if decades of savage violence are leading only to smiles and handshakes, those on the ground in the border country will start to question what exactly they have been fighting for. When an IRA man's wife turns informer, he and his brother gather their old comrades for an assault on the local army base.