Showing results by publisher "Picador" in Genre Fiction

Thirteen-year-old Nanami Kosaki loves reading. The local library is a home from home and books have become her best friends. When Nanami notices books disappearing from the library shelves, she’s particularly curious about a suspicious man in a grey suit whose furtive behaviour doesn’t feel right. Should she follow him to see what he’s up to? When a talking tabby cat called Tiger appears to warn her about how dangerous that would be, together they’re brave enough to follow the frightening trail to find out where all the books have gone.

Over the course of a single year, our nameless narrator heroically tries to keep her small brood of four chickens alive despite the seemingly endless challenges that caring for another creature entails. From the freezing nights of a brutal winter to a sweltering summer which brings a surprise tornado, she battles predators, bad luck and the uncertainty of a future that may not look anything like the one she always imagined.

When a writer named Satya attends a prestigious artists’ retreat, he finds the pressures of the outside world won’t let up: the US president rages online, a dangerous virus envelops the globe and the 24 hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. These Orwellian interruptions begin to crystallise into an idea for his new novel, Enemies of the People, about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Satya scours his life for moments where truth bends towards the imagined and misinformation is mistaken as fact.

Born to a Vietnamese family based in Melbourne, the narrator is haunted by the story of his grandfather whose ten-year imprisonment by the Communist government in Vietnam’s notorious Chi Hoa prison looms large over his own place in the world and his choice to become a human rights lawyer. As he oscillates between identities of his Australian upbringing and his Vietnamese heritage, it is the death of his grandfather in a Parisian suburb and the birth of his daughter that crystalise some of the strands that have shaped his life and thinking

As the city thrums with Blitz bombers, lonely A.R.P warden Ruby Thacker is drawn into the unfamiliar world of the India Forum. There, at the dishevelled townhouse in Bloomsbury, she meets Kitty, an ambitious barrister doing all she can to free her beloved India from British rule. But Ruby has secret motives for joining the Forum, and when the mysterious Satyajit appears with radical ideas about fighting for freedom, she finds herself torn between head and heart.

Young, inexperienced and fleeing a terrible personal loss, Rosie travels to France to become an au pair to the Tivot family. Nicole, the cool, distant and beautifully polished mother of the three children she cares for is impossible to connect with - there is something about the woman that both fascinates and unnerves Rosie. The same is true of the rest of the Tivot clan. Nicole’s husband, Marc, and their children all seem to be caught in an unending struggle against each other for love and acceptance. Only when Rosie is sent to care for Nicole’s guardian does she finally discover the truth.

Nicholas and his wife, April, live in a remote cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains with their four-year-old son, Jack. They keep their families at a distance, rejecting what their loved ones think of as 'normal'. In the early hours of a Wednesday morning, they are driving home from a party when their car crashes on a deserted road and they are killed. This is the story of what happens after the tragedy. As the couple's grieving relatives descend on the family home, they are forced to decide who will care for the child Nicholas and April left behind.

Collecting pieces written for the New Yorker and the Paris Review between 1978 and 1982, including the seminal ‘Girl’, these stunning works announced a fully-formed, generational talent and firmly established the themes that Kincaid would continue to return to in her later work: the loss of childhood, the fractious nature of mother–daughter relationships, the intangible beauty of the natural world and the striving for independence in a colonial landscape.

Throughout the collection, a mother in her late 30s relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.

Amos and Emerson have been friends for years. Despite vastly different backgrounds, the two now form an enviable portrait of middle age: their wives are close, their teenage daughters have grown up together, their days are passed in the comfortable languor of New York City wealth. They share an unbreakable bond, or so they think. This weekend, however, something is different. After gathering for Emerson’s birthday at his country home, celebration gives way to old rivalries and resentments which erupt in a shocking act of violence, one that threatens to shatter their finely made world.

Each member of the family always responded in the same way whenever Désiré’s name came up. Father and Grandfather would say nothing at all. Mother would say a few words and then falter, ‘It's all very sad.’ So, each in their own way, no one seemed to have anything much to say. The truth was that in 1983 my uncle Désiré ran away from our village, in the South of France. And when he returned home from Amsterdam, he was addicted to heroin. And then he died. That was the truth, but not the whole truth . . .

In the summer of 1938, Sonja is lifted onto a Kindertransport train that will take her from Nazi-occupied Austria to London. She leaves behind her parents, Fania and Arnold, and her baby brother Moses. She is the only member of her family to survive. In 1966 Fania is working as a massage therapist in Montreal, a place that provided her safe haven after she lost her entire family in the Second World War. And yet there are strange echoes, impressions, of those she loves everywhere she turns. Has she lost her mind or is her family still alive?