Showing results by publisher "John Murray" in Literary Fiction

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.

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.

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.

Jane Logan is six months pregnant and has moved to Berlin to live with her long-term lover, rich banker Petra. The women's chic new apartment is in a trendy part of the city but Jane finds herself increasingly uneasy there. She conceives a dread of the derelict backhouse across the courtyard and begins to suspect something sinister is happening in the flat next door, where gynaecologist Alban Mann lives with his teenage daughter, Anna.

It seemed, at times, an act of profound selfishness, to have a child so that I might become a parent; but selfish, too, to have a child and stay the same, or not to have one - unless the only honest choice would have been to try to become this kinder version of myself without the need to bring another into it.

Dounia, a young Saudi finds herself alienated and alone as she prepares for motherhood in an air-conditioned mansion in the middle of the desert. After losing her home and baby in a natural disaster, Flora does the unthinkable and leaves her surviving child in the Philippines to become an overseas domestic worker. Pushed by her family to marry a jihadist, Zeinah, a Syrian woman finds herself joining the city's morality police. Justine uproots her progressive New York family to curate an exhibit in Abu Dhabi, where she must reckon with her ethical limitations.

It was strange because it wasn't so long ago that he was convinced the only way out of the depression that had crippled him since he was a child was death. But now, he is on a high-speed train, travelling from Rome to Modena, a failed novelist on the tail of a famous physicist whose memoir he is ghostwriting. The more of another man's life he writes, the more his debt to his publisher is paid off. But nothing would be possible had he not experienced the life-altering, life-saving treatment for the darkness which had been hovering since the chemical spill in West Virginia.

An Italian novel in translation about the relationship between a teacher and a young Romanian girl serving time on Nisida, Naples' juvenile-detention centre.

This is a story about a woman. And the truck driver who mistook her for a prostitute. The old man she robbed and the hunters who smuggled her across the border. The woman whose name she stole, the wife who turned a blind eye. This is the story of a mother searching for her child. This is a story you cannot stop thinking about.

Growing up, it was always the three of them: Miller and Olly and Ash. They stuck together, like they were keeping a secret. They needed each other. As teenagers, they drove to LA, lived in a ramshackle place on the beach in Malibu, set up a record label. They were successful, best friends and Olly and Miller fell in love. Before it fell apart, it was beautiful. Then Olly stopped looking at Miller the way he used to. Miller spent a night with Ash, which turned into a marriage.

It is 2008, late capitalism is in crisis, and the great and the good are gathered at an Islington house party. Hosting proceedings are waspish Sherard Howe, scion of a publishing dynasty and owner of a left-wing magazine, and his wife, Daphne Depree, whose feminist work, The Third Sex is seen - to her increasing discomfort - as an intellectual cornerstone of the Blair era.

Eighteen years since their move to Brussels and the future is clouded with uncertainty for Neil, a Brit, American Marcy and their three Belgian-born children. Wrapped up in their own worries, Neil and Marcy fail to see how much their middle child, Alec, is struggling. When Marcy offers shelter to a young Syrian refugee, it triggers an explosive train of events that affects every member of the family.

Nagi Hayakawa is facing an impossible choice. Should she agree to marry her boyfriend, despite being ill and not knowing how many years she has left to live, or should she protect him from future heartbreak by refusing? Desperate for advice from the one person no longer there to give it - her mother who died years before - she reserves a table at the Chibineko Kitchen.