Explore the latest books of this year!
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Peter Abelsen

    The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao
    Everything is illuminated
    P.S.: The Dolphin People
    The bonesetter's daughter
    The Hundred Secret Senses
    Water for elephants
    • Live a Little

      • 352 pages
      • 13 hours of reading

      A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. *NOMINATED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2019* At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. Unlike Beryl, he forgets nothing - especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has hung over him like an oppressive cloud ever since. There's very little life remaining for either of them, but perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. Told with Jacobson's trademark wit and style, Live a Littleis in equal parts funny, irreverent and tender - a novel to make you consider all the paths not taken, and whether you could still change course.

      Live a Little2019
      3.5
    • Find me

      • 256 pages
      • 9 hours of reading

      Elio believes he has left behind his first love - but as an affair with an older man intensifies, his thoughts turn to the past and to Oliver. Oliver, a college professor, husband and father, is preparing to leave New York. The imminent trip stirs up longing and regret, awakening an old desire and propelling him towards a decision that could change everything. In Call Me By Your Name, we fell in love with Oliver and Elio. Find Me returns to these unforgettable characters, exploring how love can ripple out from the past and into the future.

      Find me2019
      3.3
    • The End of the End of the Earth

      • 288 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes--both human and literary--that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect from Franzen. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.

      The End of the End of the Earth2018
      3.2
    • Swing time

      • 432 pages
      • 16 hours of reading

      Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas- about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighbourhood far behind, travelling the world as PA to famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one per cent live.But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey - the same twists, the same shakes - and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.

      Swing time2016
      3.6
    • A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author ofFreedom. Purity Tyler, known to all as Pip, is an outspoken, forthright young woman struggling to make a life for herself. She sleeps in an rickety commune in Oakland. She's in love with an unavailable older man and is saddled with staggering college debt. She has a crazy mother and doesn't know who her father is. A chance encounter leads her to an internship in South America with the world-famous Sunlight Project, the president of which is Andreas Wolf, a charismatic genius who grew up privileged but disaffected in the German Democratic Republic. Like numerous women before her, she becomes obsessed with Andreas, and they have an intense, unsettling relationship. Eventually, he finds her work back in the United States. What lies underneath is a wild tale of hidden identities, secret wealth, neurotic fidelity, sociopathy, and murder. The truth of Pip's parentage lies at the centre of this maelstrom, but before it is resolved Franzen takes us from the rain-drenched forests of northern California, to paranoid East Berlin before the fall of the Wall, to the paradisiacal mountain valleys of Bolivia, exposing us to the vagaries of radical politics, the problematic seductions of the internet, and the no-holds-barred war between the sexes. Featuring an unforgettable cast of inimitable Franzenian characters, Purity is deeply troubling, richly moving, and hilarious.

      Purity2015
      3.6
    • The Yellow Birds

      A Novel

      • 226 pages
      • 8 hours of reading

      With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic. "The war tried to kill us in the spring," begins this breathtaking account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. Bound together since basic training when their tough-as-nails Sergeant ordered Bartle to watch over Murphy, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes impossible actions. With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic.

      The Yellow Birds2012
      3.8
    • 'Deeper, funnier, sadder and truer than a work of fiction has any right to be' Independent on Sunday 'Both a page-turner and a work of art ... an almost perfectly written novel' Evening Standard This is the story of the Berglunds, their son Joey, their daughter Jessica and their friend Richard Katz. It is about how we use and abuse our freedom; about the beginning and ending of love; teenage lust; the unexpectedness of adult life; why we compete with our friends; how we betray those closest to us; and why things almost never work out as they 'should'. It is a story about the human heart, and what it leads us to do to ourselves and each other.

      Freedom2010
      3.8
    • The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao

      • 352 pages
      • 13 hours of reading

      A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, Oscar's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar; his runaway sister Lola; their beautiful mother Belicia; and in the family's uproarious journey from the Dominican Republic to the US and back.'The Best Novel of the 21st Century to Date' - BBC Culture.

      The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao2010
      3.9
    • P.S.: The Dolphin People

      A Novel

      • 356 pages
      • 13 hours of reading

      Life of Pi meets Lord of the Flies in The Dolphin People , a darkly comic “postmodern novel par excellence” ( Sydney Morning Herald ) from Torsten Krol, the author of the critically acclaimed Callisto . While fleeing Germany after World War II, a family arrives in Venezuela and encounters a Stone Age Amazon tribe that mistakes them for dolphins in human form. But the ruse can only protect them for so long in this madcap, imaginative tale.

      P.S.: The Dolphin People2009
      4.0
    • Fall on your knees

      • 566 pages
      • 20 hours of reading

      Following the curves of history in the first half of the twentieth century, Fall on Your Knees takes us from haunted Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, through the battlefields of World War I, to the emerging jazz scene in New York City, and into the lives of four unforgettable sisters. The mythically charged family - James, a father of intelligence and immense ambition ; Materia, his Lebanese child-bride ; and their daughters: Kathleen, the eldest, a beautiful talent preparing for a career as an opera diva ; Frances, incorrigible liar and hell-bent bad girl ; Mercedes, obsessive Catholic and protector of the flock ; and Lily, the adored invalid who takes us on a quest for truth and redemption - is supported by a richly textured cast of characters. Fall on Your Knees is a story of inescapable family bonds, of terrible secrets, of miracles, racial strife, attempted murder, birth and death, and forbidden love

      Fall on your knees2008
      3.8
    • Water for elephants

      • 418 pages
      • 15 hours of reading

      Orphaned, penniless, Jacob Jankowski jumps a freight train in the dark, and in that instant, transforms his future. By morning, he's landed a job with the Flying Squadron of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. By nightfall, he's in love. In an America made colourless by prohibition and the Depression, the circus is a refuge of sequins and sensuality. But behind the glamour lies a darker world, where both animals and men are dispensable. Where falling in love is the most dangerous act of all ...

      Water for elephants2007
      4.1
    • Then We Came to the End

      • 387 pages
      • 14 hours of reading

      No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.

      Then We Came to the End2006
      3.5
    • The Geographer´s Library

      • 560 pages
      • 20 hours of reading

      A twelfth-century Sicilian cat burglar snatches a sack of artefacts from the king's geographer's library, and the tools and talismans of transmutation - and eternal life - are soon scattered all over the world. The bizarre and dangerous circumstances under which these alchemical objects change hands are testament to their extraordinary value, but it is not until nine hundred years later that a young reporter on a local paper, Paul Tomm, stumbles upon evidence that someone is collecting them again. Investigating the suspicious death of a local professor, Tomm finds the dead man's heavily fortified office stuffed with books on alchemy and clues that the man's life was as suspicious as his death ...

      The Geographer´s Library2005
      3.1
    • Specimen days

      • 308 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      This is one of the most anticipated novels of this or any other year, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours.

      Specimen days2005
      3.6
    • Dante Alighieri

      • 184 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      Only R.W.B. Lewis-the renowned biographer and author of The City of Florence-could write so insightfully about Dante Alighieri, Florence's famous son. In Dante he traces the life and complex development-emotional, artistic, philosophical-of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings through Tuscan hills and splendid churches to his days as a young soldier fighting for democracy, and to his civic leadership and years of embittered exile from the city that would fiercely reclaim him a century later.Lewis reveals the boy who first encounters the mythic Beatrice, the lyric poet obsessed with love and death, the grand master of dramatic narrative and allegory, and his monumental search for ultimate truth in The Divine Comedy. It is in this masterpiece of self-discovery and redemption that Lewis finds Dante's own autobiography-and the sum of all his shifting passions and epiphanies.

      Dante Alighieri2004
    • Kleuren die pijn doen

      • 370 pages
      • 13 hours of reading

      Zoals alle tieners uit heden en verleden hunkert Liza Normal naar roem. Helaas voor haar is ze echter geen meisje dat voor het succes. In de wieg is gelegd. Eerder voor het tegendeel. Gehinderd door de vulkanische ambities van haar moeder en haar eigen gebrek aan smaak beleeft Liza de ene afgang na de andere; zeperds, dompers en rampzalige liefdes. Het enige wat in haar voordeel werkt is het feit dat ze een veel beter mens is dan het sterretje dat ze zou willen zijn. Liza is onverwoestbaar. En als ze zich ten slotte verzoent met haar bestaan in de marge, breekt het uur aan van haar zoete wraak op de Hollywoodmythen die haar al die tijd tot wanhoop hebben gedreven.

      Kleuren die pijn doen2004
      3.2
    • De bijenkoning

      • 226 pages
      • 8 hours of reading

      / 9041406026 / Literature translated into Dutch / Nederlands / Dutch / Néerlandais / Niederländisch / paperback / 22 x 14 cm / 227 .pp /

      De bijenkoning2002
    • A young man arrives in the Ukraine with a tattered photograph, a bad translator, a man haunted by memories and an undersexed guide dog - he is looking for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. What they find turns all their worlds upside down.

      Everything is illuminated2002
      3.9
    • The bonesetter's daughter

      • 339 pages
      • 12 hours of reading

      Tells the story of three generations of Chinese women, beginning at the turn of the century.

      The bonesetter's daughter2001
      4.0
    • Wandelgangen van de Macht

      • 400 pages
      • 14 hours of reading

      In Whitehall, het regeringscentrum in Londen, leveren de verschillende politieke partijen rond de verkiezingen in het midden van de jaren vijftig een harde, niet altijd eerlijke strijd.

      Wandelgangen van de Macht1999
    • Dave travels to India with Liz hoping to get her into bed. Liz travels with Dave wanting a companion for her voyage of self-discovery. This novel is a satire about backpackers.

      Are you experienced?1999
      3.6
    • A Monk Swimming

      • 304 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      This sheet map, covering the whole of Lancashire, uses a large scale of 1 inch to 1.6 miles. It contains detailed coverage of the region's road network, including country lanes and rural lanes and tracks. Major footpaths, junctions, roundabouts and slip roads are also shown. Additional detail includes thousands of individually marked farms, houses and hamlets. Airports, airports, stations, ferries, houses, marinas and other places of interest are featured. Also included are town plans of Blackpool, Lancaster and Preston. Designed for both professional and leisure users, it is printed on one side to allow hanging as a wall map.

      A Monk Swimming1999
      3.4
    • The Hundred Secret Senses

      • 321 pages
      • 12 hours of reading

      Stunning reissue of an international bestseller, from the author of The Joy Luck Club' and The Bonesetter's Daughter'.

      The Hundred Secret Senses1996
      4.0