Two wandering adventurers and unlikely soulmates are variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves and con artists - until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles that follow a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars.

    As heir apparent to Love Hall, he must produce an heir of his own; but his obsessive love for his long-dead sister has rendered him a paralytic in matters of the heart. Adding to Geoffroy's troubles is his difficult mother, Lady Loveall, who mercilessly castigates her effeminate son, and a circling mob of greedy relatives anxious to wrest Love Hall from his grasp.Then, a miracle occurs. As his carriage passes a trash dump, Geoffroy spies an abandoned baby in the jaws of a cur. He saves the child, names her Rose, and declares her his rightful heir. The shock fells Lady Loveall on the spot, and Rose becomes the pampered daughter of Lord Loveall and his bride of convenience, the resident librarian Anonyma. This joyful period lasts until Rose's adolescence, when it becomes increasingly difficult to hide the one great secret of Love Hall: namely, that Rose, now in the position of fending off suitors for her titled hand, is in fact a boy. Rose's whiskers, deepening voice, and affection for the daughter of a courtier have not gone unnoticed. Armed with the new revelation, the Loveall's unscrupulous relatives launch a coup, and a desperately confused Rose is cast adrift -- until he finds the renewed vitality that comes from the love of true family and realizes that he can and must go home.

    After all, outside there are 8-inch-high curbs and there's always the horrible chance he might see a gas station attendant wearing a blue hat. So, except for the occasional trip to the Rite Aid to admire the California girl Zandy and to buy earplugs because they're on sale, he stays home a lot. And a good thing too, or he would have never been falsely implicated in a murder, never almost seduced Philipa, never done the impossible task of jogging around the block with Brian, never ironed his pillows, and he might never have won the Most Average American essay contest. The Pleasure of My Company is the chronicle of a modern-day neurotic yearning to break free.

    Faulkner's novel is enlivened by a strong gift for metaphor and the wisdom to use it sparingly.'When Roberta 'Bertie' Lightfoot is struck down with polio, her world collapses. But Mama doesn't tolerate self-pity, and Bertie is nobody if not her mother's daughter - until she sets her heart on becoming an artist. Through drawing, the gifted and perceptive Bertie gives form and voice to the reality of the people and the world around her. While her father is happy enough to indulge Bertie's driving passion, her mother will not let art get in the way of the future she wishes for her only daughter.In 1955 the family moves to post-colonial Port Moresby, a sometimes violent frontier town, where Bertie, determined to be the master of her own life canvas, rebels against her mother's strict control. In this tropical landscape, Bertie thrives amid the lush pallette of colours and abundance, secretly learning the techniques of drawing and painting under the tutelage of her mother's arch rival.But Roberta is not the only one deceiving her family. As secrets come to light, the domestic varnish starts to crack, and jealousy and passion threaten to forever mar the relationship between mother and daughter.Tender and witty, The Beloved is a moving debut novel which paints a vivid portrait of both the beauty and the burden of unconditional love.WINNER OF THE NITA B KIBBLE LITERARY AWARD 2013SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD 2013WINNER OF THE QUEENSLAND PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR AN EMERGING QUEENSLAND AUTHOR 2011COMMENDED FOR THE FAW CHRISTINA STEAD AWARD 2012

    As the daughter of starving refugees fleeing violent persecution in Persia, her fateful birth in a roadside tent sparked a miraculous reversal of family fortune, culminating in her father's introduction to the court of Emperor Akbar. She is called Mehrunnisa, the Sun of Women. This is her story.Growing up on the fringes of Emperor Akbar's opulent palace grounds, Mehrunnisa blossoms into a sapphire-eyed child blessed with a precocious intelligence, luminous beauty, and a powerful ambition far surpassing the bounds of her family's station. Mehrunnisa first encounters young Prince Salim on his wedding day. In that instant, even as a royal gala swirls around her in celebration of the future emperor's first marriage, Mehrunnisa foresees the path of her own destiny. One day, she decides with uncompromising surety, she too will become Salim's wife. She is all of eight years old -- and wholly unaware of the great price she and her family will pay for this dream.Skillfully blending the textures of historical reality with the rich and sensuous imaginings of a timeless fairy tale, The Twentieth Wife sweeps readers up in the emotional pageant of Salim and Mehrunnisa's embattled love. First-time novelist Indu Sundaresan charts her heroine's enthralling journey across the years, from an ill-fated first marriage through motherhood and into a dangerous maze of power struggles and political machinations. Through it all, Mehrunnisa and Salim long with fiery intensity for the true, redemptive love they've never known -- and their mutual quest ultimately takes them, and the vast empire that hangs in the balance, to places they never dreamed possible.Shot through with wonder and suspense, The Twentieth Wife is at once a fascinating portrait of one woman's convention-defying life behind the veil and a transporting saga of the astonishing potency of love.

    

    But one day, Millie’s mum leaves her alone beneath the Ginormous Women’s underwear rack in a department store, and doesn’t come back.Agatha Pantha is an eighty-two-year-old woman who hasn’t left her home since her husband died. Instead, she fills the silence by yelling at passers-by, watching loud static on TV, and maintaining a strict daily schedule. Until the day Agatha spies a little girl across the street.Karl the Touch Typist is eighty-seven years old and once typed love letters with his fingers on to his wife’s skin. He sits in a nursing home, knowing that somehow he must find a way for life to begin again. In a moment of clarity and joy, he escapes.Together, Millie, Agatha and Karl set out to find Millie’s mum. Along the way, they will discover that the young can be wise, that old age is not the same as death, and that breaking the rules once in a while might just be the key to a happy life.

    Some were privileged, some were innocent, some were lost. But to the Japanese they were all the enemy-Europeans and Americans living in Singapore, separated from their husbands and families and taken on a forced march through the jungles of Sumatra to an isolated prison camp. There, they would be tortured into submission and made to bow before the Emperor's war machine...HAZEL HAMPTONA timid young American, she would learn to walk the dangerous tightrope between survival and collaboration...AUDREY ST. JOHNThe Pregnant mistress of an English officer, she was appalled by the squalid camp conditions-and humiliated that she would share them with her lover's wife...GLORIA DENKAn Australian nurse who loved reckless adventure, she took risk and life-threatening risk-until she went too far...DR. MARGARET SUTHERLANDA prominent biographer and personal friend of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, she was forced to hide her identity or face death by firing squad...In a haunting novel of the horrors of war and the strength of friendship, these indomitable women never cease to believe in freedom, even though they are...GUESTS OF THE EMPEROR

    Determined to escape the parochial English enclave and explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rouses violent passions among both the British and their Indian subjects. A masterful portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India compellingly depicts the fate of individuals caught between the great political and cultural conflicts of the modern world. In his introduction, Pankaj Mishra outlines Forster's complex engagement with Indian society and culture. This edition reproduces the Abinger text and notes, and also includes four of Forster's essays on India, a chronology and further reading.

    First published in Hanoi during 1936, it follows the absurd and unexpected rise within colonial society of a street-smart vagabond named Red-haired Xuan. As it charts Xuan's fantastic social ascent, the novel provides a panoramic view of late colonial urban social order, from the filthy sidewalks of Hanoi's old commercial quarter to the gaudy mansions of the emergent Francophile northern upper classes. The transformation of traditional Vietnamese class and gender relations triggered by the growth of colonial capitalism represents a major theme of the novel.Dumb Luck is the first translation of a major work by Vu Trong Phung, arguably the greatest Vietnamese writer of the twentieth century. The novel's clever plot, richly drawn characters and humorous tone and its preoccupation with sex, fashion and capitalism will appeal to a wide audience. It will appeal to students and scholars of Vietnam, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, and Southeast Asian civilization.Vu Trong Phung died in Hanoi, in 1939 at the age of twenty-seven. He is the author of at least eight novels, seven plays, and several other works of fiction in addition to Dumb Luck.Peter Zinoman is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History, University of California, Berkeley. Nguyen Nguyet Cam is Vietnamese Language Instructor, University of California, Berkeley.

    Embellished with the author's lyrical prose, here is the story of Harvard-educated, aspiring aesthete Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria. As they await the inheritance of his grandfather's fortune, their reckless marriage sways under the influence of alcohol and avarice. A devastating look at the nouveau riche, and the New York nightlife, as well as the ruinous effects of wild ambition, The Beautiful and the Damned achieved stature as one of Fitzgerald's most accomplished novels. Its distinction as a classic endures to this day. Pocket Book's Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. Special features include critical perspectives, suggestions for further read, and a unique visual essay composed of period photographs that help bring every word to life.

    Thompson, The Rum Diary is a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule and anything (including murder) is permissible.

    Jonathan Lethem mined similar territory earlier this year in his delightful book, As She Climbed Across the Table, and now Winterson enters the lists with not one, but two physicists populating the pages of her equally wonderful book, Gut Symmetries. If you think about it, physics does make a good metaphor for love, encompassing as it does the principles of attraction, the exchange of energy, and unification. At the center of this meditation on "the intelligence of the universe" and "the stupidity of humankind" are Jove, a married physicist; Alice, a single physicist who becomes his mistress; and Stella, Jove's wife and later, Alice's lover. They meet on the QE2 and from there the three participants in the story take turns telling their versions of it. Gut Symmetries is a collage of memories, snippets of scientific theory, meditations on abstract concepts like truth, and the events surrounding Jove, Alice, and Stella's affair. This is a book that demands your attention, jumping as it does from one seemingly tangential topic to another; but whereas physics still seeks a grand unification theory (GUT) to explain how everything in the universe fits together, Winterson actually finds one of her own in this satisfyingly complete fictional world.

    Chapters: The Stars' Tennis Balls, Making History, the Liar, the Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, Moab Is My Washpot, the Hippopotamus, Paperweight, Stephen Fry's Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Stars' Tennis Balls is a psychological thriller novel by Stephen Fry, first published in 2000. In the United States, the title was changed to Revenge. In the Afterword to the 2003 American edition, Fry admits that the story "is a straight steal, virtually identical in all but period and style to Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo" but denies plagiarism, since Dumas also admits that the plot was taken from a contemporary urban legend. The main character, Edward (Ted/Tedward) Maddstone, is a seventeen year old schoolboy who appears to be the sort of person for whom everything goes right. He is captain of school, talented at sports and following in the footsteps of his father towards Oxford University, then a career in politics. He is happy and has fallen in love with a girl called Portia. But a few bizarre twists and turns of fate ensure that his life is turned upside down. As mentioned above, the plot is extremely similar to the story of The Count of Monte Cristo. The original title comes from a quotation taken from John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. In full it reads: "We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and banded which way please them." The novel's dedication reads simply "To M'Colleague" - "M'Colleague" being the name by which Fry and Hugh Laurie referred to each other in their TV sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

    Now, twenty years later, in the heat of a New Mexican summer, Thomas has begun having bizarre conversations with his dead relatives and it's up to Amina-a photographer in the midst of her own career crisis-to figure out what is really going on. But getting to the truth is far harder than it seems. From Thomas's unwillingness to talk, to Kamala's Born Again convictions, to run-ins with a hospital staff that seems to know much more than they let on, Amina finds herself at the center of a mystery so thick with disasters that to make any headway at all, she has to unravel the family's painful past.