The story is recounted in the present tense, first person plural. The "we" that comprises the six blind men often seems to consist of one entity; however, most of the men have separate names and identities and will sometimes say or do things that distinguish them from the group.

    Faced with the threat of bombs, bacteriological warfare and poison gas, a married couple whose pacificism complels them to opt out of 'civilisation', take to the hills to live as fugitives in the wild.Plainly and simply told, Wild Harbour charts the practical difficulties, the successes and failures of living rough in the beautiful hills of remote Speyside. In this respect the book belongs to a tradition of Scottish fiction reflected in novels such as Stevenson's Kidnapped and Buchan's John MacNab. But it takes a darker and more contemporary turn, for although Hugh and his wife Terry learn to fend for themselves, they cannot escape from what the world has become. Their brief summer idyll is brought to an end as the forces of random and meaningless violence close over them.Written in 1936, Wild Harbour has lost none of its relevance in a post-nuclear age, nor its power to move and shock.

    These two novels show Lessing returning to an earlier narrative style with fresh power.

    Howard Halliday, the editor of the Midnight Examiner and the unlikely protagonist in William Kotzwinkle's latest novel, becomes embroiled with several shady characters, including a bloodthirsty crime lord and a porn queen in danger, who lead him into a bizarre escapade that rivals only the freakish headlines in the Midnight Examiner.

    He is horrified, confused and bored by the contrived "broadcasts" of the "apes", a series of pseudo artists who resemble, on the one hand, absurd mechanical dolls, and on the other, specific personages of the era.

    Her memories of her childhood in Innisfail, New York are by turns romantic and traumatic. The early violent death of her father and abandonment by her mother have left her with a permanent sense of dislocation and loss. After decades apart, Marya becomes determined to find the mother who gave her away. In searching for her past, Marya changes her present life more than she could ever have imagined. Vividly evoking the natural beauty of rural upstate New York, and the complex emotions of a woman artist, Marya: A Life is one of Joyce Carol Oates's most deeply personal and fully-realized novels.

    His administration has been denounced by the liberal press in Sydney, but he scorns such criticism. How can it harm him when he had governed according to the rules?Flogged and brutalised, some convicts escape to the bush and take refuge with the Aborigines.Logan cannot continue to ignore the reaction to his harsh discipline after the arrival of his wife's younger sister, Frances. She cannot accept the brutality of chained and toiling men, punishment parades and the lash, and it is she who precipitates the crisis from which the final drama springs.

    Mary and her mother live in a one-room tenement flat that is home to the rituals of their bitter love. By day her mother cleans the houses of the Dublin rich, while Mary makes observations as she walks through the city. The imaginitive richness of her insight makes the city come alive as a place that is both strange and wonderful, remote yet friendly. It is this sense of discovery and the bittersweet richness it brings with it that makes this such an unusual but compelling Dublin novel."--Dr. Patricia McManus, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

    With his train of horses he carried salt and silk across distances incomprehensible to his ancient and static community. He brings ideas as well as gifts that have come, by many short journeys, from market town to market town, and from places as distant as the campfires of the Silk Road. John Turner's death in the 18th century leaves an emotional charge Ian and Sal find affects their relationship in the 21st, challenging the perceptions they have of themselves and of each other. A visionary fable firmly rooted in a verifiable place, this novel is an evocation of the lives and the language of all people who are called to the valley of Thursbitch.

    The daily routine of a man in charge of children at a state welfare organization and the demands that are made upon him are depicted in this novel set in present day Hungary.

    As the nameless writer confronts his fears, he goes on with his life in one of the most original and provocative works from a contemporary writer.

    After he marries a woman he had seen eight years earlier, the story becomes, on one level, an analogy between his temporary sexual impotence and the position of intellectuals. A year later he is ready to abandon his wife and escape from the camp. Cameo appearances by philosophic and literary figures (Marx and Meng-tz, Othello and Song Ji) and discussing China and sex allow the incorporation of non-novelistic elements while indulging in gallows humor.

    Once again, Bharati Mukherjee proves she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative."--AMY TANThis is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, "a person undreamed of in Puritan society." Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, "translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja.It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an "asset hunter" who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with "sufficient passion and intelligence, we can deconstruct the barriers of time and geography...."

    Andre Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Perce Rock--its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty--as his central metaphor, Breton considers issues of love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream.Translator Zack Rogow won the PEN-Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize for his co-translation of Breton's Earthlight.

    Patrick White's second novel is set in the thirties London and portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful is drawn to secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly and impulsively with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer- until dramatic events shock him into sudden self-knowledge.