Like Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, So Many Ways to Begin is rich in the intimate details that shape a life, the subtle strain that defines human relationships, and the personal history that forms identity. David Carter, the novel's protagonist, takes a keen interest in history as a boy. Encouraged by his doting Aunt Julia, he begins collecting the things that tell his story: a birth certificate, school report cards, annotated cinema and train tickets. After finishing school, he finds the perfect job for his lifetime obsession as curator at a local history museum. His professional and romantic lives take shape as his beloved aunt and mentor's unravel. Lost in a fog of senility, Julia lets slip a secret about David's family. Over the course of the next decades, as David and his wife Eleanor live out their lives - struggling through early marriage, professional disappointments, the birth of their daughter, Eleanor's depression, and an affair that ends badly, David attempts to physically piece together his past, finding meaning and connection where he least expects it.

    Through the story of two brothers who grew up in patriotic, suburban Melbourne, George Johnston created an enduring exploration of two Australian myths - that of the man who loses his soul as he gains worldly success, and that of the tough, honest, Aussie battler.

    A long-buried personal sadness is enfolding her—and her career is stalled—when she stumbles upon an unusual group of immigrants living in rural California. She follows them on their annual return to the remote Azorean islands in the Atlantic Ocean, where bulls run down village streets, volcanoes are active, and the people celebrate festas to ease their saudade, a longing so deep that the Portuguese word for it can’t be fully translated.Years later, California is in a terrible drought, the wildfires seem to never end, and Diana finds herself still dreaming of those islands and the chuva—a rain so soft you don’t notice when it begins or ends.With her troublesome Labrador retriever, Murphy, in tow, Diana returns to the islands of her dreams only to discover that there are still things she longs for—and one of them may be a most unexpected love.

    Choices were made without thinking. Young lives came together and would never be the same again. Years on, as Ursula confronts decisions that are not so easy to make, revelations collide with memories of Candelo - and some breathtaking secrets come to light.

    What follows is a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.Grenville's Elizabeth Macarthur is a passionate woman managing her complicated life-marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her own heart, the search for power in a society that gave her none-with spirit, cunning and sly wit.Her memoir reveals the dark underbelly of the polite world of Jane Austen. It explodes the stereotype of the women of the past- devoted and docile, accepting of their narrow choices. That was their public face-here's what one of them really thought.At the heart of this book is one of the most toxic issues of our times- the seductive appeal of false stories. Beneath the surface of Elizabeth Macarthur's life and the violent colonial world she navigated are secrets and lies with the dangerous power to shape reality.A Room Made of Leaves is the internationally acclaimed author Kate Grenville's first novel in almost a decade. It is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand that gives the past the piercing immediacy of the present.

    If Helping Verbs of the Heart was an homage to his mother, then this is a memorial to his father. It is actually two works in one. Book 1, "Numbered Sentences from the Life of the Esterházy Family", comprises 371 paragraphs, some elusively succinct, others pages long, that amount to a gloriously kaleidoscopic romp through the centuries that lie behind this European dynasty. Not that the name Esterházy is ever uttered: the main protagonist of each episode is invariably identified as "my father", whether he is an anti-Habsburg Kuruc insurrectionist or a Habsburg-loyal Labanc, a hammer of the Ottomans, a dying old man, a prisoner of war, a lord charming enough to enchant Goethe himself, or a childless man, to mention but a few of "my fathers", all evoked through the language and literature proper to each persona. This strategy of anonymity allows Esterházy to extend his typically vast net of quotations to sources that originally have no family connotations whatsoever, thereby lending broader significance to the particulars of this one family, however grand, and, vice versa, appropriating the general (European) experience to the family's specific circumstances. The baroquely exuberant proliferation of anecdotal gleanings and fragments of real and fictional history, drawing on a gamut of written genres, from maxims to parables, from confessional autobiography to the account books and chronicles, is ultimately threaded together by an unobtrusive, profoundly witty and wise philosophical vein.Book 2, subtitled "Confessions of an Esterházy family", is ostensibly a more conventional family novel. Its very subtitle alludes to an earlier Hungarian masterpiece of the genre, Confessions of a Bourgeois, 1934-35 by Sándor Márai. It consists of a series of snapshots of key events in the lives of the author's great-grandfather, grandfather, father and the young Esterházy himself. These are built up, over two hundred numbered passages, into a more or less chronological portrait of a century-and-a-half of steady decline of the family's fortunes. After 1945 the Esterházys suffered an almost catastrophic repeat of the confiscations and curtailment of liberties that befell them during the short-lived Commune of 1919 one that not only stripped them of their former rank and privileges but threatened their very subsistence. Largely anecdotal and often absurd in tone, much of this is recounted with great gusto from the author's personal perspective, not least the stories of his own childhood, such as being accidentally dropped into the baptismal font; the trek to a godforsaken village in July 1950 when an official deportation order resulted in the family being dumped in one of two rooms in a peasant couple's house; schooldays and trips to matches with his football-mad father. For all the vicissitudes and uncertainties it describes, the tone of his writing throughout is one of blithely upbeat humour and harmony, without a hint of reproach, regret or complaint."A captivatingly rich novel in terms of both its form and its stance. Certainly it is the most striking work of the fifty-year-old author's career to date, and I would evenventure to call it an epitome of the Esterházy oeuvre. Given its formal richness, however, it is in a way also a compendium of two to three centuries of Hungarianprose." -Péter Dérczy, Élet és Irodalom"This new novel is no less constructed of fragments than his earlier novels, and those are no less whole, but this has the widest span of any Esterházy composition to date: it is a sweeping, baroque work." -József Tamás Reményi, Népszabadság

    This is the story of the girl who stole it.Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

    In Bookforum, James Greer called it ambitious in a way few works of fiction are. This summer it is being republished in an all-new Harper Perennial trade paperback, significantly revised by the author, and including an extensive P.S. section including never before published outtakes, an interview with the author, and a new essay by Zambreno.Zambreno's heroine, Ruth, is a young American in London, kin to Jean Seberg gamines and contemporary celebutantes, by day spritzing perfume at the department store she calls Horrids, by night trying desperately to navigate a world colored by the unwanted gaze of others and the uncertainty of her own self-regard. Ruth, the green girl, joins the canon of young people existing in that important, frightening, and exhilarating period of drift and anxiety between youth and adulthood, and her story is told through the eyes of one of the most surprising and unforgettable narrators in recent fiction—a voice at once distanced and maternal, indulgent yet blackly funny. And the result is a piercing yet humane meditation on alienation, consumerism, the city, self-awareness, and desire, by a novelist who has been compared with Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Elfriede Jelinek.

    Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice.How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.

    has always been more at home in Sign language than in spoken English. Recently divorced, he returns to school to teach Sign. His pupils include the foster parents of a beautiful and highly intelligent ape named Eliza. The author has also written "Maestro" and "Honk If You Are Jesus".

    Out of the desert staggers a young diviner, Michael Random, offering salvation to this parched town. The once comatose community is indeed stirred to life, by hate as much as by love, and its people find salvation neither in water nor gold.

    Thowra, the magnificent silver stallion, is king of the brumbies. But he must defend his herd from the mighty horse, The Brolga, in the most savage of struggles. But that is not the only danger. Thowra needs all his speed and cunning to save his herd from capture by man. In a desperate chase through the mountains, it seems there is no longer anywhere for him to run to...

    The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its midcentury idealism and became a more polarized society.The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, The Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.

    First Paragraph:'P S,' they said. And 'Vanessa'. Or sometimes 'Ness'. PS. PS. PS. PS. Ness. Ness. Ness. It sounded through his half sleep like surreptitious mice foraging through tissue paper. It was as mysterious as the lateness of the hour — after nine o'clock — and only as far away as the kitchen door, ajar so as to hear him if he should call to them or have a nightmare. He turned in bed, listening to the whispering undertones, as steady and continuous as a tap left running and broken only by a cough or sometimes a chair scraping back on the linoleum; then a dish being taken from a cupboard and now and then a voice would catch on fire and break adrift from the murmurings, but always with the same word, Vanessa, said sharply like hitting a brass gong at dead of night and then someone would say, 'Shhh, was that him? Did he call out?' and tiptoeing would startle the old floorboards while a shadow grew larger and larger on his wall; bent to hear if he was stirring and so, annoyed with their secrets, he would feign sleep until whoever it was retreated to the kitchen and the whispering hissed up again like damp green eucalyptus logs burning.

    Who like to read. Who take satisfaction in their work. Who are resolutely kind. Leonard and Hungry Paul is the story of two friends trying to find their place in the world. It is about the uncelebrated people of this world. And it asks a surprisingly enthralling question: Can kind people change the world?