Showing results for "VE Day" in Literary Fiction

Twenty-five-year-old Takano has never liked reading, although the Morisaki bookshop has been in her family for three generations. It is the pride and joy of her uncle Ojisan, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoki left him five years earlier. When Takano's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takano is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the Morisaki bookshop.

In Tokyo, there is a neighbourhood with the highest number of bookstores in the world. It is called Jinbocho where book lovers can browse to their heart's delight and where hunters of first editions or autographed copies prowl the bookcases. The Morisaki bookshop, a small family-run shop, is so packed with books that barely five people can fit inside. Books crowd the shelves and invade every corner of the floor; when a customer arrives, the owner, Satoru, immediately pops out from behind the counter.

Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighbourhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leaves behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Yumata, a middle-aged man who's returned to the neighbourhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku, the café owner's teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister's death as she falls in love for the first time.

When her mother emigrates to China for work, twenty-year-old Chizu moves in with 71-year-old Ginko, an eccentric distant relative, taking a room in her ramshackle Tokyo home, with its two resident cats and the persistent rattle of passing trains. Living their lives in imperfect symmetry, they establish an uneasy alliance, stress tested by Chizu's flashes of youthful spite. As the four seasons pass, Chizu navigates a series of tedious part-time jobs and unsatisfying relationships, before eventually finding her feet and salvaging a fierce independence from her solitude.

An IndiBound best seller, The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband, with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.

Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical - and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be - he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life....

Najeeb s dearest wish is to work in the Gulf and earn enough money to send back home. He achieves his dream only to be propelled by a series of incidents, grim and absurd, into a slave-like existence herding goats in the middle of the Saudi desert. Memories of the lush, verdant landscape...

'As profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parker' Independent INTRODUCED BY NICOLA BEAUMAN The lark rose in the brilliant air, higher, higher on its spun-glass spiral of song, knowing nothing of peace or war, accepting joyously the bounty of another day. A...

‘Unsparing and tender’ Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn ‘A brilliant novel from our most brilliant of writers’ Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon ‘A quietly stunning achievement’ Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous As the world changes around them, a family...

Manda is a 38-year-old, tough, sarcastic woman who has yet to make peace with the town she was brought to as a teenager after her parents' messy divorce. Her mother is estranged, her father is ill, her brother and stepbrother are emotionally distant and growing restless, and all the while, her tight-lipped and depressed husband is pressing her to have a baby. Full of barbed dialogue and macabre, deadpan descriptions of family dynamics and the awkward social dances performed daily, this novel depicts those who feel permanently out of place.

Brought to you by Penguin. The happily ever after is only part of the story… A funny, touching, hopeful gem about love, marriage and second chances It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. First thing, she loses her job – or quits...

Now, in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Alfred Day begins to recall what he would rather forget.

"A sparkling travelogue and a poignant journey of self-discovery all in one. . . . Alka Joshi is simply the best!" —Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Alice Network and The Rose Code From the New York Times bestselling author of The Henna Artist, this sweeping novel of...

There’s the local GP, who knows more about his patients than he would sometimes prefer. There’s the young shop assistant at Kestrels, who understands that the ladies who come there for a new outfit sometimes hope to find a new self. There’s the tenant farm labourer who rings the tower bells at the church three times a week, the notes – harmonious and clashing – rippling out across the rooftops of the town.

Chrissie knows how to steal sweets from the shop without getting caught, the best hiding place for hide-and-seek, the perfect wall for handstands. Now she has a new secret. It gives her a fizzing sherbet feeling in her belly. She doesn't get to feel power like this at home, where food is scarce and attention scarcer. Fifteen years later, Julia is working in a fish-and-chip shop and trying to mother her five-year-old daughter, Molly. She is always worried - about affording food and school shoes, about what the other mothers think of her.

This is the story of a man named Charley who loses his job, leaves his family, and decides, one night, to end his life. Somewhere between this world and the next, he encounters his mother, who died years ago, and he spends one last day with her - a day he never had on earth. This 'ordinary' day...

This novel spans the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The 'best short story writer in English' (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

Brought to you by Penguin. A BBC, Financial Times and Cosmopolitan What to Read in 2024 pick Set in a New York apartment building, Fourteen Days is an irresistibly propulsive novel with an unusual twist: each character in this diverse, eccentric cast of neighbours has been secretly written by a...

At thirty, eldest brother Byron hasn't dated seriously in a while--not since he became a single dad to his beloved baby girl. Besides, he's found that most women can't see past his job as a bus driver, and he's not interested in that type of superficial foolishness. When he meets Cynthia Hall, her disinterest is obvious. Still, there's something about her. . .