09/29/21 World Book Night 2016 | University of Essex

World Book Night 2016 View Online

A list of books you might like to try reading for fun - they're all in stock at the Albert Sloman Library!

197 items

General Fiction (48 items)

Contemporary authors (18 items)

Life after life - Kate Atkinson, 2013 Book | Costa Book Award winner 2013. "During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.

What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life’s bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves." (Review/summary from Amazon)

House of leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski, 2001 Book | Horror/Romance/Postmodern. "Johnny Truant, a wild and troubled sometime employee in a LA tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano', a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Report.

Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews. Now the Navidsons are household names. Zampano', writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane.

But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson Record. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson's house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can't just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He's starting to notice things changing around him . . .

Immensely imaginative. Impossible to put down. Impossible to forget. House of Leaves is thrilling, terrifying and unlike anything you have ever read before." (Summary/review from Amazon).

The Sisters brothers - P. de Witt, 2011 Book | Western.

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"Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. Across 1000 miles of Oregon desert his assassins, the notorious Eli and Charlies Sisters, ride - fighting, shooting, and drinking their way to Sacramento. But their prey isn't an easy mark, the road is long and bloody, and somewhere along the path Eli begins to question what he does for a living - and whom he does it for. The Sisters Brothers pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable ribald tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love." (Summary/Review from Amazon)

We are all completely beside ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler, 2013 Book | "Rosemary's young, just at college, and she's decided not to tell anyone a thing about her family. So we're not going to tell you too much either: you'll have to find out for yourselves, round about page 77, what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other.

Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone - vanished from her life. There's something unique about Rosemary's sister, Fern. And it was this decision, made by her parents, to give Rosemary a sister like no other, that began all of Rosemary's trouble. So now she's telling her story: full of hilarious asides and brilliantly spiky lines, it's a looping narrative that begins towards the end, and then goes back to the beginning. Twice.

It's funny, clever, intimate, honest, analytical and swirling with ideas that will come back to bite you. We hope you enjoy it, and if, when you're telling a friend about it, you do decide to spill the beans about Fern - it's pretty hard to resist - don't worry. One of the few studies Rosemary doesn't quote says that spoilers actually enhance reading." (Summary/review from Amazon)

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time - Mark Haddon, 2004 Book | YA "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down." (Summary/review from Amazon)

Never let me go - Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005 Book | Dystopian.

"In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life." (Review/summary from Amazon)

A brief history of seven killings - Marlon James, 2014

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Book | Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

"Jamaica, 1976.

Seven gunmen storm Bob Marley’s house, machine guns blazing. The reggae superstar survives, but the gunmen are never caught.

From the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes a dazzling display of masterful storytelling exploring this near-mythic event. Spanning three decades and crossing continents, A Brief History of Seven Killings chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – slum kids, drug lords, journalists, prostitutes, gunmen and even the CIA. Gripping and inventive, ambitious and mesmerising, A Brief History of Seven Killings is one of the most remarkable and extraordinary novels of the twenty-first century." (Summary/Review from Amazon)

Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman, 2011 Book | YA. "Eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku, the second best runner in Year 7, races through his new life in England with his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully unaware of the very real threat around him. Newly-arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister Lydia, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of city life, from the bewildering array of Haribo sweets, to the frightening, fascinating gang of older boys from his school. But his life is changed forever when one of his friends is murdered. As the victim's nearly new football boots hang in tribute on railings behind fluorescent tape and a police appeal draws only silence, Harri decides to act, unwittingly endangering the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to keep them safe." (Summary from Amazon)

Saturday - Ian McEwan, 2005 Book | "Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and proud father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world - the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city and his happy family life are under threat.

Later, Perowne makes his way to his weekly squash game through London streets filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors. A minor car accident brings him into a confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive, young man, on the edge of violence. To Perowne's professional eye, there appears to be something profoundly wrong with him.

Towards the end of a day rich in incident and filled with Perowne's celebrations of life's pleasures, his family gathers for a reunion. But with the sudden appearance of Baxter, Perowne's earlier fears seem about to be realised." (Review/Summary from Amazon)

Life of Pi - Yann Martel, 2002 Book | Film based on the novel available at DVD 2689. Winner of the 2001 Man Booker Prize. Fantasy/Adventure. "One boy, one boat, one tiger . . .

After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orangutan, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and best-loved works of fiction in recent

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years." (Review/summary from Amazon).

One million tiny plays about Britain - Craig Taylor, 2013 Book | "A Wonder Woman and bride-to-be finds herself worse for wear at the end of a hen night; a funeral director's love of Manchester United proves unhelpful when talking to the bereaved; two overly-vigilant mothers wrestle with their paranoia in the queue for Santa's Grotto; a widow recounts her disastrous return to the world of dating and a father realises that his son is growing away from him as he helps him tie his football boots.

In these snippets of overheard conversations from across the length and breadth of the country, Craig Taylor captures the state we're in with humour and pathos and perfect timing. Laugh-out-loud funny, and sometimes heartbreakingly moving, these tiny plays in which every one of us could have a starring role are little windows into other people's lives that reveal the triumphs, disasters, prejudices, horrors and joys of twenty-first-century life.

Hugely entertaining and utterly addictive, this is book that can be dipped into or feasted upon in one sitting. It will change the way you listen to the world around you, and train journeys will never be the same again." (Review/summary from Amazon).

White teeth - Zadie Smith, 2000 Book | "On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie—working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt—is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel.

Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families—one headed by Archie, the other by Archie's best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for "no problem"). Samad —devoutly Muslim, hopelessly "foreign"— weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope." (Review/summary from Goodreads).

The autograph man - Zadie Smith, 2003, c2002 Book | "Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. His business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them—all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of forties movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries.

The Autograph Man is a deeply funny existential tour around the hollow trappings of modernity: celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. It offers further proof that Zadie Smith is one of the most staggeringly talented writers of her generation." (Review/summary from Goodreads)

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The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 2004 Book | Available in Spanish at PQ 6633.U5. "Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'cemetery of lost books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man brings his 10-year-old son Daniel one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book from the shelves and pulls out 'La Sombra del Viento' by Julian Carax.

But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. Then, one night, as he is wandering the old streets once more, Daniel is approached by a figure who reminds him of a character from La Sombra del Viento, a character who turns out to be the devil. This man is tracking down every last copy of Carax's work in order to burn them. What begins as a case of literary curiosity turns into a race to find out the truth behind the life and death of Julian Carax and to save those he left behind. A page-turning exploration of obsession in literature and love, and the places that obsession can lead." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The other Boleyn girl - Philippa Gregory, 2001 Book | "The acclaimed international bestseller set around the Tudor court, during the years when Henry VIII traded his mistress Mary Boleyn for courtship of her sister Anne - and tracing the extraordinary events that changed the course of a country’s history.

When Henry VIII tires of pretty young Mary Boleyn, her powerful family instructs her to promote her sister, Anne, as a replacement. But Anne Boleyn, newly returned from the French court, intelligent and spirited, doesn’t agree to be Henry’s mistress – only his wife. PItting the king’s desperation for an heir against his powerful advisors – Wolsey, Cromwell and Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk – what Anne brings about will change the course of a country’s history.

Told with all of Philippa Gregory’s characteristic perceptiveness, backed by meticulous historical research and superb storytelling skills, The Other Boleyn Girl brings a legendary court, its politics, personalities and scheming vividly to life." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks, 2005 Book | "A novel of overwhelming emotional power, Birdsong is a story of love, death, sex and survival. Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman, arrives in Amiens in northern France in 1910 to stay with the Azaire family, and falls in love with unhappily married Isabelle. But, with the world on the brink of war, the relationship falters, and Stephen volunteers to fight on the Western Front. His love for Isabelle forever engraved on his heart, he experiences the unprecedented horrors of that conflict - from which neither he nor any reader of this book can emerge unchanged." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Queen of bedlam - Laura Purcell, 2014 Book | "London 1788. The calm order of Queen Charlotte's court is shattered by screams. The King of England is going mad. Left alone with thirteen children and with the country at war, Charlotte has to fight to hold her husband's throne. It is a time of unrest and revolutions but most of all Charlotte fears the King himself, someone she can no longer love or trust. She has lost her marriage to madness and there is nothing she can do except continue to do her royal duty. Her six daughters are desperate to escape their palace asylum. Their only chance lies in a good marriage, but no prince wants the daughter of a madman. They are forced to take love wherever they can find it, with devastating consequences. The moving true story of George III's madness and the women

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whose lives it destroyed." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The blind assassin - Margaret Atwood, 2000 Book | Winner of the 2000 Man Booker prize. "Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms, the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one; while events in both move closer to war and catastrophe. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Popular novels (26 items)

Post Office - C. Bukowski, 1971 Book | Bukowski's first novel. ""It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers.

This classic 1971 novel--the one that catapulted its author to national fame--is the perfect introduction to the grimly hysterical world of legendary writer, poet, and Dirty Old Man Charles Bukowski and his fictional alter ego, Chinaski." (Review/summary from Goodreads).

Breakfast at Tiffany's - T. Capote, 1964 Book | Film only available at East15. "Immortalised by Audrey Hepburn's sparkling performance in the 1961 film of the same name, Breakfast at Tiffany's is Truman Capote's timeless portrait of tragicomic cultural icon Holly Golightly, published in Penguin Modern Classics.

It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while - down. Pursued by to Salvatore 'Sally' Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing and 'Rusty' Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock deparment', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The big sleep - R. Chandler, 1998 Book | Crime novel and first appearance of detective Philip Marlowe. Both 1946 and 1978 film versions in library. "

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Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out - and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse . . ." (Review/summary from Amazon).

What a carve up! - J. Coe, 1995 Book | Satirical / postmodern. "A brilliant noir farce, a dystopian vision and the story of an obsession. Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad knifeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages.

Inexplicably, Michael is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire clan whose members have a finger in every establishment pie. But as a murderous maniac stalks the family, Michael realizes that his favourite film is coming true." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The secret agent: a simple tale - J. Conrad, 1990 Book | Several copies available. "'Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town...a cruel devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.' Conrad’s ‘monstrous town’ is London, and his story of espionage and counter-espionage, anarchists and embassies, is a detective story that becomes the story of Winnie Verloc’s tenacity in maintaining her devotion to her peculiar and simple-minded brother, Stevie, as they pursue their very ordinary lives above a rather dubious shop in the back streets of Soho. However, far from offering any sentimental picture, The Secret Agent is Conrad’s funniest novel. Its savagely witty picture of human absurdity and misunderstanding is written in an ironic style that provokes laughter and unease at the same time, and that continues to provide one of the most disturbing visions of aspiration and futility in twentieth century literature." Review/summary from Amazon)

Generation X: tales for an accelerated culture - D. Coupland, 1996 Book | Novel which popularized the term 'Generation X'. "Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fallout of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation- Generation X. Fiercely suspicious of being lumped together as an advertiser's target market, they have quit dreary careers and cut themselves adrift in the California desert. Unsure of their futures, they immerse themselves in a regime of heavy drinking and working in no future McJobs in the service industry. Underemployed, overeducated and intensely private and unpredicatable, they have nowhere to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie. So they tell stories: disturbingly funny tales that reveal their barricaded inner world. A world populated with dead TV shows, 'Elvis moments' and semi-disposible Swedish furniture." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Kiss kiss - R. Dahl, 1976 Book | Short stories. "What could go wrong when a wife pawns the mink coat that her lover gave her as a parting gift? What happens when a priceless piece of furniture is the subject of a deceitful bargain? Can a wronged woman take revenge on her dead husband?

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In these dark, disturbing stories Roald Dahl explores the sinister side of human nature: the cunning, sly, selfish part of each of us that leads us into the territory of the unexpected and unsettling. Stylish, macabre and haunting, these tales will leave you with a delicious feeling of unease.

'Roald Dahl is one of the few writers I know whose work can accurately be described as addictive' Irish Times

Roald Dahl, the brilliant and worldwide acclaimed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and many more classics for children, also wrote scores of short stories for adults. These delightfully disturbing tales have often been filmed and were most recently the inspiration for the West End play, Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales by Jeremy Dyson. Roald Dahl's stories continue to make readers shiver today." (Review/summary from Amazon).

A star called Henry - R. Doyle, 1999 Book | Set in Ireland during the Easter rising and the war for indepence 1916-1921. "Born in the Dublin slums of 1901, his father a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he's out robbing and begging, often cold and always hungry, but a prince of the streets. By Easter Monday, 1916, he's fourteen years old and already six-foot-two, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army. A year later he's ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian and a killer. With his father's wooden leg as his weapon, Henry becomes a Republican legend - one of Michael Collins' boys, a cop killer, an assassin on a stolen bike." (Review/summary from Amazon).

Ask the dust - J. Fante, 2002 Book | Semi-autobiographical. "Arturo Bandini arrives in Los Angeles with big dreams. But the reality he finds is a city gripped by poverty.

When he makes a small fortune from the publication of a short story, he reinvents himself, indulging in expensive clothes, fine food and downtown strip clubs. But Bandini's delusions take a worrying turn when he is drawn into a relationship with Camilla Lopez, a beautiful but troubled young woman who will be responsible for his greatest downfall.

Ask the Dust is an unforgettable novel about outsiders looking in on a town built on celluloid dreams." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Our man in Havana - Graham Greene, c1970 Book | Spy / Satirical. "Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city of power cuts. His adolescent daughter spends his money with a skill that amazes him, so when a mysterious Englishman offers him an extra income he's tempted. In return all he has to do is carry out a little espionage and file a few reports. But when his fake reports start coming true, things suddenly get more complicated and Havana becomes a threatening place." (Review/summary from Amazon).

A moveable feast - Ernest Hemingway, 1964 Book | Memoir, published posthumously. "Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now this new special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.

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Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's sole surviving son, and an introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Seán Hemingway, this new edition also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son Jack and his first wife, Hadley. Also included are irreverent portraits of other luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford, and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft. 'A Moveable Feast' brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the unbridled creativity and enthusiasm that Hemingway himself experienced. In the world of letters it is a unique insight into a great literary generation, by one of the best American writers of the twentieth century." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The Cider House rules - John Irving, 1986 Book | Film not available. "Homer Wells' odyssey begins among the apple orchards of rural Maine. As the oldest unadopted child at St Cloud's orphanage, he strikes up a profound and unusual friendship with Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder - a man of rare compassion and an addiction to ether. What he learns from Wilbur takes him from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage surgery, to an adult life running a cider-making factory and a strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend..." (Summary from Amazon).

Three men in a boat, to say nothing of the dog! - Jerome K. Jerome, 1999 Book | Humour. "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes seem fresh and witty even today. The three men are based on Jerome himself and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom J. often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog." The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity." (Review/summary from Amazon).

One flew over the cuckoo's nest - Ken Kesey, 1999, c1990 Book | Film available at DVD 175. "Pitching an extraordinary battle between cruel authority and a rebellious free spirit, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel that epitomises the spirit of the sixties. This Penguin Classics edition includes a preface, never-before published illustrations by the author, and an introduction by Robert Faggen.

Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electroshock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy - the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. The subject of an Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest an exuberant,

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ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness." (Review/summary from Amazon).

Bartleby - Herman Melville, 1990 Book | Short novel. "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a short story by Herman Melville, published anonymously in 1853 in Putnam's Monthly Magazine. It was collected in his 1856 volume The Piazza Tales. Herman Melville wrote this story in 1853, two years after Moby Dick had been published and his writing career was beginning to lose its luster. Subtitled, "A Story of Wall Street", it is a seemingly simple story about a lawyer who hires a gentleman named Bartleby as a scrivener in his office. This was way back in the days before photocopy machines and scriveners performed the necessary tasks of tediously hand copying documents over and over. Bartleby was good at the copying part of his job, but when asked to proofread aloud one day he simply replied, "I prefer not to." From that moment forward, he used the phrase "I prefer not to" for every task requested of him, eventually "preferring not to" do any work whatsoever. The lawyer, who is astounded by Bartleby's attitude, tells the story in the first person. The story is rich in language and yet spare in actual action. The reader is forced to think, and think seriously about the choices we make daily. Bartleby chose to rebel and become an anti-hero. But the real protagonist of the story is the lawyer, who is drawn into Bartleby's power and grows to admire him. The conclusion is sad, but inevitable." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Burmese days - George Orwell, 1949 Book | George Orwell's first novel. "Based on his experiences as a policeman in Burma, 'Burmese Days' presents a devastating picture of British colonial rule. It describes corruption and imperial bigotry in a society where, 'after all, natives were natives - interesting, no doubt, but finally ... an inferior people'. When Flory, a white timber merchant, befriends Indian Dr Veraswami, he defies this orthodoxy. The doctor is in danger: U Po Kyin, a corrupt magistrate, is plotting his downfall. The only thing that can save him is membership of the all-white Club, and Flory can help. Flory's life is changed further by the arrival of beautiful Elizabeth Lackersteen from Paris, who offers an escape from loneliness and the 'lie' of colonial life." (Review/Summary from Amazon).

American pastoral - Philip Roth, 1998, c1997 Book | "In 'American Pastoral', Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager - a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Wilt - T. Sharpe, 1976, reprinted 1984 Book | Humour. "Henry Wilt, tied to a daft job and a domineering wife, has just been passed over for promotion yet again. Ahead of him at the Polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers, joiners, butchers and the like. And things are no better at home where his massive wife, Eva, is given to boundless and unpredictable fits of enthusiasm - for transcendental meditation, yoga or the trampoline."

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(Summary from Amazon).

Cannery Row - John Steinbeck, 2012 Book | "In the din and stink that is 'Cannery Row' a colourful blend of misfits - gamblers, whores, drunks, bums and artists - survive side by side in a jumble of adventure and mischief. Lee Chong, the astute owner of the well-stocked grocery store, is also the proprietor of the Palace Flophouse that Mack and his troupe of good-natured 'boys' call home. Dora runs the Bear Flag Restaurant with clockwork efficiency and a generous heart, and Doc, secreted away in his home at Western Biological Laboratories, is the fount of all wisdom. Packed with invention and ramshackle joie de vivre, Cannery Row is Steinbeck's high-spirited tribute to his native California." (Summary from Amazon)

Slaughterhouse-five - Kurt Vonnegut, 1991 Book | Short novel. "Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know." (Review/summary from Amazon)

L.A. confidential - James Ellroy, 1990 Book | "Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as crooked as the criminals. Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three L.A.P.D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers...The novel takes these cops on a sprawling epic of brutal violence and the murderous seedy side of Hollywood. One of the best (and longest) crime novels ever written, it is the heart of Ellroy's four-novel masterpiece, the LA Quartet, and an example of crime writing at its most powerful." (Summary/review from Amazon)

The hobbit: or there and back again - J. R. R. Tolkien, 1966 Book | "The Hobbit is the unforgettable story of Bilbo, a peace-loving hobbit, who embarks on a strange and magical adventure.

Bilbo Baggins enjoys a quiet and contented life, with no desire to travel far from the comforts of home; then one day the wizard Gandalf and a band of dwarves arrive unexpectedly and enlist his services – as a burglar – on a dangerous expedition to raid the treasure-hoard of Smaug the dragon. Bilbo’s life is never to be the same again.

Seldom has any book been so widely read and loved as J. R.R. Tolkien’s classic tale, ‘The Hobbit’. Since its first publication in 1937 it has remained in print to delight each new generation of readers all over the world, and its hero, Bilbo Baggins, has taken his place among the ranks of the immortals of fiction." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The lord of the rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, Alan Lee, 2002 Book | All 3 novels available at PR 6039.O55. "Continuing the story begun in The Hobbit. "Sauron, the Dark Lord, has gathered to him all the Rings of Power – the means by which he intends to rule Middle-earth. All he lacks in his plans for dominion is the One Ring – the ring that rules them all – which has fallen into the hands of the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins.

In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as the Ring is entrusted to his care. He must leave his home and make a perilous

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journey across the realms of Middle-earth to the Crack of Doom, deep inside the territories of the Dark Lord. There he must destroy the Ring forever and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.

Since it was first published in 1954, The Lord of the Rings has been a book people have treasured. Steeped in unrivalled magic and otherworldliness, its sweeping fantasy has touched the hearts of young and old alike." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Unfinished tales of Númenor and Middle-earth - J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien, 1980 Book | Unfinished Tales is a collection of narratives ranging in time from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Ring, and provides those who have read The Lord of the Rings with a whole collection of background and new stories from the twentieth century’s most acclaimed popular author.

The book concentrates on the realm of Middle-earth and comprises such elements as Gandalf’s lively account of how it was that he came to send the Dwarves to the celebrated party at Bag-End, the emergence of the sea-god Ulmo before the eyes of Tuor on the coast of Beleriand, and an exact description of the military organization of the Riders of Rohan.

Unfinished Tales also contains the only story about the long ages of Numenor before its downfall, and all that is known about such matters as the Five Wizards, the Palantiri and the legend of Amroth. The tales were collated and edited by JRR Tolkien’s son and literary heir, Christopher Tolkien, who provides a short commentary on each story, helping the reader to fill in the gaps and put each story into the context of the rest of his father’s writings." Review/summary from Amazon)

Memoirs of a geisha - Arthur Golden, 1998 Book | Film available in the library at DVD 2830. "This story is a rare and utterly engaging experience. It tells the extraordinary story of a geisha -summoning up a quarter century from 1929 to the post-war years of Japan's dramatic history, and opening a window into a half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation.

A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Her memoirs conjure up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the land's most powerful men." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Captain Corelli's mandolin - Louis De Bernières, 1995 Book | "It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals, but as a conscientious but far from fanatical soldier, whose main aim is to have a peaceful war, he proves in time to be civilised, humorous - and a consumate musician.

When the local doctor's daughter's letters to her fiancé - and members of the underground - go unanswered, the working of the eternal triangle seems inevitable. But can this fragile love survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender?" (Review/summary from Amazon)

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Classics (4 items)

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë, Michael Mason, 1996 Book | Charlotte Brontë’s literary masterpiece tells the story of the humble but spirited governess Jane Eyre .

"After an unhappy childhood, Jane Eyre takes a post at Thornfield as governess to Mr Rochester’s ward Adele Varens. When she falls in love with her employer and consents to marry him, Jane appears to have found the happiness that has eluded her. But their wedding day reveals secrets that will alter the course of their lives..." (Summary from Amazon). Also available as an e-book.

Pride and prejudice - Jane Austen, Vivien Jones, 2003 Book | "Pride and Prejudice, which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim - that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters. In this she is mocked by her cynical and indolent husband. With its wit, its social precision and, above all, its irresistible heroine, Pride and Prejudice has proved one of the most enduringly popular novels in the English language" (Summary/review from Amazon)

To kill a mockingbird - Harper Lee, 1974, c1960 Book | Film based on the novel available at DVD 2048. "Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a Mockingbird.' A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much" (Summary/review from Amazon).

Lord of the flies - William Golding, 2005, c1954 Book | Film based on the novel available at DVD 254. "A plane crashes on an uninhabited island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast.

In this, his first novel, William Golding gave the traditional adventure story an ironic, devastating twist. The boys' delicate sense of order fades, and their childish fears are transformed into something deeper and more primitive. Their games take on a horrible significance, and before long the well-behaved party of schoolboys has turned into a tribe of faceless, murderous savages" (Review/summary from Amazon)

Sci-fi (16 items)

The hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy - Douglas Adams, 1979 Book | "It’s an ordinary Thursday lunchtime for Arthur Dent until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly afterwards to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and his best friend has just announced that he’s an alien. At this moment, they’re hurtling through space with nothing but their towels and an innocuous-looking book inscribed with the big, friendly words: DON’T PANIC.

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The weekend has only just begun…" (Summary/review from Amazon)

I, robot - Isaac Asimov, 2013 Book | Film with W. Smith also available on Floor 5.

"In these short stories Isaac Asimov creates the Three Laws of Robotics and ushers in the Robot Age. Earth is ruled by master-machines but the Three Laws of Robotics have been designed to ensure humans maintain the upper hand:

1) A robot may not injure a human being or allow a human being to come to harm 2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

But what happens when a rogue robot’s idea of what is good for society contravenes the Three Laws?" (Summary/review from Amazon)

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood, 2003 Book | "Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility." (Summary/review from Amazon)

The stars my destination - Alfred Bester, 2010 Book | "Gully Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class. EDUCATION: none SKILLS: none MERITS: none RECOMMENDATIONS: none

That's the official verdict on Gully Foyle, unskilled space crewman. But right now he is the only survivor on his drifting, wrecked spaceship, and when another space vessel - the Vorga - ignores his distress flares and sails by, Gully becomes obsessed with revenge. He endures 170 days alone in deep space before finding refuge on the Sargasso Asteroid and returning to Earth to track down the crew and owners of the Vorga. But, as he works out his murderous grudge, Gully Foyle also uncovers a secret of momentous proportions..." (Summary/review from Amazon)

Something wicked this way comes - Ray Bradbury, 1963 Book | "It's the week before Hallowe'en, and Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois. The siren song of the calliope entices all with promises of youth regained and dreams fulfilled . . ." (Summary/review from Amazon)

And as two boys trembling on the brink of manhood set out to explore the mysteries of the dark carnival's smoke, mazes and mirrors, they will also discover the true price of innermost wishes..."

The Da Vinci code: a novel - Dan Brown, 2004 Book | "Harvard professor Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call

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while on business in Paris: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been brutally murdered inside the museum. Alongside the body, police have found a series of baffling codes. As Langdon and a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, begin to sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to find a trail that leads to the works of Leonardo Da Vinci - and suggests the answer to a mystery that stretches deep into the vault of history. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine code and quickly assemble the pieces of the puzzle, a stunning historical truth will be lost forever..." (Summary/review from Amazon)

A clockwork orange - Anthony Burgess, 1996 Book | 1971 Kubrick's film also available on Floor 5. "Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean? A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters." (Summary/review from Amazon)

Do androids dream of electric sheep? - Philip K. Dick, 1997 Book | Blade runner, the film by R. Scott based on Dick's book is also available on Floor 5. "World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard's world things were never that simple, and his assignment quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge and deceit - and the threat of death for the hunter rather than the hunted..." (Summary/review from Amazon)

Dune - Frank Herbert, 1966 Book | " Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person's life-span to making intersteller travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world Arrakis.

Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe.

When the Emperor transfers stewardship of Arrakis from the noble House Harkonnen to House Atreides, the Harkonnens fight back, murdering Duke Leto Atreides. Paul, his son, and Lady Jessica, his concubine, flee into the desert. On the point of death, they are rescued by a band for Fremen, the native people of Arrakis, who control Arrakis' second great resource: the giant worms that burrow beneath the burning desert sands.

In order to avenge his father and retake Arrakis from the Harkonnens, Paul must earn the trust of the Fremen and lead a tiny army against the innumerable forces aligned against them. And his journey will change the universe." (Summary/review from Amazon)

Coraline - Neil Gaiman, 2009, c2007 Book | The film version of this short novel is also available on Floor 5.

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"There is something strange about Coraline's new home. It's not the mist, or the cat that always seems to be watching her, nor the signs of danger that Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, her new neighbours, read in the tea leaves. It's the other house - the one behind the old door in the drawing room. Another mother and father with black-button eyes and papery skin are waiting for Coraline to join them there. And they want her to stay with them. For ever. She knows that if she ventures through that door, she may never come back." (Summary/review from Amazon)

The road - Cormac McCarthy, 2006 Book | "By the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007, this is the story of a father and son walking alone through burned America, heading through the ravaged landscape to the coast. It has been hailed as 'the first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation. Here is an American classic which, at a stroke, makes McCarthy a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature . . . An absolutely wonderful book that people will be reading for generations" (Summary/review from Amazon)

I am legend - Richard Matheson, 2010 Book | The film version of this novel is also available on Floor 5.

"An acclaimed SF novel about vampires. The last man on earth is not alone ... Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth ... but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive like this?" (Summary/review from Amazon)

V for vendetta - Alan Moore, David Lloyd, Steve Whitaker, Siobhan Dodds, c1989 Book | The film version of this graphin novel is also available on Floor 5 (with N. Portman and H. Weaving).

"A powerful story about loss of freedom and individuality, V FOR VENDETTA takes place in a totalitarian England following a devastating war that changed the face of the planet. In a world without political freedom, personal freedom and precious little faith in anything comes a mysterious man in a white porcelain mask who fights political oppressors through terrorism and seemingly absurd acts. It's a gripping tale of the blurred lines between ideological good and evil." (Summary/review from Amazon)

Watchmen - Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins Book | Graphic novel.

"In an alternate world where the mere presence of American superheroes changed history, the US won the Vietnam War, Nixon is still president, and the cold war is in full effect. Watchmen begins as a murder-mystery, but soon unfolds into a planet-altering conspiracy. As the resolution comes to a head, the unlikely group of reunited heroes--Rorschach, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias - have to test the limits of their convictions and ask themselves where the true line is between good and evil. In the mid-eighties, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created Watchmen, changing the course of comics' history and essentially remaking how popular culture perceived the genre. Popularly cited as the point where comics came of age, Watchmen's sophisticated take on superheroes has been universally acclaimed for its psychological depth and realism." (Summary/review from Amazon)

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If then - Matthew De Abaitua, ©2015 Book | "In the near future, after the collapse of society as we know it, one English town survives under the protection of the computer algorithms of the Process, which governs every aspect of their lives. The Process gives and it takes. It allocates jobs and resources, giving each person exactly what it has calculated they will need. But it also decides who stays under its protection, and who must be banished to the wilderness beyond. Human life has become totally algorithm-driven, and James, the town bailiff, is charged with making sure the Process’s suggestions are implemented. But now the Process is making soldiers. It is readying for war — the First World War. Mysteriously, the Process is slowly recreating events that took place over a hundred years ago, and is recruiting the town’s men to fight in an artificial reconstruction of the Dardanelles campaign. James, too, must go fight. And he will discover that the Process has become vastly more sophisticated and terrifying than anyone had believed possible" (Summary from Angry Robot Books)

The destructives - Matthew De Abaitua, 2016 Book | "Theodore Drown is a destructive. A recovering addict to weirdcore, he’s keeping his head down lecturing at the university of the Moon. Twenty years after the appearance of the first artificial intelligence, and humanity is stuck. The AIs or, as they preferred to be called, emergences have left Earth and reside beyond the orbit of Mercury in a Stapledon Sphere known as the university of the sun. The emergences were our future but they chose exile. All except one. Dr Easy remains, researching a single human life from beginning to end. Theodore’s life. One day, Theodore is approached by freelance executive Patricia to investigate an archive of data retrieved from just before the appearance of the first emergence. The secret living in that archive will take him on an adventure through a stunted future of asylum malls, corporate bloodrooms and a secret off-world colony where Theodore must choose between creating a new future for humanity or staying true to his nature, and destroying it." (Summary from Angry Robot Books)

Romance (1 items)

Possession: a romance - A. S. Byatt, 1990 Book | "Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time" (Summary from Amazon)

World literature (27 items)

Brick lane - Monica Ali, 2004 Book | Bangladesh / Great Britain. "Still in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man who is twenty years older. Away from the mud and heat of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block in London's East End. Nazneen knows not a word of English, and is forced to depend on her husband. But unlike him she is practical and wise, and befriends a fellow Asian girl Razia, who helps her understand the strange ways of her adopted new British home.

Nazneen keeps in touch with her sister Hasina back in the village. But the rebellious Hasina has kicked against cultural tradition and run off in a 'love marriage' with the man of her dreams. When he suddenly turns violent, she is forced into the degrading job of

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garment girl in a cloth factory.

Confined in her flat by tradition and family duty, Nazneen also sews furiously for a living, shut away with her buttons and linings - until the radical Karim steps unexpectedly into her life. On a background of racial conflict and tension, they embark on a love affair that forces Nazneen finally to take control of her fate.

Strikingly imagined, gracious and funny, this novel is at once epic and intimate. Exploring the role of Fate in our lives - those who accept it; those who defy it - it traces the extraordinary transformation of an Asian girl, from cautious and shy to bold and dignified woman." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The clown - Heinrich Böll, 1972, c1965 Book | Germany. Also available in German at PT 2603.O38A6. "Acclaimed entertainer Hans Schneir collapses when his beloved Marie leaves him because he won’t marry her within the Catholic Church. The desertion triggers a searing re-examination of his life—the loss of his sister during the war, the demands of his millionaire father and the hypocrisies of his mother, who first fought to “save” Germany from the Jews, then worked for “reconciliation” afterwards.

Heinrich Böll’s gripping consideration of how to overcome guilt and live up to idealism—how to find something to believe in—gives stirring evidence of why he was such an unwelcome presence in post-War German consciousness . . . and why he was such a necessary one." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov, 1997 Book | Russia. "The devil makes a personal appearance in Moscow accompanied by various demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order in disarray. Only the Master, a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil's onslaught." (Review/summary from Amazon)

If on a winter's night a traveller - Italo Calvino, 1998 Book | Italy. "You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero is you, the reader." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The farming of bones: a novel - Edwidge Danticat, 2000, c1998 Book | Haiti / United States. "It is 1937, and Amabelle Desir is a young Haitian woman working as a maid for a wealthy family in the Dominican Republic, across the border from her homeland. The Republic, under the iron rule of the Generalissimo, treats the Haitians as second-class citizens, and although Amabelle feels a strong sense of loyalty to her employers, especially since her own parents drowned crossing the river from Haiti, racial tensions are heightened when Amabelle's boss accidentally kills a Haitian in a car accident. The accident is a catalyst for a systematic round-up of Haitians, ostensibly for repatriation but in fact a prelude to slaughter. Amabelle, caught up in the chaos and confusion, returns to Haiti after much hardship to make a new life, but is for years

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uncertain of the fate of her lover, Sebastian, and haunted by a nagging sense of guilt.

A powerful, fiercely economical and deceptively moving work, blending historical accuracy with lyrical brilliance." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz, 2008 Book | Dominican Republic / United States. "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." (Review/summary from Amazon).

The burning city - Ariel Dorfman, Joaquín Dorfman, 2004 Book | United States. Fantasy. "There was fire on Earth before the fire god came. There has always been fire.What the fire god, gave to mankind was madness ... They burned the city when Whandall Placehold was two. And then again when he was seven. The fire god possessed one of the lordkin, the lust for fire took hold and the burning began. Whandall was himself one of the lordkin, but his insatiable curiosity about the hostile natural world and about the different peoples who surrounded him, allied to his intelligence and courage, marked him out for something more than burning down his own city. And when he felt the fire god enter him, it was just the start of an epic journey that would turn him into a legend." (Summary from Amazon)

Love in the time of cholera - Gabriel García Márquez, 1989 Book | Colombia. 1982 Nobel literature prize winner. also available in Spanish at PQ 8186.12.M3. "Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza's impassioned advances and married Dr Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half-century, Flornetino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina. Having sworn his eternal love to her, he lives for the day when he can court her again.

When Fermina's husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love. But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?" (Review/summary from Amazon)

Smilla's sense of snow - Peter Høeg, 1995 Book | Denmark. Detective story/Thriller. "She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime...

It happened in the Copenhagen snow. A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building. While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident. But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own. Soon she is following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow. For her dead neighbor, and for herself, she must embark on a harrowing journey of lies, revelation and violence that will take her back to the world of ice and snow from which she comes, where an explosive secret waits beneath the ice...." (Summary from Amazon).

The kite runner - Khaled Hosseini, 2004

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Book | Afghanistan / United States. "Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption." (Review/summary from Amazon).

Darkness at noon - Arthur Koestler, 1994 Book | Hungary / Great Britain. "Darkness at Noon is set in an unnamed country ruled by a totalitarian government. Rubashov, once a powerful player in the regime, finds the tables turned on him when he is arrested and tried for treason. His reflections on his previous life and his experiences in prison form the heart of this moving and though-provoking masterpiece." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The buddha of suburbia - Hanif Kureishi, 1990 Book | Pakistan / Great Britain. "Karim lives with his Mum and Dad in a suburb of south London and dreams of making his escape to the bright lights of the big city. But his father is no ordinary Dad, he is 'the buddha of suburbia', a strange and compelling figure whose powers of meditation hold a circle of would-be mystics spellbound with the fascinations of the East.

Among his disciples is the glamorous and ambitious Eva, and when 'the buddha of suburbia' runs off with her to a crumbling flat in Barons Court, Karim's life becomes changed in ways that even he had never dreamed of . . ." (Summary from Amazon)

The god of small things - Arundhati Roy, 1997 Book | India. 1997 Man Booker Prize winner. "This is the story of Rahel and Estha, twins growing up among the banana vats and peppercorns of their blind grandmother’s factory, and amid scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. Armed only with the innocence of youth, they fashion a childhood in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher) and their sworn enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun, incumbent grand-aunt).

Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel was the literary sensation of the 1990s: a story anchored to anguish but fuelled by wit and magic." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The satanic verses - Salman Rushdie, 1988 Book | India / Great Britain. "Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked aeroplane blows apart high above the English Channel and two figures tumble, clutched in an embrace, towards the sea: Gibreel Farishta, India’s legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices.

Washed up, alive, on an English beach, their survival is a miracle. But there is a price to pay. Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But chosen by whom? And which is which? And what will be the outcome of their final confrontation?" (Summary from Amazon).

Blindness - José Saramago, 1999 Book | Portugal. Also available in Portuguese at PQ 9358.6.A6. 1998 Nobel Literature prize winner. "A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An opthamologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.

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It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.

No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order. This is not anarchy, this is blindness." (Summary from Amazon).

The old man who read love stories - Luis Sepúlveda, 2002 Book | Chile. Also available in Spanish at PQ 8145.47.L8. "In a remote river town deep in the Ecuadoran jungle, Antonio José Bolívar seeks refuge in amorous novels. But tourists and opportunists are making inroads into the area, and the balance of nature is making a dangerous shift. " (Summary from Goodreads).

Burning patience - Antonio Skármeta, 1987 Book | Chile. Love story. 1994 film version Il Postino: The Postman available IL at DVD 1763. By Michael Radford, starring Massimo Troisi. Novel also available in Spanish at PQ 8146.7.A7. "A tender book about a simple man and what he learns about poetry, love, politics and life from his friend Pablo Neruda." (Summary from Goodreads).

The discreet hero - Mario Vargas Llosa, 2015 Book | Peru. Available in Spanish at PQ 8508.3.L5. 2010 Nobel literature prize winner. "Felicito Yanaque has raised himself from poverty to ownership of a trucking business. His two sons work for him. He receives a threatening letter demanding protection money. The police don't take him seriously, Felicito refuses to pay up and gets sucked into a nightmare. He becomes a reluctant public hero. Then his mistress is kidnapped, and matters become seriously complicated. And he finds that his troubles have begun very close to home." (Summary from Amazon).

Candide: or, Optimism - Voltaire, 2005 Book | France. Satirical short novel. Available in French at PQ 2082.C3 Also available as an ebook IL. "Voltaire's brilliant satirical assault on what he saw as the naïvely optimistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, Candide, or Optimism is a dazzling picaresque novel, translated and edited by Theo Cuffe with an introduction by Michael Wood in Penguin Classics.

Brought up in the household of a German Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief, inspired by Leibniz, that 'all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own fortune. As he and his various companions roam over the world, an outrageous series of disasters befall them - earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder - sorely testing the young hero's optimism. In Candide, Voltaire threw down an audacious challenge to the philosophical views of his time, to create one of the most glorious satires of the eighteenth century." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Missing person - Patrick Modiano, 1980 Book | France. 2014 Nobel Literature prize winner. Available in French at PQ 2625.O13. "In this strange, elegant novel, winner of France's premier literary prize, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.

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For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience.

On one level Missing Person is a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky cafes, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level, it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self. Modiano's sparce, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws his readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience." (Review/summary from Amazon).

The wind-up bird chronicle - Haruki Murakami, 2003 Book | "His wife is growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell." (Review/summary from Amazon)

My name is Red - Orhan Pamuk, Erdağ M. Göknar, 2002 Book | Turkey. 2006 Nobel literature prize winner. "The Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and the Ottoman Empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day - in the European manner. In Istanbul at a time of violent fundamentalism, however, this is a dangerous proposition. Even the illustrious circle of artists are not allowed to know for whom they are working. But when one of the miniaturists is murdered, their Master has to seek outside help. Did the dead painter fall victim to professional rivalry, romantic jealousy or religious terror?

With the Sultan demanding an answer within three days, perhaps the clue lies somewhere in the half-finished pictures . . .

From Turkey's winner of the Nobel Prize and author of Istanbul and The Museum of Innocence, this novel is a thrilling murder mystery set amid the splendour of Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, My Name is Red is also a stunning meditation on love, artistic devotion and the tensions between East and West." (Review/summary from Amazon).

Open secrets - Alice Munro, 1994 Book | Canada. 2013 Nobel literature prize winner. Short story collection. "Ranging from the 1850s through two world wars to the present, and from Canada to Brisbane, the Balkans and the Somme, these dazzling stories reveal the secrets of unconventional women who refuse to be contained." (Review/summary from Amazon).

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American born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang, Lark Pien, 2006 Book | China / United States. Graphic novel. "This is a tour-de-force new work by rising indie comics star Gene Yang. "American Born Chinese" maps the adolescent Chinese-American experience through three separate but interwoven stories. One story centres on Jin Wang, a Chinese-American student at an all-white California high school. Jin is plagued by jocks and bullies, so when another Chinese student transfers to the school, Jin wants nothing to do with him. Next is a comic update of the legendary story of the Monkey King, an ancient Chinese morality tale. Finally, there's the gross and surreal stereotype of Chin-Kee, the ultimate negative Chinese cliche, complete with a sitcom-style "laugh track". These three apparently unrelated tales come together in an astonishing climax - all with a mighty blast of humour, surprising poignancy and skilled artistry." (Review from Amazon)

A forest of flowers: short stories - Ken Saro-Wiwa, 1995 Book | Nigeria. "A Forest of Flowers is a collection of nineteen short stories which explore the absurdity of life for characters whose ambitions, modest as they are, are constantly thwarted by disgruntled spirits - in the form of idle and corrupt officials, adulterous spouses, envious relatives and grasping, untrustworthy entrepreneurs. Through a series of episodes, seemingly parochial and small scale, a nation is shown cracking up under the pressures of maladministration, corporate greed, sloth, ignorance and mercenary self-interest, while its people struggle against government neglect and abuse, racketeering, poverty, disease, superstition and ethnic mistrust." (Review from Amazon).

Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi, 2003 Book | Iran / France. Graphic novel. Part II also available in the library. "The intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-grandaughter of Iran's last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. This is a beautiful and intimate story full of tragedy and humour - raw, honest and incredibly illuminating." (Review/summary from Amazon)

A drifting life - Yoshihiro Tatsumi, 2013 Book | Japan. Graphic novel. "The epic autobiography of a manga master. Acclaimed for his visionary short-story collections "The Push Man and Other Stories," "Abandon the Old in Tokyo," and "Good-Bye" originally created nearly forty years ago, but just as resonant now as ever, the legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi has come to be recognized in North America as a precursor of today's graphic novel movement. "A Drifting Life" is his monumental memoir eleven years in the making, beginning with his experiences as a child in Osaka, growing up as part of a country burdened by the shadows of World War II.Spanning fifteen years from August 1945 to June 1960, Tatsumi's stand-in protagonist, Hiroshi, faces his father's financial burdens and his parents' failing marriage, his jealous brother's deteriorating health, and the innumerable pitfalls that await him in the competitive manga market of mid-twentieth-century Japan. He dreams of following in the considerable footsteps of his idol, the manga artist Osamu Tezuka ("Astro Boy," "Apollo's Song," "Ode to Kirihito," "Buddha") with whom Tatsumi eventually became a peer and, at times, a stylistic rival. As with his short-story collection, "A Drifting Life" is designed by Adrian Tomine." (Review/summary from Amazon)

LGBT+ (14 items) Popular titles from the LGBT History Month reading list.

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Pussy, king of the pirates - Kathy Acker, 1996 Book | "A retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson s Treasure Island, Pussy, King of the Pirates is a dizzyingly imaginative foray through world history, literature, and language itself." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The wanting seed - Anthony Burgess, 1965 Book | "Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious." (Review/summary from Amazon)

She rises - Kate Worsley, 2013 Book | "Louise Fletcher, a young dairy maid on an eighteenth-century Essex farm, has long been warned of the lure of the sea - after all, it stole away her father and brother. But when she is offered work as a maid in the naval port of Harwich, she leaps at the chance to see more of the world. Fifteen-year-old Luke has been press ganged and sent to sea on board the warship Essex. Aching for the girl he left behind, he must learn fast if he is to survive. Louise and Luke's new worlds are dangerous and exciting, and when they collide the consequences are astonishing." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Valentine Grey - Sandi Toksvig, 2013 Book | Longlisted for Green Carnation award, 2012. "London 1897 and a young girl, Valentine Grey, arrives in England. She's been brought up in the remote and sunny climes of India and finds being forced into corsets and skirts in damp and cold country insufferable. The only bright spot: her exciting cousin, Reggie. Reggie, and his lover Frank seek out the adventure the clandestine bars and streets of London offer and are happy to include Valentine in their secret, showing her theatre, gardens - even teaching her how to ride a bicycle. And then comes the Boer War and Reggie's father volunteers him; the empire must be defended. But it won't be Reggie who dons the Volunteer Regiment's garb. Valentine takes her chance, puts on her cousin's uniform, leaving Reggie behind and heads off to war. And for a long while it's glorious and liberating for both of the cousins, but war is not glorious and in Victorian London homosexuality is not liberating..." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Fun home: a family tragicomic - Alison Bechdel, 2006 Book | Graphic novel/memoir. "One of the best graphic memoirs of recent years, Fun Home is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The wasp factory - Iain Banks, 1984 Book | "'Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.'

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Enter - if you can bear it - the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least." (Review from Amazon)

The hours - Michael Cunningham, 2002 Book | "Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and Pen Faulkner prize. Made into an Oscar-winning film, ‘The Hours’ is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf.

In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel.

A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of ‘Mrs Dalloway’.

And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend.

Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the stories of three unforgettable women." (Review/summary from Amazon)

American psycho - Bret Easton Ellis, 2011 Book | "Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America’s greatest dream – and its worst nightmare – American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront." (Summary from Amazon)

Confessions of a mask - Yukio Mishima, 1964, c1958 Book | "One of the landmarks of Japanese literature: traditional aesthetics mixed with sado-masochist, coprophilic and homo erogenous fantasies. From the ashes of post-war defeat comes the true face of a tortured psyche trapped in a stiflingly conformist society - Mishima's earliest work and a defining self-portrait." (Review/summary from Amazon).

Gravity's rainbow - Thomas Pynchon, 1973 Book | "We could tell you the year is 1944, that the main character is called Tyrone Slothrop and that he has a problem because bombs are falling across Europe and crashing to earth at the exact locations of his sexual conquests. But that doesn’t really begin to cover it.

Reading this book is like falling down a rabbit hole into an outlandish, sinister, mysterious, absurd, compulsive netherworld. As the Financial Times said, ‘you must forget earlier notions about life and letters and even the Novel.’ Forty years since publication, Gravity’s Rainbow has lost none of its power to enthral." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith, 1966 Book | "Tom Ripley is struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors and the law, when an unexpected acquaintance offers him a free trip to Europe and a chance to start over.

Ripley wants money, success and the good life and he's willing to kill for it. When his

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new-found happiness is threatened, his response is as swift as it is shocking." (Review/summary from Amazon).

The paying guests - Sarah Waters, 2014 Book | "It is 1922, and in a hushed south London villa life is about to be transformed, as genteel widow Mrs Wray and her discontented daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the 'clerk class', bring with them gramophone music, colour, fun - and dangerous desires. The most ordinary of lives, it seems, can explode into passion and drama . . . A love story that is also a crime story, this is vintage Sarah Waters" (Summary/review from Amazon)

The gracekeepers - Kirsty Logan, 2016 Book | " North lives on a circus boat with her beloved bear, keeping a secret that could capsize her life.

Callanish lives alone in her house in the middle of the ocean, tending the graves of those who die at sea. As penance for a terrible mistake, she has become a gracekeeper.

A chance meeting between the two draws them magnetically to one another - and to the promise of a new life.

But the waters are treacherous, and the tide is against them." (Summary from Amazon)

The gay revolution: the story of the struggle - Lillian Faderman, 2015 Book | "The sweeping story of the modern struggle for gay, lesbian, and trans rights-from the 1950s to the present-based on amazing interviews with politicians, military figures, legal activists, and members of the entire LGBT community who face these challenges every day.

The fight for gay, lesbian, and trans civil rights-the years of outrageous injustice, the early battles, the heart-breaking defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers-is the most important civil rights issue of the present day. Based on rigorous research and more than 150 interviews,The Gay Revolution tells this unfinished story not through dry facts but through dramatic accounts of passionate struggles, with all the sweep, depth, and intricacies only an award-winning activist, scholar, and novelist like Lillian Faderman can evoke.

The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when law classified gays and lesbians as criminals, the psychiatric profession saw them as mentally ill, the churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with irrational hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.

In the words of the eyewitnesses who were there through the most critical events,The Gay Revolution paints a nuanced portrait of the LGBT civil rights movement. A defining account, this is the most complete and authoritative book of its kind." (Review/summary from Amazon)

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Poetry & Theatre (13 items)

The history boys - Alan Bennett, 2004 Book | DVD on order. "An unruly class of gifted and charming teenage boys are taught by two eccentric and innovative teachers, as their headmaster pushes for them all to get accepted into Oxford or Cambridge." (Summary from IMDb).

Talking heads - Alan Bennett, 2007 Book | Monologues. "Alan Bennett sealed his reputation as the master of observation with this series of 12 groundbreaking monologues, originally filmed for BBC Television.

At once darkly comic, tragically poignant and wonderfully uplifting, Talking Heads is widely regarded as a modern classic." (Review/summary from Amazon).

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead - Tom Stoppard, 1967 Book | "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play which, as it were, takes place in the wings of Hamlet, and finds both humour and poignancy in the situation of the ill-fated attendant lords.

The National Theatre production in April 1967 made Tom Stoppard's reputation virtually overnight. Its wit, stagecraft and verbal verve remain as exhilarating as they were then and the play has become a contemporary classic." (Summary/review from Amazon)

Glengarry Glen Ross - David Mamet, Karen Charmaine Blansfield, 1984 Book | DVD Available at DVD 180. "First staged in Britain in 1983, Glengarry Glen Ross is the tale of four real-estate salesmen in a cut-throat sales competition. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and was made into a film, starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin, in 1992." (Review from Amazon).

Plays: one - Harold Pinter, 1989 Book | 2005 Nobel literature prize winner. "Harold Pinter has long been acknowledged as one of the most influential playwrights in contemporary theatre; his arresting and original works have left a lasting imprint on the development of the stage and screen while delighting audiences around the world. Pinter's exacting and complex use of language and the features that mark his "comedies of menace" are clearly realized in these plays and stories. His speech Writing for the Theatre introduces the volume and establishes the context for these early years." (Review edited from Goodreads)

Cat on a hot tin roof - Tennessee Williams, 1956, c1955 Book | Film available at DVD 650. "'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterly portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Death of a salesman: certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem - Arthur Miller, 1961

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Book | "Willy Loman is on his last legs. Failing at his job, dismayed at his the failure of his sons, Biff and Happy, to live up to his expectations, and tortured by his jealousy at the success and happiness of his neighbour Charley and his son Bernard, Willy spirals into a well of regret, reminiscence, and A scathing indictment of the ultimate failure of the American dream, and the empty pursuit of wealth and success, is a harrowing journey. In creating Willy Loman, his destructively insecure anti-hero, Miller defined his aim as being 'to set forth what happens when a man does not have a grip on the forces of life'."(Review from Amazon)

High windows - Philip Larkin, 1974 Book | "When Philip Larkin's High Windows first appeared, Kingsley Amis spoke for a large and loyal readership when he wrote: 'Larkin's admirers need only be told that he is as good as ever here, if not slightly better.'

Like Betjeman and Hardy, Larkin is a poet who can move a large audience - without betraying the highest artistic standards.

The poems in High Windows illustrate Larkin's unrivalled ability to bring lyrical expression to ordinary, urban lives. It is a gift that makes him one of the most truly popular of the twentieth century's poets." (Review from Amazon).

Leaves of grass - Walt Whitman, 2008 Book | "Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent his entire life writing and re-writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death. This resulted in vastly different editions over four decades—the first a small book of twelve poems and the last a compilation of over 400 poems. The poems of Leaves of Grass are loosely connected and each represents Whitman's celebration of his philosophy of life and humanity. This book is notable for its discussion of delight in sensual pleasures during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral. Where much previous poetry, especially English, relied on symbolism, allegory, and meditation on the religious and spiritual, Leaves of Grass (particularly the first edition) exalted the body and the material world. Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement, itself an offshoot of Romanticism, Whitman's poetry praises nature and the individual human's role in it. However, much like Emerson, Whitman does not diminish the role of the mind or the spirit; rather, he elevates the human form and the human mind, deeming both worthy of poetic praise." (Review from Amazon)

100 love sonnets =: Cien sonetos de amor - Pablo Neruda, Stephen Tapscott, 1986 Book | Text in Spanish with English translation. ""The happiness I feel in offering these to you is vast as a savanna," Pablo Neruda wrote his adored wife, Matilde Urrutia de Neruda, in his dedication of One Hundred Love Sonnets. Set against the backdrop of his beloved Isla Negra, these joyfully sensual poems draw on the wind and tides, the white sand with its scattering of delicate wildflowers, and the hot sun and salty scent of the sea to celebrate their love. Generations of lovers since Pablo and Matilde have shared these poems with each other, making One Hundred Love Sonnets one of the most popular books of poetry of all time. This beautifully redesigned volume, perfect for gift-giving, presents both the original Spanish sonnets and graceful English translations." (Review from Amazon)

Station island - Seamus Heaney, 1984 Book | 1995 Nobel Literature prize winner. "The title poem from this collection is set on

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an island that has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. A narrative sequence, it is an autobiographical quest concerned with 'the growth of a poet's mind'. The long poem is preceded by a section of shorter lyrics and leads into a third group of poems in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice of the legendary mad King Sweeney." (Review from Amazon)

White egrets - Derek Walcott, 2011 Book | 1992 Nobel literature prize winner. "In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects - the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucia, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccomodating sublime of the new world, time's cunning passages, the poet's place in all of this - with a passionate intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the systolic and mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott carries his surf-like cadence from poem to poem, and from sequence to sequence in this celebratory and close-knit collection." (Review from Amazon)

Ariel - Sylvia Plath, 1965 Book | "The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' and 'Paralytic', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963." (Review from Amazon)

Non-fiction (78 items)

Biography (18 items) From individuals as diverse as Nelson Mandela, Peter the Great, Robert Mapplethorpe and Dalton Trumbo, these biographies are among the most acclaimed that the library has to offer.

Long walk to freedom: the autobiography of Nelson Mandela - Nelson Mandela, 2002 Book | Both volumes available in the library. "The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, 'A Long Walk to Freedom' brilliantly re-creates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. Emotive, compelling and uplifting, 'A Long Walk to Freedom' is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Goodbye to all that - Robert Graves, 1960, c1957 Book | "An autobiographical work that describes firsthand the great tectonic shifts in English society following the First World War, Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That is a matchless evocation of the Great War's haunting legacy. In 1929 Robert Graves went to live abroad permanently, vowing 'never to make England my home again'. This is his superb account of his life up until that 'bitter leave-taking': from his childhood and desperately unhappy school days at Charterhouse, to his time serving as a young officer in the First World War that was to haunt him throughout his life. It also contains memorable encounters with fellow writers and poets, including Siegfried Sassoon and Thomas Hardy, and covers his increasingly unhappy marriage to Nancy Nicholson. Goodbye to All That, with its vivid, harrowing descriptions of the Western Front, is a classic war document, and also has immense value as one of the most candid self-portraits of an artist ever written." (Review from Amazon)

The rings of Saturn - W. G. Sebald, 1998

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Book | "The Rings of Saturn begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia. From Lowestoft to Bungay, Sebald's own story becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. The result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human." (Review from Amazon)

Seven pillars of wisdom: a triumph - T. E. Lawrence, 1988 Book | "In his classic book, T.E. Lawrence—forever known as Lawrence of Arabia—recounts his role in the origin of the modern Arab world. At first a shy Oxford scholar and archaeologist with a facility for languages, he joined and went on to lead the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks while the rest of the world was enmeshed in World War I. With its richly detailed evocation of the land and the people Lawrence passionately believed in, its incisive portraits of key players, from Faisal ibn Hussein, the future Hashemite king of Syria and Iraq, to General Sir Edmund Allenby and other members of the British imperial forces, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an indispensible primary historical source. It helps us to understand today’s Middle East, while giving us thrilling accounts of military exploits (including the liberation of Aqaba and Damascus), clandestine activities, and human foibles." (Review from Goodreads)

Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen, 1985 Book | "From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, Karen Blixen spent her happiest years on the farm and her experiences and friendships with the people around her are vividly recalled in these memoirs. First published under the pen name Isak Dinesen, "Out of Africa" is the story of a remarkable and unconventional woman and of a way of life that has vanished for ever." (Review from Amazon)

Churchill: a life - Martin Gilbert, 1991 Book | "This edition of the highly acclaimed one-volume Churchill: A Life, is the story of adventure. It follows Winston Churchill from his earliest days to his moments of triumph. Here, the drama and excitement of his story are ever-present, as are his tremendous qualities in peace and war, not least as an orator and as a man of vision. Martin Gilbert gives us a vivid portrait, using Churchill's most personal letters and the recollections of his contemporaries, both friends and enemies, to go behind the scenes of some of the stormiest and most fascinating political events of our time, dominated by two world wars, and culminating in the era of the Iron Curtain and the hydrogen bomb." (Review from Amazon)

Maus: a survivor's tale - Art Spiegelman, 2003 Book | Graphic novel. "Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century's grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us." (Review from Amazon)

Peter the Great: his life and world - Robert K. Massie, 1981, c1980 Book | "Against the monumental canvas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia, unfolds the magnificent story of Peter the Great, crowned at the age of 10. A

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barbarous, volatile feudal tsar with a taste for torture; a progressive and enlightened reformer of government and science; a statesman of vision and colossal significance: Peter the Great embodied the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Russia while being at the very forefront of her development.

Robert K. Massie delves deep into the life of this captivating historical figure, chronicling the pivotal events that shaped a boy into a legend - including his 'incognito' travels in Europe, his unquenchable curiosity about Western ways, his obsession with the sea and establishment of the stupendous Russian navy, his creation of an unbeatable army, and his relationships with those he loved most: Catherine, his loving mistress, wife, and successor; and Menshikov, the charming, unscrupulous prince who rose to power through Peter's friendship. Impetuous and stubborn, generous and cruel, a man of enormous energy and complexity, Peter the Great is brought fully to life." (Review/summary from Goodreads)

Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson, 2011 Book | "Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues - this is the acclaimed, internationally bestselling biography of the ultimate icon of inventiveness. Walter Isaacson tells the story of the rollercoaster life and searingly intense personality of creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies,music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written, nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted." (Review from Amazon)

The autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X, Alex Haley, 2001, c1965 Book | "Celebrated and vilified the world over for his courageous but bitter fight to gain for millions of black men and women the equality and respect denied them by their white neighbours, Malcolm X inspired as many people in the United States as he caused to fear him.

His remarkable autobiography, completed just before his murder in 1965, ranges from Omaha and Michigan to Harlem and Mecca, and tells of a young, disenfranchised man whose descent into drug addition, robbery and prison was only reversed by his belief in the rights struggle for black America, and his conversion to the Nation of Islam.

Not only is this an enormously important record of the Civil Rights Movement in America, but also the scintillating story of a man who refused to allow anyone to tell him who or what he was." (Review from Amazon)

I know why the caged bird sings - Maya Angelou, 1984, c1969 Book | "Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of

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the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother's lover." (Review from Amazon)

John Adams - David G. McCullough, 2001 Book | "A biography of the extraordinary man who became the second president of the United States, this book traces John Adams' adventurous life and spirited rivalry with Thomas Jefferson, and encompasses both the American Revolution and the birth of the young republic. David McCullough describes the childhood, youth and coming of age of Adams, the fiercely driven Massachusetts farmer-lawyer whose marriage to Abigail is one of the great real-life love stories. He also tells the story of his lifelong rival Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia planter and slave-owner. Through their lives, McCullough explores the extraordinary factors that transformed 13 colonies into a united nation that eventually brought these two distinctly dissimilar men to the presidency." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Infidel - Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 2008 Book | "Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of today's most admired and controversial political figures. She burst into international headlines following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamist who threatened she would be next. An international bestseller, her life story 'Infidel' shows the coming of age of this elegant, distinguished -- and sometimes reviled -- political superstar and champion of free speech. Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright, curious, dutiful little girl evolves into a pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no other book could be more timely, or more significant." (Review/summary from Amazon)

On writing: a memoir of the craft - Stephen King, 2000 Book | "Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in the vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999 - and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery." (Summary/review from Amazon)

Just kids - Patti Smith, 2010 Book | "A prelude to fame, Just Kids recounts the friendship of two young artists--Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe - whose passion fueled their lifelong pursuit of art.

In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, Scribner's Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol's Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years--the days of cous-cous and lettuce soup.

Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. Beautifully written, this is a profound portrait of two young artists, often hungry, sated only by art and experience. And an unforgettable portrait of New York, her rich and poor, hustlers and hellions, those who

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made it and those whose memory lingers near." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Trumbo - Bruce Cook, 2015 Book | "Dalton Trumbo was the central figure of the infamous 'Hollywood Ten,' the screenwriters who, during the McCarthy era, were charged by the House Committee on Un-American Acitivities for their associations with the Communist Party. Due to their refusal to cooperate during the investigation, Trumbo and his fellow screenwriters were declared in contempt of Congress and were ultimately blacklisted from Hollywood and some were even jailed. Although Trumbo was one of several hundred writers, directors, producers, and actors who were deprived of the opportunity to work in the motion picture industry from 1947 to 1960, he won an Oscar under the pseudonym Robert Rich for The Brave One in 1956, and he was the first to see his name on the big screen again in 1960 with Exodus, one of the year's biggest movies. All his life Trumbo was a radical of the homegrown, independent variety. From his early days in Colorado, where his grandfather was a county sheriff, to his time in Los Angeles, where he organized a bakery strike and was even a bootlegger, to his time as an author when he wrote the powerful pacifist novel Johnny Got His Gun, to his heyday as a top-paid (and frequently broke) Hollywood screenwriter-where his credits include Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Papillon, Lonely Are the Brave, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The Brave One, and Kitty Foyle-his life rivaled anything he had created. Written with Dalton Trumbo's full cooperation, at a moment when he himself did not know how much time he had left, Trumbo is a candid tale of a colorful figure who was at the epicenter of a tumultuous period in recent American history." (Review/summary from Amazon)

The new tsar: the rise and reign of Vladimir Putin - Steven Lee Myers, 2015 Book | "An epic tale of Vladimir Putin's path to power, as he emerged from obscurity to become one of the world's most conflicted and important leaders. Former New York TimesMoscow Bureau Chief Steven Lee Myers has followed Putin since well before the recent events in the Ukraine, and gives us the fullest and most engaging account available of his rise to power. A gripping, page-turning narrative about Russian power and prestige, the book depicts a cool and calculating leader with enormous ambition and few scruples. As the world struggles to confront a newly assertive Russia, the importance of understanding Putin has never been greater.

Vladimir Putin rose out of Soviet deprivation to the pinnacle of influence in the new Russian nation. He came to office in 2000 as a reformer, cutting taxes and expanding property rights, bringing a measure of order and eventually prosperity to millions whose only experience of democracy in the early years following the Soviet collapse was instability, poverty and criminality. But soon Putin orchestrated the preservation of a new kind of authoritarianism, consolidating power, reasserting his country's might, brutally crushing revolts and swiftly dispatching dissenters, even as he retained the support of many." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Hitler: a biography - Volker Ullrich, Jefferson S. Chase, 2016 Book | Volume 1. "Despite his status as the most despised political figure in history, there have only been four serious biographies of Hitler since the 1930s. Even more surprisingly, his biographers have been more interested in his rise to power and his methods of leadership than in Hitler the person: some have even declared that the Führer had no private life.

Yet to render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of

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limited intelligence and poor social skills, fails to explain the spell that he cast not only on those close to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct our perception of the Führer. While charting in detail Hitler’s life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions.

Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected or unavailable sources, this magisterial study provides the most rounded portrait of Hitler to date. Ullrich renders the Führer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile ― and it is perhaps the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the clichéd image of the monster.

This definitive biography will forever change the way we look at the man who took the world into the abyss." (Review from Amazon)

Art & music (22 items)

Can't stop won't stop: a history of the hip-hop generation - Jeff Chang, 2005 Book | "Hip-hop is now a global multi-billion pound industry. It has spawned superstars all across the world. There have been tie-in clothing lines, TV stations, film companies, cosmetics lines. It even has its own sports, its own art style, its own dialect. It is an all-encompassing lifestyle.

But where did hip-hop culture begin? Who created it? How did hip-hop become such a phenomenon?

Jeff Chang, an American journalist, has written the most comprehensive book on hip-hop to date. He introduces the major players who came up with the ideas that form the basic elements of the culture. He describes how it all began with social upheavals in Jamaica, the Bronx, the Black Belt of Long Island and South Central LA. He not only provides a history of the music, but a fascinating insight into the social background of young black America.

Stretching from the early 70s through to the present day, this is the definitive history of hip-hop. It will be essential reading for all DJs, B-Boys, MCs and anyone with an interest in American history." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Networks of sound, style and subversion: the punk and post-punk worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975-80 - Nick Crossley, 2015 Book | "This book examines the birth of punk in the UK and its transformation, within a short period of time, into post-punk. Deploying innovative concepts of 'critical mass', 'social networks' and 'music worlds', and using sophisticated techniques of 'social network analysis', it teases out the events and mechanisms involved in punk's 'micro-mobilisation', its diffusion across the UK and its transformation in certain city-based strongholds into a variety of interlocking post-punk forms. Nick Crossley offers a detailed review of prior work in this area, a rich exploration of new empirical data and a highly innovative and robust approach to the study of 'music worlds'. Written in an accessible style, this book is essential reading for anybody with an interest in either UK punk and post-punk or the impact of social networks on cultural life and the potential of social network analysis to

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explore this impact." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Babylon's burning: from punk to grunge - Clinton Heylin, 2008 Book | "In this enthralling history of punk and grunge, Clinton Heylin describes how the word 'punk' was coined by revered rock journalist Lester Bangs, and charts the rise and fall of the movement, from the explosion of the Sex Pistols to the death of Kurt Cobain. Tracing punk’s origins on three continents – from the pubs of England to the clubs of New York and Cleveland, Sydney and Brisbane - as well as looking at individual bands, Heylin explores the groups who were the scenemakers, along with the underground networks established to assault the mainstream. Eloquent, enthralling, endlessly informative, Babylon's Burning will find a home in every music fan’s library." (Review from Amazon)

Black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary America - Tricia Rose, 1994 Book | "From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it a provocative fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a ""hip hop theorist,"" takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it. Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men. But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric ""Vietnam"" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, ""a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Global noise: rap and hip-hop outside the USA - Tony Mitchell, 2001 Book | "The thirteen essays that comprise Global Noise explore the hip hop scenes of Europe, Anglophone and Francophone Canada, Japan and Australia within their social, cultural and ethnic contexts. Countering the prevailing colonialist view that global hip hop is an exotic and derivative outgrowth of an African-American-owned idiom subject to assessment in terms of American norms and standards, Global Noise shows how international hip hop scenes, like those in France and Australia, developed by first adopting then adapting US models and establishing an increasing hybridity of local linguistic and musical features. The essays reveal diasporic manifestations of international hip hop that are rarely acknowledged in the growing commentary on the genre in the US. In the voices of rappers from around the globe with divergent backgrounds of race, nationality, class and gender, the authors find a consistent rhetoric of opposition and resistance to institutional forms of repression and the construction of a cohesive, historically-based subculture capable of accommodating regional and national diversities." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Heavy metal music in Britain - 2009

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Book | "Heavy metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, heavy metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concept albums and rewritings of classical poems. In other words, heavy metal tried from the beginning to locate itself in a liminal space between pedestrian mass culture and a rather elitist adherence to complexity and musical craftsmanship, speaking from a subaltern position against the hegemonic discourse. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British heavy metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British heavy metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analyses of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances. Rather than focus on individual bands or songs, the essays collected here argue with the larger system of heavy metal music in mind, providing comprehensive analyses that relate directly to the larger context of British life and culture. The wide range of approaches should provide readers from various disciplines with new and original ideas about the study of this phenomenon of popular culture." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Empire of dirt: the aesthetics and rituals of British indie music - Wendy Fonarow, 2006 Book | "Britain is widely considered the cradle of independent music culture. Bands like Radiohead and Belle and Sebastian, which epitomize indie music's sounds and attitudes, have spawned worldwide fanbases. This in-depth study of the British independent music scene explores how the behavior of fans, artists, and music industry professionals produce a community with a specific aesthetic based on moral values. Author Wendy Fonarow, a scholar with years of experience in the various sectors of the indie music scene, examines the indie music """"gig"""" as a ritual in which all participants are actively involved. This ritual allows participants to play with cultural norms regarding appropriate behavior, especially in the domains of sex and creativity. Her investigation uncovers the motivations of audience members when they first enter the community and how their positions change over time so that the gig functions for most members as a rite of passage. Empire of Dirt sheds new light on music, gender roles, emotion, subjectivity, embodiment, and authenticity." (Review from Amazon)

Songwriters on songwriting - Paul Zollo, 2003 Book | "This expanded fourth edition of Songwriters on Songwriting includes ten new interviews--with Alanis Morissette, Lenny Kravitz, Lou Reed, and others. In these pages, sixty-two of the greatest songwriters of our time go straight to the source of the magic of songwriting by offering their thoughts, feelings, and opinions on their art. Representing almost every genre of popular music, from blues to pop to rock, here are the figures that have shaped American music as we know it." (Review from Amazon)

Banksy - Wall and piece - Banksy, 2005 Book | "Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable, except maybe when it's squatting in the Tate or New York's Metropolitan Museum. Banksy is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cites throughout the world.

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Witty and subversive, his stencils show monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, policeman with smiley faces, rats with drills and umbrellas.If you look hard enough you'll find your own. His statements, incitements, ironies and epigrams are by turns intelligent and cheeky comments on everything from the monarchy and capitalism to the war in Iraq and farm animals.

His identity remains unknown, but his work is prolific. Here's the best of his work in a fully illustrated colour volume - including brand material." (Review/summary from Amazon).

On beauty - Umberto Eco, Alastair McEwen, 2004 Book | "On Beauty is neither a history of art, nor a history of aesthetics, but Umberto Eco draws on both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed us from the classical world to modern times. In terms of form and style, On Beauty has been conceived for a vast and diverse readership. Packed with examples from painting, sculpture, architecture, film, photography, the decorative arts and literature, it offers a rich and intelligent panorama of this huge subject. In On Beauty Eco is at his most captivating and eclectic: we read not only of Botticelli and Michelangelo but of how much the fashion of the 1960s owes to ancient Egyptian dress, and how ancient Roman and eighteenth-century hairstyles have much in common. It makes the familiar new, and sheds a brilliant light on the unfamiliar. On Beauty is illustrated in full colour throughout and produced to the highest standards." (Review/summary from Amazon)

On ugliness - Umberto Eco, 2007 Book | Companion piece to 'On beauty'. "Beauty and ugliness are two sides of the same coin; by ugliness we usually mean the opposite of beauty and we often define the first in order to understand the nature of the second. But the various depictions of ugliness over the centuries are richer and more unpredictable than is commonly thought. The striking images and anthological quotations in On Ugliness lead us on an extraordinary journey through the passions, terrors and nightmares of almost three thousand years, where acts of rejection go hand in hand with touching instances of empathy, and an aversion to deformity is accompanied by seductive violations of all classical canons. With his characteristic wit and erudition, Umberto Eco draws on examples in art and literature from ancient times to the present day. Abundantly illustrated with demons, madmen, vile enemies and disquieting presences, with freaks and the living dead, On Ugliness is conceived for a vast and diverse readership, and is an invaluable companion volume to On Beauty." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Comics: a global history, 1968 to the present - Dan Mazur, Alexander Danner, 2014 Book | "The first global history of comics from 1968 through to the present day, arranged chronologically and richly illustrated with prime examples of the artists, styles and movements being discussed. The authors contextualize the crucial modern period within the art forms broader history and offer a description of the more fluid, international and digital scene that is the mediums likely future. They supply examples from around the world including the US and UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Argentina, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand and from a range of renowned and lesser-known artists." (Review from Amazon).

Winsor McCay: his life and art - John Canemaker, 2005 Book | "John Canemaker reviews and fully analyzes McCay's achievements in print and film, examining his work in relation to his life, his family, and to American culture and values of the period. Original art from all the McCay's endeavors and rare personal photographs provide a visual counterpart to Canemaker's fascinating text. Begining with

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McCay's childhood in pioneer-era Michigan, circa 1870, this biography moves on through his earliest attempts to find an artistic voice in Chicago and turn-of-the-century Cincinnati, his work with circus posters, as a quick-sketch newspaper reporter, as a headliner chalk-talk artist in vaudeville, as crown jewel in William Randolph Hearst's grand line-up of newspaper cartoonists, and as the greatest of the early animators. McCay's masterpiece is the epic Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905), a beautiful and surreal fantasy rendered in stunning art nouveau line and subtle yet daring colour, and designed with layouts that anticipate cinematic storytelling techniques. McCay's ten animated films, among them How a Mosquito Operates (1912) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), remain landmarks in the history of this art and were unmatched in the fluid movement and personality of the characters until the mature films of Walt Disney came along two decades later." (Review from Amazon)

The contemporary comic book superhero - 2009 Book | "Over the last several decades, comic book superheroes have multiplied and, in the process, become more complicated. In this cutting edge anthology an international roster of contributors offer original research and writing on the contemporary comic book superhero, with occasional journeys into the film and television variation. As superheroes and their stories have grown with the audiences that consume them, their formulas, conventions, and narrative worlds have altered to follow suit, injecting new, unpredictable and more challenging characterizations that engage ravenous readers who increasingly demand more." (Review from Amazon)

The world goes pop - Elsa Coustou, 2015 Book | "The World Goes Pop explores the contemporaneous engagements with a spirit of pop throughout the globe, concentrating not only on the relatively well-covered activity in the US, UK and France but also on developments throughout Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. From the late 1950s onwards, numerous artists and movements with a Pop aesthetic developed throughout these continents, including Nouveau realisme, Neo Dada, New Figuration, Equipo Cronica, and Cronica de la Realidad and Saqqakhaneh or Spiritual Pop, as well as such singular figures as Oyvind Fahlstrom, Keiichi Tanaami, and Erro. These artists and movements differed from one another due to their geographies as much as to their exposure to centralised or marginal cultural manifestations, and they were informed by their respective traditions, social and political movements. This unique book offers an opportunity to examine the origins and socio-political side of Pop, including pop and the political representation; pop and the new sexual politics; pop and the mass; seriality, distribution and the role of print production. Featuring six newly-commissioned essays from a wide range of international contributors, and produced in close collaboration with the artists involved, The World Goes Pop is the first book to rely on primary sources to re-evaluate Pop art throughout the globe." (Review from Amazon)

England's post-war listed buildings: including scheduled monuments and registered landscapes - Elain Harwood, James O. Davies, 2015 Book | "England's Post-War Listed Buildings is a comprehensive and stylish guide to over 500 of the country's most striking, and historically relevant, architectural gems. Listed buildings range from traditional works by Raymond Erith and Donald McMorran and many of the 'pop icons' of the 1960s (including Centre Point), to internationally outstanding modern works like Stirling and Gowan's Leicester Engineering Building and Foster Associates' offices for Willis Faber Dumas in Ipswich. This fully updated and expanded edition from Elain Harwood, one of the foremost names in modern architecture writing, contains numerous new entries arranged in an accessible, regional structure, as

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well as features on telephone boxes, landscapes, memorials and sculptures." (Review from Amazon)

Film noir: from Berlin to Sin City - Mark Bould, 2005 Book | "Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City explores the murky world of a genre responsible for many of film’s most enduring images. Mark Bould discusses problems of definition and the often ambiguous nature of film noir and looks at modern films that could be called neo-noir. Iconic and enduring, film noir attracted great stars (Bogart, Bacall, Mitchum, Lancaster), many of the best directors of the era (Wilder, Lang, Preminger, Hawks, Siodmak, Welles) and this book is an indispensible guide to this still popular genre." (Review from Amazon)

Hitchcock: suspense, humour, and tone - Susan Smith, 2000 Book | "The author's treatment of the works of the most subtle of all film-makers analyzes the key elements of suspense, humour and tone across the whole of the director's career. Arguing that all three are central to our viewing experience the book aims to demonstrate how Hitchcock's integration of these elements is the key to his success as a filmmaker. Films such as "North by Northwest", "The Birds", "Shadow of a Doubt" and "Notorious" amongst others are examined in detail. The book discusses the idea of the director as a sabateur and the importance of the avoidance of cliche in Hitchcock's narrative." (Review from Amazon)

Easy riders, raging bulls: how the sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll generation saved Hollywood - Peter Biskind, 1998 Book | "Based on hundreds of interviews with directors such as Coppola, Scorsese, Hopper and Spielberg, as well as producers, stars, studio executives, writers, spouses, ex-spouses, and girlfriends, this is the story of the crazy world that the directors ruled." (Review from Amazon)

Warhol & Mapplethorpe: guise & dolls - Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, 2015 Book | "Andy Warhol (1928-1987) and Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) are well known for significant work in portraiture and self-portraiture that challenged gender roles and notions of femininity, masculinity, and androgyny. This exciting and original book is the first to consider the two artists together, examining the powerful portraits they created during the vibrant and tumultuous era bookended by the Stonewall riots and the AIDS crisis. Several important bodies of work are featured, including Warhol's Ladies and Gentlemen series of drag queen portraits and his collaboration with Christopher Makos on Altered Image, in which Warhol was photographed in makeup and wigs, and Mapplethorpe's photographs of Patti Smith and of female body builder Lisa Lyon. These are explored alongside numerous other paintings, photographs, and films that demonstrate the artists' engagement with gender, identity, beauty, performance, and sexuality, including their own self-portraits and portraits of one another. Essays trace the convergences and divergences of Warhol and Mapplethorpe's work, and examine the historical context of the artists' projects as well as their lasting impact on contemporary art and queer culture. Firsthand accounts by the artists' collaborators and subjects reveal details into the making and exhibition of some of the works presented here. With an illustrated timeline highlighting key moments in the artists' careers, and more than 90 color plates of their arresting pictures, this book provides a fascinating study of two of the most compelling figures in 20th-century art." (Review from Amazon)

Ngaanyatjarra: art of the lands - 2012 Book | "Ngaanyatjarra: Art of the Lands is a gloriously illustrated contemporary

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Indigenous art book that documents the six Aboriginal owned and run art centres that make up the Western Desert Mob of Aboriginal artists (Warakurna, Papulankutja, Tjarlirli, Kayili, Maruku and Tjanpi).

Including an introduction by Hetti Perkins, one of Australia’s most respected curators of Aboriginal art, this book combines the aesthetics of an art catalogue – featuring over 260 images (including over 170 individual pieces) of artwork produced by the various artists in recent decades – with the rigour of an academic art history – containing both essays and stories of the Ngaanyatjarra people’s perspectives on their own artistic heritage.

The Ngaanyatjarra Lands hold a unique place in the art history of Australia and yet the majority of recorded art histories of the Western Desert are dominated by the genesis of desert painting at Papunya and its progression through Papunya Tula Artists. Ngaanyatjarra: Art of the Lands documents these, as well as the following art centres: Kayili Artists, Papulankutja Artists, Tjarlirli Art, Tjanpi Desert Weavers, Maruku Arts and Crafts, and Warakurna Artists." (Review taken from UWA Books).

Eduardo Paolozzi - Judith Collins, 2014 Book | "Artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was a unique cultural figure. His varied yet instantly recognisable work chronicles the significant changes in British art from the austere 1950s to the post-post-modern late 1990s. This highly illustrated and visually exciting book provides the first comprehensive overview of the career of a major, prolific and complex artist, exploring Paolozzi's work from all periods and across all media: collage, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, tapestry and film. An Italian Scot, Paolozzi studied first at Edinburgh College of Art, before moving on to the Ruskin Drawing School and the Slade. He was a founding member of the Independent Group in the early 1950s but steadfastly resisted the 'Pop' label, preferring instead to see his pioneering interdisciplinarity as an extension and an expansion of radical Surrealism. Dedicating a chapter to each facet of Paolozzi's wide-ranging practice - including, in turn, his bronze, aluminium and public sculptures, as well as his early collages and his innovative screenprints - this book offers the definitive, illustrated, art-historical appraisal of an artist whose work continues to fascinate and inspire." (Review from Amazon)

History (16 items)

The historian's craft - Marc Bloch, 1992 Book | Available in French at Store (D 13). Original title: Apologie Pour L'histoire Ou Metier D'historien. "This work, by the co-founder of the "Annales School" deals with the uses and methods of history. It is useful for students of history, teachers of historiography and all those interested in the writings of the Annales school." (Summary from Amazon)

Bandits - E. J. Hobsbawm, 1972 Book | "'Bandits' is a study of the social bandit or bandit-rebel - robbers and outlaws who are not regarded by public opinion as simple criminals, but rather as champions of social justice, as avengers or as primitive resistance fighters. Whether Balkan haiduks, Indian dacoits or Brazilian congaceiros, their spectacular exploits have been celebrated and preserved in story and myth. Some are only know to their fellow countrymen; others like Rob Roy, Robin Hood and Jesse James are famous throughout the world. First published in 1969, Bandits inspired a new field of historical study: bandit history. This substantially extended and revised new edition appears at a time when the disintegration of state power has reintroduced fertile conditions for banditry once again to flourish in

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many parts of the world." (Review from Amazon)

The God that failed: six studies in Communism - Arthur Koestler, 1950 Book | ""The God That Failed" is a classic work and crucial document of the Cold War that brings together essays by six of the most important writers of the twentieth century on their conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with communism. In describing their own experiences, the authors illustrate the fate of leftism around the world. Andr? Gide (France), Richard Wright (the United States), Ignazio Silone (Italy), Stephen Spender (England), Arthur Koestler (Germany), and Louis Fischer, an American foreign correspondent, all tell how their search for the betterment of humanity led them to communism, and the personal agony and revulsion which then caused them to reject it. David Engerman's new foreword to this central work of our time recounts the tumultuous events of the era, providing essential background. It also describes the book's origins and impact, the influence of communism in American intellectual life, and how the events described in "The God That Failed" continue to affect public discourse today." (Review from Goodreads)

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell, 2015 Book | "'Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it'. Thus wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War, chronicled in Homage to Catalonia. Here he brings to bear all the force of his humanity, passion and clarity, describing with bitter intensity the bright hopes and cynical betrayals of that chaotic episode: the revolutionary euphoria of Barcelona, the courage of ordinary Spanish men and women he fought alongside, the terror and confusion of the front, his near-fatal bullet wound and the vicious treachery of his supposed allies.

A firsthand account of the brutal conditions of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia includes an introduction by Julian Symons in Penguin Modern Classics." (Review from Amazon)

Nothing but the truth: selected dispatches - Anna Politkovskai︠a︡, A. L. Tait, 2010 Book | Collection of articles. "Until her murder in October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya wrote for the Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta, winning international fame for her reporting on the Chechen wars and, more generally, on Russian politics and state corruption. Nothing But the Truth is a definitive collection of Anna Politkovskaya's best writings: a lasting and inspiring book from one fo the greatest reporters of our age." (Review from Amazon).

A people's history of the United States: 1492-present - Howard Zinn, 2003 Book | "Library Journal calls Howard Zinn's iconic A People's History of the United States a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories. Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn's award-winning classic continues to revolutionize the way American history is taught and remembered. Frequent appearances in popular media such as The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Good Will Hunting, and the History Channel documentary The People Speak testify to Zinn's ability to bridge the generation gap with enduring insights into the birth, development, and destiny of the nation."" (Review from Amazon)

A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson, 2004 Book | "Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him.

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A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.

Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?

On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Night - Elie Wiesel, 1960 Book | "Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor’s perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century." (Review from Amazon)

Salt: a world history - Mark Kurlansky, 2002 Book | "Homer called it a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlansky so brilliantly relates here, salt has shaped civilisation from the beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind. Wars have been fought over salt and, while salt taxes secured empires across Europe and Asia, they have also inspired revolution - Gandhi's salt march in 1930 began the overthrow of British rule in India.

From the rural Sichuan province where the last home-made soya sauce is produced to the Cheshire brine springs that supplied salt around the globe, Mark Kurlansky has produced a kaleidoscope of world history, a multi-layered masterpiece that blends political, commercial, scientific, religious and culinary records into a rich and memorable tale." (Review/summary from Amazon)

How the Irish saved civilization: the untold story of Ireland's heroic role from the fall of Rome to the rise of medieval Europe - Thomas Cahill, 1995 Book | "Ireland played the central role in maintaining European culture when the dark ages settled on Europe in the fifth century: as Rome was sacked by Visigoths and its empire collapsed, Ireland became 'the isle of saints and scholars' that enabled the classical and religious heritage to be saved.

In his compelling and entertaining narrative, Thomas Cahill tells the story of how Irish monks and scrines copied the mauscripts of both pagan and Christian writers, including Homer and Aristotle, while libraries on the continent were lost forever. Bringing the past

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and its characters to life, Cahill captures the sensibility of the unsung Irish who relaunched civilisation." (Review from Amazon)

In the heart of the sea: the tragedy of the whaleship Essex - Nathaniel Philbrick, 2000 Book | "The epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the nineteenth century – and inspiration for ‘Moby-Dick’ – reissued to accompany a major motion picture due for release in December 2015, directed by Ron Howard and starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker and Cillian Murphy.

When the whaleship Essex set sail from Nantucket in 1819, the unthinkable happened. A mere speck in the vast Pacific ocean – and powerless against the forces of nature – Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale, and her twenty crewmen were forced to take to the open sea in three small boats. Ninety days later only a handful of survivors were rescued – and a terrifying story of desperation, cannibalism and courage was revealed…

One of the greatest sea yarns ever spun, ‘In the Heart of the Sea’ is the true story of the extraordinary events that inspired Herman Melville’s masterpiece ‘Moby-Dick’." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French village, 1294-1324 - Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Barbara Bray, 1980 Book | "An enthralling account of day-to-day life in a medieval French village. Using records gathered by the Catholic Church in its pursuit of heretics, the book recreates the lives of a rich cast of village characters." (Summary from Amazon)

Citizens: a chronicle of the French Revolution - Simon Schama, 1989 Book | "One of the great landmarks of modern history publishing, Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution is the most authoritative social, cultural and narrative history of the French Revolution ever produced." (Review from Amazon)

The end of the Cold War, 1985-1991 - Robert Service, 2015 Book | "The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the spread of Perestroika throughout the former Soviet bloc was a sea change in world history and two years later resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In The End of the Cold War, acclaimed Russian historian Robert Service examines precisely how that change came about. Drawing on a vast and largely untapped range of sources, he builds a picture of the two men who spearheaded the breakthrough: Ronald Reagan, President of the United States, and Mikhail Gorbachev, last General Secretary of the Soviet Union and first and last President of the USSR. He also analyses the role of influential players not only in America and the USSR, but throughout Eastern and Western Europe, and focuses especially on Pope John Paul II, Lech Watesa and Vaclav Havel.

Authoritative, compelling and meticulously researched, this is political history at its best." (Review from Amazon)

The Silk Roads: a new history of the world - Peter Frankopan, 2015 Book | "The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the spread of Perestroika throughout the former Soviet bloc was a sea change in world history and two years later resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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In The End of the Cold War, acclaimed Russian historian Robert Service examines precisely how that change came about. Drawing on a vast and largely untapped range of sources, he builds a picture of the two men who spearheaded the breakthrough: Ronald Reagan, President of the United States, and Mikhail Gorbachev, last General Secretary of the Soviet Union and first and last President of the USSR. He also analyses the role of influential players not only in America and the USSR, but throughout Eastern and Western Europe, and focuses especially on Pope John Paul II, Lech Watesa and Vaclav Havel.

Authoritative, compelling and meticulously researched, this is political history at its best." (Review/summary from Amazon)

Germany: memories of a nation - Neil MacGregor, 2014 Book | "For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental Europe. Twenty-five years ago a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new Germany, and how do its people now understand themselves?

Neil MacGregor argues that uniquely for any European country, no coherent, over-arching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. Its frontiers have constantly floated. Königsberg, home to the greatest German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is now Kaliningrad, Russia; Strasbourg, in whose cathedral Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's greatest writer, discovered the distinctiveness of his country's art and history, now lies within the borders of France. For most of the five hundred years covered by this book Germany has been composed of many separate political units, each with a distinct history. And any comfortable national story Germans might have told themselves before 1914 was destroyed by the events of the following thirty years.

German history may be inherently fragmented, but it contains a large number of widely shared memories, awarenesses and experiences; examining some of these is the purpose of this book. Beginning with the fifteenth-century invention of modern printing by Gutenberg, MacGregor chooses objects and ideas, people and places which still resonate in the new Germany - porcelain from Dresden and rubble from its ruins, Bauhaus design and the German sausage, the crown of Charlemagne and the gates of Buchenwald - to show us something of its collective imagination. There has never been a book about Germany quite like it." (Review from Amazon)

Science (12 items)

Bad science - Ben Goldacre, 2009 Book | "Ben Goldacre’s wise and witty bestseller, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, lifts the lid on quack doctors, flaky statistics, scaremongering journalists and evil pharmaceutical corporations.

Since 2003 Dr Ben Goldacre has been exposing dodgy medical data in his popular Guardian column. In this eye-opening book he takes on the MMR hoax and misleading cosmetics ads, acupuncture and homeopathy, vitamins and mankind’s vexed relationship with all manner of ‘toxins’. Along the way, the self-confessed ‘Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General’ performs a successful detox on a Barbie doll, sees his dead cat become a certified nutritionist and probes the supposed medical qualifications of ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith.

Full spleen and satire, Ben Goldacre takes us on a hilarious, invigorating and ultimately

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alarming journey through the bad science we are fed daily by hacks and quacks." (Review from Amazon)

Bad pharma: how drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients - Ben Goldacre, 2013 Book | "Ben Goldacre puts the $600bn global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. What he reveals is a fascinating, terrifying mess.

Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But instead, companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits by design. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data is simply buried. All of this is perfectly legal. In fact, even government regulators withhold vitally important data from the people who need it most. Doctors and patient groups have stood by too, and failed to protect us. Instead, they take money and favours, in a world so fractured that medics and nurses are now educated by the drugs industry.

The result: patients are harmed in huge numbers.

Ben Goldacre is Britain’s finest writer on the science behind medicine, and ‘Bad Pharma’ is the book that finally prompted Parliament to ask why all trial results aren’t made publicly available – this edition has been updated with the latest news from the select committee hearings. Let the witty and indefatigable Goldacre show you how medicine went wrong, and what you can do to mend it." (Review from Amazon).

Hyperspace: a scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the tenth dimension - Michio Kaku, 1995 Book | "Already thoroughly familiar to the seasoned science fiction fan, Hyperspace is that realm which enables a spaceship captain to take his ship on a physics-defying shortcut (or "wormhole") to the outer shores of the Galaxy in less time than it takes a 747 to fly from New York to Tokyo. But in the past few years, physicists on the cutting edge of science have found that a 10-dimensional Hyperspace may actually exist, albeit at a scale almost too small to comprehend, smaller even than a quark; and that in spite of its tiny size, it may be the basis on which all the forces of nature will be united.

This is the first book for a general audience on one of the latest, most exciting developments in modern science. In the past several years, theoretical physicists―the author among them―have discovered that the universe exists not merely in the four spacetime dimensions (3 of space + one of time) with which Einstein made us familiar, but rather as a ten-dimensional Hyperspace. Once the domain of the science fiction writer or the occultist, Hyperspace has recently been shown to be the only kind of space in which the laws of modern physics can be satisfactorily explained. Amazingly enough, many of the phenomena whose explanations have stymied 20th century physicists and cosmologists can now be perfectly clarified by using the ten dimensions of Hyperspace. Most importantly, Einstein's unfulfilled dream, the work on which he spent the last several decades of his life in vain―the unification of all the forces of nature―now sits waiting on the ten-dimensional doorstep of modern theoretical physicists.

Michio Kaku―theoretical high-energy physicist, author, radio talkshow host, and nuclear disarmament activist―is one of the pioneers in the field of String Theory, which states that the basic constituents of our universe are not quarks or protons or electrons, but much smaller entities called "strings" or "superstrings", which vibrate―like violin strings―in 10 dimensional Hyperspace, and whose vibrations in different resonances are manifested in

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the elementary particles. In his book, Kaku takes the reader on a ride through Hyperspace to the edge of physics. On the way he gives crystal clear explanations of such formidable mathematical concepts as non-Euclidean Geometry, Kaluza-Klein Theory, and Supergravity, the everyday tools of the string theorist.

Utilizing fascinating and often hilarious anecdotes from history, from art, and from science fiction, Kaku shows us that writers and artists―in addition to scientists―have been fascinated by multidimensional space for over a century.

In fact, many of the weird effects created by such famous artists as Dali and Picasso can be explained and more appreciated with an eye on the fourth spatial dimension. Finally, Kaku shows us why the ability to master Hyperspace may be our only salvation from destruction at the end of space-time.

This lively yet authoritative book is spiced with many whimsical illustrations in a style reminiscent of the late science writer George Gamow." (Review from Amazon)

The code book: the secret history of codes and code-breaking - Simon Singh, 2000 Book | "From the best-selling author of Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book is a history of man’s urge to uncover the secrets of codes, from Egyptian puzzles to modern day computer encryptions.

As in Fermat’s Last Theorem, Simon Singh brings life to an anstonishing story of puzzles, codes, languages and riddles that reveals man’s continual pursuit to disguise and uncover, and to work out the secret languages of others.

Codes have influenced events throughout history, both in the stories of those who make them and those who break them. The betrayal of Mary Queen of Scots and the cracking of the enigma code that helped the Allies in World War II are major episodes in a continuing history of cryptography. In addition to stories of intrigue and warfare, Simon Singh also investigates other codes, the unravelling of genes and the rediscovery of ancient languages and most tantalisingly, the Beale ciphers, an unbroken code that could hold the key to a $20 million treasure." (Review from Amazon)

Longitude: the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time - Dava Sobel, 2011 Book | "Anyone alive in the 18th century would have known that ‘the longitude problem’ was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day – and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives, and the increasing fortunes of nations, hung on a resolution.

The quest for a solution had occupied scientists and their patrons for the better part of two centuries when, in 1714, Parliament upped the ante by offering a king’s ransom (£20,000) to anyone whose method or device proved successful. Countless quacks weighed in with preposterous suggestions. The scientific establishment throughout Europe – from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton – had mapped the heavens in both hemispheres in its certain pursuit of a celestial answer. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution.

Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd, 'Longitude' is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation and clockmaking." (Review from Amazon)

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Guns, germs, and steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years - Jared M. Diamond, 2005 Book | 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner. "Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe?

Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians.

An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is a ground-breaking and humane work of popular science." (Review from Amazon)

The elegant universe: superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the quest for the ultimate theory - Brian Greene, 2000 Book | "In The Elegant Universe Brian Greene, one of the world's leading string theorists, peels away the layers of mystery surrounding string theory to reveal a universe which isnt quite what we think: one that consists of eleven dimensions, where all matter is generated by the vibrations of microscopically tiny loops of energy. Greene uses everything from an amusement park ride to ants on a garden hose to explain the beautiful yet bizarre realities that modern physics is unveiling. Dazzling in its brilliance, unprecedented in its ability to both illuminate and entertain, The Elegant Universe is a tour de force of scientific writing - a delightful, lucid voyage through modern physics that brings us closer to understanding how the universe works." (Review from Amazon)

The fabric of the cosmos: space, time and the texture of reality - Brian Greene, 2005 Book | "What is reality? Could we exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? What are the limits of the universe?

Brian Greene has made the mysteries of space and time accessible to millions with his acclaimed writings and award-winning TV series. Now he reveals a world more beautiful and bizarre than we could have imagined, where 'dark matter' reigns, space warps and wiggles through eleven dimensions, minute particles dance, fizz and teleport across vast distances, everything is made of vibrating strings and, like an ant on a lily-pad, we may be floating on a sliver of spacetime.

Revealing new layers of reality that lie just beneath the surface of our everyday lives, this grand tour of the universe will make you look at the world in a completely new way." (Review from Amazon)

The right stuff - Tom Wolfe, 1983 Book | "What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse? I decided on the simplest approach possible. I would ask a few of the astronauts and find out...

The men had it. Yeager. Conrad. Grissom. Glenn. Heroes. The first Americans in space - battling the Russians for control of the heavens, putting their lives on the line. The women had it. While Mr Wonderful was aloft, it tore your heart out that the Hero's Wife, down on the ground, had to perform with the whole world watching. The Right Stuff. It's the quality beyond bravery, beyond courage." (Summary from Amazon)

A brief history of time: from the big bang to black holes - Stephen Hawking, 1988

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Book | "Was there a beginning of time? Could time run backwards? Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries? These are just some of the questions considered in an internationally acclaimed masterpiece by one of the world's greatest thinkers. It begins by reviewing the great theories of the cosmos from Newton to Einstein, before delving into the secrets which still lie at the heart of space and time, from the Big Bang to black holes, via spiral galaxies and strong theory. To this day A Brief History of Time remains a staple of the scientific canon, and its succinct and clear language continues to introduce millions to the universe and its wonders." (Review from Amazon)

The selfish gene - Richard Dawkins, 2006 Book | " Professor Dawkins articulates a gene's eye view of evolution - a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. This imaginative, powerful, and stylistically brilliant work not only brought the insights of Neo-Darwinism to a wide audience, but galvanized the biology community, generating much debate and stimulating whole new areas of research." ( Professor Dawkins articulates a gene's eye view of evolution - a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. This imaginative, powerful, and stylistically brilliant work not only brought the insights of Neo-Darwinism to a wide audience, but galvanized the biology community, generating much debate and stimulating whole new areas of research." (Review from Amazon)

"Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!": adventures of a curious character - Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton, Edward Hutchings, 1985 Book | "Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, Richard Feynman was one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, but he was also a man who fell, often jumped, into adventure. An artist, safecracker, practical joker and storyteller, Feynman's life was a series of combustible combinations made possible by his unique mixture of high intelligence, unquenchable curiosity and eternal scepticism. Over a period of years, Feynman's conversations with his friend Ralph Leighton were first taped and then set down as they appear here, little changed from their spoken form, giving a wise, funny, passionate and totally honest self-portrait of one of the greatest men of our age." (Review from Amazon)

Philosophy & Psychology (10 items)

On evil - Terry Eagleton, c2010 Book | Also available as an e-book. "For many enlightened, liberal-minded thinkers today, and for most on the political left, evil is an outmoded concept. It smacks too much of absolute judgements and metaphysical certainties to suit the modern age. In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defence of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artefact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world. In a book that ranges from St. Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for no reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Why does goodness seem so boring? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all?" (Review from Amazon)

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On bullshit - Harry G. Frankfurt, 2005 Book | " One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory."

Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are." (Review from Amazon)

Explore everything: place-hacking the city - Bradley L. Garrett, 2013 Book | "What does it feel like to find the citys edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure." (Review from Amazon)

Reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world - Jane McGonigal, 2012 Book | "In this ground-breaking book, visionary game designer Jane McGonigaI challenges conventional thinking and shows that games - far from being simply escapist entertainment - have the potential not only to radically improve our own lives but to change the world." (Review from Amazon)

The Lucifer effect: how good people turn evil - Philip G. Zimbardo, 2009 Book | "In The Lucifer Effect, the award-winning and internationally respected psychologist, Philip Zimbardo, examines how the human mind has the capacity to be infinitely caring or selfish, kind or cruel, creative or destructive. He challenges our conceptions of who we think we are, what we believe we will never do - and how and why almost any of us could be initiated into the ranks of evil doers.

At the same time he describes the safeguards we can put in place to prevent ourselves from corrupting - or being corrupted by - others, and what sets some people apart as heroes and heroines, able to resist powerful pressures to go along with the group, and to refuse to be team players when personal integrity is at stake.

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Using the first in-depth analysis of his classic Stanford Prison Experiment, and his personal experiences as an expert witness for one of the Abu Ghraib prison guards, Zimbardo's stimulating and provocative book raises fundamental questions about the nature of good and evil, and how each one of us needs to be vigilant to prevent becoming trapped in the 'Lucifer Effect', no matter what kind of character or morality we believe ourselves to have." (Review from Amazon)

Blink: the power of thinking without thinking - Malcolm Gladwell, 2006 Book | "An art expert sees a ten-million-dollar sculpture and instantly spots it's a fake. A marriage analyst knows within minutes whether a couple will stay together. A fire-fighter suddenly senses he has to get out of a blazing building. A speed dater clicks with the right person...

This international bestselling book is all about those moments when we 'know' something without knowing why. Here Malcolm Gladwell explores the phenomenon of 'blink', showing how a snap judgement can be far more effective than a cautious decision. By trusting your instincts, he reveals, you'll never think about thinking in the same way again." (Review by Amazon)

The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference - Malcolm Gladwell, 2001 Book | "In this brilliant and original book, Malcolm Gladwell explains and analyses the 'tipping point', that magic moment when ideas, trends and social behaviour cross a threshold, tip and spread like wildfire. Taking a look behind the surface of many familiar occurrences in our everyday world, Gladwell explains the fascinating social dynamics that cause rapid change." (Review from Amazon)

Thinking, fast and slow - Daniel Kahneman, 2011 Book | "The phenomenal New York Times Bestseller by Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow offers a whole new look at the way our minds work, and how we make decisions.

Why is there more chance we'll believe something if it's in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. This book reveals how our minds are tripped up by error and prejudice (even when we think we are being logical), and gives you practical techniques for slower, smarter thinking. It will enable to you make better decisions at work, at home, and in everything you do." (Review from Amazon)

The psychology of selling: how to sell more, easier, and faster than you ever thought possible - Brian Tracy, 2004 Book | "Double and triple your sales-in any market. The purpose of this book is to give you a series of ideas, methods, strategies, and techniques that you can use immediately to make more sales, faster and easier than ever before. It's a promise of prosperity that sales guru Brian Tracy has seen fulfilled again and again. More sales people have become millionaires as a result of listening to and applying his ideas than from any other sales training process ever developed." (Review from Amazon)

How we decide - Jonah Lehrer, 2009 Book | "The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions

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Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we “blink” and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind’s black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they’re discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason—and the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, it’s best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we’re picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to use the different parts of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.

Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research as well as the real-world experiences of a wide range of “deciders”—from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players.

Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage of the new science to make better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence. His goal is to answer two questions that are of interest to just about anyone, from CEOs to firefighters: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?" (Review/summary from Amazon)

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