The Silver River

Biographies & Memoirs

DAISY GOODWIN

Arts & Literature

Fourth Estate Ltd.

Shelley : The Pursuit

A fantastic reissue of Richard Holmes' epic biography of this most enigmatic and intriguing of the Romantic poets. This is simply one of the greatest biographical achievements of recent years. Shelley, the most neglected of all the great Romantic poets, was born in Sussex in 1792 and died in Tuscany in 1822, a brief life packed with love affairs, alarums and excursions. Holmes's book offers a serious and critical reappraisal of Shelley as a man and a writer; all his prose and poetry is carefully re-examined, his sense of spiritual and geographical isolation brilliantly described and a detailed portrait of his macabre imaginative life slowly assembled. Shelley's intense friendships with some of the most remarkable figures of his age fill Holmes's pages with a vivid parorama of revolutionary idealism and recklessness. To this is added the private story of Shelley's tortuous romantic liaisons, complications which affected both the peculiar tenor of his daily life and the remotest conceptions of his poetry. This is a stunning, entrancing biography of a fascinating subject, and a timely reissue of an absolutely seminal work.

HOLMES, Richard

A high-security luxury housing estate in the Thames Valley sees a disturbing outbreak of violence in this compelling novella, newly reissued with an introduction from Adam Phillips. Pangbourne Village is exclusive, expensive and protected from the outside world by the very latest in security systems. A seeming idyll of family life; the perfect place to bring up a child. So why, in the space of ten minutes early one morning, were the thirty-two adult residents brutally murdered, and all thirteen children abducted? After months of fruitless investigation - and no word of the children or a ransom - the police are mystified. It is only when psychiatrist Richard Greville is called in that the truth behind the massacre gradually becomes clear. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Ali Smith, Iain Sinclair, Martin Amis and Ned Beauman) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood.

Running Wild

BALLARD,J.G.

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Set in Germany at the end of the 18th century, this book tells the story of the brilliant young Fritz von Hardenberg, later to become the great romantic philosopher &amp; poet. He announces his engagement to a 12 year old girl, to his family's consternation.

The Blue Flower

Literature & Fiction

Fitzgerald, Penelope

Literary

Problem: Best friends keep giving extremely generous giftsSolution: Give better ones in returnPhilip has a lot on his mind. At home, in his unnecessarily large, excessively expensive house in south London, he is attempting to become a Taoist master of love with his wife Alice, but his quest is forever being interrupted by the requests of his twin daughters: Can we have a pony - please? I want to go to boarding school - please? At work, in his shed/office at the bottom of the garden, between countless games of Minesweep and FreeCell, Philip is trying to pay the mortgage by writing instruction manuals for Korean bread-making machines. And, at parties where he is concerned that he is not taken seriously (he has been variously mistaken as a doctor/waiter and sinologist) Philip tells the world he is a scriptwriter, even though all he has managed to pen is a story he calls Wang the Unlucky Scholar.But, above all, Philip is worrying about his best friends Sean and Barry. The problem is simple: they give great presents. Their gifts are exquisite: a full set of Italian crockery, a handmade corkscrew from Venice. They give them indiscriminately: on birthdays, at parties and quite often for no reason whatsoever. And, most distressingly, these presents break all bounds of generosity: two FA Cup Final tickets beside the royal box, a skiing holiday for Philip's entire family. These are gifts that hurt a man's pride, these are gifts that can never be matched.

The Gift

Children's Books

Flusfeder, David

From one of Britain's finest authors, a wry, shocking and beautifully-written memoir of childhood, ghosts (real and metaphorical), illness and family. 'Giving up the Ghost' is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's uniquely unusual five-part autobiography. Opening in 1995 with 'A Second Home', Mantel describes the death of her stepfather which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of her childhood. In 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' Mantel takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating in the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelight ceremony of her mother's 'churching'. In 'Smile', an account of teenage perplexity, Mantel describes a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Finally, at the memoir's conclusion, Mantel explains how through a series of medical misunderstandings and neglect she came to be childless and how the ghosts of the unborn like chances missed or pages unturned, have come to haunt her life as a writer.

Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir

HILARY MANTEL

Contemporary

From the author of THE FOWLER FAMILY BUSINESS comes a reissue of his infamous, intensely distilled epic, POMPEY.  This novel recounts scores of stories: of HoTLoVe, OMO, AO-1; of a pygmy hunt, an assassination, a crucifixion; of a human blood bank and a man with metal in his head and a dentist with nasty habits; of sick sex, ill winds, malignant diseases; of the Voys, the Halals, the Puppymen.  Most of all it tells the story of a flaky pyrotechnicist, Guy Vallender, and of his four progeny, chief among them Poor Eddie, who was quarry, whose gifts were otherwordly, whose gruesome fate was perhaps transcendent.  The action stretches seamlessly between the mid 40s and the mid 70s; its many topographies include Brussels, Salisbury, the Teutoburgerwald, the Congo, the industrial wastes of Lorraine. But the dominant setting is the titular city -- a nightmarish brick grid set on mud a populated by garish freaks. It is here that the characters move to their unique and inexorable ends, fuelled by the bad faith of the former comedian Ray Butt's Church Of The Best Ever Redemption and by the bad blood of the gerontophiliac Jean-Marie. POMPEY is a witty, gripping, emotionally harrowing work by our most viciously inventive writer -- part hallucinatory adventure, part unhappy family saga, part perverse tragedy of the fundamentalist delusion, it is persistently, hurtfully entertaining. And it includes footnotes. Heed the author's warning: 'After using this book please wash your hands.' That way you'll cleanse the stain of corruption, the reek of life as it's really lived (in Meades's fervid imagination).

Pompey

MEADES, JONATHAN

From the author of "The Binding Chair", this follow-up to memoir "The Kiss" explores the bonds of motherhood between four generations. When Kathryn Harrison was a little girl, her young mother left her in the care of her British grandmother who was raised in Shanghai. To Kathryn, her mother's mother seemed an almost unimaginably powerful figure: an imperious arbiter of good taste and a master storyteller, who, when coaxed, might reveal stories of a magic and vanished world. She jilted an array of suitable men before concluding that she was not quite modern enough to have a baby without a husband. At the age of 43 she finally married, and the fruit of this union, Harrison's mother, was no more interested than she in being bound by convention. An occasional witness to her daughter's growth to adulthood, she would appear sporadically in film-star clothes and urge unwanted glamour on her shy child. Harrison grew up a spectator of the remarkable, striving to comprehend these women and yet find her own way to live. In this touching memoir, Harrison writes of the ties that bind mothers to their children - and the forces that can drive them apart. She ponders the legacy of storytelling she inherited from her grandmother, and peers into the deep well of family history from which she draws inspiration for her novels. Reconsidering her past as she watches her own children grow, she recalls the thrilling risk of shoplifting; the longing for perfection that resulted in a fierce eating disorder; and the thunderous fights that showed how impossible and how necessary it was to leave home. "Seeking Rapture" conveys the aching tenderness Harrison feels toward her children, and her awe of their imaginary worlds that no adult can enter. The evocative book will awaken readers to sift through their own sense of motherhood, loss and regeneration as it chronicles the unforgettable episodes that form the drama of domestic life.

SEEKING RAPTURE: A MEMOIR

Kathryn Harriison

I'll Take You There

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the world's most respected living novelists. 'I'll take You There' is an intense, deeply moving story of how a young woman finds her place in the world. 'In those days in the early 1960s we were not women yet but girls. This was, without irony perceived as our advantage.' So begins 'I'll Take You There', an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a young woman who comes of age in the most turbulent of American decades. 'Anellia' - as she sometimes calls herself - is a student at Syracuse University, the first time she has lived away from her family. Headstrong, passionate, occasionally obsessive, she is pitiless in exposing herself to her new life as she searches for a place in the world. In her quest for belonging, 'Anellia' discovers the risks, and curious rewards, of confronting the world: being taken in, and then cruelly rejected by a 'sisterhood' of her fellow students, falling recklessly in love with an older graduate student who happens to be black, making a journey westward when summoned by a figure from her past who she believed to be dead. Through this triptych of events, the atoms of 'Anellia's' life comes together as she begins her journey into adulthood. This spellbinding novel confirms Oates as one of America's most important writers. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our times. 'I'll Take You There' is a deeply moving, wry, intense examination of how a girl becomes a young woman.

Joyce Carol Oates

Shell Collector

The Shell Collector

Anthony Doerr

Genre Fiction

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