A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of all human consciousness.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Calvino, Italo (cuba/italy)

Vintage, UK

Wherever there is science, there are scientists; and wherever there are scientists there is rivalry. Rivalry is a key feature of scientific endeavour. This book examines eight instances in the history of science and technology that changed the world, in all of which the stress of rivalry played a pivotal role. The driving force of rivalry takes many forms, whether between individual scientists, groups of scientists, institutions or among the international scientific community. The stories of Newton and Leibniz, Lavoisier and Priestley, Darwin and Wallace, Edison and Tesla, the race for the Atom Bomb, Crick and Watson, the space race, and the feuds between Bill Gates and Larry Ellison illustrate the varying forms rivalry can take.

Rivals : Conflict As the Fuel of Science

Michael, White

Fly Away Peter

Literature & Fiction

DAVID MALOUF

Genre Fiction

This work digs deep and painfully into personal experience of depression and mental illness, while also considering the wider picture: the historical, social, biological, pharmaceutical and medical aspects and implications of the disease. Having experienced what he is writing about firsthand, Solomon describes the experience from the inside. He has also researched every aspect of depression, including: the historical treatment and study of "melancholy" as far back as the Greeks and Romans (who believed that cauliflower was good for depression), and through to the side effects of the pharmaceutical cocktails of the present day; case histories of people in out of mental hospitals; faith healers; the power of suggestion; and the implications for the future of Western society.

The Noonday Demon

Biographies & Memoirs

Solomon, Andrew

Memoirs

Some prefer nettles

Some Prefer Nettles

Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō

Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the twenties, when she was orphaned in a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There were her grandmothers: one was a blood-curdling Catholic who combined piousness and pugnacity; the other was Jewish and wore a veil to hide the disastrous effects of a face-lift. There was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy 'mouth-breathing'. 'Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,' Mary McCarthy says, 'I have wished that I were writing fiction.' But these were the people, along with the ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who helped to inspire her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous and her witty, novelist's imagination.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

McCARTHY, Mary

Religion & Spirituality

When Maria turns twenty, she falls in love. She is in the wrong town and he is the wrong sort of man. Going through his things, she finds a photo of herself when she was twelve years old. She has the same smile, but she is wearing the wrong clothes: she is the same, only different. This novel follows the lives of Maria and the girl in the picture.

What Are You Like?

Enright. Anne

Contemporary

The Hotel

Bowen, Elizabeth

Harry Fielding has had enough. He's had enough of his adopted city, he's tired of his flat and most of all he's finished with MI5. But his plans for a new life are ruined when an old friend reappears, who's in trouble. Harry cannot abandon a mate.

McKenzie's Friend

Davison, Philip

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, a bland white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in an empty white room... Adie Klarpol, a disillusioned artist, is invigorated by the thrill of working with the Cavern's cutting-edge technology. As Cold War empires collapse and the Berlin Wall falls, she retreats into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. In Beirut, English teacher Taimur Martin is held in solitary confinement by Islamic fundamentalists, where he must keep his mind whole by the force of his memory alone. What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these two people unwittingly build in common, where the strands of this wildly inventive novel coalesce into one.

Plowing the Dark

RICHARD POWERS

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