The narrator's situation, as a new resident of heaven, is quite out of the ordinary, yet I soon suspended my disbelief and became intrigued by this dead teenager's description of her former life, friends and family and her observation of their ongoing activities. I was also struck by how, in contrast to the underlying horror of the cause of her death, her prose, at times, is quite poetic, and her description of her surroundings very inviting, making one almost look forward to the attractions of the after-life!
The internationally bestselling novel that inspired the acclaimed film directed by Peter Jackson.
With an introduction by Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles.
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.
In heaven, Susie Salmon can have whatever she wishes for - except what she most wants, which is to be back with the people she loved on earth. In the wake of her murder, Susie watches as her happy suburban family is torn apart by grief; as her friends grow up, fall in…
This is known as 'the lost novel' of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which his family published after his death. Since the main character, who travels alone to a Caribbean island once a year to visit her mother's grave, is a woman who uses the trip to seduce a different man every year, some critics have labelled this, 'not his best work'. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it because it shows how love never obeys the rules, and how marriage does not vaccinate one from desiring others.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The extraordinary rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize–winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude—a moving tale of female desire and abandon
Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night…
I liked the parts of the book set in Egypt and am always attracted to any references to quantum theory. I doubt, however, that any British aristocrat would have been christened Wyatt. He should definitely have been a Charles, Henry or William.
'A writer the world should be reading right now.' Independent
Who would you be, if you hadn't turned out to be the person you are now?
Dawn is a death doula, and spends her life helping people make the final transition peacefully.
But when the plane she's on plummets, she finds herself thinking not of the perfect life she has, but the life she was forced to abandon fifteen years ago - when she left behind a career in Egyptology, and a man she loved.
Against the odds, she survives, and the airline offers her a ticket to wherever she…
When banker-turned-zookeeper, Phil, receives a package from his globe-trotting uncle Edgar, he’s completely baffled. The gleaming, oval curiosity is like nothing he’s ever seen before. And when it hatches into a creature unlisted in any zoological manuals, he takes the bold decision to nurture the hatchling at home – but only after extracting a promise of secrecy from his mother, his uncle, and the attractive young woman who witnessed the opening of the package. Others soon learn of the newborn’s existence, however, and with Phil’s love life unexpectedly taking off amid all the drama, events at Meadowbank Farm Zoo veer from fantastically surreal, to perilously intense . . . all in the blink of a dragon's eye.
