Alan Hollinghurst always delivers top-notch highbrow fiction; the only fault with this book would be that the jumps in time in each section - sometimes several decades - left subsequent chapters a little baffling
'The best novel that's been written about contemporary Britain in the past ten years. It's funny but desperately moving too' - The Sunday Times
Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, heartbreaking but wickedly funny portrait of England spanning six decades from 1962 to the present day. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age.
Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship…
Known for meticulously researched and brilliantly detailed accounts of horrific true crime legends, Harold Schechter takes readers inside the very heart and mind of true evil. Here is the grisly truth of Ed Gein, the killer whose fiendish fantasies inspired Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' - the mild mannered farmhand bound to his dominating mother, driven into a series of gruesome and bizarre acts beyond all imagining. In chilling detail, DEVIANT explores the incredible career of one of the most twisted madmen in the annals of crime - and how he turned a small Wisconsin farmhouse into his own private playground of…
A rarity in literature at present,, a book that really engages the reader about the eco struggle without being too preachy (not sure what's wrong with preaching on this particular topic, though) and without shying away from some of the less palatable aspects of human-too-animal exploitation and abuse
A literary thriller about endangered species in the world's most remote areas, and those who put their lives on the line to protect them.
Biologist Angela Haynes is accustomed to dark, lonely nights as one of the few humans at a penguin research station in Patagonia. She has grown used to the cries of penguins before dawn, to meager supplies and housing, to spending most of her days in one of the most remote regions on earth. What she isn't used to is strange men washing ashore, which happens one day on her watch.
Although many books cover the lives of Russia’s last royal family in some considerable detail, their time spent under house arrest in their own domestic home – the Alexander Palace, outside St. Petersburg – is often explained in a few scant pages, or a chapter at most. But when set against the Revolution and the abdication of the Tsar, these few months from February to August 1917 take on tremendous significance and deserve to be studied in detail. Therein, as events spiralled out of control, the Romanovs would find themselves virtual prisoners in their own palace.
Worse still, with the aforementioned Tsar – Nicholas II – away and ensconced in the vicissitudes of World War One, it was left to his wife Alexandra – favourite granddaughter of Queen Victoria – to commandeer a household increasingly under siege. She did this with aplomb, whilst simultaneously caring for a haemophiliac son and four daughters laid low by life-threatening measles. Alexandra’s boast that she was the one who ‘wore the trousers’ was thus put to the test in the hardiest of scenarios, as she found herself forced both to bolster a flagging palace garrison against the possibility of attack by bloodthirsty insurgents, whilst attempting to hold together a domestic staff increasingly fearful for their own lives in the face of mob retribution. Meanwhile, the German High Command set about releasing a veritable human bacillus – Lenin himself – back toward his native Russia, in a novel attempt to destabilise the Russian war machine further still.
Not simply a blow-by-blow account of the daily lives of a monarchy defiled, this book runs in tandem with the Russian Revolution as it surges out from Petrograd and toward the idyllic suburbs that the Romanovs called their home … without Rasputin to rally them, who can save the dynasty now?!
