Category Archives: Caribbean
Playback
Playback is a classic novel by Raymond Chandler, the master of hard-boiled crime.Stalking the tawdry neon wilderness of forties and fifties Los Angeles, Raymond Chandler`s hard-drinking, wise-cracking Phillip Marlowe is one of the world`s most famous fictional detectives.Playback finds Marlowe mixing business with pleasure – getting paid to follow a mysterious and lovely red-head named
The High Window
`He lay crumpled on his back. Very lonely, very dead.The safe door was wide open. A metal drawer was pulled out. It was empty now. There may have been money in it once.` Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe`s on a case: his client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants
โ€Gladwell`s most enjoyable book so far. It is a feel-good extravaganza, nourishing both heart and mindโ€. (Financial Times). โ€I devoured in a single readingโ€. (Richard E. Grant). โ€When you read it, you feel like you can topple giantsโ€. (Jon Ronson). What if everything we thought about power was wrong? What if, in the ancient story
American Interior: The Quixotic Journey of John Evans, His Search for a Lost Tribe and How, Fuelled by Fantasy and (Possibly) Booze, He Accidentally Annexed a Third of North America
American Interior is a psychedelic historical travelogue from Welsh pop legend Gruff Rhys. This book was longlisted for the guardian first book and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize in 1972, John Evans, a twenty-two-year-old farmhand from Snowdonia, Wales, travelled to America to discover whether there was indeed, as widely believed, a tribe of Welsh-speaking
The Autumn of the Patriarch
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, explores the loneliness of power in Autumn of the Patriarch. `Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred
News of a Kidnapping
Gabriel Garcia Marquez`s News of a Kidnapping is a powerful retelling of actual events from a turbulent period of Colombian history. `She looked over her shoulder before getting into the car to be sure no one was following her.` Pablo Escobar: billionaire drugs baron, ruthless manipulator brutal killer and jefe of the infamous Madellin cartel.
The General in His Labyrinth
The General in his Labyrinth is the compelling tale of Simon Bolivar, a hero who has been forgotten and whose power is fading, retracing his steps down the Magdalena River by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. `It was the fourth
The Lady in the Lake
The Lady in the Lake is a classic detective novel by the master of hard-boiled crime Derace Kingsley`s wife ran away to Mexico to get a quickie divorce and marry a Casanova-wannabe named Chris Lavery. Or so the note she left her husband insisted. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it he denies
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Find out why fellow authors like Ali Smith, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen love Lydia Davis`s writing so much in this landmark collection of all of her stories to date from across three decades. And why James Wood described this book in the New Yorker as `a body of work probably unique in American writing`
The Financial Lives of the Poets
From the author of the bestselling Beautiful Ruins comes The Financial Lives of Poets – a brilliantly funny novel about a man who, in an attempt to save himself, may destroy everything he loves. Meet Matt Prior. He`s about to lose his job, his house, his wife, and maybe his sanity too. Financial journalist Matt
Providence
Kitty Maule wants to be `totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful.` Instead, she is clever, hesitant and too patient for her own good. For years, she has been in love with her colleague Maurice Bishop, a charming English lecturer who seems not to notice her feelings. But when there comes a chance
The Motorcycle Diaries
An iconic bestseller- Che Guevara`s account of his youthful adventures travelling around South America on his motorcycleAt the age of twenty-three, Ernesto `Che` Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set out from their native Argentina to explore their continent, with only a single 1939 Norton motorcycle to carry them, nicknamed La Poderosa (`the powerful one`).
Things That Can and Cannot be Said
An account of the extraordinary meeting between four brilliant political activists: Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, Pentagon Papers insider Daniel Ellsberg and acclaimed actor John Cusack `What sort of love is this love that we have for countries? What sort of country is it that will ever live up to our
The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of `The Prize and The Quest` reveals how climate battles and energy revolutions are mapping our futureA new type of Cold War is emerging between China and the West. . The global order is being simultaneously shaken by climate change and the shale revolution in oil and gas – and now
Betty
`There was no longer that ambivalent inconsistency between her words and thoughts, no more fever, no more artificial heat, no more vagueness. Instead was the truth in all its rawness, in black and white, in stark, cruel lines.`Adrift and alone, Betty finds herself propped up at the bar of a sleazy establishment on the Champs-Elysees.
We Were Eight Years in Power: `One of the foremost essayists on race in the West` Nikesh Shukla, author of The Good Immigrant
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER`I`ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates` Toni Morrison`Searing. One of the foremost essayists on race in the West… [He] is responsible for some of the most important writing about what it is to be black in America today` Nikesh
A Confederacy of Dunces
`This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians …don`t make the mistake of bothering me`. Ignatius J. Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much unhinged, too. But is he bothered by
Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know
Ever since Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba in 1959, Americans have obsessed about the nation ninety miles south of the Florida Keys. America`s fixation on the tropical socialist republic has only grown over the years, fueled in part by successive waves of Cuban immigration and Castro`s larger-than-life persona. Cubans are now a major ethnic
Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas
In the dying days of the eighth century, the Vikings erupted onto the international stage with brutal raids and slaughter. The medieval Norsemen may be best remembered as monk murderers and village pillagers, but this is far from the whole story. Throughout the Middle Ages, long-ships transported hairy northern voyagers far and wide, where they
