What a wet month October was! But it didn’t dampen our spirits here at Parade’s End. We shut the curtains against the rain and nights drawing in and got stuck into some great books.
Here’s what our booksellers recommend from October.
Oxford, 1836.
The city of dreaming spires.
It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world.
And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows.
Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift.
Until it became a prison…
But can a student stand against an empire?
The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers
England, 1989.
Over the course of a burning hot summer, two very different men – traumatized Falklands veteran Calvert, and affable, chaotic Redbone – set out nightly in a clapped-out camper van to undertake an extraordinary project.
Under cover of darkness, the two men traverse the fields of rural England in secret, forming crop circles in elaborate and mysterious patterns.
As the summer wears on, and their designs grow ever more ambitious, the two men find that their work has become a cult international sensation.
And that an unlikely and beautiful friendship has taken root as the wheat ripens from green to gold.
Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin
Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne.
Her daily life is lived to the rhythms of the hilarious and touching confidences of random visitors and her colleagues—three gravediggers, three groundskeepers, and a priest.
Violette’s routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of police chief Julien Seul, wishing to deposit his mother’s ashes on the gravesite of a complete stranger. Julien is not the only one to guard a painful secret: his mother’s story of clandestine love breaks through Violette’s carefully constructed defences to reveal the tragic loss of her daughter, and her steely determination to find out who is responsible.
The funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness, Fresh Water for Flowers brings out the exceptional and the poetic in the ordinary. A delightful, atmospheric, absorbing tale.
Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad by Damilare Kuku
One night, you will calmly put a knife to your husband’s penis and promise to cut it off. It will scare him so much that the next day, he will call his family members for a meeting in the house. He will not call your family members, but you will not care.
Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad is a collection of twelve short stories featuring characters with unique voices and stories that represent the diverse class, gender and ethnic melting pot that is Lagos.
There’s a story of a young lady who tries to find her oyibo soulmate on the streets of Lagos; another of a pastor’s wife who defends her husband from an allegation of adultery; a wife takes a knife to her husband’s penis; a night of lust between a rising musician and his Instagram baddie takes an unexpected turn.
Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad underscores with wit, humour, wisdom and sensitivity, the perils of trying to find lasting love and companionship in Africa’s most notorious city.
Radical Love by Neil Blackmore
Welcome to England, 1809. London is a violent, intolerant city, exhausted by years of war, beset by soaring prices and political tensions. By day, John Church preaches on the radical possibilities of love to a multicultural, working-class congregation in Southwark. But by night, he crosses the river to the secret and glamorous world of a gay molly house on Vere Street, where ordinary men reinvent themselves as funny, flirtatious drag queens and rent boys cavort with labourers and princes alike. There, Church becomes the first minister to offer marriages between men, at enormous risk.
Everything changes when Church meets the unworldly and free-thinking Ned, part of a group of African activist abolitionists who attend his chapel. The two bond over their broken childhoods, and Church falls obsessively in love with Ned’s tender nature. In a fragile, colourful secret world under threat, Church’s love for Ned takes him to the edge of reason.
Based on the incredible true story of one of the most important events in queer history, Radical Love is a sensuous and prescient story about gender and sexuality, and how the most vulnerable survive in dangerous times.
Trust is a sweeping puzzle of a novel about power, greed, love and a search for the truth that begins in 1920s New York.
Can one person change the course of history?
A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife.
Together, they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. Now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage.
Who will have the final word in their story of greed, love and betrayal?
Composed of four competing versions of this deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.
Killers of The Flower Moon by David Grann
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma.
After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. But the bureau badly bungled the investigation.
In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery.
Together with the Osage he and his undercover team began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous
Clash of Civilisations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio tells the story of the immigrant tenants of a building in Rome, who offer skewed accounts of a murder.
In this award-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author Amara Lakhous, each character takes his or her turn centre-stage, “giving evidence,” recounting his or her story.
The dramas of emigration, the daily equivocations of immigration, the fears and misunderstandings of a life spent on society’s margins, abused by mainstream culture’s fears and indifference, preconceptions and insensitivity.
What emerges is a touching story that is common to us all, whether we live in Rome, London or in Los Angeles.
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton (“bad taste” loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad.
One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises).
All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?
The Stolen Hours by Karen Swan
A reluctant bride. A forbidden romance. An island full of secrets . . .
It’s the summer of 1929 and Mhairi MacKinnon is in need of a husband. As the eldest girl among nine children, her father has made it clear he can’t support her past the coming winter. On the small, Scottish island of St Kilda, her options are limited. But the MacKinnons’ neighbour, Donald, has a business acquaintance on distant Harris also in need of a spouse. A plan is hatched for Donald to chaperone Mhairi and make the introduction on his final crossing of the year, before the autumn seas close them off to the outside world.
Mhairi returns as an engaged woman who has lost her heart – but not to her fiancé. In love with the wrong man yet knowing he can never be hers, she awaits the spring with growing dread, for the onset of calm waters will see her sent from home to become a stranger’s wife.
When word comes that St Kilda is to be evacuated, the lovers are granted a few months’ reprieve, enjoying a summer of stolen hours together. Only, those last days on St Kilda will also bring trauma and heartache for Mhairi and her friends, Effie and Flora. And when a dead body is later found on the abandoned isle, all three have reason enough to find themselves under the shadow of suspicion . . .
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett
THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAIL… True-crime author Amanda Bailey knows all about the notorious Alperton Angels cult. There have been dozens of books and films about the Angels, ever since the night nearly two decades ago, when they attempted to sacrifice a baby they believed to be the Antichrist.
With all the cultists now dead – apart from their charismatic leader – it seems like there’s nothing new to say about the Angels… until now. The Alperton baby has turned eighteen and can finally be interviewed, and if Amanda can track them down, it will be the scoop of the year. But rival author Oliver Menzies is just as smart, better connected, and is also on the baby’s trail.
As Amanda and Oliver are forced to collaborate, they realise that what everyone thinks they know about the Angels is wrong.
The truth is something much darker and stranger. And the devilish story of the Alperton Angels is far from over…
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
From one of the most celebrated imaginations in American literature, Lorrie Moore’s new novel is a magic box of longing and surprise.
Following a middle-aged history teacher who embarks on a road trip with the great lost love of his life, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a masterfully crafted meditation on what it means to learn to live with your choices.
High up in a New York City hospice, Finn sits with his beloved brother Max, who is slipping from one world into the next.
But when a phone call summons Finn back to a troubled old flame, a strange journey begins, opening a trapdoor in reality.
It will prompt a questioning of life and death, grief and the past, comedy and tragedy, and the diaphanous separations that lie between them all.
Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang
Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody.
White lies
When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.
Dark humour
But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
Deadly consequences…
What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.