We made it! We survived what always feels like the longest month of the year. If you achieved your goals such as dry January, Veganuary, starting your fitness regime etc, etc then we applaud you. Our booksellers’ new year resolutions are always to read more and they didn’t let us down in January. Here are our top picks from last month.
Sister Perpetue is not to move. She is not to fall asleep. She is to sit, keeping guard over the patient’s room. She has heard the stories of his hunger, which defy belief: that he has eaten all manner of creatures and objects. A child even, if the rumours are to be believed. But it is hard to believe that this slender, frail man is the one they once called The Great Tarare, The Glutton of Lyon.
Before, he was just Tarare. Well-meaning and hopelessly curious, born into a world of brawling and sweet cider, to a bereaved mother and a life of slender means. The 18th Century is drawing to a close, unrest grips the heart of France and life in the village is soon shaken. When a sudden act of violence sees Tarare cast out and left for dead, his ferocious appetite is ignited, and it’s not long before his extraordinary abilities to eat make him a marvel throughout the land.
Following Tarare as he travels from the South of France to Paris and beyond, through the heart of the Revolution, The Glutton is an electric, heart-stopping journey into a world of tumult, upheaval and depravity, wherein the hunger of one peasant is matched only by the insatiable demands of the people of France.
Confessions with Blue Horses by Sophie Hardach
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2019. Tobi and Ella’s childhood in East Berlin is shrouded in mystery. Now adults living in London, their past is full of unanswered questions. Both remember their family’s daring and terrifying attempt to escape. But what happened next? Where did their parents disappear to, and why? What happened to Heiko, their little brother? And was there ever a painting of three blue horses?
In contemporary Germany, Aaron works for a Stasi archive, making his way through old files, reconstructing the tragic history of thousands of families. But one file in particular catches his eye; and soon unravelling the secrets at its heart becomes an obsession.
When Ella finds a stash of her mother’s notebooks, she and Tobi embark on a search that will take them back to Berlin. Her fate clashes with Aaron’s, and they piece together the details of Ella’s past… and a family torn apart.
Devastating and beautifully written, funny and life-affirming, Confession with Blue Horses explores intimate family life and its strength in the most difficult of circumstances.
The Hunger of Women by Marosia Castaldi
Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself-by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love.
Unconventional in style and yet rivetingly accessible, The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa’s observations, reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with her own embattled mother’s age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter’s inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa’s new community of lovers and customers. A tribute not only to the tradition of women’s writing on hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Helene Cixous, The Hunger of Women is nothing less than a literary feast.
All the Lonely People by Mike Gayle
In phone calls to his daughter in Australia, widower Hubert Bird paints a picture of the perfect retirement, packed with fun and friendship.
But Hubert Bird is lying.
Something has made him turn his back on people, and he hardly sees a soul.
So when his daughter announces she’s coming to visit, Hubert faces a race against time: to make his real life resemble his fake life before he’s found out.
Along the way Hubert renews a cherished friendship, is given a second chance at love and even joins an audacious community scheme. But with the secret of his earlier isolation lurking in the shadows, is he destines to always be one of the lonely people?
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
About one woman’s fine, hard life at the racetrack, Kick the Latch – with its ruthless concision and artful mysteries – is lightning in a bottle
Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack – the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the ‘particular language’ of ‘grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody’ – with economy and integrity.
Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a feat of synthesis reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. As Scanlan puts it, ‘I wanted to preserve – amplify, exaggerate – Sonia’s idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self.’ Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track.
I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet by Shauna Niequist
When everything we’ve been clinging to falls apart, how do we know what to keep and what to let go of?
I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet , now a New York Times bestseller, is a clear-eyed look at where we go from here–and how we can transform our lives along the way. Just after her fortieth birthday, author Shauna Niequist found herself in a season of chaos, change, and loss unlike anything she’d ever faced.
She discovered that many of the beliefs and practices that she usually turned to were no longer serving her. After trying–and failing–to pull herself back up using the same old strategies and systems, she realized she required new courage, curiosity, and compassion. S
he discovered the way through was more about questions than answers, more about forgiveness than force, more about tenderness than trying hard. In I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet , Niequist chronicles her journey–from her life-changing move from the Midwest to Manhattan to the power of unlearning what is no longer helpful and accepting the unknowns that come with midlife, heartbreak, and chronic pain. With her characteristic candor and grace, Niequist writes about her experience learning how Follow Niequist as she endeavors to understand grief, to reshape her faith, and to practice courage when it feels impossible.
This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all. It’s about falling so wildly in love with him – the way one will at twenty-four – that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight.
There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end. It’s spring and Lara’s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard.
While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they’ve always longed to hear – of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.
A sweeping story about obsession, mysticism, art, and earthly desire.
At the centre of this story, is the Cathedral. Its design and construction in the 12th and 13th centuries in the fictional town of Hagenburg unites a vast array of unforgettable characters whose fortunes are inseparable from the shifting political factions and economic interests vying for supremacy.
From the bishop to his treasurer to local merchants and lowly stonecutters, everyone, even the town’s Jewish denizens, is implicated and affected by the slow rise of Hagenburg’s Cathedral, which in no way enforces morality or charity.
Around this narrative core, Ben Hopkins has constructed his own monumental edifice, a choral novel that is rich with the vicissitudes of mercantilism, politics, religion, and human enterprise. Ambitious, immersive, a remarkable feat of imagination, Cathedral deftly combines historical fiction, the literary novel of ideas, and a tale of adventure and intrigue.
Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra
The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles-a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice.
Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.
Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators.
Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European emigres: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled.
While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate – and her own.
The Woman In Me by Britney Spears
The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.
In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court.
The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others.
The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.
Written with remarkable candour and humour, Spears’s ground-breaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.
The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
Her decision changed history. Now her family must survive it.
British Malaya, 1930s. Discontented housewife Cecily is seduced by Japanese general Fujiwara and the glorious future he is promising for ‘independent’ Malaya, free from British colonialism.
As she becomes further embedded as his own personal spy, she unwittingly alters the fate of her country by welcoming in a punishing form of dictatorship under the Japanese in WWII.
Japanese-occupied Malaya, 1945. Cecily and her family are barely surviving. Her children, Jujube, Abel and Jasmin, are surrounded by threat, and look to their mother to keep them safe. But she can’t tell them about the part she played in the war – and she doesn’t know how to protect them.
Can Cecily face up to her past to save her children? Or is it already too late… ?