SCEPTRE

(P/B) The Ministry of Time
A civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering 'expats' from across history to test whether time-travel is feasible. Her role is to work as a 'bridge': living with, supporting and monitoring expat '1847' - Commander Graham Gore, a former Victorian polar explorer. Gore, an adventurer by trade, soon adjusts to this bizarre new world of washing machines, feminism and Spotify; and during a long, sultry summer the pair move from awkwardness to friendship to something more. But as the true shape of ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) Factfulness
Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends - why the world's population is increasing; how many young women go to school; how many of us live in poverty - we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and a man who can make data sing, Hans Rosling, t...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) TIEPOLO BLUE
Exiled from his university position for an inexcusable blunder, art historian Don Lamb flees to London, a city alive with sex and creativity. There, over the course of a long, hot summer, as he is immersed in the anarchic art and gay scenes of the mid-90s, Don sees his carefully curated life irrevocably changed. But his epiphany is also a reckoning, as his unexamined past is revealed to him in a devastating new light. Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don's turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life. (From ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) You Are Here
Sometimes you need to get lost to find your way Marnie is stuck. Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that often feels like it's passing her by. Michael is coming undone. Reeling from his wife's departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells. When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a ne...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(H/B) IN
Nick is an illustrator isolated by his tendency to observe rather than participate in life. But when bravely experiments with stepping outside the comforts of 'small talk', he discovers that when he asks genuine questions of those around him, he unlocks the potential for mundane interactions to become meaningful, and sometimes even unforgettable. And when he does, when a person opens their world to him, he explores it as if it were a real place: a physical manifestation of each person's true self and the meaningful conversation that Nick i...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) WINTER'S BONE
Amid the harsh landscape of the Ozark Hills, sixteen-year-old Ree is taking care of her mother and two brothers. Her father has put their house up as bail and if he doesn't show up at court it'll be sold from under them. To save her family she needs to track him down but in a community riven with long-running feuds getting answers isn't easy. (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) Stone Yard Devotional
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Australian outback. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident. But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) A MAN CALLED OVE
At first sight, Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots - neighbours who can't reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d'etat that ousted him as Chairman of the Residents' Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of the local streets. But isn't it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MILK TEETH
A girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, fearing her own desires and feeling undeserving of love. Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she meets someone who offers her a new way to experience the world. But when he invites her to join him in Barcelona, the promise of care makes her uneasy. In the shimmering Mediterranean heat, she is faced with both pleasure and shame, and must find out if she is able to change. (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) Our Moon
From the first prehistoric life that crawled onto land guided by the power of the tides, to the division of time into months and seasons for the first humans, the moon has driven the expansion and development of our world. It has inspired scientific discovery and culture from the ancient astronomers to the scientific revolution of Copernicus and Galileo, from the 1969 Apollo landings to writers and artists, and stirred an inexhaustible desire to know where we come from and how we got here. And as astronauts around the world prepare to retu...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE BLAZING WORLD
The artist Harriet Burden, furious at the lack of attention paid her by the New York art world, conducts an experiment: she hides her identity behind three male fronts in a series of exhibitions. Their success seems to prove her point, but there's a sting in the tail - when she unmasks herself, not everyone believes her. Then her last collaborator meets a bizarre end. In this mesmerising tour de force, Burden's story emerges after her death through a variety of sources, including her (not entirely reliable) journals and the testimonies of...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH
Art Bechstein steps out of the library into the summer of his graduation year. Not yet ready for respectability, he falls in with the exotic, charming Arthur Lecomte, and ricochets between a homosexual relationship and an intense affair with a strange and beautiful girl called Phlox. Before long, the world of his new friends and the underworld of his father must collide, with consequences that Art cannot control. (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE SHAKING WOMAN OR A HISTORY OF MY NERVES
While speaking at a memorial event for her father, the novelist Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. Was it triggered by nerves, emotion - or something else entirely? In this profoundly thought-provoking and revealing book, Hustvedt takes the reader on her journey through psychiatry, philosophy, neuroscience and medical history in search of a diagnosis. Conveying the often frightening mysteries of illness, she illuminates the perennially mysterious connection between mind and body and what we mean by 'I'. (From the ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MY GRANDMOTHER SENDS HER REGARDS AND APOLOGISES
A must-read for fans of Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measure, by the author of the New York Times bestselling phenomenon A Man Called Ove will charm and delight anyone who has ever had a grandmother. Everyone remembers the smell of their grandmother's house. Everyone remembers the stories their grandmother told them. But does everyone remember their grandmother flirting with policemen? Driving illegally? Breaking into a zoo in the ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE BONE CLOCKS
Run away, one drowsy summer's afternoon, with Holly Sykes: wayward teenager, broken-hearted rebel and unwitting pawn in a titanic, hidden conflict. Over six decades, the consequences of a moment's impulse unfold, drawing an ordinary woman into a world far beyond her imagining. And as life in the near future turns perilous, the pledge she made to a stranger may become the key to her family's survival... In 1984, teenager Holly Sykes runs away from home - a Gravesend pub. Sixty years later, she is to be found in the far west of Ireland, rais...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(H/B) MILK TEETH
A girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, precarity and a toxic culture of bodily shame, certain that she must make herself ever smaller to be loved. Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she fights to create her own life. She meets someone who cracks her open and offers her a new way to experience the world. But when he invites her to join him in Barcelona, the promise of pleasure and care makes her uneasy. In the shimmering heat of the Mediterranean, she faces the po...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) GHOSTWRITTEN
An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what links him to a jazz buff in downtown Tokyo? Or to a Mongolian gangster, a woman on a holy mountain who talks to a tree, and a late night New York DJ? Set at the fugitive edges of Asia and Europe, Ghostwritten weaves together a host of characters, their interconnected destinies determined by the inescapable forces of cause and effect. A magnificent achievement and an engrossing experience, David Mitchell's first novel announced the arrival of one of the most ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) BRITT-MARIE WAS HERE
Britt-Marie was Here is a funny, poignant and uplifting tale of love, community, and second chances. For as long as anyone can remember, Britt-Marie has been an acquired taste. It's not that she's judgemental, or fussy, or difficult - she just expects things to be done in a certain way. A cutlery drawer should be arranged in the right order, for example (forks, knives, then spoons). We're not animals, are we? But behind the passive-aggressive, socially awkward, absurdly pedantic busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams a...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) SCHINDLER'S ARK
Winner of the Booker Prize and international bestseller, made into the award-winning film Schindler's List. REISSUED AS A SCEPTRE 30TH CLASSIC, with a new afterword by the author. In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mi...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) ALL DAY IS A LONG TIME
David has a mind that never stops running. He reads Dante and Moby Dick, he sinks into Hemingway and battles with Milton. But on Florida's Gulf Coast, one can slip into deep water unconsciously. At the age of fourteen, David runs away from home to pursue a girl. He tries crack cocaine for the first time and is hooked instantly. Over the course of the next decade, he fights his way out of jail and rehab, trying to make sense of the world around him - a sunken world where faith in anything is a privilege. He makes his way to a tenuous sobrie...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...