GRANTA

(P/B) WHO PAID THE PIPER?
During the Cold War, writers and artists were faced with a huge challenge. In the Soviet world, they were expected to turn out works that glorified militancy, struggle and relentless optimism. In the West, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession. But such freedom could carry a cost. This book documents the extraordinary energy of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were instruments - whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or n...
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(P/B) GUT SYMMETRIES
Travelling across the Atlantic on board the QE2, Alice - a bright, young physicist - meets Jove, short for Giovanni, one of the world's most respected experts on time travel and a confirmed lothario. By the time the pair land in New York, Alice has become Jove's mistress, an affair of the heart which is only complicated further when Alice meets Jove's, wife, Stella; a tempestuous beauty born with a diamond at the base of her spine. As this love triangle turns into a menage-a-trois, Alice, Stella and Jove struggle against the currents immer...
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(P/B) JOB
'Many years ago there lived in Zuchnow, in Russia, a man named Mendel Signer. He was pious, God-fearing and ordinary, an entirely commonplace Jew...' So Roth begins his novel about the loss of faith and the experience of suffering. His modern Job goes through his trials in the ghettos of Tsarist Russia and on the unforgiving streets of New York. Mendel Singer loses his family, falls terribly ill and is badly abused. He needs a miracle... (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) JACK
Jack is a teenager who wants nothing more than to be normal - even if being normal means having divorced parents and a rather strange best friend. But when Jack's father takes him out rowing on a lake and tells his son that he's gay, nothing will ever be normal again. Out of Jack's struggle to redefine 'family', comes a work of enormous humour, charm and resonance, the most convincing, funny and insightful novel about adolescence since The Catcher in the Rye. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) LOOKING FOR TRANSWONDERLAND
Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England but spent her childhood summers in Nigeria - a country she considered an unglamorous parallel universe, devoid of all creature comforts. After her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was murdered there in 1995, Noo rarely returned to the land of her birth. More than a decade later, she decided to come to terms with Nigeria. From the exuberant chaos of Lagos, to the calm beauty of the eastern mountains; the eccentricity of a Nigerian dog show to the empty Transwonderland Amusement Park, Noo combines trave...
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(Η/B) 10:04
In the past year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. Now, in a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called 'hilarious... cracklingly intelligent... and o...
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(P/B) SEVEN DAYS IN THE ART WORLD
From London to Beijing to New York, art sales are booming, and the art world receives the sort of breathless media attention once reserved for celebrities and royals. In Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton, a brilliant young sociologist, looks at all aspects of buying, selling and creating serious art. Thornton has exceptional access, and brings a keen critical eye to her coverage of this glamorous milieu, offering the first authoritative account of what is now a multi-billion-dollar global market place-cum-playground for an ever-e...
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(P/B) WHAT I SAW
In 1920, Joseph Roth, the most renowned German correspondent of his age, arrived in Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. He produced a series of impressionistic and political writings that influenced an entire generation of writers, including Thomas Mann and the young Christopher Isherwood. Roth, like no other German writer of his time, ventured beyond Berlin's official veneer to the heart of the city, chronicling the lives of its forgotten inhabitants - the Jewish immigrants, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless ...
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(P/B) THE WHITE CITIES
Joseph Roth, the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925 and, as an Austrian Jew, was exiled there for the rest of his life. Collected together here for the first time in English, these exhilarating pieces evoke a world of suppleness, beauty and promise. From the port town of Marseilles to the Riviera of Nice and Monte Carlo, to the exotic hill country around Avignon, from the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast, to prostitutes and Sunday bullfigh...
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(P/B) SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY
In a very near future, a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don't tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, proud author of what may well be the world's last diary. Despite his job at an outfit called 'Post-Human Services', which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn't it? Lenny's from a different century. He TOTALLY loves books (or 'printed, bound media artifacts' as they're now known), even though most of his peers find ...
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(P/B) THE GRANTA BOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY (VOLUME 2)
Richard Ford, one of the finest American novelists and short-story writers, introduced the first Granta Book of the American Short Story, which Granta Books published in 1992. It became the definitive anthology of American short fiction written in the last half of the twentieth century. In the fourteen years since, Ford has been reading new stories and rereading old ones and selecting new favourites. This new collection, again of more than forty writers, expands Ford's original choice to include stories that he regretted overlooking first ...
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(P/B) THE REAL ODESSA
It has long been known that Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke and many other Nazi war criminals found refuge in Argentina. In this book, a courageous Argentinian writer shows exactly how it was done, and reveals that the escapes were organized with the enthusiastic support of President Juan Peron. Even at this late date, when so much is known about the complicity of the Catholic Church and Allied intelligence agencies in the flight of the Nazis, Goni's material still has the power to shock. The paperback edition of The Real Odes...
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(P/B) A GESTURE LIFE
Franklin Hata, Korean by birth but raised in Japan, is an outsider in American society, but he embodies the values of the town he calls his own - he is polite and keeps himself to himself. Franklin deflects everyone with courtesy and impenetrable decorum, and becomes a respected elder of his small, prosperous American town. 'You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness,' Sunny tells her adoptive father. But as Sunny tries to unpick her father's scrupulous self-control, the story he has repressed emerges: his life as a medic in the ...
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(P/B) FALSE DAWN
‘A powerful analysis of the deepening instability of global capitalism’ George Soros In the midst of the current financial crisis, John Gray revisits his brilliant polemic against the forces of global capitalism and deregulation. Written over ten years ago, False Dawn is a remarkably prescient book, sharply criticizing the greed and unsustainable economic practices which have proved to be the seeds of a worldwide recession. In a substantial new chapter, Gray considers how the economic landscape has shifted in a decade, and asks the crucia...
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(H/B) WE THE ANIMALS
Three brothers tear their way through childhood-smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from rubbish, hiding when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn-he's Puerto Rican, she's white-barely out of childhood themselves, and their love is a serious, dangerous thing. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a c...
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(H/B) APOLLO'S ANGELS
APOLLO'S ANGELS is a major new history of classical ballet. It begins in the courts of Europe, where ballet was an aspect of aristocratic etiquette and a political event as much as it was an art. The story takes the reader from the sixteenth century through to our own time, from Italy and France to Britain, Denmark, Russia and contemporary America. The reader learns how ballet reflected political and cultural upheavals, how dance and dancers were influenced by the Renaissance and French Classicism, by Revolution and Romanticism, by Express...
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(P/B) EURYDICE STREET
Sofka Zinovieff had fallen in love with Greece as a student, but little suspected that years later she would return for good with an expatriate Greek husband and two young daughters. This book is a wonderfully fresh, funny and inquiring account of her first year as an Athenian. The whole family have to get to grips with their new life and identities: the children start school and tackle a new language, and Sofka's husband, Vassilis, comes home after half a lifetime away. Meanwhile, Sofka resolves to get to know her new city and become a Gr...
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HOW TO READ THE EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

(P/B) HOW TO READ SHAKESPEARE

(P/B) GRANTA 109
Most of us spend more time at work than anywhere else, but are our lives defined by the work that we do? Do our jobs reflect our passions and personality, or are they just a means to an end, a necessary evil to pay for the weekends? From the jobless to the workaholics, from Peru to Essex to Rwanda, Granta 109 tells the stories of how and why we work, and whether or not work has the power to make us who we are. (From the publisher)...
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