Literary Fiction Political

Ma Taffy may be blind, but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. While they wait for his mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen. A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place where many things that should happen don't, and plenty of things that shouldn't happen do.

A spellbinding historical novel about a woman who befriends Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and is drawn into their world of intrigue, from the author of Margot. On June 19, 1953, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for conspiring to commit espionage. The day Ethel was first arrested in 1950, she left her two young sons with a neighbor, and she never came home to them again. Brilliantly melding fact and fiction, Jillian Cantor reimagines the life of that neighbor and the lives of Ethel and Julius.

Jamie McAlister has resigned herself to the fact that in this job market, her painfully expensive degree might only get her a position at Starbucks, when she suddenly lands a prestigious internship at the White House. Although she doesn’t hit it off with the other interns, she is eager to work hard and make the best of the opportunity while it lasts. An unexpected encounter late one evening with the charismatic President Gregory Rutland seems like just a fleeting flirtation, but when he orchestrates clandestine meetings and late-night phone calls, their relationship quickly escalates....

Wry, moving, beautifully observed and politically astute, this latest audiobook from one of New Zealand's finest chroniclers pinpoints universal truths through very NZ lives. Life isn't always like it appears in the movies. In 1952 Irene Sandle takes her young daughter to Motueka. Irene was widowed during the war and is seeking a new start and employment in the tobacco fields. There, she finds the reality of her life far removed from the glamour of the screen.

Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako's ship is captured, it is not long before the atmostphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on the cello....

Layla James, a recent graduate and budding photographer, never knew anything about her father except that he named her for the iconic song by Eric Clapton. Her mother - steeped in a political activism that Layla rejects - kept their past shrouded in secrecy, and when she dies of cancer, she leaves only an enigmatic letter - the first in a series that will lead Layla through a cross-country network of '60s radicals and closer to the bombshell at the heart of her parents' past.

Roaming India in 1939 and the early 1940s, two flawed but extraordinary men latch onto each other with shocking consequences as each follows an ill-fated quest for “enlightenment.” Moses, a Polish Jew, is fleeing both the Nazis and his own failed marriage; Sahadeva, an itinerant Hindu monk, is trying to resolve his crisis of religious belief. Both men find themselves embroiled in hardship, shame, and chaos, stumbling into scandal and ultimately tragedy.

Set in a fictitious post-colonial African nation, the discovery of the body of a drowned prostitute leads to an exploration of the conflict between an individual and the modern African state. A gripping study of truth, silence, and the abuse of power. A young woman runs into the sea and drowns. The last man who spoke to her, a curious individual known as Bukuru, is asked to account for her suicide. His shocking revelations land him in court.

She is a painter. He is a poet. Their art bridges time.

It is 1978. Merle is in her first year at the Corcoran School of Art, catapulted from her impoverished Appalachian upbringing into a sophisticated, dissipated art scene. It is also 1870. The teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud is on the verge of breaking through to the images and voice that will make his name. The meshed power of words and art thins the boundaries between the present and the past—and allows these two troubled, brilliant artists to enter each other’s worlds.

Timely and unique, Jia is the first novel about present-day North Korea to be published in the West. It is easily a YA crossover novel as Jia follows the adventures of an orphaned young woman, Jia in the 1970s and 1980s - bitterly tumultuous times for North Korea and China. Jia has the grace of a dancer but the misfortune of coming from a politically suspect family.

Imagine a faraway country that was once a friend of the West becoming the enemy, its people isolated and savagely repressed by a tyrant known as Great Uncle. As one of the country's most celebrated writers and a war hero, the storyteller has a better life than most – until he is made an offer he can't refuse. He must write a great novel, telling of the suffering of his people under the enemy's cruel economic sanctions and portraying Great Uncle as their saviour.

Published at the height of the McCarthy era, Norman Mailer's audacious novel of socialism is at once an elegy and an indictment, a sinuous moral thriller and an intellectual slugfest. Wounded during World War II, Mike Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But when Lovett rents a room in Brooklyn, he finds that his housemates have secrets of their own: one betrays a husband no one ever sees; another may have been a Communist executioner.

The year is 2002. Weekly news magazines dominate the political agenda in New York and Washington. A young journalist named Michael M. Hastings is an intern at The Magazine, wet behind the ears, the only one in the office who has actually read his coworkers' books. He will stop at nothing to turn his internship into a full-time position and has figured out just who to impress: Nishant Patel, the international editor, and Sanders Berman, managing editor - both vying for the job of editor-in-chief.

Written by the much-admired Italo-Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, Miral is a novel that focuses on remarkable women whose lives unfold in the turbulent political climate along the borders of Israel and Palestine. The story begins with Hind, a woman who sacrifices everything to establish a school for refugee Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem. Years later, Miral arrives at the school after her mother commits suicide.

Le maccarthysme a beau déferler sur l'Amérique au tournant des années cinquante, Ira Ringold se croit à l'abri de la chasse aux sorcières. Non seulement parce que son appartenance au Parti communiste est ignorée même de ses amis, mais surtout parce que l'enfant des quartiers pauvres de Newark, l'ancien terrassier au lourd passé, s'est réinventé en Iron Linn, vedette de la radio, idéale réincarnation de Lincoln, et heureux époux de Eve Frame, ex-star du muet.

Set in Iran at the end of the 19th century in the Persian royal court of the Qajars, In the Palace of Flowers is an atmospheric historical novel about Jamila, an Abyssinian slave who stands at the funeral of a Persian nobleman, watching the rites with empty eyes. In that very moment, she realizes that her life will never be acknowledged or mourned with the same significance. The fear of being forgotten, of being irrelevant, sets her and Abimelech, a fellow Abyssinian slave and a eunuch, on a path to find meaning.

Shan Devar, a trainee geologist, scarred by the horrific killing of his father in his home town of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, is on the search for his wife and child after losing contact with them during his tortuous passage to the UK. When he meets Tuli, the enigmatic proprietor of Vesuvio, via his "life clinic" at the top of the restaurant, he finds a man who is not only willing to orchestrate the hunt for the people who are most dear to him but who journeys with him into the unknown, ultimately risking his life along with Shan’s own, in the attempt to find them.

The Sabas family lives in a small Jordanian town that for centuries has been descended upon by all manner of invader, the latest a scourge of disconcerting Evangelical tourists. The border town relies on a blackmarket trade of clothes, trinkets, and appliances - the quality of which depends entirely on who’s fighting - but the conflict in nearby Syria has the place even more on edge than usual. Meanwhile, the Sabas home is ruled by women - Mother Fadhma, Laila, Samira, and now, Muna, a niece visiting from America for the first time - and it is brimming with regrets and desires.

Pjotr Nesterenko ist mit dem Tod auf vertrautem Fuß. Als Direktor des Moskauer Krematoriums in der Stalin-Zeit hat er sie alle eingeäschert: die Abweichler, die angeblichen Spione und die einstigen Revolutionshelden, die den Säuberungen zum Opfer fallen. Er jedoch, davon ist er überzeugt, kann gar nicht sterben. So oft ist er dem Tod schon knapp entronnen. Bis der Tag seiner eigenen Verhaftung kommt.

Un joven periodista poblano llega a la Ciudad de México para encontrar su oportunidad. Tras cubrir el fraude electoral de 1988 y ser testigo de los tejemanejes entre los medios y el gobierno, descubre que debe dejar los escrúpulos a un lado si quiere progresar en la escena del periodismo nacional. Su insaciable ambición lo lleva años después a La Televisora, el medio de comunicación más importante del país. El ascenso es meteórico: en pocos años, de reportero a anfitrión del noticiero matutino más popular de la televisión...