'The Alexander Trilogy contains some of Renault's finest writing. Lyrical, wise, compelling: the novels are a wonderful imaginative feat' SARAH WATERS
'The Alexandriad is one of the twentieth century's most unexpectedly original works of art' GORE VIDAL
In the first novel of her stunning trilogy, Mary Renault vividly imagines the life of Alexander the Great, the charismatic leader whose drive and ambition created a legend.
Alexander's beauty, strength and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. His mother, Olympias, and his father, King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son's loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengeance from the cradle. His love for the youth Hephaistion taught him trust, while Aristotle's tutoring provoked his mind and Homer's Iliad fuelled his aspirations. Killing his first man in battle at the age of twelve, he became regent at sixteen and commander of Macedon's cavalry at eighteen, so that by the time his father was murdered, Alexander's skills had grown to match his fiery ambition.
Shortlisted for the 1970 Lost Booker Prize
'This is not just a novel: it's also the best imagining we are ever likely to have of a man who tore up history. The language may seem a bit florid at first - a little too "historical novel" - but set all snobbery aside: this is wonderful, scholarly, top-flight stuff' - Emily Wilson, Guardian
'The Alexander Trilogy stands as one of the most important works of fiction in the 20th century . . . it represents the pinnacle of [Renault's] career . . . Renault's skill is in immersing us in their world, drawing us into its strangeness, its violence and beauty. It's a literary conjuring trick like all historical fiction - it can only ever be an approximation of the truth. But in Renault's hands, the trick is so convincing and passionately conjured' - Antonia Senior, The Times
'The Alexander Trilogy contains some of Renault's finest writing. Lyrical, wise, compelling: the novels are a wonderful imaginative feat' SARAH WATERS
In the final novel of her stunning trilogy, Mary Renault vividly imagines the life of Alexander the Great, the charismatic leader whose drive and ambition created a legend.
Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind an empire that stretched from Greece and Egypt to India.
After Alexander's death in 323 B.C. his only direct heirs were two unborn sons and a simpleton half-brother. Every long-simmering faction exploded into the vacuum of power. Wives, distant relatives and generals all vied for the loyalty of the increasingly undisciplined Macedonian army. Most failed and were killed in the attempt. For no one possessed the leadership to keep the great empire from crumbling. But Alexander's legend endured to spread into worlds he had seen only in dreams.
'Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us. She shows us their strangeness; discerning, sure-footed, challenging our values, piquing our curiosity, she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us' - HILARY MANTEL
'The Alexander Trilogy stands as one of the most important works of fiction in the 20th century . . . it represents the pinnacle of [Renault's] career . . . Renault's skill is in immersing us in their world, drawing us into its strangeness, its violence and beauty. It's a literary conjuring trick like all historical fiction - it can only ever be an approximation of the truth. But in Renault's hands, the trick is so convincing and passionately conjured' Antonia Senior, The Times
'One of the greatest historical novels ever written'
SARAH WATERS
'I love to find queer representation in historical fiction. . . Renault's eye for intimacy is amazing'
DOUGLAS STUART
'Fierce, complex and eloquent'
MADELINE MILLER
'Mary Renault is a shining light'
HILARY MANTEL
***
A groundbreaking queer classic and powerful reimagining of the last years of Alexander the Great, told through the eyes of his lover.
I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a king.
And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.
Bagoas, abducted as a boy and sold as a eunuch, has been transported to the heart of the Persian court as courtesan to King Darius. But when the Macedon army conquers his homeland, Bagoas finds freedom at the hands of their golden young commander, whose name is already becoming a legend: Alexander.
Their encounter sparks a passionate devotion that shapes the Persian boy's future - and deepens into a relationship that will sustain them both through assassination plots, political intrigue and the threat of Alexander's own restless ambition. This is a spellbinding tale of power, loyalty and loss - a vision of history transfigured by love.
'Nowhere else in fiction have Alexander's beauty and charisma blazed with such potency'
TOM HOLLAND
'Passionate and captivating'
SEÁN HEWITT
'All my sense of the ancient world - its value, its style, the scent of its wars and passions - comes from Mary Renault'
EMMA DONOGHUE
'The Alexander Trilogy stands as one of the most important works of fiction in the 20th century'
ANTONIA SENIOR, THE TIMES
WOMAN explores the essence of what it means to be female. In mapping the inner woman - from organs to orgasms - Natalie Angier presents an extraordinary new vision of the female body as an evolutionary masterpiece.
'Anyone living in or near a female body should read this book' - Gloria Steinem
'Women have long been regarded as slaves to biology and evolution, prisoners in a hormonal swamp. But now, some of the sacred tenets of evolutionary psychology . . . have come under fresh challenge. As the century turns, it could be Goodbye women's lib; hello female liberation! . . . WOMAN is a delicious cocktail of estrogen and amphetamine designed to pump up the ovaries as well as the cerebral cortex' - Barbara Ehrenreich, Time magazine
'Drawing on science, literature and history, Angier provides valuable insight into the power of hormones, breast milk and the all-important clitoris. A must for every woman's bookshelf' - Woman's Journal
Anna and Daphne have combined their many years of experience, producing an interesting and well written book based on fact rather than opinion, covering conception to postnatal. Most expecting mothers will not be seen by the NHS until around 12 weeks of pregnancy, and this book provides the advice and reassurance needed during this time. It also features a 'read your week of pregnancy', which offers mothers the opportunity to monitor symptoms that can indicate different things at different stages of the pregnancy. Issues broached in the book include: conception difficulties, what tests to opt for, how to break the news at work, when to tell an older child, taking your partner to the scan, opting for a caesarean.
The Glass Ocean is a story of becoming. Flamehaired, six-foot-two in stocking feet, newly orphaned Carlotta Dell'oro recounts the lives of her parents - solitary glassmaker Leonardo Dell'oro and beautiful, unreachable Clotilde Girard - and discovers in their loves and losses, their omissions and obsessions, the circumstances of her abandonment and the weight of her inheritance. With a master artisan's patience and exquisite craft, debut novelist Lori Baker has created a gemlike Victorian world, a place where mistakes of the past reappear in the future, art can destroy, and family is not to be trusted.
Punjab, Pakistan, June 2009. The temperature is 45° and Asia has been out picking fruit for several hours. It's exhausting, sweaty work, but Asia and her husband have five children to feed. At midday she goes to the nearest well, picks up a cup and takes a long drink of cool water. She refills the cup, drinks some more and then offers it to another woman.
Suddenly one of her fellow workers cries out that the water belongs to the Muslim women and that with her actions, Asia - who is Christian - has contaminated it. An argument ignites and in an instant, with one word, Asia's fate is sealed. 'Blasphemy!' someone shouts. In Pakistan this is a charge punishable by death.
First attacked by a mob, Asia was soon after thrown into prison and then sentenced to be hanged. Since then she has been kept in a windowless cell. Her family have had to flee their village, under threat from vengeful extremists. In the wave of accusation that followed, only two public figures came to Asia's defence: the Muslim governor of the Punjab and Pakistan's Christian Minister for Minorities. Both have since been brutally murdered.
Here, in equal measures shocking and inspiring, Asia Bibi, who has become a symbol for everyone concerned with ending the violence committed in the name of religion, bravely speaks to us from her prison cell.
From the author of BETWEEN THE STOPS and TOKSVIG'S ALMANAC
'Teasing out untold stories of the battlefield . . . follows the footsteps of the likes of Sarah Waters and Pat Barker' Independent
London, 1897. A young girl, Valentine Grey, arrives in England. She's been brought up in the remote and sunny climes of India and finds being forced into corsets and skirts in damp and cold country insufferable. The only bright spot: her exciting cousin, Reggie. Reggie, and his lover Frank seek out the adventure the clandestine bars and streets of London offer and are happy to include Valentine in their secret, showing her theatre, gardens - even teaching her how to ride a bicycle.
And then comes the Boer War and Reggie's father volunteers him; the empire must be defended. But it won't be Reggie who dons the Volunteer Regiment's garb. Valentine takes her chance, puts on her cousin's uniform, leaving Reggie behind and heads off to war. And for a long while it's glorious and liberating for both of the cousins, but war is not glorious and in Victorian London homosexuality is not liberating . . .
Includes the novels Frenchman's Creek and Hungry Hill, and the story collection The Birds & Other Stories.
Frenchman's Creek tells the story of Lady Dona St Columb's escape from the Restoration Court in search of love and adventure at Navron in Cornwall. Hungry Hill is a powerful tale of the feud between two great families, the Donovans and the Brodricks. Daphne du Maurier's short story 'The Birds' was the basis for the classic Hitchcock film.
A brilliant exposé of poverty and politics in Britain.
In 1937 George Orwell published The Road to Wigan Pier, an account of his famous 'urban ride' among the people and places of the Great Depression. Fifty years later we lived through a second Great Depression, and this time the journey north was made by a woman - like Orwell a journalist and a socialist, but, unlike him, working class and a feminist.
Wigan Pier Revisited is a devastating record of what Beatrix Campbell saw and heard in towns and cities ravaged by poverty and unemployment. She talked to young mothers on the dole, to miners and their families, to school leavers, battered wives, factory workers, redundant workers; discovered what work, home, family, politics and dignity meant for working-class people. Out of this came her passionate plea for a genuine socialism, one informed by feminism, drawing its strength from the grass roots and responding to people's real needs.
'Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I'd go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius' LUCY SCHOLES, GUARDIAN
'It is hard not to believe that Barbara Comyns's own adventures are entangled in her fiction' JANE GARDAM, SPECTATOR
'All of her books read as if she wrote them effortlessly' URSULA HOLDEN
On the banks of the River Avon, five sisters are born. The seasons come and go, the girls take their lessons under the ash tree and there is always the sound of water swirling through the weir. Then, unexpectedly, an air of decay descends upon the house: ivy grows unchecked over the windows, angry shouts split the summer air, the milk sours in the larder and their father takes out his gun. Tragedy strikes the family, and before long the furniture is being auctioned off and the sisters dispersed among relatives. In her daring first novel, originally published in 1947, Barbara Comyns' unique young heroine relates the vivid, funny and bittersweet story of a childhood.
Fascinating and extraordinary, thrilling and poignant, My Judy Garland Life will speak to anyone who has ever nursed an obsession or held a candle to a star.
Judy Garland has been an important figure in Susie Boyt's life since she was three years old, comforting, inspiring and at times disturbing her. In this unique book, Boyt travels deep into the underworld of hero worship, reviewing through the prism of Judy our understanding of rescue, consolation, love, grief and fame. What does it mean to adore someone you don't know? What is the proper husbandry of a twenty-first century obsession?
Boyt's journey takes in a duetting breakfast with Mickey Rooney, a Munchkin luncheon, tea with the largest collector of Garlandia, an illicit late-night spree at the Minnesota Judy Garland Museum and a breathless, semi-sacred encounter with Miss Liza Minnelli . . .
