Political

Big Brother is watching you.... 1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates....

In Silverview, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past 60 years - the secret world itself....

Animal Farm is George Orwell's great socio-political allegory set in a farmyard....

One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice.  If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street. If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt....

As teenagers, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love....

Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize. The richly exotic story of the childhood the twins Esthappen and Rahel craft for themselves amongst India's vats of banana jam and mountains of peppercorns....

A huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War....

The movie adaptation of The Kite Runner has been nominated for a 2008 Academy Award.
Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of its monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul.

Tremendous in scope and breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's magnum opus, an electrifying moral defense of capitalism and free enterprise....

Shevek is brilliant scientist who is attempting to find a new theory of time - but there are those who are jealous of his work, and will do anything to block him....

When a NASA satellite discovers an astonishingly rare object buried deep in the Arctic ice, the floundering space agency proclaims a much-needed victory, a victory with profound implications...

Vanessa Wye was 15 years old when she first had sex with her English teacher. She is now 32 and the teacher, Jacob Strane, has just been accused of sexual abuse by another former student of his....

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, is living out his old age when a letter from his old Service summons him to London....

To those who don’t really know her, Kate Henderson’s life must seem perfectly ordinary. But she is in fact a senior MI6 officer, who right now is nursing the political equivalent of a nuclear bomb....

Edge of Eternity is a sweeping tale of the fight for individual freedom in a world gripped by the mightiest clash of superpowers anyone has ever known....

Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death....

Martin Gilmour is an outsider. When he wins a scholarship to Burtonbury School, he doesn't wear the right clothes or speak with the right kind of accent....

When Tiro, the confidential secretary of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning....

A tour-de-force of historical imagination....

From two former military officers and award-winning authors comes a chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034 - and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration....

Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give way to Olympic fever, Middle England follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change....

Book two in the magnificent Empire Trilogy by best-selling authors Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts....

1431 is a dangerous time for a woman to be defiant. Inside closed bedchambers and upon bloody battlefields, Cecily portrays war as women fight it....

In the early 1980s, long before he was President or head of the CIA, even before a submarine named Red October crossed the Atlantic...

Presenting the full-cast BBC Radio adaptation of C. P. Snow's epic series about the English establishment across the 20th century....

Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at their family estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative. 

In the weeks before the election of Donald Trump, Niran, a young, liberal, Iraqi Muslim immigrant, struggles to find her footing in a neighborhood of well-to-do, conservative Iraqi Christians. Inspired by her idol Enheduanna, the first recorded writer in history and famed priestess of Ancient Mesopotamia, Niran navigates societal challenges, fights against cultural stereotypes, and most of all, aims to make her voice heard by all around her. With a desire to study, work, and love, Niran rediscovers her purpose in life.

It’s two decades in the future, and a Christian college student named Ace Hartwick has just destroyed his neighbor’s so-called “wife”—actually a sexbot named Sally—in a trash compactor. Soon, Ace will be on trial for murder. Unfortunately for Ace, everyone despises his kind of “radical” Christianity, and, in the fragile America of the future, all the juries are fixed.

On the battlefields of the Crimea, William Gale cradles the still-warm body of his brother. William's experience of war will bring about a change in him that will reverberate through his family over the next two centuries. In the 1970s, William's descendants invite Stephen, a distant relation, to stay in their house in the English countryside—but their golden summer entanglements will end in a shocking fall from grace. Half a century later, a confrontation between the surviving members of the family will culminate in a terrible reckoning.

The last great 19th-century Russian novelist brings his symbolism together with realism, to blend real and fictional people together in the Russian revolutionary period of 1905 that laid the seeds for the 1917 dark Soviet period that Bely anticipates, set in the Paris of Russia, St Petersburg. An intriguing fantasy mixed with reality, dark and bright colors, with a dose of romanticism.

A writer takes residence in the illustrious but decaying Grand Hotel Europa, to think about where things went wrong with Clio, with whom he fell in love in Genoa and moved to Venice. He reconstructs a compelling story of love in times of mass tourism, about their trips to Malta, Palmaria, Portovenere and the Cinque Terre and their thrilling search for the last painting of Caravaggio. Meanwhile, he becomes fascinated by the mysteries of Grand Hotel Europe and gets more and more involved with the memorable characters who inhabit it, and who seem to come from a more elegant time. 

Laura, a student from a modest background, escapes her small town to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield fellowship to study at Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her coursework, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation. Years later, back in the United States with a PhD and dissertation on Henry James, she loses her job as an adjunct and reconnects with the Weatherfield Foundation. Commissioned to write a history for its centennial, she becomes obsessed by the Gilded Age origins of the Weatherfield fortune.

The year is 2060, and by executive order, the president has herded 2/3 of the American population to underground bunkers specially built to save America from worldwide destruction. The remaining 1/3 are sacrificed in the practicality needed to construct 50 bunkers. This story begins a century later when rumors evolve about escaping to the outside world. To maintain order within the bunker communities, just the mention of wanting to go outside led to the expression of being careful about what you wish for!

Alan Ainslie is an able and dedicated man high in the government. Daniel Ainslie, his son, is a member of an explosive movement impelled by the naive rebelliousness of the New Left. Hugh MacLennan weaves a complex and story of two generations in conflict. Originally published in 1967, Return of the Sphinx is something of a sequel to the more optimistic Two Solitudes and reflects MacLennan's disenchantment with the world in general and the apparently intractable French-English debate in Canada.

In the 1980s, the Bureaucracy eliminated all knowledge of the past in the wake of a nuclear holocaust. In 2030, André Gervais discovers two metal boxes containing manuscripts, diaries, and other personal papers that have somehow survived and asks an old man, John Wellfleet, to use these documents to discover the past. In doing so, Wellfleet learns the truth about two relatives.

One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street. If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt. There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.

A long time ago, in a bountiful land not so far away, the animal denizens lived quite happily. Then the colonisers arrived. After nearly a hundred years, a bloody War of Liberation brought new hope for the animals—along with a new leader. A charismatic horse who commanded the sun and ruled and ruled and kept on ruling. For 40 years he ruled, with the help of his elite band of Chosen Ones, a scandalously violent pack of Defenders and, as he aged, his beloved and ambitious young donkey wife, Marvellous.

Nancy Harrison is running for Senate, and she’s going to win, goddamnit. Not that that’s her slogan, although it could be. She’s said all the right things. Passed all the right legislation. Chapped her lips kissing babies. There’s just one problem: her grown children. Greta and Nick Harrison are adrift. Nick is floundering in his attempts to write a musical about the life of Joan Didion. And then there’s his little sister Greta. Smart, pretty, and completely unmotivated, allowing her life to pass her by like the shoppers at the Apple store where she works.

In this 1945 novella, barnyard animals rise up against the oppressive rule of human farmers and set about to create a better world for themselves. When two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, emerge as leaders of the new collective, a schism is created with dire implications for the erstwhile utopia. George Orwell's satirical story of Revolutionary Russia and Stalinism is a classic of anti-authoritarianism protest literature.

 The Not Wives traces the lives of three women as they navigate the Occupy Wall Street movement and each other. Stevie is a nontenured professor and recently divorced single mom; her best friend, Mel, is a bartender, torn between her long-term girlfriend and her desire to explore polyamory; and Johanna is a homeless teenager trying to find her way in the world who bears shared witness to a tragedy that interlaces her life with Stevie’s.