New titles this Week
Some great new books in store this week. We start with A stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett, the Lost Stories. A collection of twenty short stories from the early career of the much loved author. The stories are accompanied by wonderful woodcut illustrations. A great Christmas gift for any Terry Pratchett fans.
Gunflower by Lauren Jean McKay is another short story collection but with a very different theme, where the author uses her humour, energy, and flair, to show us glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans. Fantasy in a very different frame.
We also have a new novel by An Yu. Ghost Music portrays the journey of a former pianist who is haunted by the life she could have led. The Guardian describes the book as an ‘intriguing exploration of music, self-knowledge and marital discord’. Are you intrigued?
Baumgartner is Paul Auster’s latest offering and while described as ‘amiable aimlessness’ in the Guardian, other reviews have described it as brilliant a ‘taut yet expansive novel of love, memory, and grief’. Let us know what you think once you have had a read.
Our translated fiction offering this week is Centro Europa By Vincent Luis Mora. The book is described as ‘audacious, playful and wickedly funny’ and the translation as ‘bold yet lyrical’. The story follows the discoveries of newly widowed, Redo Hauptshammer, who arrives in a small Prussian town to claim a plot of arable land and to bury his wife. The other bodies he discovers as he digs, unearth a long history of oppression, expropriation and erasure. This one is Our Book of the Week.
And lastly, a Christmas read in the recently rediscovered Mistletoe Malice by Kathleen Farrell, which was penned in 1951. The story describes the unravelling of a dysfunctional family who reunite for the Christmas holidays and ‘as more guests arrive, each bringing their secret truths and dreams, the Christmas tree explodes, a brawl erupts, an escape occurs – and their ‘midwinter madness’ climaxes.’ Does that sound familiar?
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