The White Tiger ++ Signed, Quoted & Dated ++ - Aravind ADIGA
Published by UK Atlantic Books 1 March 2008
Price£230.00
ISBN 978-1843547204
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed, Quoted and Dated (29/03/08 date of Cambridge signing) by author to the title page. Book comes with a Man Booker 'Fiction at its Finest' brochure with extracts from the six shortlisted books, also a Cambridge WordFest brochure and postcard.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize, 2008.
Short listed for the Man Booker Prize, 2008.
Long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2008.
Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. As Balram broods over his situation, he realizes that there is only one way he can become part of this glamorous new India - by murdering his master."The White Tiger" presents a raw and unromanticised India, both thrilling and shocking - from the desperate, almost lawless villages along the Ganges, to the booming Wild South of Bangalore and its technology and outsourcing centres. The first-person confession of a murderer, "The White Tiger" is as compelling for its subject matter as for the voice of its narrator - amoral, cynical, unrepentant, yet deeply endearing.
The Secret Scripture - Sebastian BARRY
Published by UK Faber & Faber 1 May 2008
Special Price £23.99
ISBN 9780571215287
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.
WINNER of the COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR, 2008
WINNER of the the Costa Novel Award, 2008.
Short listed for the Man Booker Prize, 2008.
Long listed for The Man Booker Prize 2008.
Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.
The Northern Clemency - Philip HENSHER
Published by UK Fourth Estate 1 April 2008
Price£20.00
ISBN 9780007174799
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.
Short listed for the Man Booker Prize, 2008.
Long listed for The Man Booker Prize 2008.
An epic chronicle of the last 20 years of British life from the Booker long listed and Granta Best of Young British novelist, Philip Hensher. Beginning in 1974 and ending with the fading of Thatcher's government in 1996, 'The Northern Clemency' is Philip Hensher's epic portrait of an entire era, a novel concerned with the lives of ordinary people and history on the move. Set in Sheffield, it charts the relationship between two families: Malcolm and Katherine Glover and their three children; and their neighbours the Sellers family, newly arrived from London so that Bernie can pursue his job with the Electricity Board. The day the Sellers move in there is a crisis across the road: Malcolm Glover has left home, convinced his wife is having an affair. The consequences of this rupture will spread throughout the lives of both couples and their children, in particular 10-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused taunting of 15-year-old Sandra Sellers, childhood crises that will come to a head twenty years later. In the background, England is changing: from a manufacturing and industrial based economy into a new world of shops, restaurants and service industries, a shift particularly marked in the North with the miners' strike of 1984, which has a dramatic impact on both families. Inspired by the expansive scale and webs of relationships of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels, 'The Northern Clemency' shows Philip Hensher to be one of our greatest chroniclers of English life.
The Lost Dog - Michelle de KRETSER
Published by UK Chatto & Windus 1 May 2008
Special Price £10.00
ISBN 9780701182106
First EditionFirst Printing
** UNSIGNED**
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing.
Long listed for The Man Booker Prize, 2008.
Tom Loxley is holed up in a remote cottage in the bush, trying to finish a book on Henry James and the Uncanny when his dog goes missing, trailing a length of orange twine, tied with firm knots. Tom's lonely childhood in India taught him to tie knots but not to hold on...The house belongs to Nelly Zhang, an elusive artist with whom Tom has become enthralled. The narrative spans ten days while Tom searches for his dog... and loops back in time to take the reader on a breathtaking journey into glittering worlds far beyond the present tragedy, from an Anglo-Indian childhood to the brittle contemporary Melbourne art scene, from Tom's scratchy, unbearably poignant relationship with his ailing mother to the unanswered puzzles in Nelly's past - her husband also disappeared in the bush.And the reader fears for Tom as well as for the dog. Set in present-day Australia and mid-20th century India, here is a haunting, layered work that vividly counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the untamed, ancient continent beyond.
With its atmosphere of menace and an acute sense of the unexplained in any story, it illuminates the collision of the wild and the civilised, modernity and the past, home and exile. "The Lost Dog" is a mystery and a love story, an exploration of art and nature, a meditation on ageing and the passage of time. It is a book of wonders: a gripping contemporary novel which examines the weight of history as well as different ways of trying to grasp the world.
The Enchantress of Florence ++ Signed++Number++ Limited Edition ++ - Salman RUSHDIE
Published by Jonathan Cape-Backwell Collectors Library 2008
Price£99.99
ISBN .9780224086028
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst PrintingLimited Edition
One of 100 copies of a signed limited edition, this being number 43 of 100: Johnathan Cape/Blackwell Collector’s Library. Sewn into cream boards, quarter bound in dark blue cloth with gold title and decoration to spine plus ribbon. The book is enclosed in matching cloth covered slipcase. "Sumite castalios nigris de fontibus haustus" motif on endpapers and also blocked in gold on front panel.
Long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2008.
A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather Babar: Qara Koz, 'Lady Black Eyes', a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbek warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerized by her presence, and much trouble ensues. "The Enchantress of Florence" is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other - the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia's boyhood friend "il Machia" - Niccolr Machiavelli - is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor's story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he's a liar, must he die?
The Enchantress of Florence - Salman RUSHDIE
Published by UK Jonathan Cape 3 April 2008
Price£19.99
ISBN 9780224061636
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed and Dated (14.4.08, date of London signing) by author to the title page.
Long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2008.
A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather Babar: Qara Koz, 'Lady Black Eyes', a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbek warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerized by her presence, and much trouble ensues. "The Enchantress of Florence" is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other - the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia's boyhood friend "il Machia" - Niccolr Machiavelli - is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor's story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he's a liar, must he die?
The Clothes on Their Backs ++ Signed UK First Edition ++ - Linda GRANT
Published by UK Virago 7 February 2008
Price£80.00
ISBN 9781844085408
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed and Dated by author. Book comes with a ticket from the London signing event.
Winner of the South Bank Book of the Year, 2008.
Short listed for the Man Booker Prize, 2008.
Long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2008.
In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? This is a novel about survival - both banal and heroic - and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live. Set against the backdrop of a London from the 1950s to the present day, The Clothes on Their Backs is a wise and tender novel about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress ourselves in, and about how they define us all.
Observer - 'So artfully constructed that you barely feel you're reading at all, so fluid and addictive is the plot. But like all the best boks, the serious ideas it raises stay with you for a long time afterwards . . . A wonderful, tightly written novel that is above all a masterclass in the perils of hypocrisy'
Sea of Poppies - Amitav GHOSH
Published by UK Hodder Murrary 1 May 2008
Price£50.00
ISBN 9780719568954
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed and Dated (10/6/08, date of London signing) by author to the title page. Book comes with a flyer from the signing event and a Signed promotional postcard.
Short listed for the Man Booker Prize, 2008.
Long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2008.
At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive -- a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists
Netherland - Joseph O'NEILL
Published by UK Fourth Estate 6 May 2008
Price£25.00
ISBN 9780007269068
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hard cover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.
PEN/Faulkner Award Winner 2009.
Long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2008.
In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans - his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in the Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. Lost in a country he'd regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place - the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriended Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city's first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck's dream and Chuck's sense of American possibility - until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend's activities and ambitions...
'Netherland' is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O'Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.
Girl in a Blue Dress - Gaynor ARNOLD
Published by Tindell Street Press Ltd 14 August 2008
Price£17.99
ISBN 9780955647611
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Soft cover original, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.
Alfred Gibson's funeral has taken place at Westminster Abbey, and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. The Great Man favours his children and a clandestine mistress over his estranged wife. Dorothea revisits their early courtship before the birth of too many children snapped her vitality, and discovers the devious nature and hypnotic power of this celebrity author. Now she needs to face her grown up children, and worse, her nemesis of ten years, the charming Miss Ricketts. This is a re-telling of the lives of Charles and Catherine Dickens.
Long listed for the Man Booker Prize, 2008.
Child 44 ++ Signed & Lined ++ - Tom Rob SMITH
Published by UK Simon & Schuster 3 March 2008
Price£39.99
ISBN 978-1847371263
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed & First Line Quoted by author to the title page..
Quote is: "Since Maria had decided to die her cat would have to defend for itself"
Short listed for the Costa First Novel Award, 2008.
Long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2008.
MGB officer Leo is a man who never questions the Party Line. He arrests whomever he is told to arrest. He dismisses the horrific death of a young boy because he is told to, because he believes the Party stance that there can be no murder in Communist Russia. Leo is the perfect soldier of the regime. But suddenly his confidence that everything he does serves a great good is shaken. He is forced to watch a man he knows to be innocent be brutally tortured. And then he is told to arrest his own wife. Leo understands how the State works: Trust and check, but check particularly on those we trust. He faces a stark choice: his wife or his life. And still the killings of children continue...
Scott Turow "CHILD 44 is a remarkable debut novel - inventive, edgy and relentlessly gripping from the first page to the last."
Robert Towne "Child 44 contrasts the bleakness of Stalinist Russia with a love story that unexpectedly and ironically blooms only because the lovers are nearly crushed by a relentless totalitarian regime hell bent on their destruction. As the two attempt to solve a series of brutal child murders the government is determined not to acknowledge, they must avoid being killed themselves in a simultaneous flight and pursuit across the wintry Russian landscape. Achingly suspenseful, full of feeling and of the twists and turns that one expects from Le Carre at his best, it's a tale that grabs you by the throat and simply never lets you go."