Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed and Quoted by author to the title page. Book comes with a Charleston Festival event brochure.
Quote is: "Time now to consider the compacts that hold the world together, the compact between ruler and ruled..."
Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2009
Longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2009.
'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.
"A fascinating read, so good I rationed myself. It is remarkable and very learned; the texture is marvellously rich, the feel of Tudor London and the growing household of a man on the rise marvellously authentic. Characters real and imagined spring to life, from the childish and petulant King to Thomas Wolsey's jester, and it captures the extrovert, confident, violent mood of the age wonderfully." C.J. Sansom
Heavy Book (672 pages) therefore postage has been adjusted accordingly.
The Wilderness - Samantha HARVEY
Published by UK Jonathan Cape 5 February 2009
Price£29.99
ISBN 9780224086073
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed, Quoted and Dated by author to the title page. Book comes with a South Bank event brochure.
Long listed for The Man Booker Prize 2009.
It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by 'poor Eleanor', a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all? From the first sentence to the last, "The Wilderness" holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.
The Little Stranger - Sarah WATERS
Published by UK Virago 28 May 2009
Price£69.99
ISBN 9781844086016
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed, Lined and Dated by author to the title page. Book comes with a flyer from the London signing event and a promotional postcard.
Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2009.
Longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2009.
After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote ‘The Night Watch’, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Short listed for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.
The Children's Book - A.S. BYATT
Published by UK Chatto & Windus 7 May 2009
Price£35.00
ISBN 9780701183899
Signed by Author
First EditionFirst Printing
Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed. Lined and Dated by author to the title page. Quote " In their innocence they were betrayed" dated May 11th 2009
Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2009
Longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2009
Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a storybook world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum's treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love, by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents' plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era, growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation grew up unaware of the darkness ahead. In their innocence, they were betrayed unintentionally by the adults who loved them. In a profound sense, this novel is indeed the children's book.
'intellectual zest keeps the book sizzling with ideas...this is the most stirring novel Byatt has written since Possession' Sunday Times
'A richly allusive text...astonishing power and resonance' Sunday Telegraph