CHILD 44

• Title: Child 44
• Author: Tom Rob Smith
• Genre: Fiction, Thriller
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM10/=
• Condition: Read lightly. Good condition. Kindly note the line made in black marker pen to denote a discount book.
• Status: Available.

Book description:

Child 44 is a thriller set in the terror of 1950s Stalinist Russia, a brutal regime that executed anyone who disagreed with its dogma. It proclaimed to be a perfect society. So, when a series of brutal murders take place, no one is permitted to say that these are the work of a serial killer. In a perfect society there can be no crime.

One man, Leo Demidov, a State security agent, a man who has spent his entire career arresting innocent men and women, decides to redeem himself by catching this killer. To do so, he must buck the system, risking his life and the life of everyone he loves.

Source: Amazon

ON CHESIL BEACH

• Title: On Chesil Beach, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize
• Author: Ian McEwan (Booker Prize-winning author of the 'Atonement')
• Genre: Fiction,
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM15/=
• Condition: Read lightly. Good condition.
• Status: Available.

Book description:
The year is 1962. Florence, the daughter of a successful businessman and an aloof Oxford academic, is a talented violinist. She dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, the earnest young history student she met by chance and who unexpectedly wooed her and won her heart. Edward grew up in the country on the outskirts of Oxford where his father, the headmaster of the local school, struggled to keep the household together and his mother, brain-damaged from an accident, drifted in a world of her own. Edward’s native intelligence, coupled with a longing to experience the excitement and intellectual fervour of the city, had taken him to University College in London. Falling in love with the accomplished, shy and sensitive Florence – and having his affections returned with equal intensity – has utterly changed his life.

From the precise and intimate depiction of two young lovers eager to rise above the hurts and confusion of the past, to the touching story of how their unexpressed misunderstandings and fears shape the rest of their lives, On Chesil Beach is an extraordinary novel that brilliantly, movingly shows us how the entire course of a life can be changed – by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Reviews:
'In its precision, scope and force, this is an astounding novel, more tender than anything McEwan has hitherto produced' Guardian

Source: Amazon

INTERPRETER OF MALADIES

• Title: Interpreter of Maladies (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2000)
• Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
• Genre: Fiction, Short stories
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM10/=
• Condition: Yellowed Pages
• Status: Available.
  

Book description:

Pulitzer-winning, scintillating studies in yearning and exile from a Bengali Bostonian woman of immense promise. A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal, he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily and send her spiralling into nostalgia for her homeland...Jhumpa Lahiri's prose is beautifully measured, subtle and sober, and she is a writer who leaves a lot unsaid, but this work is rich in observational detail, evocative of the yearnings of the exile (mostly Indians in Boston here), and full of emotional pull and reverberation.

Reviews:

'Lahiri has an extraordinary voice' Salman Rushdie

'Jhumpa Lahiri is the kind of writer who makes you want to grab the next person you see and say "Read this!" She's a dazzling storyteller with a distinctive voice, an eye for nuance, an ear for irony. She is one of the finest short story writers I've read.' Amy Tan

'Jhumpa Lahiri's strong, subtle short story collection is a debut to relish.' Guardian

Source: Amazon

THE GARGOYLE

• Title: The Gargoyle
• Author: Andrew Davidson
• Genre: Fiction
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM20/=
• Condition:Very good, like new
• Status: Available.
  

Book description:
On a dark road in the middle of the night, a car plunges down into a ravine. The driver survives the crash, but suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in the hospital, planning his suicide, a strange woman appears at the foot of his bed, insisting she saved his life a century ago. Spanning medieval Germany, Japan, Iceland and beyond, The Gargoyle is a mesmerising novel of death, history, obsession and faith.

Reviews:
"Spellbinding...A page-turning adventure that will keep you reading well past bedtime." The Boston Globe

"Beguiling...Mixing romance, classic allusion and reality, Davidson's debut is a bravura performance." Marie Claire.

INTIMACY & MIDNIGHT ALL DAY

• Title: Intimacy (a novel) and Midnight All Day (stories) - 2 BOOKS IN ONE!
• Author: Hanif Kureishi
• Genre: Fiction
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM20/=
• Condition: Good
• Status: Available.

Book Description:

Together in one volume -- Hanif Kureishi's highly acclaimed and controversial novel, Intimacy, and, available for the first time, his latest collection of provocative short stories, Midnight All Day.

Jay, the narrator of Intimacy, tells his story on the night he is preparing to leave his lover, Susan, and their two boys. Stripping away all posturing and self-justification, Hanif Kureishi explores the fears and desires that drive a man to leave a woman. Midnight All Day is an astonishing, darkly comic collection of new stories, in which Kureishi confirms his reputation as one of our foremost chroniclers of the loveless, the lost and the dispossessed. The characters are familiar in the cultural landscape of the nineties: frustrated and intoxicated, melancholic and sensitive, yet capable of great cruelty, and if necessary, willing to break the constraints of an old life to make way for the new.

Review:

"Kureishi is a fluent, socially observant writer whose sentences move with intelligence and wit." The New York Times Book Review

"Kureishi does time and again that which very few writers of even the highest caliber dare attempt: he writes very funny works about serious topics." San Fancisco Review of Books

"Kureishi is, simply, a wonderful writer, and Intimacy is a work of dark beauty." Harper's Bazaar

About the Author:

Hanif Kureishi won the presitigious Whitbread Prize for his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. He received an Oscar nomination for his first screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette. Kureishi's other screenplays include Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, which he also directed, and My Son the Fanatic, adapted from a story in his collection Love in a Blue Time. His most recent novel is Gabriel's Gift. He lives in London.

Source: Amazon

MANAGEMENT OF BUSINESS FOR 'A' LEVELS & LCCI

• Title: Management of Business for 'A' Levels and LCCI
• Author: Vincent A. Gabriel
• Genre: Reference
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM10/=
• Condition: Yellowed pages
• Status: Available.

ALL-NEW AUSTRALIAN JOKES

• Title: All-New Australian Jokes
• Author: Philip Adams & Patrice Newell
• Genre: Humour
• Type: Paperback (480 pages)
• Price: RM15/=
• Condition: Yellowed pages
• Status: Available

ONCE IN A HOUSE ON FIRE

• Title: Once In A House On Fire
• Author: Andrea Ashworth
• Genre: Autobiography
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM15/=
• Condition: Yellowed pages
• Status: Available

Review:
Given her start in life, it is all the more remarkable that Andrea Ashworth should have turned out to be an Oxford graduate with such a compelling memoir under her belt. Her father died when she was five, her mother was left, poor and isolated in 70s, depressed Manchester to bring up Andrea and her younger sister singlehandedly. Along comes a physically abusive stepfather who sets about dragging the young family into the pits of despair, petty crime and sordid poverty. But Ashworth writes an enchanting story that blends social history (the 70s are rendered with an acute eye for detail) with poetic intensity. She turns a child's uncomprehending gaze on the domestic horrors of working- class life when it is dominated by a vicious man and drunken, self-pitying mother. We know, as we listen with Andrea, that her mother has decided to leave her man when she puts Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" on the turntable. Unfortunately, we know, too, that she was kidding herself when said man comes home and twirls her round the front room to the sound of Motown disco. We know, because Ashworth makes us re-live her childhood by dint of her astonishing gift for storytelling. --Lilian Pizzichini

Source: Amazon

BORN TO BE RILED

• Title: Born to be Riled
• Author: Jeremy Clarkson, host of the hugely successful TV Show, Top Gear
• Genre: Humour
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM20/=
• Condition: Good. Lightly read.
• Status: Available.

Synopsis:
Jeremy Clarkson, it has to be said, sometimes finds the world a maddening place. And nowhere more so than from behind the wheel of a car, where you can see any number of people acting like lunatics while in control (or not) of a ton of metal. In "Born to be Riled", Clarkson takes a look at the world through his windscreeen, shakes his head at what he sees - and then puts the boot in. Among other things, he explains: why Surrey is worse than Wales; how crossing your legs in America can lead to arrest; the reason cable TV salesmen must be punched; and, that divorce can be blamed on the birth of Jesus. Raving politicians, pointless celebrities, ridiculous 'personalities' and the Germans all get it in the neck, together with the stupid, the daft and ludicrous in a tour de force of comic writing guaranteed to have Clarkson's postman wheezing under sackfuls of letters from the easily offended.

Source: Amazon

CONTEST

• Title: Contest
• Author: Matthew Reilly
• Genre: Thriller
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM15/=
• Condition: Ok. Slightly yellowed pages
• Status: Available.

Synopsis:
The New York State Library looms as a silent sanctuary of knowledge: a hundred-year-old labyrinth of towering bookcases, narrow aisles, and spiral staircases. But for Dr Stephen Swain and his eight-year-old daughter Holly it is a place of nightmare. Because, for just one night, this historic building is to become the venue for a horrifying contest, a contest in which Swain must compete, whether he likes it or not. The rules of the challenge are simple: seven contestants will enter, but only one will leave. With his daughter in his arms, Stephen Swain is plunged into a terrifying fight for survival. The stakes are high, the odds are brutal. He can choose to run, to hide, or to fight - but if he wants to live, he needs to win. For, in this particular contest, unless you leave as victor, you do not leave at all.

Source: Amazon

FROM PANIC TO POWER - SOLD (NABILA)

• Title: From Panic to Power
• Author: Lucinda Bassett
• Genre: Self help, reference
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM15/= (retailed at Kinokuniya at RM56.10)
• Condition: Yellowed pages
• Status: SOLD (NABILA) 4.9.09

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

• Title: Everything is Illuminated (made into a movie starring Elijah Wood)
• Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
• Genre: Fiction
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM15/=
• Condition: Yellowed pages
• Status: Available

Book Description:
"An astonishing feat" THE TIMES A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into bizarre new forms; a "blind" old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis Jr, Jr. What they are looking for seems elusive -- a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war. What they find turns all their worlds upside down.

Review:
"pulses with life and is haunted by vilest madness. It is outrageously ambitious, extraordinarily moving, utterly successful." Financial Times

Source: Amazon

A LONG WAY DOWN

• Title: A Long Way Down
• Author: Nick Hornby
• Genre: Fiction
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM20/=
• Condition: Good.
• Status: Available.

About the Author:
Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of High Fidelity, About a Boy and How to be Good, as well as two works of non-fiction, Fever Pitch and 31 Songs, and the editor of Speaking with the Angel. In 1999 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award. In 2002 he won the W.H.Smith Award for Fiction and in 2003 was honoured with the Writers’ Writer Award at the Orange Word International Writers Festival. He lives in Highbury, North London.

Book Description:
‘Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower block?’ For disgraced TV presenter Martin Sharp the answer’s pretty simple: he has, in his own words, ‘pissed his life away’. And on New Year’s Eve, he’s going to end it all … But not, as it happens, alone. Because first single-mum Maureen, then eighteen-year-old Jess and lastly American rock-god JJ turn up and crash Martin’s private party. They’ve stolen his idea – but brought their own reasons. Yet it’s hard to jump when you’ve got an audience queuing impatiently behind you. A few heated words and some slices of cold pizza later and these four strangers are suddenly allies. But is their unlikely friendship a good enough reason to carry on living?

Source: Amazon

BARREL FEVER

• Title: Barrel Fever
• Author: David Sedaris
• Genre: Humour
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM20/=
• Condition: Good, slight yellowing of pages
• Status: Available.

Book Description:
In David Sedaris's world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz and the National Enquirer, Sedaris's collection of stories and essays is a rollicking tour through the American Zeitgeist: a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicide tried to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; and in his essays, David Sedaris considers the hazards of rewards of smoking, writing for Giantess magazine, and living with his scrappy brother Paul, aka 'The Rooster'. With a perfect eye and a voice infused with as much empathy as wit, Sedaris writes and reads stories and essays that target the soulful ridiculousness of our behaviour. Barrel Fever is like a blind date with modern life - and anything can happen.

Review:
'This is a man who could capture your heart and lift your spirits while reading out the ingredients of a rice cake.' Observer 'His best, funniest, most satisfying book.' Time Out

Source: Amazon

SHAKESPEARE THE COMPLETE WORKS

• Title: Shakespeare, The Complete Works
• Author: William Shakespeare
• Genre: Classics, Literature
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM35/=
• Condition: Excellent. Brand new.
• Status: Available.

Synopsis:
Gathers all of Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and poems.

MRS DALLOWAY

• Title: Mrs Dalloway
• Author: Virginia Woolf
• Genre: Classics, Literature
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM8/=
• Condition: Yellowed pages
• Status: Available.

About the Author:
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is now recognised as a major 20th century author, a great novelist and essayist, and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist.

Book Description:
On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway, the glittering wife of a Member of Parliament, is preparing for a grand party that evening. As she walks through London, buying flowers, observing life, her thoughts are in the past, and she remembers the time when she was as young as her own daughter Elizabeth; her romance with Peter Walsh, now recently returned from India; and the friends of her youth. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is being driven mad by shell shock. As the day draws to its end, his world and Clarissa's collide in unexpected ways.

Featured in the movie, The Hours, starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore & Meryl Streep

Source: Amazon, Wikipedia

THE FUNDAMENTALS & PRACTICE OF MARKETING

• Title: The Fundamentals and Practice of Marketing
• Author: John Wilmshurst
• Genre: Reference
• Type: Paperback
• Price: RM10/=
• Condition: Yellowed pages
• Status: Available.