In The Company Of Strangers

Meigs's account of the National Film Board of Canada production unfolds in a meditation on time, old age and bonding.

She had everything she ever wanted – apart from love. As the wife of a wealthy but cruel businessman, Mona has all her heart desires: money, friends, social status... everything aside from freedom. Reconnecting with old friend, Meera, introduces her to a world of glamour, parties and covert affairs. And when she meets Ali, a young man whose beautiful exterior hides the pain of his humble roots and family tragedy, Mona feels alive for the very first time. Heady with love, Mona and Ali begin a delicate game of deceit that spirals out of control. But in a world where danger lurks on every corner, their forbidden love may not only destroy Mona’s marriage, but have tragic and long-lasting consequences. A captivating tale of love and loss, set against a backdrop of contemporary Pakistan that fans of Christy Lefteri and Lucinda Riley will love.

This title shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, the book suggests that rival countercurrents within these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. By investigating how the question of family is a hidden key to modernist structure and style, the book explores the formal narrative potential of queerness and in doing so rewrites the history of the modern novel.

A poignant, “top rank” espionage thriller spanning from WWII to the Cold War from the award-winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon (The Guardian). Portugal, 1944. Recruited by British intelligence to help uncover Nazi secrets of atomic warfare, math prodigy Andrea Aspinall soon disappears into the crowds of Lisbon, hiding behind a new identity. Karl Voss, an attaché for German intelligence, arrives in the city under the purported agenda of helping the Reich, all the while secretly working to save his beloved home country from annihilation under their reign. Two lost souls meet in a city filled with haunting secrets and deadly lies, desperately trying to find love amid assassination attempts, shifting loyalties, and heartbreaking betrayals. And when tragedy strikes, the repercussions last for decades, leading one of them on a quest, twenty-four years later, back into a sinister world of espionage long thought left behind. Hailed as both “a heartrending tale, unfolded with loving patience and rising tension” (Kirkus Reviews) and “an evocative and compelling thriller” (Publishers Weekly), The Company of Strangers is a provocative and moving take on the classic espionage narrative, exploring what happens when the allegiances of heart and head oppose each other.

The Company of Strangers shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives. This completely revised and updated edition includes a new chapter analyzing how the rise and fall of social trust explain the unsustainable boom in the global economy over the past decade and the financial crisis that succeeded it. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Paul Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, cities, and the banking system to provide the foundations of social trust that we need in our everyday lives. Even the simple acts of buying food and clothing depend on an astonishing web of interaction that spans the globe. How did humans develop the ability to trust total strangers with providing our most basic needs?

This is a wonderful book, very well written and accessible to a wide audience.

A twisted relationship between two couples reaches a terrible climax in this novel by the New York Times-bestselling author of Machines Like Me. Colin and Mary are lovers on holiday in Italy, their relationship becoming increasingly problematic as they become increasingly alienated from one and other. They move from place to place in this foreign land but seemingly without aim or purpose, seemingly bored and without attachment. Then they meet a man named Robert and his disabled wife, Caroline. Colin and Mary seem happy for the diversion—happy to meet another couple that takes their focus off of each other for a while. But things become strange when they attempt to leave: Robert and Caroline insist that they stay with them for a while longer. While Mary and Colin do rediscover an erotic attraction to each other during this time, they also find that their relationship with Robert and Caroline is taking a dreadful and horrific turn, in this “fine novel” by the Booker Prize-winning author of Saturday and On Chesil Beach (New Statesman). “McEwan perfectly captures the thrill of travel when one is divorced from familiar surroundings and the chance of something unusual and out-of-character seems possible. Of course, this being a McEwan fiction, the possibility is a brutal truth about how people find love in extreme ways.”—The Daily Beast

Sometime in the future the head librarian at a great center of learning suddenly disappears, leaving behind a journal that describes his weariness with a world "where people teach but know nothing, where the sentences flow on endlessly but lead nowhere." His successor in the post becomes more and more intrigued by the vanished man's fate, until a series of mysterious clues lead him on a journey both inward and outward, to a world that begins where language ends. Within a matter of weeks he finds himself in the company of powerful dervishes, God-intoxicated nomads whose eyes blaze with love, and ragged beggars with the smile of the Pure One. These men, the followers of an enlightened Shaykh, speak little, but simply to be in their company fills him with ecstasy and knowledge.