The First Book Of Calamity Leek

"WONDERFULLY STRANGE." --Mark Haddon A beguiling, irresistibly immersive debut novel about sixteen sisters in a walled garden, and what happens to their carefully constructed world when one girl starts asking questions about life outside. Fourteen-year-old Calamity Leek and her sisters spend their days tending white roses and memorizing the lessons in Aunty’s Appendix, a multi-volume compendium of show tunes, beauty regimens, and twisted creation myths. Calamity knows the Appendix front to back, and she is Aunty’s favorite, destined for particular greatness. But when her restless sister Truly Polperro gets too curious about life beyond their Wall of Safekeeping, she cracks Calamity’s world wide open. Calamity needs a new book. And she will have to write it herself. With formidable imagination and brilliant strangeness, Paula Lichtarowicz's The First Book of Calamity Leek draws on fairytales and doublespeak to tell a story both classic and keenly modern. Calamity, fearless and wrenching, leads us to question the stories we ourselves live by.

In this "riveting, heartfelt" novel of love and consequences (Heather Morris, New York Times bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz), a woman dreams of becoming a doctor until World War II leads her instead into an astonishing love—and a fateful choice. Is it possible to fall in love at the edge of life? Lena has lived a long, quiet life on her farm in Wales, alongside her husband and child. But as her end approaches, buried memories begin to return. Of her childhood in Poland, and her passion for science. Of the early days of her marriage, reluctant wife to an army officer. Of the birth of her daughter, whose arrival changed everything. Memories less welcome return, too. Her Polish village, transformed overnight by the Soviets, and the war that doomed her entire family to the frigid work camps of the Siberian tundra. And buried in that blinding snow, amongst the darkness of survival, the most haunting memory of all: that of an extraordinary new love. Exploring motherhood, marriage, consequences, and our incredible human capacity for hope, The Snow Hare is the story of a woman who dares to love and to dream in the face of impossible odds, and of the peace we each must make with our choices, even long after the years have gone by.

You're eight years old. An only child. You love your parents, but you're convinced you're not enough for your mother because she fosters other people's kids. You've learnt to cope, just about, with how this makes you feel -- but then a boy called Robert arrives, and he and your Mum seem to connect in a way you never have. You hate him for it. And her. And one day you do something really bad to teach them both a lesson. At twenty-eight, you return home to face your mother, who is now chronically ill. Despite the intervening years, you haven't forgiven her - or yourself - for what happened. Ultimately, though, it's her forgiveness you crave, even after all this time - because you need to know, finally, that you were enough for her.

One of the most talked-about novels of the year, this international bestseller gives new meaning to the term “unputdownable.” Reviewers and readers everywhere have been eagerly abandoning their everyday lives for days and even weeks on end, refusing to leave Michel Faber’s vividly realized fictional world. They are captivated by Sugar, an enigmatic nineteen-year-old prostitute whose story begins in a hellish nineteenth-century London brothel. Struggling to lift her body and soul out of the gutter, Sugar claws her way up the social ladder to gain refuge in the wealthy family of her besotted lover, William Rackham, unwilling heir to a perfumery. Now in the popular Perennial format, The Crimson Petal and the White is a gripping tale, extraordinarily rich, intricate and intoxicating to the final page.

A compulsive and chilling debut about a girl growing up in a cult

The amphibious cult classic: a magical tale of a suburban housewife's affair with a frogman ...'Disturbing but seductive ... Wonderful.' Margaret Atwood'Perfect.' Max Porter'Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.' Marlon James'A feminist masterpiece: tender, erotic, singular.' Carmen Maria Machado'Kind of weird and cool. ' Irvine Welsh''Genius ... A broadcast from a stranger and more dazzling dimension.' Patricia Lockwood'Genius ... Like Revolutionary Road written by Franz Kafka ... Exquisite.' The Times'Incredibly liberates readers from the awfulness of convention to a state where weirdness and otherness are beautiful.' Sarah Hall'A devastating fable of mythic proportions ... Wondrously peculiar.' Irenosen Okojie (foreword)Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs; her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce. One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic, Larry the frogman is a revelation - and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams ... Rachel Ingalls's Mrs Caliban is a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale, as magical today as it was four decades ago'A miracle . A perfect novel.' New Yorker'Every one of its 125 pages is perfect ... Clear a Saturday, please, and read it in a single sitting.' Harper'sWhat Readers Are Saying:'Maybe the most gorgeous, lyrical book ever written'*****'A fantastic wee novel, strange and brilliant, and absolutely the inspiration for The Shape of Water.'*****'Wonderful, sharp minimal prose offers big truths. Superb - brilliant, in fact.'*****'Absolutely incredible. It's weird, funny, and heartbreaking, like a Richard Yates novel except with lizardman sex.'*****'One of the best tongue-in-cheek social satires that I've ever read. It delves into gender politics. It takes a long, hard look at mental health. It addresses female sexual freedom and agency. It asks the reader to examine what it means to be human ... Genius.'*****'Really brilliant: a deconstruction of suburbia by way of monster movies that examines sad realities with hilarious verve ... Sometimes you need a sexy frog person to break you out of the ties that bind. '*****'Hooked me so deeply I picked it up and finished it the same night ... Beautiful ... Will stay with me.'*****'What the hell just happened?'*****

An atmospheric and gripping novel from an exciting new voice for fans of The Snow Child and The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. South-West Germany, 1926. The disappearance of a baby girl calls for Constable Theodore Hildebrandt and his son Klaus to visit the remote village of Hindelheim, a place where nothing ever happens. But the news of the missing baby has brought darkness to the community. It is as if someone or something wicked is playing a game. As the wind blows and the mist thickens, tensions rise amongst the villagers as everyone falls under suspicion. And when the rumours begin and secrets start to unravel, the quiet village of Hindelheim is set to change for ever.

About this novel, which focuses on two young women early in the 20th century, both victims of sexual abuse, as they struggle to gain for themselves and their children the rights and opportunities usually denied to poor women, Tillie Olsen said, "I love and am ineradicably grateful for this book, this writer, as I have been but to a few dozen others in my lifetime... Images, scenes, relationships, comprehensions portrayed here will never leave us. She is a writer of international stature and significance."