English Books for Christmas
Kuang: Katabasis
The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld. Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him. But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together. That’s if they can agree on anything. Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?
Shattuck: The History of Sound
The journey of two men who only spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine … The History of Sound is a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.
Hadley: The Party
On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students‘ party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings. As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives.
Galbraith: The Hallmarked Man
A dismembered corpse is discovered in the vault of a silver shop. The police initially believe it to be that of a convicted armed robber – but not everyone agrees with that theory. One of them is Decima Mullins, who calls on the help of private detective Cormoran Strike as she’s certain the body in the silver vault was that of her boyfriend – the father of her newborn baby – who suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. The more Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott delve into the case, the more labyrinthine it gets …
Coe: The Proof of My Innocence
Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere. That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in a more extreme direction. One that’s finally poised to put their plans into action. But speaking truth to power can be dangerous …
Hope: Albion
The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember.
Frannie, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn. Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out her childhood love. And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.
Vuong: The Emperor of Gladness
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink …
Irving: Queen Esther
After forty years, John Irving returns to the world of his bestselling classic novel and Academy Award-winning The Cider House Rules, revisiting the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, Maine, where Dr Wilbur Larch takes in Esther, a Viennese-born Jew whose life is shaped by anti-Semitism. Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine, and anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland. …