Giovanni’s Room James Baldwin
When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend’s return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened – while Giovanni’s life descends into tragedy.
United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love’s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love…
Shortlisted for this month
Beatlebone – Kevin Barry
A searing, surreal novel that blends fantasy and reality–and Beatles fandom–from one of literature’s most striking contemporary voices, author of the international sensation City of Bohane
It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought eleven years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching forties, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to calm his unquiet soul in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.
Beatlebone is a tour de force of language and literary imagination that marries the most improbable elements to the most striking effect. It is a book that only Kevin Barry would attempt, let alone succeed in pulling off–a Hibernian high wire act of courage, nerve, and great beauty
The Birthday Boys – Beryl Bainbridge
A brilliantly realized evocation of the thoughts and voices of Captain Scott and the four men with him, who suffered extraordinary hardships before finally dying during their 1912 attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole.
‘A whole lost era of fantastic courage, determination, idealism, curiosity, boyish foolishness and class mores is brought brilliantly and touchingly back by Bainbridge’s penetrating psychological acumen and her superb scene and action painting…A masterly achievement, not to be missed by anyone who cherishes a strong, meaningful story beautifully told’ Publishers Weekly
The Birthday Boys is one of Beryl Bainbridge’s most acclaimed novels, telling the story of Scott’s doomed expedition through the voices of five men on the voyage. As Scott, Petty Officer Taff Evans, ship’s doctor Dr Edward Wilson, Lieutenant Henry Bowers and Captain Lawrence Oates step forward for their place in the narrative, the reader is gripped by the the characters themselves alongside the vividly evoked period.