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A passage to India
€13,65di E.M. Forster
When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the ‘real India’, they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rouses violent passions among both the British and their Indian subjects. A masterly portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India compellingly depicts the fate of individuals caught between the great political and cultural conflicts of the modern world.
A Passage to India, written by E.M. Forster and published in 1924, is one of the most acclaimed novels in English literature. Set against the backdrop of British colonial India, the novel explores complex themes such as colonialism, racial prejudice, cultural misunderstandings, and the challenges of communication between East and West.
Through vivid characters and evocative storytelling, Forster highlights the social and political tensions of the era, delivering a nuanced critique of British imperialism and its impacts. The narrative balances moments of humor, tragedy, and profound philosophical reflection, making it a timeless masterpiece.
This novel is ideal for lovers of classic literature, students of British colonial history, and anyone interested in cross-cultural relationships and postcolonial studies.
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A Question of Power
€15,25di Bessie Head
In this semi-autobiographical novel, Head tracks the protagonist Elizabeth’s struggle to emerge from the oppressive social situation in which she finds herself, and from the nightmares and hallucinations that torment her.
Elizabeth, like the author, was conceived in an out-of-wedlock union between a black man and a white woman of social standing – a union outlawed by her country of birth, South Africa. Elizabeth leaves South Africa with her young son to live in Botswana, a country that has escaped some of the worst evils of colonial domination. But in rural Botswana she is once again faced with a constricting social system as the villagers are suspicious of her urban ways and frown upon her individualistic behaviour. They also bear her ill will on racial grounds because she is light skinned like the ‘Bushmen’ who are a despised tribe there.
Elizabeth suffers not only social isolation but intellectual deprivation as well. One of the few people with whom she can converse as an intellectual equal is the American peace corps volunteer, Tom. During the four years in which Elizabeth is plagued by mental, social and economic challenges, it is Tom, and her own love for and obligation to her young son that help her to survive this ordeal.
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Age of Iron
€13,50by J.M. Coetzee
Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee tells the remarkable story of a nation gripped in brutal apartheid in his Sunday Express Book of the Year award-winner Age of Iron.
In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange and disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies and the brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face to face with its true horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant’s son, the burning of a nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man who one day appears on her doorstep.
In Age of Iron, J. M. Coetzee brings his searing insight and masterful control of language to bear on one of the darkest episodes of our times.
‘Quite simply a magnificent and unforgettable work’ Daily Telegraph
‘A superbly realized novel whose truth cuts to the bone’ The New York Times
‘A remarkable work by a brilliant writer’ Wall Street Journal
South African author J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice for his novels Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K. His novel, Foe, an exquisite reinvention of the story of Robinson Crusoe is also available in Penguin paperback.
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Angels & Insects
€12,00di A.S. Byatt
Like A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, these two mesmerising novellas are set in the nineteenth century. In Morpho Eugenia, an explorer realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In The Conjugal Angel, curious individuals – some fictional, others drawn from history – gather to connect with the spirit world. Throughout both, Byatt examines the eccentricities of the Victorian era, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance, science and faith into a sumptuous, magical tapestry.
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Black Skin, White Masks
€17,00di Frantz Fanon
First published in English in 1968, Frantz Fanon’s seminal text was immediately acclaimed as a classic of black liberationalist writing. Fanon’s descriptions of the feelings of inadequacy and dependence experienced by people of colour in a white world are as salient and as compelling as ever. Fanon identifies a devastating pathology at the heart of Western culture, a denial of difference, that persists to this day. His writings speak to all who continue the struggle for political and cultural liberation in our troubled times.
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Boonrod
€12,00by Paola Tonussi
Boonrod is a creature born on the street in Thailand and destined for a vagabond’s life. Everything changes for him thanks to a chance meeting with the boy Atid, who gives him love and a real home. A perfect mutual understanding soon grows between them, a friendship coloured by a sort of nostalgia, suspended, as in a fairy-story, between the enchantment of childhood and the lush beauty of the tropical landscape. This happy interlude comes to an abrupt end when Boonrod, once more on his own, must confront pain and anguish, cruelty and death. Salvation comes at the eleventh hour and he will be given the chance of starting over again, with a new life. “Paola Tonussi, with her writer’s sensibility and sure poetic touch, has succeeded in rendering not only the extraordinary love story that those who share their lives with a dog know well; but also – and astonishingly – to describe through the eyes of ‘man’s best friend’ himself the suffering and atrocity of the DMT, that every year is responsible in China and Korea for the massacre of millions of innocent and vulnerable creatures, snared, tortured and killed to finish on the tables of the grossest form of oriental traditionalism. Paola’s is then a book that scores doubly. Because she extracts from the devotion that has always united men and their dogs a unique voice, that anatomizes the full range of unconditional affection, the courage of bearing witness and the hope of salvation”. (Maria Grazia Filippi, journalist) “a poetic and terrible tale” (Sergio Frigo, writer)
Also available in Italian
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Castle Rackrent
€7,75di Maria Edgeworth
During the 1790s with Ireland in political crisis Maria Edgeworth made a surprisingly rebellious choice in Castle Rackrent her first novel she adopted an Irish Catholic voice to narrate the decline of a family from her own Anglo Irish class Castle Rackrent s narrator Thady Quirk givesus four generations of Rackrent heirs Sir Patrick the dissipated spendthrift Sir Murtagh the litigating fiend Sir Kit the brutal husband and gambling absentee and Sir Condy the lovable and improvident dupe of Thady s own son Jason With this satire on Anglo Irish landlords Edgeworth pioneered the regional novel and inspired Sir Walter Scott s Waverly 1814 She also changed the focus of conflict in Ireland from religion to class and boldly predicted the rise of the Irish Catholic Bourgeoisie With her satire on Anglo Irish landlords in Castle Rackrent 1800 Maria Edgeworth pioneered the regional novel and inspired Sir Walter Scott s Waverley 1814 Politically risky stylistically innovative and wonderfully entertaining the novel changes the focus of conflict in Ireland from religion to class and boldly predicts the rise of the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie
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Castle Rackrent and Ennui
€14,00di Maria Edgeworth
Thady Quirk, devoted steward to the decaying estate of the Rackrent family, narrates a riotous story of four generations of a dying dynasty in Castle Rackrent (1800). Thady will defend his masters to the end, but eventually his naivety and blind loyalty cause him to ignore the warning signs as the family’s excesses lead them to ruin. This volume also includes Ennui, the entertaining ‘confessions’ of the Earl of Glenthorn, a bored, spoiled aristocrat. Desperate to be free from ‘the demon of ennui’, Glenthorn’s quest for happiness takes him through violence and revolution, and leads to intriguing twists of fate. Both novels offer a darkly comic and satirical exposé of the Irish class system, and a portrait of a nation in turmoil.
