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The Dain Curse
€10,00di Dashiell Hammett
Miss Gabriel Dain Leggett is young and wealthy, with a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her. They die – violently. Is she the victim of a family curse? The short, squat, utterly unsentimental Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts and finds himself confronting something infinitely more dangerous. This is the Continental Op’s most bizarre case.
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Love
€10,00di Angela Carter
“One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.”
Annabel and Lee are married; Lee and Buzz are brothers. A quirky threesome, they have set up a household on the fringes on university life in the late sixties. Their hermetic existence is filled with drugs, sex, alchohol, intensity, and madness; their relationships with one another are haunting and complex.
Carter’s compelling tale carries echoes of Poe and Bronte into the very modern world of artists’ flats, psychiatrists’ offices, and generational conflicts. It is ultimately a tale of the search for loyalty and love in the midst of emotional starvation.
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Remembering Babylon
€10,00by David Malouf
A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the moment of its foundation, with early settlers staking out their small patch of land and terrified by the harsh and alien continent. Focussing on the hostility between the early British inhabitants and the native Aborigines. Remembering Bablyon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy who finds himself caught between the two worlds. Shot through with humour, and written with the poetic intensity that characterised Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, this is a novel of epic scope yet it is simple, compassionate and universal: a classic.
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Northanger Abbey
€9,00di Jane Austen
The Penguin English Library Edition of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen ‘To look almost pretty, is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life, than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive’ During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine’s love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father’s mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General Tilney. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and and optimistic of Jane Austen’s works. The Penguin English Library – 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.
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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
