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The River At Green Knowe
Ida, Oscar and Ping are staying with Ida's great-aunt at the ancient, river-encircled house of Green Knowe. They set out to chart the river in the canoe, and soon discover that it has some surprising and mysterious secrets.
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The Land Of Green Ginger
When Prince Abu Ali, son of Aladdin, is born, his destiny has already been foretold: he is the one chosen to break the spell of the mysterious land of Green Ginger. His quest brings him into contact with flying carpets, button-nosed tortoises, magic phoenix birds - and two very villainous princes.
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The Museum Of Innocence
It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.’ And so begins the new novel from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name is Red, his first since winning the Nobel Prize. It is a perfect Spring in 1975, Istanbul. Kemal, heir to one of the town’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, from another aristocratic family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl, and a distant relation. As they break the taboo of virginity, a rift opens between Kemal and his lovingly described world of the westernized families of Istanbul with their opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, dining-room rituals, picnics, their mansions on the Bosphorus infused with the melancholy of decay. For nine years Kemal will find excuses to visit the other Istanbul, a house in the impoverished backstreets that Füsun shares with her parents, enjoying the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His love for his distant relative will take him to the seedy film circles of Istanbul, cheap bars, sad hotels, a society of small men with big dreams and bitter failures. It will make Kemal a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his love story and his obsessive heart’s reactions: his anger and impatience, his remorse and humiliation, his miscalculated hopes of recovery, and his daydreams that transform his Istanbul into a city of signs and spectres of his beloved with whom he can only exchange meaning-laden glances, stolen kisses in cars, movie houses and park shadows. All that will remain to him, certainly and eternally, is the museum he creates, a map of a society’s rituals and mores, and of one man’s broken heart. A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment, and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half western and half traditional - its rituals, its morality, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.
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Family Matters
Nariman Vakeel is a seventy-nine-year-old Parsi widower beset by Parkinson's disease and haunted by memories of the past. He lives with his two middle-aged step-children. When Nariman's illness is compunded by a broken ankle, he's forced to take up residence with his daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad and their two young sons. This new responsibility for Yezad, who is already besieged by financial worries, proves too much and pushes him into a scheme of deception - with devastating consequences. Wise and compassionate, Family Matters has all the richness, the gentle humour and the narrative sweep that have earned Rohinton Mistry the highest accolades.
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Something To Tell You
amal Khan, a psychoanalyst in his fifties living in London, is haunted by memories of his teens: his first love, Ajita; the exhilaration of sex, drugs and politics; and a brutal act of violence which changed his life for ever. As he and his best friend Henry attempt to make the sometimes painful, sometimes comic transition to their divorced middle age, balancing the conflicts of desire and dignity, Jamal's teenage traumas make a shocking return into his present life.
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Screwed
"What would you do for a fifty-quid bet? All I have to do is shag a certain boy.t's not as if I've never done it before - I'm no virgin. Sex is what I know - what I do. I thought I'd win this bet within a week. But how was I to know this was the one boy in the world who wanted a relationship rather than a one night stand? And how was I to know I'd end up wanting that too? "
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A Fine Balance
Set in mid-1970s India, A Fine Balance is a subtle and compelling narrative about four unlikely characters who come together in circumstances no one could have forseen, soon after the government declares a 'State of Internal Emergency'. It is a breathtaking achievement: panoramic yet humane, intensely political yet rich with local detail; and, above all, compulsively readable.
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Difficult Daughters
Set around the time of Partition and written with absorbing intelligence and sympathy, Difficult Daughters is the story of a woman torn between family duty, the desire for education, and illicit love. Virmati, a young woman born in Amritsar into an austere and high-minded household, falls in love with a neighbour, the Professor--a man who is already married. That the Professor eventually marries Virmati, installs her in his home (alongside his furious first wife) and helps her towards further studies in Lahore, is small consolation to her scandalised family. Or even to Virmati, who finds that the battle for her own independence has created irrevocable lines of partition and pain around her.