Granta Publication Lake Like a Mirror Ho Sok Fong

As politics slides toward impulsivity, and outrage bests rationality, how can philosophy help us critically engage with the world? • How to Think Like A Philosopher is a revelatory exploration of the methods, tenets and attitudes of thought that guide philosophy, and how they can be applied to our own lives • Drawing on decades of enquiry and a huge range of interviews, Julian Baggini identifies twelve key principles that promote incisive thinking. Pay attention; question everything; seek clarity, not certainty: these are just a few of philosophy’s guiding maxims which can be applied to everything from understanding the impact of climate change to correctly appraising our own temperaments • Both a fresh introduction to philosophy covering canonical and contemporary philosophers, and an essential, practical guide to good thinking, How to Think Like a Philosopher shows us the way to a more humane, balanced and rational approach to thinking, to politics, and to life

In England half a century ago, well-brought-up young women are meant to aspire to the respectable life. Some things are not to be spoken of; some are most certainly not to be done. There are rules, conventions. Meg Bailey obeys them. She progresses from Home Counties school to un-Bohemian art college with few outward signs of passion or frustration. Her personality is submerged in polite routines; even with her best friend, Roxane, what can’t be said looms far larger than what can. But circumstances change. Meg gets a job and moves to London. Roxane gets married to a man picked out by her mother. And then Meg does something shocking – shocking not only by the standards of her time, but by our own. As sharp and startling now as when it was written, Don’t Look at Me Like That matches Diana Athill’s memoirs After a Funeral and Instead of a Letter in its gift for storytelling and its unflinching candour about love and betrayal

After a sudden, devastating loss, Mara flees her family and ends up adrift in a wealthy coastal town. Mired in her grief, Mara's first few days are spent alone, surviving on what scraps of food she can find, and swimming at night in the ocean. When her money runs out and the tourist season comes to a close, Mara finds a job in a local wine store and meets its owner, Simon, a man whose loneliness she immediately recognises as a mirror to her own. As Mara dances around her growing attraction to Simon, she is forced to reckon with both her present desires and her past errors, and with the compulsion she feels to both make and unmake herself • Tides is a spare, visceral portrait of a woman nearly pulled under by loss and desire. It is an unforgettable introduction to a debut writer of uncommon literary power

A young woman, Violet, lies in a hospital bed in the closing days of the war. Her pregnancy is over and she is no longer able to conceive. With her husband deployed to the Pacific Front and her friends caught up in transitory love affairs, she must find a way to put herself back together • In a small, watchful town in the Welsh valleys, another Violet contemplates the fate she shares with her unborn child. Unwed and unwanted, an overseas posting offers a temporary way out. Plunged into the heat and disorder of Naples, her body begins to reveal the responsibility it carries even as she is drawn into the burnished circle of a charismatic new friend, Maggie • Between these two Violets, sung into being like a babe in a nursery rhyme: a son. As their lives begin to intertwine, a spellbinding story of women’s courage emerges, suffused with power, lyricism and beauty, from an exhilarating new voice in British fiction

Twelve-year-old Robert hates his maths teacher: he sets his class boring problems and won’t let them use their calculators. Then in his dreams Robert meets the Number Devil, who brings the subject magically to life, illustrating with wit and charm a world in which numbers can amaze and fascinate, where maths is nothing like the dreary, difficult process that so many of us dread. The Number Devil knows how to make maths devilishly simple

The Mezzanine is the story of one man’s lunch hour. It addresses the big questions of corporate life, like: Why does one shoelace always wear out before the other? Whose genius lies behind the folding spout on the milk carton? Whatever happened to the paper drinking-straw? • Nicholson Baker’s hilarious debut novel documents the thoughts of an office worker as he day-dreams on the escalator, on his way to buy shoe-laces. Sparklingly original, intelligent and digressive, it paved the way for authors such as David Foster Wallace and Joshua Ferris and introduced one of the most controversial and acclaimed authors in America today

The Big Guy loves his family, money and democracy. Undone by the results of the 2008 presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of America. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family, and must take responsibility for his past actions. Closely guarded secrets surface when his wife Charlotte stops self-medicating to numb her emotions. And when eighteen-year-old Meghan votes for the first time, she awakens to the dissonance between her father’s expectations and her own dreams for the future • In a story as much about the dynamics of a family as the desire for power, A.M. Homes unpacks a dangerous rift in American identity, where words mean different things to different people, prompting a reconsideration of the definition of truth and freedom

Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital • She has learned to say this flatly and without emotion, the way she says her name (Marina), her doll’s name (also Marina) and her age (seven). Her parents were killed in a car crash and now she lives in the orphanage with the other little girls. But Marina is not like the other little girls • In the curious, hyperreal, feverishly serious world of childhood, Marina and the girls play games of desire and warfare. The daily rituals of playtime, lunchtime and bedtime are charged with a horror; horror is licked by the dark flames of love. When Marina introduces the girls to Marina the Doll, she sets in motion a chain of events from which there can be no release • With shades of Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro and Mariana Enriquez, Such Small Hands is a beautifully controlled tour-de-force, a bedtime story to keep readers awake

This novella, one of the most haunting things that Joseph Roth ever composed, was published in 1939, the year the author died. Like Andreas, the hero of the story, Roth drank himself to death in Paris, but this is not an autobiographical confession. Rather, it is a secular miracle-tale, in which the vagrant Andreas, after living under bridges, has a surprising run of good luck that changes his circumstances profoundly. The novella is extraordinarily compressed, dry-eyed and witty, despite its melancholic subject matter

Lyrical, dark, comic or iconoclastic, the Irish short story has always punched well above its weight. Anne Enright has brought together a dazzling collection of Irish stories by authors born in the twentieth century – from Mary Lavin and Frank O’Connor to Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry. With a pithy and passionate introduction by Enright, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story traces this great tradition through decades of social change and shows the pleasure Irish writers continue to take in the short-story form. Deft and often devastating, the short story dodges the rolling mythologies of of Irish life to produce truths that are delightful and real • Also includes stories by: Maeve Brennan, Roddy Doyle, Mary Lavin, Colum McCann, William Trevor, John McGahern, Colm Toibin, Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry

Haroun's father is the greatest of all storyletters. His magical stories bring laughter to the sad city of Alifbay. But one day something goes wrong and his father runs out of stories to tell. Haroun is determined to return the storyteller's gift to his father. So he flies off on the back of the Hoopie bird to the Sea of Stories - and a fantastic adventure begins

This Book Will Save Your Life is an uplifting story about one man's efforts to bring himself back to life • Richard is a modern-day everyman, a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home in Los Angeles who needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time a wide sinkhole appears outside his living-room window, threatening the foundations of his house. A vivid novel about compassion and transformation, This Book Will Save Your Life reveals what can happen if you are willing to open yourself up to the world around you • Since her debut in 1989, A. M