Vintage books Beyond A Boundary James C. L. R

As a child Ludo is plucked out of the shantytown where he was born and transported to a world of languid, cosseted luxury. Now twenty-seven, he works high above the above the sprawling metropolis of Sao Paulo for a vacuous 'communications company'. But this is not his world, and this is not a simple rags-to-riches story: Ludo's destiny moves him around like a chess piece, showing him both extremities of opulent excess and abject poverty, taking him to the brink of madness and brutality • By the author of The Amnesia Clinic and winner of the Somerset Maugham Award

Upstate is a funny, moving family drama from one of the world’s most influential literary critics • Alan Querry, a successful property developer from the north of England, has two daughters: Vanessa, a philosopher who lives and teaches in Saratoga Springs, NY, and Helen, a record company executive based in London. The sisters never quite recovered from their parents’ bitter divorce and the early death of their mother, with Vanessa particularly affected, and plagued by bouts of depression since her teenage years • When she suffers a new crisis, Alan and Helen travel to Saratoga Springs. Over the course of six wintry days in upstate New York, the Querry family begins to struggle with the questions that animate this profound and searching novel: Why do some people find living so much harder than others? • Rich in subtle human insight, and vivid with a sense of place, Upstate is a perceptive, intensely poignant novel

It is 1969 and James Bond is about to go solo, recklessly motivated by revenge • A seasoned veteran of the service, 007 is sent to single-handedly stop a civil war in the small West African nation of Zanzarim. Aided by a beautiful accomplice and hindered by the local militia, he undergoes a scarring experience which compels him to ignore M’s orders in pursuit of his own brand of justice. Bond’s renegade action leads him to Washington, D.C., where he discovers a web of intrigue and witnesses fresh horrors • Even if Bond succeeds in exacting his revenge, a man with two faces will come to stalk his every waking moment

‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’ Richard Feynman wrote this in 1965 – the year he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work on quantum mechanics. Over the past decade, the enigma of quantum mechanics has come into sharper focus. We now realise that quantum mechanics is less about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information: about what can be known and how • The quantum world isn’t a different world: it is our world, and if anything deserves to be called ‘weird’, it’s us. This exhilarating book is about what quantum maths really means – and what it doesn’t mean

James and Katherine meet at a wedding in London in 2006, towards the end of the money for nothing years. James is a man with a varied past now living alone in a flat in Bloomsbury; Katherine is separated from her husband and working in an interim job in a luxury hotel. They exchange phone numbers at the wedding, but from then on not much goes according to the script

'There he was, his trunk wrapped in hers. Whatever hurt or sorrow befell him was not really happening to him. He was on the other bank with his mother. He was not here' • When a young elephant is brutally orphaned by poachers, he begins terrorising the countryside, earning his malevolent name, the Gravedigger, from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries with leaves. Manu, the studious son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger and is drawn into the alluring world of ivory hunting • Emma is working on a documentary set in a Kerala wildlife park with her best friend. Her work leads her to witness the porous boundary between conservation and corruption, until eventually she finds herself caught up in her own betrayal

What does it take to be a family? • Julia has fallen deeply, unexpectedly in love. James is her second chance, and everything she never knew she wanted. It’s perfect but for two things: their children • Julia’s beloved daughter Gwen loathes James and James’s son Nathan takes pleasure in antagonising his new stepsister. Uniting two households is never easy, but the teenagers’ unexpected actions will eventually threaten everyone’s hard-won happiness

A powerful and unique story about connection, showing that miracles can happen – even across a library circulation desk • The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-eight year old librarian Peggy Cort feels as if love and life have stood her up. That is, until the day James Carlson Sweatt – the 'over-tall' eleven year old boy who's the talk of the town – walks into her library and changes her life for ever • Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who's ever really understood her, and as he grows – six foot five at age twelve, then seven foot, then eight – so does their most singular romance

What would a fair and equal society actually look like? • Imagine a world with no banks. No stock market. No tech giants. No billionaires • In Another Now world-famous economist, Yanis Varoufakis, shows us what such a world would look like. Far from being a fantasy, he describes how it could have come about - and might yet. But would we really want it? • Varoufakis's boundary-breaking new book confounds expectations of what the good society would look like and confronts us with the greatest question: are we able to build a better society, despite our flaws

Eleven years old and on the cusp of puberty, Aron Kleinfeld is precocious, imaginative - the leader of his gang of friends. But his bar mitzvah is looming, his friends are all hitting puberty and Aron, terrified and revolted by what he sees around him, enters a state of arrested development. He stops growing, retreats from the world, and is imprisoned in the body of a child for three long years. While Israel inches towards the Six-Day War, and his friends cross the boundary between childhood and adolescence, Aron remains in his child's body, spying on the changes that adulthood wreaks as, like his hero Houdini, he struggles to escape the trap of growing up

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory, an enthralling, wrenching novel about the lives and choices of one family, caught on the cusp of identities • Jonah, Ruth and Joseph are the children of mixed-race parents determined to raise them beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. Yet they cannot be protected from the world forever • Even as Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, the opera arena remains fixated on his race. Ruth turns her back on classical music and disappears, dedicating herself to activism and a new relationship. As the years pass, Joseph – the middle child, a pianist and our narrator – must battle not just to remain connected to his siblings, but to forge a future of his own • This is a story of the tragedy of race in America, told through the lives and choices of one family caught on the cusp of identities

Genteel life at 'the 'Big House' continues while the Irish War of Independence rages beyond the gates, but for how long? • Read Elizabeth Bowen's accessible feminist take on the Irish aristocracy • WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VICTORIA GLENDINNING • The Irish troubles rage, but up at the 'Big House', tennis parties, dances and flirtations with the English officers continue, undisturbed by the ambushes, arrests and burning country beyond the gates. Faint vibrations of discord reach the young girl Lois, who is straining for her own freedom, and she will witness the troubles surge closer and reach their irrevocable, inevitable climax