Weidenfeld & Nicolson Sophie's World Гордер Юстейн

When 14-year-old Sophie encounters a mysterious mentor who introduces her to philosophy, mysteries deepen in her own life. Why does she keep getting postcards addressed to another girl? Who is the other girl? And who, for that matter, is Sophie herself? To solve the riddle, she uses her new knowledge of philosophy, but the truth is far stranger than she could have imagined • We are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference between us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick

A worldwide bestseller since its publication, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, struggling writer and illegitimate son of Jenny Fields - an unlikely feminist heroine ahead of her time • Beautifully written, The World According To Garp is a powerfully compelling and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation

Jakop is a lonely man • Divorced from his wife, with no friends apart from his constant companion Pelle, he spends his life attending the funerals of people he doesn't know, obscuring his identity in a web of improbable lies • As his addiction spirals out of control, he is forced to reconcile his love of language and stories with the ever more urgent need for human connection • An Unreliable Man is a moving and thought-provoking novel about loneliness and truth, about seeking a place in the world, and about how storytelling gives our lives meaning

Words are under threat • It's time to fight back • Imagine a world without words • A world in which books, libraries and newspapers are things of the past • A world where personal devices provide all you could want or need • Anana Johnson and her father, Doug, are hard at work on the final edition that will ever be printed of the English Dictionary. But one evening, Doug disappears and Anana unearths a single written clue: ALICE • In the battle to save her father, Anana discovers secret societies, dark incinerator rooms and underground passages • Above all, she finds a world that faces ruin from the dark side of technology

Welcome to a world where every desire is visible, rising from the body as a plume of Smoke. A world where bodies speak to one another and infect each other with desire, anger, greed. It is 1909 and this world stands on a precipice - some celebrate this constant whisper of skin to skin, and some seek to silence it forever • Enter Eleanor, a young woman with a strange power over Smoke and niece of the Lord Protector of England. Running from her uncle and home, she finds shelter in a New York theatre troupe • Then Nil, a thief hiding behind a self-effacing name. He's an orphan snatched from a jungle-home and suspects that a clue to his origins may lie hidden in the vaults of the mighty, newly-risen East India Company • And finally Thomas, one of the three people to release Smoke into the world

Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married several times, she has lived a life full of exploration. Now, as she begins to feel the first ravages of age, she wants to find a new sense of meaning. She leaves her lover Yolo on a journey down the Colorado River - a journey that will force her to re-explore her past and her future, and her connection to the real world. On her travels she meets shamans and the mysterious spiritual world of the native Indian. Yolo too begins his own journey as he travels to Hawaii and meets a former lover whose life is being destroyed by the excesses of American society. As Kate and Yolo gain shifting insights into the world around them, will their paths diverge or lead back to each other? This is a novel very much in tune with the zeitgeist - Alice Walker argues that we need to look inwards and develop a more open attitude in order to combat the pervasive climate of fear and distrust

Janet is sad. And she's quite happy with that. But the world has other plans... Sad Janet introduces a hilarious, provocative new voice in literary fiction • A whip-smart black comedy for fans of The New Me and My Year of Rest and Relaxation • Meet Janet. Janet is sad. Not about her life, about the world. Have you seen it these days? • The thing is, she's not out to make anyone else sad. She's not turning up to weddings shouting that most marriages end in divorce. She just wants to wear her giant coat, get rid of her passive-aggressive boyfriend, and avoid human interaction at the rundown dog shelter where she works • That is, until word spreads about a new pill that promises cynics like her one day off from being sad. When her family stages an intervention, and the prospect of making it through Christmas alone seems like too much, Janet finally decides to give them what they want

'The laws of Smoke are complex. Not every lie will trigger it. A fleeting thought of evil may pass unseen. Next thing you know its smell is in your nose. There is no more hateful smell in the world than the smell of Smoke...' • Smoke opens in a private boarding school near Oxford, but history has not followed the path known to us. In this other past, sin appears as smoke on the body and soot on the clothes. Children are born carrying the seeds of evil within them. The ruling elite have learned to control their desires and contain their sin. They are spotless. It is within the closeted world of this school that the sons of the wealthy and well-connected are trained as future leaders. Among their number are two boys, Thomas and Charlie. On a trip to London, a forbidden city shrouded in smoke and darkness, the boys will witness an event that will make them question everything they have been told about the past

It all began with the whale • When a young man washes up on the sands of St Piran in Cornwall, it is clear to the villagers that this is not a regular day. What has brought him here? And what is the crisis only he understands, that threatens not only their community but all of civilisation? • With a global pandemic on the horizon, and a whale lurking in the bay, the villagers of St Piran must band together to survive. Intimate, funny and heart-warming, John Ironmonger tells a compelling story about the important things that hold us together, and how hope can be found, even at the end of the world

A portrait painted in blood. A valley shrouded in secrecy. A woman fighting for her life • 'The Sleeping Nymph': a work of art of magnetic beauty, painted by a young partisan fighter during the last days of the Second World War. A painting carrying a shocking secret hidden in the red pigment on the canvas, made with the blood of a human heart • But whose heart? • There is no body, no confession. Only that faint trace of blood. And that's what leads commissioner Teresa Battaglia - herself hiding an unspeakable truth - to the Resia Valley, in the north eastern part of Italy: a perfect genetic enclave protected for centuries from the outside world • The valley and the portrait are the only clues for a murder that occurred more than 70 years before. A red thread leading to the shadow of someone hell-bent on protecting a sacred secret

The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold • The house lights lower • The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness • As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play • Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone • As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage

'For a while he watched the butterflies which still swooped and fluttered in this little glade, impervious to the bombs that had fallen round about.' • 1939: Walter Blackett, ruthless rubber merchant, is head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. And his family's prosperous world of tennis parties, cocktails and deferential servants seems unchanging. No one suspects it - but this world is poised on the edge of the abyss. This is the eve of the Fall of Singapore • A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip is a modern classic from a Booker prize-winning author