Narrative theme: Sense of place Books

‘Absolutely brilliant… An exceptionally exciting, mysterious book – we both loved it’  Richard & JudyIt all happens so quickly. One day you're living the dream, commuting to work by riverbus with your charismatic neighbour Kit in the seat beside...

The multi-million copy selling, international bestsellerKim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is the South Korean sensation that has got the whole world talking. The life story of one young woman born at the end of the twentieth century raises questions about endemic...

'Delightful' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY   Can she find it in her heart to let go before it’s too late?As her daughter grows up, Ave Maria can’t help but feel time is slipping through her fingers. Her friends in Big Stone Gap are going through major...

‘One of my all-time favourite novels’ WHOOPI GOLDBERG ‘Funny, charming and original’ FANNIE FLAGG, author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café   How do you face the future when the past won’t let you go?Big Stone Gap is a sleepy...

'Trigiani is a wonderful storyteller... Readers will enjoy Big Cherry Holler immensely' USA TODAYHow do you move forward if you’ve already lost your way?   It's been eight years since town pharmacist and self-proclaimed spinster Ave...

A gorgeous read full of hope, warmth and heartfelt emotion from the Sunday Times bestselling author ​‘The feeling you get when you read a Milly Johnson book should be bottled and made available on the NHS’ Debbie JohnsonLaurie and Pete...

THE ISLES OF SCILLY MYSTERIES # 1‘Gripping, clever and impossible to put down' ERIN KELLYDI Ben Kitto needs a second chance. After ten years working for the murder squad in London, a traumatic event has left him grief-stricken. He’s tried to resign...

The slow-burning, deeply felt story of a social outcast reckoning with the wounds of her past.Regina is a socially awkward loner content to live a life withdrawn from everyone except her cherished pet bunny. But after seven years of silence, Regina's...

"A literary pulp fiction that flays and skewers post-Millennial New York and along the way reinvents the American detective novel." -Evan Wright,New York Timesbestselling authorHarry Bloch is a ghost-ghostwriter, that is. He's the man behind your...

An addictive and cozy crime novel about female rage.Diana Parks is a beautician with a temper, and she's not the only member of Ottersea WI who's had enough of bullies and slimeballs. When the body of lecherous landlord Raj Sumal washes up on the beach,...

A debut English-language collection of hopeful and carefully attentive poems by one of South Korea's most lauded young poets.This collection offers a selection of poems from Sin Yong Mok's earlier collections, intended to serve as an illustration of his...

Raised in a conservative Christian home in the East Coast of Canada, Mag is urged to preserve her purity at all costs. Desperate to secure her place in heaven, she rejects the hyper-sexual youth culture of her small town-until she falls for a magnetic,...

Profound, perceptive, and wryly observed, Estates Large and Smallis the story of one man's reckoning and an ardent defence of the shape books make in a life.What decades of rent increases and declining readership couldn't do, a pandemic finally did: Phil...

The celebrated, National Book Award-winning, translation of Baudelaire's masterpiece. "It is the English edition to acquire."-Washington PostPulitzer Prize winning poet and translator, Richard Howard, gives readers the true voice of Baudelaire in this...

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, Cassie is trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses and unethical projects, she struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth...

Julian Tepper's fourth novel, Cooler Heads, is a story about modern love. With a triangulation of lovers and spouses, young children and careers struggling to get off the ground, in Celia and Paul we encounter two people in that pocket of life when the...

Beleth Station has seen better days, days long since lost to time.A tiny dot on the map beyond a two-hour drive to any one city. It's a forgotten place to all except the unfortunate souls who were born there, folks who are barely hanging on and will...

The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family's roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion-both toward and away from us-and...

Rapturously received by critics and enthusiastically embraced by readers, The Great Leader is an enthralling, blackly comic take on the detective story that follows a retired detective in hilarious and bold pursuit of a sinister cult leader. Detective...

Against a backdrop of vast geological time and recent fossil-fuel burning history, the poems of Katrina Porteous's latest collection address current issues of social and environmental change. 330 million years ago what is now the rocky shore close to...

Winner of the 2023 Prix Mdicis, Prix Dcembre, and Prix RinguetCline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead...

From Minrose Gwin, award-winning author ofThe Accidentals, comesBeautiful Dreamers,a story of a precocious teen and her mother, their gay best friend, and the con man who unravels their family.It's 1953 when Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, are...

As teenagers, Helen, Annie and Laura were inseparable, bonding over family, boys and their dreams for the future. But when school ended, so did their friendship. Twenty-five years later, a snowstorm forces the three women to spend time together, leaving...

A taut, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life. "Dawn Lundy Martin's poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can't do," writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions...

Written with keen perception and insatiable curiosity, Chris Nealon's fifth book of poetry,All About You, is both a study of personhood and a diary of release from it."You almost let your ego go," he writes, "but oh-/maybe tomorrow." Revolving through...

Competition for a bridal magazine cover unleashes mayhem, forcing a mastermind maid of honour to stop being a people pleaser and start figuring out what she wants out of life. A hilarious, smart coming-of-age story.Olivia 'Liv'...

For fans of Americana music and a beer after mowing the lawn,The Last Saturday in Americaconfronts the long shadow of Southern masculinity.The Last Saturday in Americais set in a nation on the precipice of great change. Through examinations of suburban...

From prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin comes the contemplative, superbly-crafted story of a woman scapegoated by sudden tragedy, and the unexpected paths she must wander in search of redemption.Haesoo is a successful therapist and regular guest on...

Selected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of history's most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us.Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line...

I Think We're Alone Now is a bold and far-ranging second collection from a fresh and original new voice in British poetry.This was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective...

Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristjn Norge, who vanished from Eilean a' Bhis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished...

New York Times Best Thriller of 2023New York Times Editors' Pick 2023For seventeen years, small-town public defender Andy Hughes has been underpaid to look after the poor, the addicted, and the unfortunate souls who constantly cycle through the courts,...

From church barn to apple orchard, from snow-covered pasture to secret moonshine cabin, Manning's Snakedoctor reinvigorates the Kentucky pastoral through poems that find light in shadow, good in evil, love in a father's stinging blow.Maurice Manning...

"The novel is a quiet but strong tour de force."~Marly Swick, author of Evening News: A Novel1992. Tyler Manning- high school teacher, part-time farmer, bachelor of 38-is planning his first day of summer vacation when a strange car approaches his Kansas...

Perfect for fans of Emily Giffin and Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Palace at Dusk explores the complexity of love in an illicit office romance.Harvard-educated corporate attorney Jasmine "Jae" Phillips promised herself that she wouldn't date anyone at the...

What came first in this Gothic Western, the ghosts orThe Black Tree Atop the Hill?Set in an alternate American old-west that is hauntingly familiar yet strangely off-putting, Marisol is the first to see the tree on the hill, but that's only to be...

Bad Foundationsis a comedic absurdist novel about a home foundation inspector whose own home life is falling apart.Cook does not have an ordinary job. He spends his days inspecting people's crawl spaces, cataloging their filth and photographing the decay...

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky'sThe Shiningis an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape.Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel,both realized and imagined,...

I Could Read the Sky is a collaboration, in the shape of a lyrical novel, between writer Timothy O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke.It tells the story of a man coming of age in the middle of this century. Now at its end, he finds himself alone,...

Written by Germany's #1 bestselling author Juli Zeh, About People takes place in the middle of lockdown in spring 2020 and subtly describes the social and very private consequences of the pandemic.Fleeing stay-at-home orders in the big city,...

Burmese poet Maung Day's ninth book of poems but his first full-length collection written in English, Death in Summer is a haunting, surreal series of prose poems and original ink drawings that delivers defiant social commentary on the atrocities of...

Navigating the uncertainty of a divided China wracked by warfare and corruption, Tao Yuanming's poetry-expertly translated by Red Pine-chooses the path walked by China's ancient sages, finding joy in living a simple life. The latest work in Red Pine's...

With the Spanish flu pandemic on the rise, a former gold rush town- once the largest city in the Pacific Northwest- is threatened with extinction via eminent domain should their population fall below 125 citizens. To save their homes, former madam Maude...

"... Take the leap: fall in love with Jazz, with Serena, with Fletch, with Rocky maybe even with a ball python or a dusky pygmy rattler." ~ Laura McBride, author of We Are Called to Rise and In the Midnight RoomThe theft of Trina Leigh Dean's beloved...

The novels O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My ntonia made Willa Cather's reputation and, though published separately, are nowstudied together as Willa Cather's Great Plains Trilogy. These three novels, set in Nebraska and Colorado, cemented...

In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow,...

Daniel Zimmer will do almost anything to end his pain-except for the one thing that might work.Growing up in 1970s Brooklyn under the shadow of his tyrannical father and against the backdrop of the Son of Sam murders, the Karen Ann Quinlan tragedy, and...