Synopsis
Controversial and compelling, "In Cold Blood" reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. The book that made Capote's name, In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative.
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LATEST RECOMMENDATIONS
(New and not so new books to enjoy)
Paul Auster
The Brooklyn Follies
Synopsis
Nathan and Tom are an uncle and nephew double-act - one in remission from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter, the other hiding away from his once-promising academic career. Matters change when Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives...
Reviews
Herald
'A dark, deliciously funny novel, so good you never want it to end.'
New Statesman
'Auster at the top of his game. This superb novel about human folly turns out to be tremendously wise.'
Listen to an excerpt
Read an excerpt
Available in the library
Truman Capote
In Cold Blood
Available in the library
Tracy Chevalier
The
Lady and the Unicorn
Synopsis
The Lady
and the Unicorn tapestries are a set of six medieval tapestries. Beautiful,
intricate and expertly made, they are also mysterious in their origin
and meaning. Tapestries give an appearance of order and continuity, as
if designed and made by one person, belying the complicated process required
to create them. Weavers, patrons, designers, artists, merchants and apprentices
were involved in their making, and behind them were the wives, daughters
and servants who exercised influences over their men. Like the many strands
of wool and silk woven together into one cloth, so these people came together
in a complex dance to create the whole picture. Jean le Viste, a newly
wealthy member of the French court, commissions the tapestries to hang
in his chateau. Nicolas, his chosen designer, meets le Viste's wife Genevieve
and his daughter Claude, both of whom take a keen interest in the tapestries.
Guardian
'The Lady and the Unicorn will perhaps eclipse Pearl Earring.’
Daily Mail
'Her helter-skelter dialogue has a lot of charm and wit'.
Available in the library
Jonathan Coe
The Closed Circle
Synopsis
Set against the backdrop of the Millenium celebrations and Britain's increasingly
compromised role in America's war against terrorism', The Closed Circle
lifts the lid on an era in which politics and presentation, ideology and
the media have become virtually indistinguishable. Darkly comic, hugely
engaging, and compulsively readable, it is the much-anticipated follow-up
to Jonathan Coe's bestselling novel The Rotters' Club, and reintroduces
us to the characters first encountered in that book. But whereas The Rotters'
Club was a novel of innocence, The Closed Circle is its opposite: a novel
of experience.
Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Synopsis
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery
novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone.
Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows
a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves
lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and
being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his
own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying
journey which will turn his whole world upside down.
Available
in the library
Zoë Heller
Notes on a Scandal
Synopsis
When Sheba arrives Barbara senses that she will be different from the
rest of her staff-room colleagues. Sure enough Sheba starts an affair
with a pupil and is caught. When all the dust settles and Sheba's life
falls apart, Barbara is there for her even if she can't condone her sexual
behaviour.
Alan Hollinghurst
The Line of Beauty
Book Description
It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest has moved into an attic
room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new
Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby - whom
Nick had idolized at Oxford - and Catherine, always standing at a critical
angle to the family and its assumptions and ambitions.
As the Thatcher boom-years unfold, Nick, an innocent in the worlds of
politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of the
glamorous family he is entangled with. Two vividly contrasting love-affairs,
with a young black clerk and a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers
and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling
to him as that of power and riches to his friends.
Starting at the moment The Swimming-Pool Library ended, The Line of Beauty
traces the further history of a decade of change and tragedy. Richly textured,
emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, it is a major work by one of the
finest writers in the English language.
Reviews
Observer
A classic of our times… The work of a great English stylist in full
maturity; a masterpiece.
Daily Telegraph
A magnificent novel... There are literally thousands of impeccably nuanced
touches.
Financial Times
Must rank among the funniest [novels] ever written about Thatcher's Britain,
while remaining one of the most tragically sad.
The Times
Luminous... [an] astonishingly Jamesian novel.
Available in the library
Nick Hornby
A Long Way down
Synopsis
Asks some of the big questions: about life and death, strangers and friendship,
love and pain, and whether a group of losers, and pizza, can really see
you through a long, dark night of the soul.
Available in the library
Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go
Synopsis
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there? It is only years later that Kathy, now aged 31, finally allows herself to yield to the pull of memory. What unfolds is the haunting story of how Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, slowly come to face the truth about their seemingly happy childhoods - and about their futures. Never Let Me Go is a uniquely moving novel, charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our lives.
Read an interview with the author.
Read an excerpt.
Available in the library
David Lodge
Author! Author
Synopsis
Framed by a dramatic and moving account of Henry James's last illness,
Author! Author! begins in the early 1880s, describing James's friendship
with the genial Punch artist, George Du Maurier, and his intimate but
problematic relationship with fellow American novelist Constance Fenimore
Woolson. At the end of the decade Henry, worried by the failure of his
books to sell, resolves to achieve fame and fortune as a playwright while
Du Maurier diversifies into writing novels. The consequences that ensue
mingle comedy, irony, pathos, and suspense. As Du Maurier's novel Trilby
becomes the bestseller of the century, Henry anxiously awaits the opening
night of his make-or-break play, Guy Domville. This event, on January
5, 1895, and its complex sequel form the climax to Lodge's absorbing novel.
Thronged with vividly drawn characters, some of them with famous names,
Author! Author! presents a fascinating panorama of literary and theatrical
life in late Victorian England. But at its heart is a portrait, rendered
with remarkable empathy, of a writer who never achieved popular success
in his lifetime or resolved his sexual identity, yet wrote some of the
greatest novels about love in the English language.
Ian McEwan
Saturday
Synopsis
Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and proud father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world - the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city and his happy family life are under threat. Later, Perowne makes his way to his weekly squash game through London streets filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors. A minor car accident brings him into a confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive, young man, on the edge of violence. To Perowne's professional eye, there appears to be something profoundly wrong with him. Towards the end of a day rich in incident and filled with Perowne's celebrations of life's pleasures, his family gathers for a reunion. But with the sudden appearance of Baxter, Perowne's earlier fears seem about to be realised.
Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood
Synopsis
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
Peter Robinson
In a Dry Season
Synopsis
During a blistering summer, drought has depleted Thornfield Reservoir, uncovering the remains of a small village called Hobb's End - hidden from view for over 40 years. For a curious young boy this resurfaced hamlet has become a magical playground ...until he unearths a human skeleton. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is given the impossible task of identifying the victim - a woman who lived in a place that no longer exists, whose former residents are scattered to the winds. Anyone else might throw in the towel but Banks sets out to uncover the murky past buried beneath a flood of time...
'A WONDERFUL NOVEL' Michael Connelly
Diane Setterfield
The Thirteenth Tale
Synopsis
Vida Winter, a bestselling yet reclusive novelist, has created many outlandish life histories for herself, all of them invention. Now old and ailing, at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. Her letter to biographer Margaret Lea - a woman with secrets of her own - is a summons. Vida's tale is one of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family: the beautiful and wilful Isabelle and the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling, but as a biographer she deals in fact not fiction and she doesn't trust Vida's account. As she begins her researches, two parallel stories unfold. Join Margaret as she begins her journey to the truth - hers, as well as Vida's.
Read reviews here
Zadie Smith
On Beauty
Synopsis
Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman
abroad and a long-suffering Professor at Wellington College. He has been
married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles
the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue
their own paths, and faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children,
Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no
clear plans for the finale. Then Jerome, Howard's oldest son, falls for
Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps. Increasingly,
the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner
of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background
of real wars that they barely register...