Fiction

In a New York apartment, Isabel Raine is having breakfast with her husband. In Marcus Raine she thought she'd found the man she would be with for ever. But when she says goodbye to him that morning, little does she know that within 24 hours he'll have gone missing and life as she has known it for the past 5 years will be fractured beyond repair.

Udodi's death was the beginning of the raging storm but at that moment we thought that the worst had already happened, and that life would treat us with more kindness.

Adults is what you want it to be. A misadventure of maturity, a satire on our age of self-promotion, a tender look at the impossibility of womanhood, a love story, a riot. And Emma Jane Unsworth is the only voice to hear it from. Adults is excruciating, a gut punch of hilarity and a book laden with truth that you will read again and again.

When the three witches - now old, remarried and widowed - decide to go back to Eastwick to spend a summer together, many things have changed. Darryl Van Horne is gone. Their husbands and lovers have gone. The lithe and supple bodies with which they wrecked marriages and wreaked havoc many years before have gone.

It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job.

Fifty-six and overweight, Harry Rabbit Angstrom has a struggling business on his hands and a heart that is starting to fail. His family, too, is giving him cause for concern. His son is a wreck of a man and his wife has decided that she wants to be a working girl. He has to make the most of life. After all, he doesn't have much time left.

In 1969, the times are changing in America. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife leaves him, and suddenly, into his confused life comes Jill, a runaway who becomes his lover. But when she invites her friend to stay, a young black radical named Skeeter, the pair's fragile harmony soon begins to fail.

It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's ok, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out?

Newly revised by the author for this edition, and printed together in one volume for the first time, Updike's four Rabbit novels chronicle the history of a man and a nation from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The darkly beautiful autobiographical story of a childhood spent in the shadow of a domineering, abusive father.

September, 1939, and the worries of war follow Josephine Tey to Hollywood, where a different sort of battle is raging on the set of Hitchcock's Rebecca.