HAPPY BARGAIN BOOK GIFT HUNTING 70339 CASSANDRA AND
JANE: A Jane Austen Novel by Jill Pitkeathley
They were beloved sisters and the best of friends. Yet Jane and Cassandra Austen suffered the same fate as many of the women of their era. Forced to spend their lives dependent on relatives, both financially and emotionally, the sisters spent their time together trading secrets, challenging each
other’s opinions, and rehearsing the myriad of domestic dramas that Jane would later bring to fruition in her popular novels. For each sister suffered through painful romantic disappointments - tasting passion, knowing great love and then losing it - while the other stood witness. Upon Jane’s death, Cassandra deliberately destroyed her personal letters. Here the author Jill Pitkeathley ingeniously re-imagines the unique and intimate relationship between two extraordinary siblings. 270pp in paperback. £9.95 NOW £3.50
70348 DEAREST COUSIN
JANE: A Jane Austen Novel by Jill Pitkeathley Drawing on historical fact, the author paints a luminous portrait of the true-life cousin of a literary legend, from her flirtatious younger years to her profound influence on Jane Austen. Outrageous, precocious, free spirited and seductive, Countess Eliza de Feuillide has an unquenchable thirst for life. Rumoured to have been
born of a mad love affair between her mother and the great Warren Hastings of the East India Company, Eliza sees her world as her playground, filled with grand galas, theatre and romance. Losing her only child at an early age and widowed when her husband, a dashing French Count, is claimed by the guillotine during the dark days of the Reign of Terror, Eliza is determined to remain unfettered. 276pp in paperback. Remainder mark. £9.99 NOW £4
68445 GRAND AFFAIR by Charlotte Bingham Unaware of the misery that surrounded her birth, for the first four years of her life, all Ottilie Cartaret knows is love. When she is moved to Cornwall, their fortunes seem set fair. Tragedy strikes when her mother dies and young Ottilie finds herself in unfamiliar surroundings, adopted by the Cartarets. They are a wealthy couple who run the Grand Hotel and she grows up spoilt by all the visitors, with the exception of the mysterious annual guest nicknamed ‘Blue Lady’, with whom Ottilie is unknowingly and inextricably linked. But the regulars of the now decaying hotel die off and the family are unable to adapt to modern ways. Only Ottilie has the means to save the Grand, even though she may sacrifice too much of herself. 479pp in paperback. £6.99 NOW £2.50
69044 LAST STATION by Jay Parini This is an unforgettable portrait of Russia on the cusp of revolution. 1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world’s most famous author, but fame comes at a price. In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find respite, so he leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believed his last days would pass in peaceful isolation. But the battle for Tolstoy’s soul will not be so simple. 372pp in paperback. £8.99 NOW £1.50
70017 BLUE MOVIE by Terry Southern
Fuelled by drugs, monstrous egos and rampant libidos, the novel is a hilarious, wildly erotic and biting satire on Hollywood. Terry Southern was one of the most famous writers of the 1960s and was screenwriter of Easy Rider and Barbarella amongst others. He was also a novelist and counterculture legend. He died in 1995. King B is
the Oscar winning director who has filmed everything. Sid Krassman is the producer who has never underestimated the lowest paid of the American public. Angela Sterling is the sex symbol who wants to do something ‘serious’. Together they are determined to film the dirtiest and most expensive pornographic movie ever. 256pp in paperback, facsimile reprint of the 1970 orginal.
£10 NOW £3.50 69308 THE VAMPYRE, THE WEREWOLF AND
OTHER GOTHIC TALES OF HORROR by John Polidori and others
A 19th century medley of the macabre, here are seven blood-chilling tales. The story begins as a gentleman travelling in Greece falls in love with a local beauty. When she warns him of vampires, he scoffs at her fears, until he is caught in the forest one night and finds someone at his throat. This fiendishly good collection continues with Clemence Houseman’s The Werewolf, in which a white-robed maiden with a thirst for blood encounters twin brothers and executes a diabolical plan. Other tales include Monos and Daimonos, The Curse and The Victim. 118pp in bargain softback. £6.99 NOW £3
69423 WICKED COMPANY by Ciji Ware In the 18th century, the glamorous Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres were all the rage, beckoning every young actor and playwright with the lure of fame and fortune. But competition and back-biting between theatre owners, patrons, actors and writers left aspiring playwrights with their work stolen, profits withheld and reputations on the line. For a woman, things were harder still, as the chances of a ‘petticoat playwright’ getting past the government censor were slim. In this exciting and cutthroat world, Sophie, a young woman with a talent for writing, could lose all in the blink of an eye. Can she possibly succeed? 609 paperback pages. £11.99 NOW £2.50
69456 DEVIL MAY CARE: The New James
Bond Novel by Sebastian Faulks Writing as Ian Fleming, the popular novelist has been a self-confessed Bond fan since school days. ‘It was a wet
evening in Paris. On the slate roofs of the big boulevards and on the small mansards of the Latin Quarter, the rain kept up a ceaseless patter…Yusuf Hashim was sheltered by the walkway above him…after six years of fighting the French in Algeria, he had finally cut and run.’ It is great to see James Bond back in another fabulous adventure featuring his love of beautiful women, good food, travel, cars and this story is set in the area defined by the map at the beginning of the book covering the USSR and south to Persia (Iran). 284pp in paperback. $14 NOW £4.50
69513 THE APPOINTMENT by Herta Müller A brooding allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolai Ceausescu. It tells of one day in the life of a young clothing factory worker summoned by the regime. She has been questioned before, but this time believes it will be worse. And what is her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy. ‘Marry me’ the notes say, with her name and address - anything to get out of the country. Distracted, she finds herself on an unfamiliar street and what she discovers there puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective. 214pp in paperback. £12.99 NOW £3
69533 ZONE OF THE INTERIOR by Clancy Sigal
Reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, here is a spaced-out 60s anti-establishment novel. It tells the story of Sid Bell, an American political fugitive in London, who falls under the spell of Dr Willie Last, reminiscent of the radical ‘anti-psychiatrist’ R. D. Laing. This unlikely duo feast on LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, yoga, meditation, vegetarianism and psycho-babble, believing that only by self-injecting themselves with schizophrenia will they become true existentialist guerrillas. Softback, 360pp.
£9.99 NOW £2 69741 QUARTERED SAFE OUT HERE: A
Harrowing Tale of World War II by George MacDonald Fraser This compassionate, courageous account vividly describes the nerve-wracking, front-line action George MacDonald Fraser saw while serving as a 19-year-old soldier during what turned out to be the last great land campaign of World War II, that is, the British army’s ferocious battle against the Japanese in Burma. From a distressing and terrifying personal experience, here is a tale of great poignancy and excitement. 236 paperback pages with map, glossary and author’s note on the Cumbrian dialect. $14.95 NOW £4.50
70433 VINTAGE VAMPIRE STORIES
edited by Robert Eighteen- Bisang and Richard Dalby Here are rare vampire tales from the 19th and early 20th centuries collected for the first time in one volume. They include tales by Pu Songling, William H. G. Kingston, Mary Fortune, G. J. Whyte-Melville, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Professor P. Jones, R. Murray Gilchrist plus
the more famous Bram Stoker, Phil Robinson, Dick Donovan and Sabine Baring-Gould. The macabre tales were originally published from 1679-1909 and include Bram Stoker’s handwritten notes for Dracula (Count Vampire). 318pp in paperback. £9.99 NOW £4.50
69971 CHRIST THE LORD: The Road to Cana by Anne Rice
The story begins in the last winter of the ‘hidden years’, culminating with 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness. It concludes with a miracle - the turning of water into wine at the marriage in Cana. Whispers of a virgin birth have long surrounded Jesus. His brothers, mother and friends wait for some sign of the path he will take, some with impatience and others with incredulity. Both divine and human, he struggles with the demands of his family, the need for love and his overwhelming sense of destiny. Now aged 30, Jesus of Nazareth emerges from his baptism in the River Jordan to confront his mission, and the Devil. 242pp in softback. £11.99 NOW £2.75
69989 KATE HANNIGAN’S GIRL by Catherine Cookson
It is the early 1920s and Kate Hannigan is happily married to Dr Rodney Prince, who has willingly accepted her illegitimate daughter Annie as the eldest child of their household. When Annie meets Terence, she discovers a love and security that she never thought possible. But with her mortal enemy Cathleen determined to destroy her happiness, Annie must summon all her strength not only to keep Terence, but to preserve her family and life as well. A moving tale of enduring love and the cruel stigma of illegitimacy in those times. 350pp in paperback. £3.99 NOW £3
70026 EATING AIR: A Novel by Pauline Melville
This unusual novel is both comic and terrifying, satirical and poetic at the same time. It concerns Ella, a beautiful dancer with the Royal Ballet who, in the 1970s, falls in love with Donny, a rebel and free spirit. They move into a household of political radicals and become casually drawn into extremism. When the infiltration of Special Branch leads to a violent crime, Ella is forced into self- imposed exile in Brazil. At the time of her return over 30 years later, a new kind of terrorism is rife. She is re- united with a former housemate who is torn over whether to join Islamic extremists who plan to attack a bank. 408 pages. £12.99 NOW £3
70353 DREAM OF FAIR TO MIDDLING WOMEN: A Novel by Samuel Beckett edited by
Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier Written in summer 1932, youthfully exuberant and visibly influenced by James Joyce, the book is a piece of extraordinary virtuosity. Beckett is already delighting in the wordplay and sheer joy of language that mark his later oeuvres. Above all, the story brims with the humour that, like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision. It serves as a wonderful introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author and offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist’s life when he was a young man. When he submitted it to publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky. 241 pages with silk bookmark. $30 NOW £6
Bibliophile Books Unit 5 Datapoint, 6 South Crescent, London E16 4TL TEL: 020 74 74 24 74
70033 JANICE GENTLE GETS SEXY by Mavis Cheek
Under pressure from her money-obsessed agent, Janice Gentle writes delicate, romantic novels with one goal in mind - to make enough money to find the man she loved and lost 20 years ago. But when Rohanne Bulbecker, a successful New York publisher, asks for Janice’s help with an extremely marketable idea, it is an opportunity for Janice to abandon her usual predictable genre and try to write something entirely new. 323pp in paperback. £6.99 NOW £2.75
70101 SKETCHES OF
ENGLISH CHARACTER by Catherine Gore
Born in 1799, Catherine Gore as a child wrote poetry and embarked on a prolific writing career that was to last more than three decades and produce more than 60 published works. In a series of witty and observant short stories, she describes what she believes to be the stereotypical figures of Victorian
life. From the interfering Chaperone getting in the way of the Debutante’s romantic expectations to the overblown pomposity of the family butler who runs the household with an iron fist but ingratiates himself with the master, Catherine Gore brings to life the characters that best denote her generation of English men and women. 190pp in paperback. £10 NOW £5
70046 SECRET SCRIPTURE by Sebastian Barry
Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future as the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, where she has spent the best part of her adult life, prepares to close. Leading up to the closure, she often talks with her psychiatrist Dr Grene. This relationship, guarded but trusting after so many years, intensifies and complicates as the doctor mourns the death of his wife. Told through their respective journals, the story emerges of Roseanne’s family in 1930s Fligo in Ireland. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, her story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland. 300 large pages.
£12.99 NOW £3.50
70066 THE PORNOGRAPHER by John McGahern
Michael, a writer of pornographic fiction, creates an ideal world of sex through his two stock athletes, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael, while he bungles every phrase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to her love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt’s slow death in hospital tolerable. Sex and death are never far from each other in this novel which illuminates a variety of disenchantment. First published in 1979 and here in paperback reprint, 252pp. £7.99 NOW £2.25
70074 THE GOOD MAN JESUS AND THE
SCOUNDREL CHRIST by Philip Pullman In Philip Pullman’s hands, this sacred tale is reborn as one of the most thrilling and visionary stories in this new interpretation. This is the story of Jesus and his brother Christ, of how they were born, of how they lived and how one of them died. On that night in Bethlehem Mary gave birth not just to one son but two, one strong, quiet and calm, the other a sickly child. This is the story of two brothers, one impassioned and one reserved, one destined to go down in history and the other to be forgotten. In fairly large print, 265pp can be enjoyed by adults and readers as young as 12. Paperback. £7.99 NOW £3
70505 A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN
UKRAINIAN by Marina Lewycka ‘Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was 84 and she was 36. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of slouthed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.’ Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. The sisters uncover 50 years of Europe’s darkest history as they go back to the roots they would much rather forget. 325pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £4
70511 TWO CARAVANS by Marina Lewycka
A field of strawberries in Kent, and sitting in it two caravans, one for the men and one for the women. The residents are from all over - miner’s son Andiy is from the old Ukraine, while sexy young Irina is from the new. They eye each other warily. There are the Poles, Tomasz and Yola, two Chinese girls, and Emanuel from Malawi. They are all here to pick strawberries in
England’s green and pleasant land, but England is not so pleasant for immigrants. Not with Russian gangster- wannabees like Vulk, who has taken a shine to Irina and thinks kidnapping is a wooing strategy. And so Andiy, who really doesn’t fancy Irina, (honest), must set off in search of the girl he is not in love with. 310pp in paperback.
£7.99 NOW £3.50
70513 WE ARE ALL MADE OF GLUE by Marina Lewycka
Georgie Sinclair’s life is coming unstuck. Her husband left her, her son is obsessed with the End of the World and now her elderly neighbour Mrs Shapiro has decided they are related. Or so the hospital informs her when Mrs Shapiro has an accident and names Georgie next of kin. This however is not a case of a quick ward visit - Mrs Shapiro has a large rickety house full of stinky cats that need looking after and a pair of estate agents that seem intent on swindling from her. And then there is the social worker who wants to put her in a nursing home, not to mention a painful past. 420pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £3.50
70775 MARINA LEWYCKA: Set of Three by Marina Lewycka Buy all three and save more. £23.97 NOW £9.50
e-mail:
orders@bibliophilebooks.com
Fiction 11
70713 MY DRIVER by Maggie Gee
The book tells the story of Vanessa, a plucky but accident-prone writer, who flies from London to Uganda for an African writers’ conference. She also means to visit her former cleaner, a Ugandan named Mary, now the successful Executive Housekeeper of Kampala’s up- market Sheraton Hotel, who has secretly summoned Vanessa’s beloved ex-husband Trevor, a
plumber, to her home village to build a new well. Mary’s son, Jamil, is missing. Vanessa sets off alone on safari to distant Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to see the mountain gorillas. Farce teeters on the edge of something much darker when she quarrels with her driver and, at the same time, a bloody war closes in on Bwindi from the Congo. 321 pages. £12.99 NOW £3.25
70705 ICE PEOPLE by Maggie Gee It is the middle of the 21st century, and the next Ice Age has suddenly sent global warming into reverse. Saul is one of the Ice People, the threatened peoples of the Northern Hemisphere who, watching their world freeze over, try to move south towards the equator. A universal freeze has also descended on relationships between men and women who live in morbid segregation, with feathered robots as sexual partners. In a neat reversal of First World/Third World assumptions, Africa’s relative warmth offers a last hope. The novel charts one man’s struggle to rescue his alienated son and bring him to where the sun shines. 319pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £3
70407 THE ELEPHANT’S
JOURNEY: A Novel by José Saramago In 1551, King João of Portugal decides to give Archduke Maximilian an unusual wedding present, an elephant named Solomon, along with his keeper, Subhro. The two have been living in dismal conditions, forgotten in a corner of the palace grounds. When it occurs to the king that an elephant might
be an appropriate gift, everyone rushes to get them ready. Subhro is given two new suits of clothes, and Solomon a long-overdue scrub. Accompanied by the archduke, his new bride and the royal guard, our unlikely heroes traverse a continent riven by the Reformation and civil war. They make their way through the cities of northern Italy, Genoa, Piacenza, Mantua, Verona, Venice and Trent, where the Council of Trent is in session. Then they brave the Alps and the terrifying Isarco and Brenner passes, sail across the Mediterranean Sea and up the Inn River. Elephants, it turns out, are natural sailors. 209 pages. $24 NOW £5.50
70500 THE RESCUE MAN by Anthony Quinn
In the summer of 1939 historian Tom Baines is at work on a study of Liverpool’s architectural past. Like the rest of the country, he is distracted by the ominous rumblings from Europe. If war should come, will the buildings and streets that he documents survive? But his faltering project receives a boost when a photographer Richard Tanqueray and his wife Bella
befriend him, and together they work against the clock of a rapidly contracting peacetime. A further preoccupation takes hold when he begins to read the long forgotten journals of a brilliant young architect Peter Eames, a disciple of Ruskin. Eames’s own legacy will have unexpected reverberations 70 years later when war comes and Baines joins a Heavy Rescue Team. A superb recreation of wartime Liverpool. 311pp in paperback.
£11.99 NOW £3.75
70231 RITUAL IN THE DARK by Colin Wilson
It concerns a young man, Gerard Sorme, who becomes accidentally involved with an older man he gradually comes to suspect of being a sex-killer. Whitechapel, where Jack the Ripper killed five prostitutes, is the scene of the murders. But the killer is also a homosexual and seeks a relationship with the young man. Sorme lives a borderline existence in cheap flats, eating at workman’s cafés. He soon finds himself moving into a murky world where there is a constant dichotomy between dreams and reality. 416 pages. £7.99 NOW £3.50
69552 CASEBOOK OF VICTOR
FRANKENSTEIN: A Novel by Peter Ackroyd This chilling book, by an award-winning master of the historical novel, prompted one of the most heartfelt accolades we have ever come across: 'I found his book so creepy I kept the bedroom light on all night'. You have been warned. It takes a writer of considerable confidence, wit and skill to attempt a modern retelling of a bona fide English classic but Ackroyd brilliantly re- imagines a tale that has enthralled readers for nearly two centuries. In a haunting and atmospheric novel, he brings together the fictional Victor Frankenstein, who conducts anatomical experiments to re-animate the dead, and the author of the original novel, Mary Shelley, together with real persons of the period such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, and produces a story that is terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. 353 rough-cut pages with one b/w illustration. $26.95 NOW £5
70349 DEATH IN THE ANDES by Mario Vargas Llosa
In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army Corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomás have been dispatched to investigate and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas they assume are responsible. But the townspeople do not trust the officers, creating their own theories as to what forces claimed the bodies of the missing men. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Tomás entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. A fantastically picturesque landscape of Indians and Llamas, snowy peaks, hunger and violence. 276pp in paperback.
$15 NOW £4
www.bibliophilebooks.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36