SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1992 BOOKER PRIZEWINNER OF THE IRISH TIMES-AER LINGUSLITERATURE PRIZE FOR FICTION"BRILLIANT, UNIQUE. Patrick McCabe pushes your head through the book and you come out the other end gasping, admiring, and knowing that reading fiction will never be the same again. It's the best Irish novel I've read in years." – Roddy Doyle, Author, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha"STUNNING… PART HUCK FINN, PART HOLDEN CAULFIELD, PART HANNIBAL LECTER." – The New York Times Book Review"AN ALMOST PERFECT NOVEL… A BECKETT MONOLOGUE WITH PLOT BY ALFRED HITCHCOCK… STARTLINGLY ORIGINAL." – The Washington Post Book World"BRILLIANT… Francie is a shrewd and amusing observer… his voice is mordant, colloquial and brash as a punch in the nose." – Scott Turow"A ROLLICKING NASTY NOVEL." – The Village Voice"There are a number of fine novels about violent youth, and Patrick McCabe's frightening and sorrowful The Butcher Boy stands up to any of them… Francie portrays himself in every word he utters, and his language gives Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy its valuable dread power." – The Atlanta Journal Constitution"A CHILLING TALE OF A CHILD'S HELL… OFTEN SCREAMINGLY FUNNY… THE BOOK HAS A COMPELLING AND TERRIBLE BEAUTY." – The Boston Globe"A tour de force." – Kirkus Reviews"IT'S AS BRIGHT AS IT IS DEPRESSING, AS FUNNY AS IT IS GRUESOME. We see Francie clearly as psychopath, and we ache with sympathy for him. It's almost impossible to pinpoint the moment in his growing up when the imagination of an ordinary boy shades over into something dangerously loony. The key is Francie's slangy, angry, '60s-flavored voice, which McCabe renders with a minimum of punctuation and a maximum of control." – Los Angeles Times Book Review"AN UNRELENTING, UPBEAT STREAM OF PATTER. McCabe's acclaimed third novel… walks the path of dementia with remarkable assurance." – Entertainment Weekly"McCABE'S FRANCIE SPEAKS IN A RICH VERNACULAR SPIRITED BY THE BRASSY AND ENDEARING RHYTHMS OF PERPETUAL DELINQUENCY; even in his gradual unhinging, Francie remains a winning raconteur. By looking so deeply into Francie's soul, McCabe subtly suggests a common source of political and personal violence – lack of love and hope." – Publishers Weekly"PATRICK McCABE IS AN OUTSTANDING WRITER. The Butcher Boy is fearful, original, compelling and very hard to put out of your mind. American readers should pay close attention to this man." – Thomas McGuane"A BRILLIANT BOOK SO VERY FUNNY AS WELL AS BEING HEARTRENDINGLY SAD." – J. P. Donleavy"Written with wonderful assurance and a technical skill that is as great as it is unobtrusive… Perhaps the novel is best read as a twisted coming-of-age story; imagine Huck Finn crossed with Charlie Starkweather, and you have Francie Brady, the young narrator of The Butcher Boy." – The Washington Post Book World"A POTENT AMALGAM OF COMEDY, HORROR AND PATHOS… The Butcher Boy is a prime slice of modern Gothic… McCabe presents a study in spiritual derangement that rivets." – The Sunday Times (London)"DEADLY SERIOUS, TERRIFICALLY LOONY AND SCARY, AND ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS… Francie Brady's story is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Moran, Malone, and the Unnameable even, with Anthony Burgess's Alex tossed in for good measure." – James McManus"THE MOST ASTONISHING IRISH NOVEL FOR MANY YEARS, A MASTERPIECE." – Sunday Independent"A POWERFUL AND DEEPLY SHOCKING NOVEL where the seemingly innocent logic of a child imperceptibly turns into the manic logic of an unhinged mind. Patrick McCabe portrays 1960s small-town life from a bizarre perspective where the aliens from Outer Space on the television are as real as the emotional poverty of one child filled with unconscious envy for another." – Dermont Bolger

One of contemporary fiction’s most “wickedly brilliant…endlessly talented” (Publishers Weekly) satirists delivers a dystopian novel skewering global politics and Big Brother-style government post-9/11.When Tom Brodzinksi tries to give up smoking, he inadvertently sets off a chain of events that threaten to upset the tenuous balance of peace in a not-too-distant land. When he flips the butt of his final cigarette off the balcony of his vacation apartment, it lands on elderly Reggie Lincoln, lounging on the balcony below. Lincoln suffers a burn, and the local authorities charge Tom with assault — in a country with draconian anti-smoking laws, a cigarette is a weapon of offense. For reparation, Tom must leave his family behind and wander through the arid center of the country’s deserted territory. Joining Tom on his journey is Brian Prentice, a mysteriously sinister presence, who has his own sins to make up for. Inevitably, the two men encounter violence, forcing them to come together despite their seething mistrust. A profoundly disturbing allegory, The Butt reveals the heart of a distinctly modern darkness.

In four sections-Childhood, Migration, First Generation, and Return-the contributors to this anthology write powerfully, often hauntingly, of their lives in Haiti and the United States. Jean-Robert Cadet's description of his Haitian childhood as a restavec-a child slave-in Port-au-Prince contrasts with Dany Laferriere's account of a ten-year-old boy and his beloved grandmother in Petit-Gove. We read of Marie Helene Laforest's realization that while she was white in Haiti, in the United States she is black. Patricia Benoit tells us of a Haitian woman refugee in a detention center who has a simple need for a red dress-dignity. The reaction of a man who has married the woman he loves is the theme of Gary Pierre-Pierre's "The White Wife"; the feeling of alienation is explored in "Made Outside" by Francie Latour. The frustration of trying to help those who have remained in Haiti and of the do-gooders who do more for themselves than the Haitians is described in Babette Wainwright's "Do Something for Your Soul, Go to Haiti." The variations and permutations of the divided self of the Haitian emigrant are poignantly conveyed in this unique anthology.

In a masterpiece of savage comedy, the author of the bestselling "Nothing But Blue Skies" writes of the perverse Whitelaw patriarch, a man who exerts his control, even in death, by means of a will that binds the family fortune to a failing marriage.

The Calcutta Chromosome is one of those books that's marketed as a mainstream thriller even though it is an excellent science fiction novel (It won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award). The main character is a man named Antar, whose job is to monitor a somewhat finicky computer that sorts through mountains of information. When the computer finds something it can't catalog, it brings the item to Antar's attention. A string of these seemingly random anomalies puts Antar on the trail of a man named Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995 while searching for the truth behind the discovery of the cure for malaria. This search for Murugan leads, in turn, to the discovery of the Calcutta Chromosome, which can shift bits of personality from one person to another. That's when things really get interesting.

"This is a wonderful novel. Original, suspenseful, funny, and profoundly moving. It's about family, community, the human bond with animals, and – oh yeah – spaceships. I am in awe of Yannick Murphy's achievement and I plan to recommend it to everyone I know." – Geraldine BrooksThe daily rhythm of a veterinarian's family in rural New England is shaken when a hunting accident leaves their eldest son in a coma. With the lives of his loved ones unhinged, the veterinarian struggles to maintain stability while searching for the man responsible. But in the midst of their great trial an unexpected visitor arrives, requesting a favor that will have profound consequences – testing a loving father's patience, humor, and resolve and forcing husband and wife to come to terms with what 'family' truly means.The Call is a gift from one of the most talented and extraordinary voices in contemporary fiction – a unique and heartfelt portrait of a family, poignant and rich in humor and imagination.

When Señora Mir lays her body across the abandoned tracks for a tram that will never arrive, she presents Ringo Kid with a riddle he will not unravel until after her death.In Ringo's Barcelona, life endures in the shadow of civil war — the Fascist regime oversees all. Inspired by glimpses of Hollywood glamour, he finds his own form of resistance, escaping into myths of his own making, recast as a heroic cowboy or an intrepid big-game hunter. But when he finds himself inveigled as a go-between into an affair far beyond his juvenile comprehension, he is forced to turn from his interior world and unleash his talent for invention on the lives of others.And all the while he is left to wonder — what could have happened to Señora Mir that day to send her so far beyond the edge of reason?

On Good Friday, a brutal double murder takes place in the woods, and the killer records the sickening crime on videotape. With the local media building up excitement — and outrage — at the scheduled airing of the footage, two couples in the midst of celebrating the Easter holiday find their idyll interrupted by the breaking news.Against the backdrop of twenty-four-hour news coverage, the four friends spend the weekend playing cards, chatting, eating, and drinking. Despite their best efforts to enjoy this rare time together, they’re unable to stop talking about the murders and the search for the elusive killer. Repulsed by the airing of the crime, they question the ethics of showing such atrocities on television — yet they can’t stop watching.A gripping psychological thriller, The Camera Killer will keep listeners tuned to the very end as the mystery unravels.

In this witty and enthralling saga of revolutionary South America, Carlos Fuentes explores the period of profound upheaval he calls" the romantic time." His hero, Baltasar Bustos, the son of a wealthy landowner, kidnaps the baby of a prominent judge, replacing it with the black baby of a prostitute. When he catches sight of the baby's mother, though, he falls instatnly in love with her and sets off on an anguished journey to repent his act and win her love.

Who bludgeoned the co-ed and killed the dean?

To find out, McCall had to risk riots. Yippies and the dark mysteries of today’s student unrest...

An electrifying debut novel that becomes a shocking tale about… boredom.In a deeply compelling debut novel, Lee Rourke — a British underground sensation for his story collection Everyday—tells the tale of a man who finds his life so boring it frightens him. So he quits his job to spend some time sitting on a bench beside a quiet canal in a placid London neighborhood, watching the swans in the water and the people in the glass-fronted offices across the way while he collects himself.However his solace is soon interupted when a jittery young woman begins to show up and sit beside him every day. Although she won't even tell him her name, she slowly begins to tell him a chilling story about a terrible act she committed, something for which she just can't forgive herself — and which seems to have involved one of the men they can see working in the building across the canal.Torn by fear and pity, the man becomes more immersed in her tale, and finds that boredom has, indeed, brought him to the most terrifying place he's ever been.

The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949."No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered a a highly original technique for objectifying the perennial degradation of mankind within a context of fantasy….Nowhere has the nightmare of human terror and the deracinated sensibility been more consciously analyzed than in The Cannibal. Yet one is aware throughout that such analysis proceeds only in terms of a resolutely committed humanism." — Hayden Carruth

Ackroyd's retelling of Chaucer's classic isn't exactly like the Ethan Hawke'd film version of Hamlet, but it's not altogether different, either. Noting in his introduction that the source material is as close to a contemporary novel as Wells Cathedral is to an apartment block, Ackroyd translates the original verse into clean and enjoyable prose that clears up the roadblocks readers could face in tackling the classic. The Knight's Tale, the first of 24 stories, sets the pace by removing distracting tics but keeping those that are characteristic, if occasionally cringe-inducing, like the narrator's insistence on lines like, Well. Enough of this rambling. The rest of the stories continue in kind, with shorter stories benefiting most from Ackroyd's treatment, though the longer entries tend to… ramble. The tales are a serious undertaking in any translation, and here, through no fault of Ackroyd's work, what is mostly apparent is the absence of the original text, making finishing this an accomplishment that seems diminished, even if the stories themselves prove more readable.***A fresh, modern prose retelling captures the vigorous and bawdy spirit of Chaucer's classicRenowned critic, historian, and biographer Peter Ackroyd takes on what is arguably the greatest poem in the English language and presents the work in a prose vernacular that makes it accessible to modern readers while preserving the spirit of the original.A mirror for medieval society, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales concerns a motley group of pilgrims who meet in a London inn on their way to Canterbury and agree to take part in a storytelling competition. Ranging from comedy to tragedy, pious sermon to ribald farce, heroic adventure to passionate romance, the tales serve not only as a summation of the sensibility of the Middle Ages but as a representation of the drama of the human condition.Ackroyd's contemporary prose emphasizes the humanity of these characters-as well as explicitly rendering the naughty good humor of the writer whose comedy influenced Fielding and Dickens-yet still masterfully evokes the euphonies and harmonies of Chaucer's verse. This retelling is sure to delight modern readers and bring a new appreciation to those already familiar with the classic tales.

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in 2003, The Caprices is a collection of stories artfully told across the theatre of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. An Anglo-Indian cavalryman, his homeland on the brink of revolution, finds himself in Malaysia fighting to protect British interests. Two soldiers lost in the jungle with a Japanese prisoner confront their prejudices toward each other, and the nature of being American. An island witnesses the passing of history from Magellan, to Amelia Earhart, to the dropping of the atomic bomb. With exquisite lyricism tempered by a journalist’s eye for detail, Murray shines light on the tangle of battles created by that conflict, the violent reach across the generations, the shattering reverberations in memory. With this collection, Sabina Murray established herself as a passionate and wise voice of literary fiction.

"I am not in a contest. I never wanted fame or money. I wanted to get the word down the way I wanted it, that's all. And I had to get the words down or be overcome by something worse than death." So writes the late Charles Bukowski in his entry for 6/23/92 (12:34 AM). The Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship, a delightful, posthumous gathering of excerpts from Bukowski notebooks, is loaded with such direct ruminations about writing, death, money, humanity, and how the author located meaning and value in his daily life and work. Richly illustrated with gritty drawings by Robert Crumb, Bukowski's legions of readers will want to add this prose volume to their collections. Autograph seekers, race track habitués and the dull thud of the nags ("I go to the track almost reluctantly. I am too idiotic to figure out any other place to go...I guess getting my ass out of here forces me to look at Humanity and when you look at Humanity you've GOT to react." p.66), Hollywood types, classical music and classy authors, poets and poseurs, all subjects frequently addressed by Bukowski over the course of his long, productive career, shape the book's contents. One observes Bukowski at home, going to the mall with wife Linda, driving the LA freeways, at his computer mulling over what does and doesn't add up. Charles Bukowski scrapped and fought for his rewards and, as "The Captain Is Out To Lunch" makes indelibly clear, it was honest writing and its publication, not money or fame, that empowered him. Ultimately he achieved acclaim and a fair measure of financial success, after establishing a beneficial relationship with John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, a committed independent publisher who enabled him to reach a world-wide audience of readers. They valued his work during his lifetime and continue to anticipate the thinning stream of books still coming out several years after his death.

The state of the nation has changed. With much of the country now underwater, assets and weapons seized by the government — itself run by the sinister 'Authority' — and war raging in South America and China, life in Britain is unrecognisable.

The trilogy comprises Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990), novels linked by metaphors borrowed from theatre, traditional carnival itself and literary mythology. The characters make Odyssean voyages through time and space, witnessing and re-enacting the calamitous history of mankind, sometimes assuming sacrificial roles in an attempt to save modern civilisation from self-destruction.' Independent on Sunday'The Four Banks of the River of Space is a kind of quantum Odyssey… in which the association of ideas is not logical but… a "magical imponderable dreaming". The dreamer is Anselm, another of Harris's alter egos, like Everyman Masters in Carnival and Robin Redbreast Glass in The Infinite Rehearsal… Together, they represent one of the most remarkable fictional achievements in the modern canon.'

Peter Ackroyd's imagination dazzles in this brilliant novel written in the voice of Victor Frankenstein himself. Mary Shelley and Shelley are characters in the novel.It was at Oxford that I first met Bysshe. We arrived at our college on the same day; confusing to a mere foreigner, it is called University College. I had seen him from my window and had been struck by his auburn locks.The long-haired poet – 'Mad Shelley' – and the serious-minded student from Switzerland spark each other's interest in the new philosophy of science which is overturning long-cherished beliefs. Perhaps there is no God. In which case, where is the divine spark, the soul? Can it be found in the human brain? The heart? The eyes?Victor Frankenstein begins his anatomy experiments in a barn near Oxford. The coroner's office provides corpses – but they have often died of violence and drowning; they are damaged and putrifying. Victor moves his coils and jars and electrical fluids to a deserted pottery and from there, makes contact with the Doomesday Men – the resurrectionists.Victor finds that perfect specimens are hard to come by… until that Thames-side dawn when, wrapped in his greatcoat, he hears the splashing of oars and sees in the half-light the approaching boat where, slung into the stern, is the corpse of a handsome young man, one hand trailing in the water…

Greg and Tess MacAvoy are one of four prominent Nantucket couples who count each other as best friends. As pillars of their close-knit community, the MacAvoys, Kapenashes, Drakes, and Wheelers are important to their friends and neighbors, and especially to each other. But just before the beginning of another idyllic summer, Greg and Tess are killed when their boat capsizes during an anniversary sail. As the warm weather approaches and the island mourns their loss, nothing can prepare the MacAvoy's closest friends for what will be revealed.Once again, Hilderbrand masterfully weaves an intense tale of love and loyalty set against the backdrop of endless summer island life.

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock.Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty facade is a town at war.Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils… Pagford is not what it first seems.And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.