16-04-2004, 11:08 AM
Bookseller of Kabul By Asne Seierstad
Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for several months. For more than 20 years Sultan Khan defied the authorities - be they Communist or Taliban - in order to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the Communists, and watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. He even resorted to hiding most of his stock in attics all over Kabul. But while Khan is passionate in his love of books and hatred of censorship, he is also a committed Muslim with strict views on family life. As an outsider, Seierstad is able to move between the private world of the women - including Khan's two wives - and the more public lives of the men. And so we learn of proposals and marriages, suppression and abuse of power, crime and punishment. The result is a moving portrait of a family and a clear-eyed assessment of a country struggling to free itself from history.
Asne Seierstad was born in 1970 and studied Russian, Spanish and the History of Philosophy at Oslo University. She has worked as a war correspondent, first in Russia between 1993 and 1996, then in China in 1997. Between 1998 and 2000 she reported on the war in Kosovo for Norwegian television, and in 2000 she published With Their Backs to the Wall: Portraits from Serbia. In autumn 2001 she spent three months in Afghanistan, reporting for a number of major Scandinavian newspapers. In spring 2003 she reported on the war in Iraq from Baghdad.
(ISBN: 1844080471) Published by Time Warner
Notes on a Scandal By Zoe Heller
Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this - it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power - he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons. Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes much of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession - and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover.
Zoe HellerÂ’s first novel, Everything You Know, was published by Viking in 1999. She writes a column for the Daily Telegraph and was Columnist of the Year for 2002. She lives in New York. Notes on a Scandal was one of this yearÂ’s nominations for the Man Booker Prize.
(ISBN: 0141012250) Published by Penguin
The Know By Martina Cole
Joanie Brewer’s children mean the world to her. She’d do anything to make sure they’re fed and clothed – even if it means going on the game – and she lives in constant fear that one of them will be taken from her. Eighteen-year-old Jon Jon is already knee-deep in crime, and Jeanette, only 14, knows more than is good for her. In a world where no one is to be trusted her 11-year-old daughter Kira is the most vulnerable to danger. When she disappears Joanie’s darkest fears are realised. She thinks she knows what’s happened to her little girl, and her obsession to uncover the truth threatens to destroy them all.
Martina Cole has written nine previous novels, all of which have been outstandingly successful bestsellers. Her most recent novels, MauraÂ’s Game and Faceless, both shot straight to No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller lists and total sales of MartinaÂ’s novels now exceed three million copies. Dangerous Lady and The Jump have gone on to become hugely popular TV drama series and several of her other novels are in production for TV. Martina Cole has a son and daughter and she lives in Essex.
(ISBN: 074726967X) Published by Headline
White Mughals By William Dalrymple
Set in and around Hyderabad, India at the beginning of the nineteenth century, White Mughals tells the story of the improbably romantic love affair and marriage between James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a rising star in the East India Company, and Khair-un-Nisa, a Hyderabadi princess. As Kirkpatrick gradually goes native (adopting local clothes and undergoing circumcision) he becomes a secret agent working for his wife's royal family against the English, as he tries to balance the interests of both cultures.
Dalrymple is steeped in India, having lived there for six years, and written a series of remarkable travel books chronicling its past and present, including City of Djinns and The Age of Kali. Having already earned comparisons with great travel writers like Chatwin and Theroux, Dalrymple has now produced a meticulously researched and beautifully written historical narrative on one of the most colourful but neglected aspects of British colonial rule in India. William DalrympleÂ’s first book In Xanadu won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award. His second City of Djinns won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. His third From the Holy Mountain was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Thomas Cook Award. He also wrote and presented the television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002.
(ISBN: 0006550967) Published by Harper Collins
The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold
Susie Salmon, raped and murdered at the age of 14, watches from heaven as her friends and siblings grow up and do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But then she finds that life is not quite finished with her yet. The Lovely Bones is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting. It is, above all, a novel which finds light in the darkest of places, and shows how even when that light seems to be utterly extinguished, it is still there, waiting to be rekindled.
At the age of 18 as a college student, Alice Sebold was beaten and viciously raped by a stranger. The police said she was very lucky not to have been killed because another girl was found dismembered in the same place. AliceÂ’s memoirs, Lucky, was published at the same time as The Lovely Bones and follows her dreadfully difficult path to recovery and justice - including taking the man to court and seeing him locked up behind bars. The Lovely Bones is her debut novel and in the US has become the most successful debut novel since Gone with the Wind. Alice lives in California with her husband, Glen David Gold.
(ISBN: 0330485385) Published by Pan Macmillan
Starter For Ten By David Nicholls
The year is 1985 and Brian has just started his first term at university, armed with the obligatory CND membership and a complete set of Kate Bush albums. But he also has a dark secret - a long-held, burning ambition to appear on University Challenge and now, finally, it seems the dream is about to become reality. He's made the team, they've successfully completed the qualifying rounds and are limbering up for their first televised match in January. Surely it's only a matter of time before Brian is shaking hands with Bamber Gascoigne and holding aloft the silver-plated commemorative plaque? But Brian has a whole lot of living to do before then and when he falls in love with his team-mate, the off-puttingly posh Alice, he finds there's more than a spanner in the works.
David Nicholls is one of the most successful young screenwriters working in television. His credits include the third series of Cold Feet (for which he received a BAFTA nomination for his writing), I Saw You and Rescue Me, which he also created. In the past he has worked as an actor and script-editor, before starting work as a full-time writer in 1999, when he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Simpatico, an adaptation of a Sam Shepard play, which starred Jeff Bridges and Sharon Stone, Albert Finney and Nick Nolte. Starter For Ten is DavidÂ’s debut novel.
(ISBN: 0340734868) Published by Hodder
Brick Lane By Monica Ali
Nazneen's inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu. Her life in London's Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm. Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters' embarrassment and her husband's resentments. Into that fragile peace walks Karim. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging; he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community's own; he opens her eyes and directs her gaze - but what she sees, in the end, comes as a surprise to them both.
Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She lives in London with her husband and two small children. She is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist 2003. Brick Lane was one of this yearÂ’s nominations for the Man Booker Prize.
(ISBN: 0552771155) Published by Transworld
Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for several months. For more than 20 years Sultan Khan defied the authorities - be they Communist or Taliban - in order to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the Communists, and watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. He even resorted to hiding most of his stock in attics all over Kabul. But while Khan is passionate in his love of books and hatred of censorship, he is also a committed Muslim with strict views on family life. As an outsider, Seierstad is able to move between the private world of the women - including Khan's two wives - and the more public lives of the men. And so we learn of proposals and marriages, suppression and abuse of power, crime and punishment. The result is a moving portrait of a family and a clear-eyed assessment of a country struggling to free itself from history.
Asne Seierstad was born in 1970 and studied Russian, Spanish and the History of Philosophy at Oslo University. She has worked as a war correspondent, first in Russia between 1993 and 1996, then in China in 1997. Between 1998 and 2000 she reported on the war in Kosovo for Norwegian television, and in 2000 she published With Their Backs to the Wall: Portraits from Serbia. In autumn 2001 she spent three months in Afghanistan, reporting for a number of major Scandinavian newspapers. In spring 2003 she reported on the war in Iraq from Baghdad.
(ISBN: 1844080471) Published by Time Warner
Notes on a Scandal By Zoe Heller
Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this - it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power - he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons. Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes much of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession - and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover.
Zoe HellerÂ’s first novel, Everything You Know, was published by Viking in 1999. She writes a column for the Daily Telegraph and was Columnist of the Year for 2002. She lives in New York. Notes on a Scandal was one of this yearÂ’s nominations for the Man Booker Prize.
(ISBN: 0141012250) Published by Penguin
The Know By Martina Cole
Joanie Brewer’s children mean the world to her. She’d do anything to make sure they’re fed and clothed – even if it means going on the game – and she lives in constant fear that one of them will be taken from her. Eighteen-year-old Jon Jon is already knee-deep in crime, and Jeanette, only 14, knows more than is good for her. In a world where no one is to be trusted her 11-year-old daughter Kira is the most vulnerable to danger. When she disappears Joanie’s darkest fears are realised. She thinks she knows what’s happened to her little girl, and her obsession to uncover the truth threatens to destroy them all.
Martina Cole has written nine previous novels, all of which have been outstandingly successful bestsellers. Her most recent novels, MauraÂ’s Game and Faceless, both shot straight to No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller lists and total sales of MartinaÂ’s novels now exceed three million copies. Dangerous Lady and The Jump have gone on to become hugely popular TV drama series and several of her other novels are in production for TV. Martina Cole has a son and daughter and she lives in Essex.
(ISBN: 074726967X) Published by Headline
White Mughals By William Dalrymple
Set in and around Hyderabad, India at the beginning of the nineteenth century, White Mughals tells the story of the improbably romantic love affair and marriage between James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a rising star in the East India Company, and Khair-un-Nisa, a Hyderabadi princess. As Kirkpatrick gradually goes native (adopting local clothes and undergoing circumcision) he becomes a secret agent working for his wife's royal family against the English, as he tries to balance the interests of both cultures.
Dalrymple is steeped in India, having lived there for six years, and written a series of remarkable travel books chronicling its past and present, including City of Djinns and The Age of Kali. Having already earned comparisons with great travel writers like Chatwin and Theroux, Dalrymple has now produced a meticulously researched and beautifully written historical narrative on one of the most colourful but neglected aspects of British colonial rule in India. William DalrympleÂ’s first book In Xanadu won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award. His second City of Djinns won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. His third From the Holy Mountain was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Thomas Cook Award. He also wrote and presented the television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002.
(ISBN: 0006550967) Published by Harper Collins
The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold
Susie Salmon, raped and murdered at the age of 14, watches from heaven as her friends and siblings grow up and do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But then she finds that life is not quite finished with her yet. The Lovely Bones is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting. It is, above all, a novel which finds light in the darkest of places, and shows how even when that light seems to be utterly extinguished, it is still there, waiting to be rekindled.
At the age of 18 as a college student, Alice Sebold was beaten and viciously raped by a stranger. The police said she was very lucky not to have been killed because another girl was found dismembered in the same place. AliceÂ’s memoirs, Lucky, was published at the same time as The Lovely Bones and follows her dreadfully difficult path to recovery and justice - including taking the man to court and seeing him locked up behind bars. The Lovely Bones is her debut novel and in the US has become the most successful debut novel since Gone with the Wind. Alice lives in California with her husband, Glen David Gold.
(ISBN: 0330485385) Published by Pan Macmillan
Starter For Ten By David Nicholls
The year is 1985 and Brian has just started his first term at university, armed with the obligatory CND membership and a complete set of Kate Bush albums. But he also has a dark secret - a long-held, burning ambition to appear on University Challenge and now, finally, it seems the dream is about to become reality. He's made the team, they've successfully completed the qualifying rounds and are limbering up for their first televised match in January. Surely it's only a matter of time before Brian is shaking hands with Bamber Gascoigne and holding aloft the silver-plated commemorative plaque? But Brian has a whole lot of living to do before then and when he falls in love with his team-mate, the off-puttingly posh Alice, he finds there's more than a spanner in the works.
David Nicholls is one of the most successful young screenwriters working in television. His credits include the third series of Cold Feet (for which he received a BAFTA nomination for his writing), I Saw You and Rescue Me, which he also created. In the past he has worked as an actor and script-editor, before starting work as a full-time writer in 1999, when he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Simpatico, an adaptation of a Sam Shepard play, which starred Jeff Bridges and Sharon Stone, Albert Finney and Nick Nolte. Starter For Ten is DavidÂ’s debut novel.
(ISBN: 0340734868) Published by Hodder
Brick Lane By Monica Ali
Nazneen's inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu. Her life in London's Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm. Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters' embarrassment and her husband's resentments. Into that fragile peace walks Karim. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging; he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community's own; he opens her eyes and directs her gaze - but what she sees, in the end, comes as a surprise to them both.
Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She lives in London with her husband and two small children. She is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist 2003. Brick Lane was one of this yearÂ’s nominations for the Man Booker Prize.
(ISBN: 0552771155) Published by Transworld
![[Image: bookswap_sig.gif]](http://www.globalbuzz-sa.com/forums/images/sig/bookswap_sig.gif)
The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn, the more places you'll go. Dr. Seuss
"Be who you are and say what you feel,
because those who mind don't matter
and those who matter don't mind."
-Dr Seuss-
