Showing titles in City Life

The last word anyone would use to describe Stella St. Vincent is adventurous. She's perfectly comfortable with the familiar, strict routines of her life as a copyeditor in New York. That is until she receives a mysterious note from her late mother and a one-way plane ticket to Paris. Alone and overwhelmed in a foreign city, Stella avoids new people and ventures out as little as possible. But then she meets Jules, an octogenarian art collector with very different ideas about how she should spend her time.

Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. She’s living her best life! Or is she? The debris of years of dysphoria and failed relationships rattle around in her head. When she tumbles down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party and wakes up in hospital alone, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity. Enter Vincent, corporate lawyer and hobby baker. His trad friendship group may as well speak a different language to Max, and his Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman.

Henry Miller is undisputedly one of the most important American writers and Sexus like his other works was banned in English speaking countries for obscenity. It explores work, love and friendship and as with all his work is based on autobiographical experiences- in this book his passionate affair with a dance hall hostess in NY that is recounted in intimately graphic and vivid detail.

It is the evening of 16-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress - the very same dress that was sewn for a different wearer, Melody's mother, for a celebration that ultimately never took place. Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents - from the 1921 Tulsa massacre to post-9/11 New York....

Sister Europe tells the story of one wild night in Berlin, as a ragtag group meet at the Hotel Interconti to celebrate an elderly author’s venerable career (all under the resolute assurance that their wealthy host will provide a free and fancy dinner). Inevitably, boredom, hunger and horniness set in, and the gang—a young trans teen and her father; an ageing publisher and his flakey date; a dog, a troubled heiress and an Arabic prince—are flung out on an exhilarating odyssey through the city’s shadow and light.

A dazzling novel about one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility . . .

The banned books club was only the beginning; a place for the women of Prague to come together and share the tales the Germans wanted to silence. For bookshop owner, Jana, doing the right thing was never a question. So when opportunity comes to help the resistance, she offers herself – and her bookshop. Using her window displays as covert signals and hiding secret codes in book marks, she’ll do all in her power to help.

In their Saitama office, Ashikawa is the kind of woman Nitani knows he will likely marry: sweet, obliging, and determined to wean him off his addiction to instant noodles. But he finds himself increasingly unable to respect her – or the sugary treats she shares around the workplace, winning their colleagues’ affection with baking rather than hard work. Oshio is bolder and uninhibited – she is Nitani's drinking buddy. In the oppressive office atmosphere, the pair grows closer, both outsiders struggling with the rigid status quo.

Agnes Green is not having the summer of her life. Trapped in the suburbs with a strict religious mother, her nights are spent secretly dating Toby—who loves arthouse film, getting stoned, and ignoring her texts—and her days listening to sermons about the sins of the flesh. Then she meets Emily. Beautiful, charismatic and oddly controlling, Emily has a suggestion for Agnes. A life-changing way of making cash and having fun. It might even involve love. And it's easy. All you have to do is put a little black dress on and go to lunch.

When Libby Nicholls arrives in London, broken-hearted and with her life in tatters, the first person she meets on the bus is elderly pensioner Frank. He tells her about the time in 1962 he met a girl on the number 88 bus with beautiful red hair just like her own. They made plans for a date, but Frank lost the ticket with her number written on it. For the past sixty years, he's ridden the same bus trying to find her. Libby is inspired by the story and, with the help of an unlikely companion, she makes it her mission to continue Frank's search.

When her husband suggests a romantic break, Claire feels obliged to say yes but immediately regrets it. After all that they've been through, how can one weekend in Paris save their marriage? Claire and Ronan aren't the only people on a make-or-break visit to the City of Love. There is a big-shot movie producer from Hollywood, full of regret for a life ill-lived; a student from Boston, torn between love and duty; a Ukrainian refugee struggling to protect her little sister; and an old woman from Dijon, hoping to be braver than she has ever had to be before.

Funny Ethnics catapults listeners into the sprawling city-within-a-city that is Western Sydney and the world of Sylvia Nguyen: only child of Vietnamese refugee parents, unexceptional student, exceptional self-doubter. It's a place where migrants from across the world converge, and identity is a slippery, ever-shifting beast. Jumping through snapshots of Sylvia's life—from childhood to something resembling adulthood—this novel is about square pegs and round holes, those who belong and those on the fringes.

For Evelyn, mornings pass as mornings always do. She ticks off the jobs at the laundromat and gives welcoming smiles to those who come in. If they've earned one. Evelyn knows what is going on in her community because she pays attention. She sees the weariness of the frazzled shop owners, the woman with the nasty boyfriend, the nice man with the curly-topped dog, the car parking war and the forgetful man. The community might not notice Evelyn, because it is easy to overlook the seemingly ordinary. But Evelyn is far from ordinary.

April, 1945. As the Americans storm the Buchenwald concentration camp, among the survivors are Jakob and Emmanuelle, barely more than teenagers. Each of them has lost everything and everyone in the unspeakable horrors of the war. But when they meet, they find hope and comfort in each other. They marry and build a happy, prosperous life for themselves and their new family, but their pasts cast a long shadow over the present....

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of NW, Zadie Smith’s first novel since the bestselling On Beauty. Read by Don Gilet and Karen Bryson. This is the story of a city. The north-west corner of a city. Here you’ll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between.

Bounty hunting can be dangerous, but Jace Reed is used to danger and always follows the rules. Including the most important one—never get emotionally involved. But everything goes haywire when the Brooklyn “it girl” interrupts his most important assignment. Beautiful Lucy Moor may or may not hold the only clue to the target that Jace has been tracking for months. So becoming her roommate to get the intel from her should be easy… right?

Secret femme-fatale in training Millicent Whittenburg needs to escape her unpleasant and restrictive betrothal. Taking matters into her own hands, she plans her eventual ruin! Then she can disappear from society to carry out the Queen’s deadly missions. Step 1: seduce the one man who despises marriage more than her!

Howard and Elsie Manning were born on the same day, met at kindergarten, and have been married for 59 years. They have lived sensible, productive lives, and raised two self-sufficient daughters. Now, at 78, they are bored with the predictability of life, fed up with contemporary society, have aching joints and dwindling finances, and—funeral by funeral—their circle of friends is shrinking. Worst of all, they are grieving for their beloved, recently deceased dog Maisie.

A disillusioned nurse suddenly learns how to care. An injured young sportsman wakes up find that he can see only in black and white. A desperate old widower takes too many pills and believes that two angels have arrived to usher him through purgatory. Two agoraphobic men called Dave share the symptoms of a brain tumour, and frequently waken their neighbour with their ongoing rows. Separate lives, running in parallel, destined to collide and then explode.

Maria, a trans woman in her 30s, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters. After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the Pacific, embarking on her version of the Great American Road Trip.