Engelska

<p>Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, is holidaying at her family's distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera. She spends the summer beneath the green umbrella pines and oppressive purple bougainvillea scribbling into her Anthology of Hates to pass the time. </p><p>Until she meets the Bradleys. </p><p>Don and Eva Bradley are well-behaved and middle-class - everything she is not. It is love at first sight. But the friendship ends in tears. Penelope and Don Bradley leave the Riviera, embarking on the painful process of growing up. She, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm. He, in rebellion against the philistine values of his parents. </p>

<p><b>Here are fifteen pitch-perfect stories about women trying to make their own way: featuring daughters, divorcees, fox demons, a praying mantis, and . . . green frogs.</b><br/><br/>A young girl reconnects with her Korean grandmother; an artist considers her connection to the Korean folktale of the green frog; a praying mantis living in a beautiful home overlooking the park finds the New York dating scene leaves her hungering for more; a fox demon seeks revenge for her murdered sister, only for her loyalties to be torn; AI brings a grieving mother's daughter back to life; at a spa in the mountains, a recently divorced woman has a ghostly encounter; and a recipe book instructs the reader on 'how to eat your own heart'.<br/><br/><b>From the writer of <i>Sea Change</i>, this collection of fifteen offbeat, scintillating stories influenced by Korean fairy tales and contemporary ennui, shines a light on womanhood in all of its human (and other) forms.</b></p>

<p>The story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs.</p><p>As the girls' pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight. </p>

<p>It's summer, 1984, in blue-collar Swaffham, Massachusetts. </p><p>Mel is thirteen, drinking a Slush Puppie at the drugstore, when she hears a voice, 'deep and movie-star dramatic, like Lauren Bacall': Sylvia. </p><p>What follows is a story of transgender awakening. Sylvia's shameless swagger and tough-girl trans femininity is an affront to the Swaffham locals, and her presence triggers hatred and, ultimately, violence. But it is also a catalyst for Mel.</p><p>Through her friendship with Sylvia, Mel comes to realise that not only is there a world beyond Swaffham, there are other ways of being, free from the class and gender roles embodied by her cruel, vulnerable mother Irene or her best friend, the troubled Jules. </p>

Grace lives alone in Ballybrady, a little village on the sublimely beautiful east coast of Northern Ireland. She fills her days with swimming, fishing, quilting, and baiting the tourists who arrive from the city with more money than sense. She hasn't left the village since a traumatic stay in London as a young woman at the end of the 1980s. One of the tourists is Evan, taking an enforced holiday from his family and work in Belfast after breaking down after the death of his daughter in infancy. He has come to try to process his grief and make himself desirable again as a husband, a father and a business partner. But he hasn't been there a week until he gets trapped by lockdown. When Grace saves his life in a kayaking accident - if it was an accident - and Evan's troubled son arrives to stay, all three are drawn together in a way that forces a reckoning with their personal traumas and draws them back into society. This is a moving and funny debut novel set in a quirky coastal community you will be desperate to visit after reading. It will appeal to readers of Elizabeth Strout, Maggie O'Farrell and Alice Munro.

<p><b><i>One photograph, one treasured memory, one chance to go back . . .</i></b><br/><br/>In Mr Hirasaka's cosy photography studio in the mountains between this world and the next, someone is waking up as if from a dream.<br/><br/>There is a stack of photos on their lap, one for every day of their life, and now they must choose the pictures that capture their most treasured memories, which will be placed in a beautiful lantern. Once completed, it will be set spinning, and their cherished moments will flash before their eyes, guiding them to another world.<br/><br/>But, like our most thumbed-over photographs, our favourite memories fade with age. So each visitor to the studio has the chance to choose one day to return to and photograph afresh. Each has a treasured story to tell, from the old woman rebuilding a community in Tokyo after a disaster, to the flawed Yakuza man who remembers a time when he was kind, and a strong child who is fighting to survive.<br/><br/><b>Extraordinarily moving and wise, <i>The Lantern of Lost Memories</i> is a beautiful Japanese tale about the people that make us and the moments that change us.</b></p>

<p>It is the summer of 1851 and Charlotte Morrison is on holiday in Germany with her brother and his wife. On the surface, Charlotte is an unmarried aunt with a sparse, unfulfilled life. But beneath that quiet respectability lie unsuspected depths hidden murmurings. </p><p>On a day trip boating down the Rhine, Charlotte sights a fellow traveller, Edward Newman, who releases the hissing floodwaters of her subconscious. Dark and dangerous, they sweep Charlotte towards the watershed of her life, stretching her imagination to its limit; almost to breaking point.</p><p>Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981, Ann Schlees evocative, heady novel creates an aura of tension that is as compelling as it is mysterious, forcing her characters to confront each other as well as themselves over one hot summer abroad. </p>