Best books of 2022 according to Book in Bar
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From the bestselling author of Middle England comes a novel that tells the story of post-war Britain through four generations of one familybr>br>In the Birmingham suburb of Bournville, site of a famous chocolate factory, a family celebrates VE Day in 1945. As the country struggles to understand the war it has just endured, six more national celebrations follow: coronations and football matches, fairy-tale weddings and royal funerals. As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from wartime nostalgia to James Bond and coronavirus, one pressing question starts to emerge: have these milestone celebrations brought the family - and their country - closer together, or left them more adrift and divided than ever before?br>br>From one of Britain''s best-loved novelists comes a story for our times, a story that is by turns unsettling and profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true.>
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A clever premise, well executed in lean, lucid prose - The Handmaid''s Tale for the Squid Game generation
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Shy, lonely and introverted Fuyuko lives alone and fills her days with her job as a freelance proofreader. About to turn thirty-five, she cannot imagine ever having any emotional or successful relationship in her life as it currently stands. She is regularly haunted by encounters of the past. But Fuyuko loves the light and goes out on the night of her birthday, Christmas Eve, to count the lights. Her only friend, Hijiri, offers some light in her life, but it is a chance encounter with another man, Mr. Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher, who offers her access from another dimension to light. Pulsing, poetic, modern and shocking, The Night Belongs to Lovers is the third novel from internationally bestselling author Mieko Kawakami.
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BABEL: OR THE NECESSITY OF VIOLENCE - AN ARCANE HISTORY OF THE OXFORD TRANSLATORS'' REVOLUTION
R F Kuang
- Harper voyager
- 1 September 2022
- 9780008501815
''One for Philip Pullman fans'' THE TIMES Traduttore, traditore : An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
Oxford, 1836.
The city of dreaming spires.
It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world.
And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows.
Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift.
Until it became a prison...
But can a student stand against an empire?
An incendiary new novel from award-winning author R.F. Kuang about the power of language, the violence of colonialism, and the sacrifices of resistance.
''A masterpiece that resonates with power and knowledge. BABEL is a stark picture of the cruelty of empire, a distillation of dark academia, and a riveting blend of fantasy and historical fiction - a monumental achievement'' Samantha Shannon, author of THE PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE -
The award-winning author of Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel returns with a novel of time travel that precisely captures the reality of our current moment. Sea of Tranquility is a virtuoso performance and an enormously exciting offering from one of our most remarkable writers. In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core. Two centuries later Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is traveling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive''s bestselling novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in time, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. Sea of Tranquility is a novel that investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities, that plays with the very line along which time should run. Perceptive and poignant about art, and love, and what we must do to survive, it is incredibly compelling.
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IT'S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH (COMICS EN ANGLAIS)
THOROGOOD ZOE
- Image
- 19 August 2022
- 9781534323865
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A beautiful, limited edition slipcase containing Cormac McCarthy''s two-book masterpiece The Passenger 1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot''s flightbag, the plane''s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit - by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness. Stella Maris 1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia''s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger , a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
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From Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout, comes Lucy by the Sea, a novel featuring Lucy Barton, the indomitable heroine of My Name is Lucy Barton and Oh William! Lucy is uprooted from her life in New York City and reluctantly goes into lockdown with her ex-husband William in a house on the coast of Maine. Strout''s new novel is a miraculous work of fiction. A brilliantly sharp evocation of the period we have just lived through, it is a novel that both resonates deeply and consoles us too.br>br>''A superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her own'' Hilary Mantelbr>br>''A terrific writer'' Zadie Smithbr>br>''She gets better with each book'' Maggie O''Farrellbr>br>AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW>
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A searing debut novel inspired by a true story from the streets of Oakland, California, announcing the arrival of a blazing, young talent ''Leila Mottley''s writing erupts and flows like lava . . . Nightcrawling bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole'' TOMMY ORANGE, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize ''A truly beautiful and powerful book'' RUTH OZEKI When there is no choice, all you have left to do is walk.
Kiara Johnson does not know what it is to live as a normal seventeen-year-old. With her mother in a rehab facility and an older brother who devotes his time and money to a recording studio, she fends for herself - and for nine-year-old Trevor, whose own mother is prone to disappearing for days at a time. As the landlord of their apartment block threatens to raise their rent, Kiara finds herself walking the streets after dark, determined to survive in a world that refuses to protect her.
Then one night Kiara is picked up by Officers 601 and 190, and the gruesome deal she is offered in exchange for her freedom lands her at the centre of a media storm. If she agrees to testify in a grand jury trial, she could help expose the sickening corruption of a police department. But honesty comes at a price - one that could leave her family vulnerable to their retaliation, and endanger everyone she loves.
Nightcrawling is an unforgettable novel about young people navigating the darkest corners of an adult world, told with a humanity that is at once agonising and utterly mesmerising.>
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Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant , there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, a tight-knit seaside community. After university, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta''s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coast Canadians who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can''t find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Katie will be far more than she anticipates. Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world''s largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal. Beaton''s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
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How else do we return to ourselves but to fold The page so it points to the good part In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother''s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We''re Briefly Gorgeous , Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong''s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicentre of the break. The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds , winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging-forth all at once.
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From Booker-prizewinner Douglas Stuart an extraordinary, page-turning second novel, a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in the hyper-masculine and violently sectarian world of Glasgow''s housing estates. They should be sworn enemies if they''re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they find themselves falling in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo works especially hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo''s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future. Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in literary fiction, Douglas Stuart''s Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.
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United States, 1937. In the middle of the Great Depression, 22-year-old photographer John Clark is brought in by the Farm Security Administration to document the calamitous conditions of the Dust Bowl in the central and southern states, in order to bring the farmers' plight to the public eye. When he starts working through his shooting script, however, he finds his subjects to be unreceptive. What good are a couple of photos against relentless and deadly dust storms? The more he shoots, the more John discovers the awful extent of their struggles, coming to question his own role and responsibilities in this tragedy sweeping through the center of the country. A moving and unforgettable tale, inspired by real-life stories of courage and perseverance against all odds.
