UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction at the UGA Libraries

Transition by Iain M. Banks
PR6052.A485 T73 2009

A world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse, such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organisation with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers?

On the Concern’s books are Temudjin Oh, an un-killable assassin who journeys between the peaks of Nepal, a version of Victorian London and the dark palaces of Venice; and a nameless, faceless torturer known only as the Philosopher. And then there’s the renegade Mrs Mulverhill, who recruits rebels to her side; and Patient 8262, hiding out from a dirty past in a forgotten hospital ward. As these vivid, strange and sensuous worlds circle and collide, the implications of turning traitor to the Concern become horribly apparent, and an unstable universe is set on a dizzying course.

Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker
PR6052.A64876 B88 2010

From the award-winning author of Darkmans comes a comic epistolary novel of startling originality and wit.

Reading other people’s letters is always a guilty pleasure. But for two West Yorkshire policemen – contemplating a cache of 26 undelivered missives, retrieved from a back alley behind the hairdresser’s in Skipton – it’s also a job of work. The quaint moorside village of Burley Cross has been plunged into turmoil by the theft of the contents of its postbox, and when PC Roger Topping takes over the case, which his higher-ranking schoolmate Sergeant Laurence Everill has so far failed to crack, his expectations of success are not high.Yet Topping’s investigation into the curtain-twitching lives of Jeremy Baverstock, Baxter Thorndyke, the Jonty Weiss-Quinns, Mrs Tirza Parry (widow), and a splendid array of other weird and wonderful characters, will not only uncover the dark underbelly of his scenic beat, but also the fundamental strengths of his own character.The denizens of Burley Cross inhabit a world where everyone’s secrets are worn on their sleeves, pettiness becomes epic, little is writ large. From complaints about dog shit to passive-aggressive fanmail, from biblical amateur dramatics to an Auction of Promises that goes staggeringly, horribly wrong, Nicola Barker’s epistolary novel is a work of immense comic range. It is also unlike anything she has written before. Brazenly mischievous and irresistibly readable, Burley Cross Postbox Theft is a Cranford for today, albeit with a decent dose of Tamiflu, some dodgy sex-therapy and a whiff of cheap-smelling vodka.

Walcot by Brian Aldiss
PR6051.L3 W35 2009

On the glorious sands of the North Norfolk coast, Steve, the youngest member of the Fielding family, plays alone. But are these halcyon days?  The great events of the Twentieth Century are about to sweep Steve and his sister Sonia into deep waters. Chance is all.  The fortunes of the Fielding family continue through the storms of world events marking the outrageous years of the Twentieth Century.

Notwithstanding: Stories from an English Village by Louis de Bernières
PR6054.E132 N68 2009

A funny and heartbreaking new book from one of Britain’s favourite and bestselling writers.

Welcome to the village of Notwithstanding where a lady dresses in plus fours and shoots squirrels, a retired general gives up wearing clothes altogether, a spiritualist lives in a cottage with the ghost of her husband, and people think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed. Based on de Bernières’ recollections of the village he grew up in, Notwithstanding is a funny and moving depiction of a charming vanished England.

Old Swords, and Other Stories by Desmond Hogan
PR6058.O346 O43 2009

These eleven stories by Desmond Hogan, his first publication since Larks’ Eggs: New and Selected Stories (2005), collect newly minted shards of experience focused on the lives of the dreamers and marginalized who populate his imagined worlds. They range in time and place from France, Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century to Ireland of the 1950s and the present day. Their concerns are fragility and identity expressed through the outer semblances of dress and deportment, and inner realities of involuntary memory and the retrieval of shared pasts. Close observation of nature combines with psychological unveilings, much of it in the form of erotic reverie. This bricolage of melded history and a fragmented modernism renders truth-to-experience like no other contemporary voice.

This author’s linguistic resourcefulness is unique to Irish letters, and each new gathering enlarges upon his reputation as one of Ireland’s most fearless and invigorating writers, who, in the words of film-maker Neil Jordan, “remakes the world every time he puts pen to paper.”

Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon
PR6073.E374 C45 2009

Fay Weldon in top gear: a wickedly sharp, history-bending, cosmos-colliding novel that tells the story of Frances, Fay’s never-born younger sister.

Its 2013 and eighty-year-old Frances (part-time copywriter, has-been writer, one-time national treasure) is sitting on the stairs of Number 3, Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, listening to the debt collectors pounding on her front door. From this house she’s witnessed five decades of world history – the fall of communism, the death of capitalism – and now, with the bailiffs, world history has finally reached her doorstep. While she waits for the bailiffs to give up and leave, Frances writes (not that she has an agent any more, or that her books are still published, or even that there are any publishers left). She writes about the boyfriends she borrowed and the husband she stole from Fay, about her daughters and their children. She writes about the Shock, the Crunch, the Squeeze, the Recovery, the Fall, the Crisis and the Bite, about NUG the National Unity Government, about ration books, powercuts, National Meat Loaf (suitable for vegetarians) and the new Neighbourhood Watch. She writes about family secrets…

The problem is that fact and fiction are blurring in Frances’ mind. Is it her writer’s imagination, or is it just old age, or plain paranoia? Are her grandchildren really plotting a terrorist coup upstairs? Are faceless assassins trying to kill her younger daughter? Should she worry that her son-in-law is an incipient megalomaniac being groomed for NUG’s highest office? What on earth can NUG have against vegetarians? And just what makes National Meat Loaf so tasty?

The Wonder by Diana Evans
PR6105.V345 W66 2009

From the acclaimed author of 26a, comes a dazzling new novel about the fight to achieve one’s dream, and an unsolved disappearance at the heart of a family.

As a child Lucas assumed that all children who’d lost their parents lived on water. Now a restless young man, and still sharing the West London narrowboat with his sister Denise, he secretly investigates the contents of an old wardrobe, in which he finds relics from the Midnight Ballet, an influential black dance company of the 1960s founded by his Jamaican father, the charismatic Antoney Matheus.

In his search to unravel the legacy of the Midnight Ballet, Lucas hears of hot-house rehearsals in an abandoned Notting Hill church, of artistic battles and personal betrayals, and a whirlwind European tour. Most importantly, Lucas learns about his parents’ passionate and tumultuous relationship and of the events that led to his father’s final disappearance.

Vividly conjuring the world of 1950s Kingston, Jamaica, the Blues parties and early carnivals of Ladbroke Grove, the flower stalls and vinyl riflers of modern-day Portobello Road, and the famous leap and fall of Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, Diana Evans creates a haunting and visceral family mystery about absence and inheritance, the battle between love and creativity, and what drives a young man to take flight…

War & Music: A Medley of Love by Max Evans
PS3555.V23 W37 2010

Ty Hale, a young corporal from Lovington, New Mexico, finds himself alone in the middle of a grain field in Normandy after being knocked unconscious by the explosion of a German artillery shell.  Stunned from the explosion and overwhelmed by visions of the grandfather who raised him and the simple life of the New Mexico prairie he has left behind, Ty attempts to rejoin his unit but instead stumbles onto a country estate and inextricably into the lives of its inhabitants.

Philippe Gaston, a former music teacher, his stunningly beautiful daughter Renée, and Hans Heinike, a German deserter and an accomplished musician, are attempting to carve out a normal existence in spite of the chaos and destruction that surrounds them.

As Philippe devotes his time to his German protégé, Ty and Renée fall in love and Ty learns of the Gaston estate’s unique legacy of survival and the most recent story of violence and sacrifice that has preserved this pristine oasis in the midst of a raging war. The music that permeates their solitary existence, whether it be the buzzing and chattering of insects and birds, a violin and human voice joined in concert, or the fire of machine guns and the distant rumble of tanks, draws these unlikely comrades together and reveals the common humanity that resides in us all. The war, the music, the love, and the rhythms of nature are all timeless and eternal.

My Hollywood: A Novel by Mona Simpson
PS3569.I5117 M92 2010

From the much-loved author of Anywhere but Here and The Lost Father, a long-awaited novel—her first in ten years—about two women behind the glitter of Hollywood.

Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to L.A. so her husband can follow his dream of writing TV comedy. Suddenly, the marriage changes, with Paul working all hours and Claire left with a baby, William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for.

Enter Lola—a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who comes to work in America to pay for her own children’s higher education back in the Philippines. Lola stabilizes the rocky household, and soon other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and William remains her own closely guarded secret.

In a novel, at turns satirical and heartbreaking, where mothers’ modern ideas are given practical overhauls by nannies, we meet Lola’s vast network of fellow caregivers, each with her own story to tell. We see the upstairs competition for the best nanny and the downstairs competition for the best deal, and are forced to ask whether it’s possible to buy love for our children and what that transaction costs. We see the endangerment of a modern marriage despite the best of intentions. This tender, witty, and resonant novel provides the profound pleasures readers have come to expect from Mona Simpson, here writing at the height of her powers.

A Dog With N0 Tail by Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Translated by Robin Moger.
PJ7808.J85 F25513 2009

This is a story about building things up and knocking them down. Here are the campfire tales of Egypt’s dispossessed and disillusioned, the anti-Arabian Nights.

Our narrator, a rural immigrant from the Bedouin villages of the Fayoum, an aspiring novelist and construction laborer of the lowest order, leads us down a fractured path of reminiscence in his quest for purpose and identity in a world where the old orders and traditions are powerless to help.

Bawdy and wistful, tragicomic and bitter, his stories loop and repeat, crackling with the frictive energy of colliding worlds and linguistic registers. These are the tales of Cairo’s new Bedouin, men not settled by the state but permanently uprooted by it. Like their lives, their stories are dislocated and unplotted, mapping out their quest for meaning in the very act of placing brick on brick and word on word.