The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

$8.00 NZD

Category: Literary Fiction | Reading Level: good

Russia's literary world is shaken to its foundations when a mysterious gentleman o a professor of black magic o arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a bizarre retinue of servants. It soon becomes clear that he is the Devil himself, come to wreak havoc among the cultural elite of a disbelieving capital. But the Devil's mission quickly becomes entangled with the fate of the Master o a man who has turned his back on his former life and taken refuge in a lunatic asylum o and his past lover, Margarita. Both a satirical romp and a daring analysis of the nature of good and evil, innocence and guilt, The Master and Margarita is the crowning achievement of one of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century. ...Show more

Classic Rhymes for Kiwi Kids by Peter Millett

$8.00 NZD

Category: Children Non-fiction | Reading Level: near fine

Award winning author Peter Millett (The Anzac Puppy) and illustrator Scott Tulloch (I Am Not A Worm) add a classic Kiwi spin to some all-time favourite nursery rhymes.

Mapping the World by . J. Schuler

$85.00 NZD

Category: Maud’s Picks | Reading Level: very good

With more than 400 historic maps, explanatory text and a timeline, this lavish book traces the exploration of the globe from the 15th century when the European seafarer first set sail across the oceans.

Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx

$12.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

E. Annie Proulx's "Accordion Crimes" is a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. Proulx brings the immigrant experience in America to life through the eyes of the descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Africans, Irish-Scots, Franco-Canadians and many others, all linked by their succe ssive ownership of a simple green accordion. The music they make is their last link with the past -- voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance. Proulx's prodigious knowledge, unforgettable characters and radiant language make "Accordion Crimes" a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality. ...Show more

The Letters of T.S.Eliot Volume I 1898-1922 by T.S. Eliot

$14.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: good

Published on the centenary of his birth, this volume of the correspondence of T.S.Eliot covers the period from his childhood in St Louis, Missouri, until the end of 1922 - the year of "The Waste Land" and seven years after he had married and settled in England. The text includes not only letters of sign ificance which Eliot wrote during this period, but also letters written to him by family, friends and contemporaries. The poet's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot, has assembled the material from collections, libraries, sale rooms, archives and private sources all over the world. She has also drawn extensively upon her own archive in London. She has written the introduction, annotated the letters throughout and provided chronologies and an editorial commentary where necessary. The photographs, many of them previously unpublished, depict Eliot and his milieu, while sketches by the poet himself appear amongst several of the early letters. Mrs Eliot is also the editor of "The Waste Land Facsimile". ...Show more

The Voyage of the Narwhal - A Novel by Andrea Barrett

$14.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

A major novel by the author of Ship Fever, winner of the 1996 National Book Award for fiction. Part adventure, part love story, this unforgettable novel captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration. Combining fact and fiction, the story focuses on Erasmus Darwin Wells, a 19th-century scholar/ naturalist and his expedition to search for an open polar sea. ...Show more

Adult Pleasures - Essays on Writers and Readers by Dan Jacobson

$14.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Reading Level: very good

Updike by Adam Begley

$20.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

In this eye-opening, authoritative biography, Adam Begley offers a captivating portrait of John Updike, the author who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, and who dedicated himself to the task of tran-scribing "middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities."Updike e xplores the stages of the writer's pilgrim's progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing on in-depth archival research as well as interviews with the writer's family, friends, and colleagues, Begley explores how Updike's fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life--including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his firsthand experience of the "adulterous society" he was credited with exposing in the bestselling novel Couples.With a sharp critical sensibility, Begley probes Updike's best-loved works--from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy--and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Candid, intimate, and utterly absorbing, Updike is a masterful biography of a national treasure whose writing continues to resonate like no one else's. ...Show more

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

$14.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

From the bestselling author of "The Little Stranger "and "Fingersmith," an enthralling novel about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London. It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa--a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants--life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the "clerk class," the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances's life--or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, "The Paying Guests" is Sarah Waters's finest achievement yet. ...Show more

Henry James and Edith Wharton - Letters: 1900-1915 by Lyall H. Powers (Editor); Henry James; Edith Wharton

$25.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Atonement by Ian McEwan

$15.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony's sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge. By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl's scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life. In each of his novels Ian McEwan has brilliantly drawn his reader into the intimate lives and situations of his characters. But never before has he worked with so large a canvas: In "Atonement "he takes the reader from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from the London's World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999. "Atonement" is Ian McEwan's finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound-and profoundly moving-exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution. ...Show more

Maurice Gee: Life and Work by Rachel Barrowman

$35.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Literature | Reading Level: very good

Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand s greatest fiction writers. His long literary career began in the 1950s and includes seventeen adult novels, thirteen novels for children, a short story collection, and screenplays for television and film. His work is loved by generations of readers and has earned him m any awards. In this revelatory new work, acclaimed biographer Rachel Barrowman interweaves the story of Gee s life with his fiction, illuminating the unassuming man in the grey cardy alongside his unsettling stories. Immaculately researched, with full access to her subject and his records, "Maurice Gee: Life and Work "offers a fascinating portrait of a writing life. Gee once described himself as a New-Zealandy sort of writer living in a New-Zealandy sort of place .'.'. writing New-Zealandy sort of books . His work has always drawn from a particular, personal New Zealand; his fictional territory takes in the domestic lives and landscapes of New Zealand s provincial towns and middle-class suburbs places where murders happen, where families hurt and self-destruct. Through decades of changing literary fashions, Gee has gone on doing his own thing, seeking out evidence of disorder, passion, of the primitive thing . "Maurice Gee: Life and Work" explores the connections and paradoxes of a private man who has written his life into fiction. It is a compelling story of a life and a major contribution to New Zealand literary history." ...Show more