The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy $38
From the 1997 Booker Prize-winning author of the internationally acclaimed and beloved bestseller The God of Small Things. This sumptuously moving novel – Arundhati Roy’s first in 20 years – takes us on an intimate journey across the Indian subcontinent – from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi and the glittering malls of the burgeoning new metropolis to the snowy mountains and valleys of Kashmir, where war is peace and peace is war, and from time to time ‘normalcy’ is declared. The cast of unforgettable characters are caught up in the tide of history. Told with a whisper, with a shout, with tears and with laughter, it is a love story and a provocation. Its heroes, present and departed, human and animal, have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love – and by hope. For this reason, fragile though they may be, they never surrender. Braiding richly complex lives together, this ravishing and deeply humane novel reinvents what a novel can do and can be, demonstrating on every page the full range of Arundhati Roy’s exceptional storytelling gifts.
Pieces of Happiness
Anne Ostby $37
When recently widowed Kat writes to her four lifelong school friends, now in their sixties, inviting them to live on her cocoa plantation in the South Pacific, they swap icy pavements and TV dinners for a tropical breeze and an azure-blue ocean. Leaving behind loneliness, dead-end jobs and marriages that have gone sour, they settle into the Women’s House, surrounded by palms and cocoa trees; and locals with the puzzling habit of exploding into laughter for no discernible reason. Each of the women has her issues to resolve, and secrets to keep. But together the friends find a new purpose, starting a business to make chocolate: bittersweet, succulent pieces of happiness. As they embrace a new culture that views ageing so differently from their own, will they learn to accept and forgive; to discover the value of friendship, and a better way to live? A story of love, hope and chocolate, Pieces of Happiness will reaffirm your faith in friendship, second chances, and the importance of indulging one’s sweet tooth.
Salt Houses
Hala Alyan $35
Where do you go when you can’t go home? In Palestine, on the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. Although she keeps her predictions to herself that day, they soon come to pass in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East. Caught up in the resistance, Alia’s brother disappears, while Alia and her husband move from Nablus to Kuwait City. Reluctantly they build a life, torn between needing to remember and learning to forget. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Alia and her family yet again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it. Scattering to Beirut, Paris and Boston, Alia’s children begin families of their own, once more navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities. Hala Alyan’s powerful and poetic voice takes us into the dark recesses of history and guides us right up to the present tensions between East and West, the modern and the ancestral, the hopeless and the hopeful in this heartbreaking and lyrical novel that challenges and humanises an age-old conflict we might think we understand: you can’t go home again.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman $35
No one’s ever told Eleanor Oliphant that life should be better than fine. She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions – but everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling, unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the type of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. It is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. Warm and uplifting, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realises... The only way to survive is to open your heart.
Exile
James Swallow $33
The eagerly awaited sequel to Nomad, the outstanding, explosive, international bestselling political thriller of 2016. A vicious Serbian gang whose profits come from fake nuclear weapons. A disgraced Russian general, with access to the real nuclear thing. A vengeful Somali warlord, with a cause for which he’d let the world burn. A jaded government agency, without the information to stop him. Only one man sees what’s coming – and even he might not be able to prevent it. Racing breathlessly from uncharted CIA prisons to the skyscrapers of Dubai, from storm-beaten oil rigs off the African coast to the ancient caverns beneath the city of Naples, Marc Dane – now working as an analyst for the United Nations agency Office of Nuclear Security – finds himself forced into a deadly hunt, against impossible odds. If I Am Pilgrim or Nomad gripped you, Exile is for you.
