Original Fiction
07/01/2010 978 0 571 235667 512pp _
Trade Paperback £14.99 _ _
UK and Commonwealth excluding Canada _
Chronic City
18/03/2010 978 0 571 245178 320pp _
Trade Paperback £12.99 _ _
Joanna Kavenna
It has begun as it is always beginning. Always and forever. The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires and lies. Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan’s social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a much-beloved sitcom. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much-covered in the tabloids: his teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift: she in earth’s stratosphere, he in a vague routine puncuated by Upper Eastside dinner parties. Into Chase’s cloistered life enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop-critic, whose countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Together, they attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: truth.
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Original Fiction
The Birth of Love
Jonathan Lethem Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College. He is the author of seven novels including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger. He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guestedited The Year’s Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine. His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney’s and many other periodicals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
UK and Commonwealth excluding Canada, EU exclusive
Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem’s novel is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.
Joanna Kavenna grew up in various parts of Britain, and has also lived in the USA, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States. Her first book The Ice Museum was about travelling in the North. Her second book, a novel called Inglorious, won the Orange Prize Award for New Writers. Kavenna’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian and Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the International Herald Tribune, the Spectator and the Telegraph, among other publications. She has held writing fellowships at St Antony’s College, Oxford and St John’s College, Cambridge. She currently lives in the Duddon Valley, Cumbria.
In Vienna, in 1865, Ignaz Semmelweis has been hounded into a lunatic asylum, ridiculed for his claim that doctors’ unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. The deaths of thousands of mothers are on his conscience and his dreams are filled with blood. In 2153, humans are birthed and raised in breeding centres, nurtured by strangers and deprived of familial love. Miraculously, a woman conceives, and Prisoner 730004 stands trial for concealing it. In London in 2009, Michael Stone’s novel about Semmelweis has been published, after years of rejection. But while Michael absorbs his disconcerting success, his estranged mother is dying and asks to see him again. As Michael vacillates, Brigid Hayes, exhausted and uncertain whether she can endure the trials ahead, begins the labour of her second child. Through the interwoven stories of these four characters, The Birth of Love explores the intense, conflicting emotions of motherhood as few contemporary novels have dared to do. A beautifully constructed and immensely powerful work, it is also a story of rebellion, isolation and the damage done by rigid ideologies. It confirms Joanna Kavenna, winner of the Orange New Writers Award for Inglorious, as one of the most ambitious and talented authors writing today.
‘A great writer who I have no doubt will be read long after I am gone.’ Shami Chakrabarti
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