Original Fiction
03/06/2010 978 0 571 251810 240pp _
Trade Paperback £12.99 _ _
UK and Commonwealth _ _
Playing Days
Benjamin Markovits
03/06/2010 978 0 571 254750 336pp _
Trade Paperback £12.99 _ _
Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father – professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an ecclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it. It’s an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement – and often intense disappointment – of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and life changing as the game itself. Tinged with the meloncholy and nostalgia of early steps into adulthood, Playing Days is the story of a young man’s first experience of adult love, and of the discovery of his own limitations. It confirms Markovits’s reputation as one of the great young American novelists of his generation.
Original Fiction
Whatever You Love Louise Doughty
A novel of love, loss, and revenge from highly acclaimed novelist Louise Doughty. Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics. He has written four previous novels, including Either Side of Winter and A Quiet Adjustment.
UK, Commonwealth and EU exclusive _
Louise Doughty is the author of five novels – Crazy Paving, Dance with Me, Honey-Dew, Fires in the Dark and Stone Cradle – and one book of non-fiction, A Novel in A Year, based on her hugely popular Daily Telegraph column. Doughty also writes radio plays and journalism and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio 4, as well as teaching for the Faber Academy. She lives in London.
We think of our lives as linear, with a clear beginning and middle and end. The line is inexorable: time itself. Betty’s death stopped time. The line dissolved and life became a point, fixed on the day that Betty died. When two police officers knock on Laura’s door, her life changes for ever. Her nine-year-old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed, and Laura is left both devastated and desperate for revenge against the man responsible for Betty’s death. Laura’s grief re-opens old wounds and she is thrown back to the story of her passionate love affair with Betty’s father David, their marriage and his subsequent affair with another woman. When does lust become sexual jealousy – and when does the desire for justice become a bitter thirst for violence? What are the boundaries between love and the desire for possession or control? Haunted by her past, and driven to breaking point by her desire for retribution, Laura discovers the lengths she is willing to go to for love.
‘Her observations of women’s lives are breathtakingly original.’ The Times
‘Doughty has a subtle, unshowy talent that packs an emotional punch . . . moves and impresses in equal measure.’ Independent
‘I wanted to return to something, to my father’s childhood as much as my own.’ 16
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