An outrageously funny novel of adventure, sex, corruption, and crime from one of the greatest British authors of the twentieth century. Michael Cullen is proud to be a bastard. His first memories are of the war, when his mother welcomed every soldier in Britain into her house, and young Michael hid beneath her bed to let the rocking of the springs lull him to sleep. By the time he’s eighteen, he’s got a pregnant girlfriend, and is staring down a long life of working-class respectability that simply makes him sick. So Michael says goodbye to his girlfriend and his home in Nottingham, and hits the road for London, where he will make his fortune—or die trying. From the nightclubs of Soho to the depths of London’s underworld, Michael can’t help but get into trouble. But whether he’s chauffeuring a vicious gangster or smuggling gold bullion across the channel, he never stops having a wonderful time. Indeed, Michael is something else entirely: a happy bastard with nothing to lose. A rollicking picaresque novel by the legendary author of such classics of kitchen sink realism as The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Start in Life is one of the funniest British novels of the twentieth century. A Start in Life is the 1st book in the Michael Cullen Novels, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order. “A Start in Life is, for my money, the best novel that Sillitoe has yet written.” —New Statesman “The kind of hilarious nonsense that keeps you riveted to deck-chair or arm-chair, depending on the season.” —The Daily Telegraph Praise for Alan Sillitoe “The master of British verbal architecture.” —Rolling Stone Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright, known for his honest, humorous, and acerbic accounts of working-class life. Sillitoe served four years in the Royal Air Force and lived for six years in France and Spain, before returning to England. His first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was published in 1958 and was followed by a collection of short stories, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. With over fifty volumes to his name, Sillitoe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.

"Short stories of Iowa farm and village life." Cf. Hanna, A. Mirror for the nation

The Divorce tells about a man who takes a vacation from Providence, R.I. in early December to avoid conflicts with his newly divorced wife and small daughter. He travels to Buenos Aires and there, one afternoon, he encounters a series of the most magical coincidences. While sitting at an outdoor café, absorbed in conversation with a talented video artist, a young man with a bicycle is thoroughly drenched by a downpour of water seemingly from rain caught the night before in the overhead awning. The video artist knows the cyclist, who knew a mad hermetic sculptor, whose family used to take the Hindu God Krishna for walks in the neighborhood. More meetings, more whimsical and clever stories continue to weave reality with the absurd until the final, brilliant, wonderful, cataclysmic ending.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Step into Paris as you have never seen it before. . . SHORTLISTED FOR THE HAYES & JARVIS FICTION WITH A SENSE OF PLACE, 2018 EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL WRITING AWARD 'An engaging debut that throws light on a hidden side of Paris' Woman and Home 'A sensitive, necessary, brave book.' Laura Barnett, author of The Versions of Us What building doesn't have secrets? How much does anyone know of what goes on behind their neighbour's doors? On a hot June day, grief-stricken Edward arrives in Paris hoping that a stay in a friend's empty apartment will help him mend. But this is not the Paris he knows: there are no landmarks or grand boulevards, and the apartment he was promised is little more than an attic room. In the apartments below him, his new neighbours fill their flats with secrets. A young mother is on the brink, a bookshop owner buries her past, and a banker takes up a dark and malicious new calling. Before he knows it, Edward will find himself entangled in their web, and as the summer heat intensifies so do tensions within and without the building, leading to a city-wide wave of violence, and a reckoning within the walls of number 37. With a sultry heat to rival A Year in Provence and all the sharp perception of Leila Slimani's Lullaby, These Dividing Walls is a beautifully written and eye-opening novel about the Paris we don't see. 'It'll open your heart and mind. It certainly did mine' The Pool 'An unforgettable and unexpected portrait of Paris' Hannah Rothschild *********** What readers have said about These Dividing Walls: 'Totally engrossing - it was a magical pleasure to lose myself in these people's world each night' 'The quality of the writing in These Dividing Walls is never short of exquisite' 'This is an outstanding debut novel from an author to watch' 'A delightful glimpse into the lives of a group of people one hot and fearful summer'

Billy Graham shares God's gentle, reassuring promise of spiritual calm and authentic peace in a world falling apart at the seams. In a culture that values "quality of life" and personal happiness above all else, why are so many of us unhappy, anxious, lonely, on the brink of despair? Why do so many of us feel empty, even though we live surrounded by plenty? In Peace with God, Reverend Graham takes you on a great quest to find the answers to life's purpose. Along the way, he answers essential questions to understanding the true hope at the foundation of the Christian faith—questions like: What is God like? Why did Jesus come? What is repentance? How can I be sure of salvation? How should a Christian live? "God's peace can be in your heart—right now . . .Whatever the circumstances, whatever the call, whatever the duty, whatever the price, whatever the sacrifice—His strength will be your strength in your hour of need. It's all yours, and it's free." Peace with God is a timeless message of hope for all those struggling with despair and loneliness. Billy Graham will beckon you on the path to lasting peace as he describes the basics of the biblical message, the problem of sin, the tenets of the Christian way of life, and the glorious hope for the future.

"Heidegger wants us to recapture the sense of people as unique and valuable, and this seems like the central argument of Dillard's book." How did we ever come to believe in the myth of intentional, just and legitimate systems of social organization - like states, corporations, and families - without actually accounting for the fair creation, development and consensual inclusion of future generations - the majority of persons - into those systems? How is consent, or self-determination, possible without that account? What norm could possibly precede that account? These articles - several peer-reviewed and originally published by Yale, Duke, Northwestern and other universities - will argue that, abstraction aside, there is no real justice without ensuring all children a fair start in life, both socially and ecologically. We first move towards justice by reforming the moral and legal right to have children, and the family planning systems the right creates, around zero baseline - or Fair Start - modeling that through collective child-centric planning enables consent to power and thus relative self-determination against the true baseline of nonpolity. Without it, we never orient our actions from a just, or inclusive and reflective, position. Fair Start moves the discussion away from population and toward people, away from counting people and toward making people count. If we care about freedom, we first care about people because in democratic systems they - ultimately - have political authority over us. A just creation norm makes God fair, our systems consensual, and frees us from one another. This book thus seeks to correct what we might call the constitutive or grundnorm fallacy: The mistake of trying to derive inclusive systems of justice, and freedom, downstream of our creation rather than going to the source - just family planning. Correcting that mistake, and understanding the right to have children, resolves a corruption at the heart of human rights which makes a system designed to protect the most vulnerable, like future persons, fundamentally exploitative of them. The creation norm is what most accounts, and should most account, for the lives we experience. Making that norm fair brings us to optimal world populations. It is also the most effective solution to the ecosocial crises we face today, with the weight of evidence showing ten to twenty times the impact, via redistributive Fair Start family planning entitlememts/incentives, on things like the climate crisis and economic inequality relative to downstream measures. "Justice is not abstract, but created in the constant and fundamental formation - or procreation - of power relations."