Groff paints a picture of medieval France so stunning that it makes you care about a character so intensely it’s almost as if you were having sex.
The extent of the paradox of being in love with a cloistered (literally) lesbian abbess who “lived” eight hundred years ago is matched only by the bloodlust of rooting for her to murder and outlive her enemies.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS AN OBAMA'S BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Gorgeous, sensual, addictive' SARA COLLINS 'Brightly lit' NAOMI ALDERMAN
Born from a long line of female warriors and crusaders, yet too coarse for courtly life, Marie de France is cast from the royal court and sent to Angleterre to take up her new duty as the prioress of an impoverished abbey.
Lauren Groff's modern masterpiece is about the establishment of a female utopia.
'A propulsive, captivating read' BRIT BENNETT 'Fascinating, beguiling, vivid' MARIAN KEYES 'A dazzlingly clever tale' THE TIMES 'A thrillingly vivid,…
This incredibly readable work of anthropological discovery helps put a bow on the last 40 years of research on the topic of who we are and how we got here.
The most incredible takeaway is that we didn’t have to end up in a world of nation-states, that throughout pre-history and beyond, there have been people and cultures that were truly egalitarian and humanistic, and that we can become that way again.
It’s one of my favorite books of non-fiction ever because it gives me hope that perhaps our children or their children will remake a better world.
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction…
The novel is both a trenchant and fast-moving exploration of what it’s like to be a human in the last half of the twentieth century and a primer for any writer wanting to write a novel without getting bogged down in things like establishing scenes and familiar plot devices.
Ernaux just tells stories about her characters and is unafraid to let her third-person narrator tell without showing.
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times),…
A powerful examination of the past in light of the present, The Silk Factory is as much an autobiographical descent into the generational trauma induced by history as it is a memoir of the Holocaust itself. Sparked by an email from a nephew he didn’t even know existed, Hickins, a former journalist, learns of the existence of a silk factory that belonged to his family before being expropriated by the Nazi government, relives the deaths of people he never met, and comes to learn of the heroism of Paul Mirat, the mayor of a small village in France who saved his father’s life along with hundreds of others. Hickins is also forced to confront his own patterns of misbehaviors as he tries to raise a young child free of the blood and guilt of the past.
