Thursday, April 28, 2011

Swamplandia by Karen Russell


The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline and Swamplandia!, their island home in the Florida Everglades and gator-wrestling theme park, is swiftly being encroached upon by a sophisticated competitor known as The World of Darkness. Ava, a resourceful but terrified twelve year old, must manage seventy gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Her mother, Swamplandia!'s legendary and beautiful star attraction, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her Grandpa Sawtooth has been sent to the mainland to an old folk's home; her brother has secretly defected to The World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep the family afloat; and her father, the Chief, is AWOL.

To save them, Ava must journey on her own to a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, a harrowing odyssey from which she emerges a true heroine. Swamplandia! is a dark and mythic story, bursting with energy and an unstoppable inventiveness, by a writer with an astonishingly original and exuberant imagination.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

THE IMPAC SHORTLIST 2011

• Galore by Michael Crummey
• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
• Ransom by David Malouf
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates
• Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibín
• Love and Summer by William Trevor
• After the Fire, a Still, Small Voice by Evie Wyld

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

ORANGE PRIZE SHORT LIST

The Orange Prize short list was announced this morning and we are delighted to see that Emma Donohue is one of the selected writers for Room, a brilliant book, and one of our favorites. This is the list:


Emma Donoghue (Irish) - Room; Picador; 7th Novel



•Aminatta Forna (British/Sierra Leonean) - The Memory of Love; Bloomsbury; 2nd Novel


•Emma Henderson (British) - Grace Williams Says it Loud; Sceptre; 1st Novel


•Nicole Krauss (American) - Great House; Viking; 3rd Novel


•Téa Obreht (Serbian/American) - The Tiger’s Wife; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1st Novel


•Kathleen Winter (Canadian) - Annabel; Jonathan Cape; 1st Nov

We have copies of these books available now!!!