THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER: THE RETURN OF JACKSON BRODIE, ''LIKE ALL GOOD DETECTIVES, A HERO FOR MEN AND WOMEN ALIKE'' ( The Times) '' Big Sky is laced with Atkinson''s sharp, dry humour, and one of the joys of the Brodie novels has always been that they are so funny'' ( Observer ) Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village in North Yorkshire, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son Nathan and ageing Labrador Dido, both at the discretion of his former partner Julia. It''s a picturesque setting, but there''s something darker lurking behind the scenes. Jackson''s current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, seems straightforward, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network-and back into the path of someone from his past. Old secrets and new lies intersect in this breathtaking new literary crime novel, both sharply funny and achingly sad, by one of the most dazzling and surprising writers at work today.
***Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2014*** Forever after, there were for them only two sorts of men: the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not.
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.
Hailed as a masterpiece, Richard Flanagan's epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man's reckoning with the truth.
A fair-haired young man from Virginia sees a dark girl rowing on the lake at Versailles and he falls in love. She turns out to be the Duchess de La Rochefoucauld, known as Rosalie, married to a man twice her age who also happens to be her uncle. It is the spring of 1875 and the young American, William Short, nicknamed Wm, has crossed the Atlantic to serve as secretary to his adoptive father Thomas Jefferson at the Paris embassy. Lodging on the Champs Elysees with Jefferson's two young daughters and their teenage slave Sally Hemings, Wm becomes the darling of the free spirits of the ancien regime, who want to copy everything American, including revolution and the pursuit of happiness.
But this is a time when nothing runs straight, certainly not the pursuit of happiness. Together and apart, Wm and Rosalie endure the bloodiest days of the Terror when everyone loses their heads or their illusions except for one man, but that man is about to become President of the United States.
Stylish, intelligent and witty, The Condor's Head is by turns tense and erotic, incredibly funny and unbearably sad. It includes the real-life letters of Wm and Rosalie and Jefferson, some never published before. It also incidentally reveals the truth about the Third President and Sally Hemings.
