Recommendations based on "Babel"

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come.That girl didn’t want to die. She just wanted out of that house. She wanted out of that decorating scheme.The five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric and, now, gone –had always been a point of obsession for the entire neighbourhood.Although the boys that once loved them from afar have grown up, they remain determined to understand a tragedy that has defied explanation. The question persists – why did all five of the Lisbon girls take their own lives?This lyrical and timless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life announced the arrival of one of the greatest American novelists of the last thirty years.‘A flare from my own secret world, all the inchoate longings and obsessions of being a teenager somehow rendered into book form’ Emma Cline, author of The Girls

The exciting end to The Poppy War trilogy, R.F. Kuang's acclaimed, award-winning epic fantasy that combines the history of 20th-century China with a gripping world of gods and monsters, to devastating, enthralling effect.After saving her nation of Nikan from foreign invaders and battling the evil Empress Su Daji in a brutal civil war, Fang Runin was betrayed by allies and left for dead.Despite her losses, Rin hasn't given up on those for whom she has sacrificed so much – the people of the southern provinces and especially Tikany, the village that is her home. Returning to her roots, Rin meets difficult challenges – and unexpected opportunities. While her new allies in the Southern Coalition leadership are sly and untrustworthy, Rin quickly realizes that the real power in Nikan lies with the millions of common people who thirst for vengeance and revere her as a goddess of salvation.Backed by the masses and her Southern Army, Rin will use every weapon to defeat the Dragon Republic, the colonizing Hesperians, and all who threaten the shamanic arts and their practitioners.As her power and influence grows, will she be strong enough to resist the Phoenix's voice, urging her to burn the world and everything in it?R.F. Kuang's book 'Babel' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 05-09-2022.

Rin’s story continues in this acclaimed sequel to The Poppy War—an epic fantasy combining the history of twentieth-century China with a gripping world of gods and monsters.The war is over.The war has just begun.Three times throughout its history, Nikan has fought for its survival in the bloody Poppy Wars. Though the third battle has just ended, shaman and warrior Rin cannot forget the atrocity she committed to save her people. Now she is on the run from her guilt, the opium addiction that holds her like a vice, and the murderous commands of the fiery Phoenix—the vengeful god who has blessed Rin with her fearsome power.Though she does not want to live, she refuses to die until she avenges the traitorous Empress who betrayed Rin’s homeland to its enemies. Her only hope is to join forces with the powerful Dragon Warlord, who plots to conquer Nikan, unseat the Empress, and create a new republic.But neither the Empress nor the Dragon Warlord are what they seem. The more Rin witnesses, the more she fears her love for Nikan will force her to use the Phoenix’s deadly power once more.Because there is nothing Rin won’t sacrifice to save her country . . . and exact her vengeance.

From the critically acclaimed creator of the Heartstopper series comes a smartly crafted contemporary YA novel, perfect for readers who love Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl. This is an utterly captivating and authentic teen novel from the author of Solitaire, which VOYA said “could put her among the great young adult fiction authors.”Frances Janvier spends most of her time studying.Everyone knows Aled Last as that quiet boy who gets straight As.You probably think that they are going to fall in love or something. Since he is a boy and she is a girl.They don’t. They make a podcast.In a world determined to shut them up, knock them down, and set them on a cookie cutter life path, Frances and Aled struggle to find their voices over the course of one life-changing year. Will they have the courage to show everyone who they really are? Or will they be met with radio silence?

'Stunning' DAZED 'Her prose sparkles' ELIZA CLARK 'Hauntingly good' iNEWS 'A must read' GLAMOUR From the bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a haunting, heart wrenching novel of three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world. There's no way to bury a body in earth which is flooded It is a fact consigned to history along with almost everything else It's been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway. As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Something sinister seems to be unfolding, something related to their mother's long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always been unusually interested in their lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperilled world. 'Armfield writes so gracefully' THE TIMES 'Evocative yet grounded' OBSERVER 'A chilling vision of a future capital that I've found impossible to shake' INEWS 'Ballard-ian in apocalyptic scope ... Deeply, passionately, messily human' PAUL TREMBLAY 'A signature cocktail of deadpan wit and staggering beauty' ALICE SLATER 'Brilliant, original ... an era-defining writer' KALIANE BRADLEY 'Every page guillotines you with its wisdom' TOM BENN

AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AN AMAZON BEST BOOK OF 2024 WINNER OF GOODREADS MYSTERY & THRILLER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 'I was totally gripped' DOUGLAS STUART 'Immersive and enthralling' PAULA HAWKINS 'At first hard to put down. By page 200, impossible' STEPHEN KING ---------------------------------------------------- When their thirteen-year-old daughter Barbara goes missing at summer camp, all eyes fall on the Van Laar family. They're cold, rich people. They own the camp. And it's happened to them before. Fourteen years ago their little boy, Bear, vanished without a trace. Two children lost to the same wilderness. Is it a tragedy... or a crime? ----------------------------------------------------- 'Brilliantly plotted and perfectly paced ... I can't remember the last time I felt so entangled in a novelist's coils' Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures 'A beguiling novel with a relentless grip. You won't be able to put it down' Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground 'At once an immersive family saga and utterly propulsive mystery. Beautifully written' Emilia Hart, author of Weyward 'A masterful literary thriller' Lucy Clarke, author of The Hike 'Riveting from page one to the last breathless word ... This book flew by at lightning speed, but will stick with me for a very long time' Rebecca Makkai, author of I Have Some Questions For You 'Dickensian in scope ... Very entertaining' Vogue, Best Picks for Summer 2024 The God of the Woods debuted at #3 on the New York Times bestseller list on 21 July 2024. READERS ARE SAYING... 'I simply couldn't put it down!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'An excellent page-turner' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'I didn't see the end coming' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'I strongly urge everyone to read it and experience the magic for themselves' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'My top read for 2024 so far. Actually, top read full stop' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'A fascinating story with lots of ups and downs... I did like the conclusion, very clever!!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Loved this book from page one! ... A book not to be missed!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'I cannot think of when I have read anything so evocative' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'A riveting read. If you're looking for intriguing characters, a beautifully crafted, slow and atmospheric mystery that feels incredibly intense, then this is the one for you' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own.Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:The story of a hero’s descent to the underworldAlice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.