Recommendations based on "Night Music"

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE WINNER OF IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 'The most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read' SALLY ROONEY The treatment of refugees has become one of the most devastating human rights disasters in our history. In this book, award-winning journalist Sally Hayden unfolds a staggering investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa. This book follows the experiences of refugees, telling a range of shocking and eye-opening human stories. But it also surveys the bigger picture: the negligence of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations. The economics of the twenty-first-century slave trade and the EU's bankrolling of Libyan militias. The trials of people smugglers, the frustrations of aid workers, the loopholes refugees seek out and the role of social media in crowdfunding ransoms. Who was accountable for the abuse? Where were the people finding solutions? Why wasn't it being widely reported? At its heart, this is a book about people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.

A sensitive portrayal of the healing process that took place in the aftermath of the First World War, J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country includes an introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald, author of Offshore, in Penguin Modern Classics. A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years. Adapted into a 1987 film starring Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson and Kenneth Branagh, A Month in the Country traces the slow revival of the primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War Joseph Lloyd Carr (1912-1994) attended the village school at Carlton Miniott in the North Riding and Castleford Secondary School. A head teacher, publisher and novelist, his books include A Day in Summer (1964); The Harpole Report (1972); A Month in the Country (1980), which won the Guardian Fiction prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Battle of Pollock's Crossing (1985), which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; What Hetty Did (1988) and Harpole and Foxberrow, General Publishers (1992). If you enjoyed A Month in the Country, you might like Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Unlike anything else in modern English literature' D.J. Taylor, Spectator

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERIlja Leonard Pfeijffer’s moving and addictive masterpiece of European identity, nostalgia and the end of an era.‘A masterpiece: grandiose style, brilliant and rich. It will defy the ages’ Trouw (The Netherlands)‘The love of my life lives in my past. That is, despite the alliteration, a terrible sentence to write. I do not want to come to the conclusion that, as it is the case for the hotel where I am staying and the continent after which it is named, the best time is behind me and that I have little more to expect from the future than to live on my past.’A writer takes residence in the illustrious but decaying Grand Hotel Europa, to think about where things went wrong with Clio, with whom he fell in love in Genoa and moved to Venice. He reconstructs a compelling story of love in times of mass tourism, about their trips to Malta, Palmaria, Portovenere and the Cinque Terre and their thrilling search for the last painting of Caravaggio. Meanwhile, he becomes fascinated by the mysteries of Grand Hotel Europe and gets more and more involved with the memorable characters who inhabit it, and who seem to come from a more elegant time. All the while, globalisation seems to be grabbing hold even on this place frozen in time.Grand Hotel Europa is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s masterly novel on the old continent, where so much history resides that there is no place left for a future and where the most realistic future perspectives are offered in the form of exploiting the past in the shape of tourism.

Middle-age sneaks up on Mr. Smith, but he survives despite his son's wedding in Paris, his inability to understand his new relatives, and his grudging acknowledgment of his mortality

"There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world."—Wall Street Journal Twelve remarkable stories by the master storyteller William Trevor. In this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales, William Trevor plumbs the depths of the human heart. Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation. Trevor is, in his own words, "a storyteller. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so." Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try. Trevor wrote eighteen novels and novellas, and hundreds of short stories, for which he has won a number of prizes including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement. In 2002 he was knighted for his services to literature.

A collection of nine exceptional stories from the much-loved author of The Catcher in the RyeAn American soldier has a strange encounter with an orphaned English teenager the night before he leaves for war. A four-year-old boy runs away in a dinghy; a missionary's child is kidnapped by Chinese bandits. A honeymoon in Florida goes awry with tragic consequences. Including the first stories to feature Salinger's beloved Glass family characters, this brilliantly varied collection offers a vivid introduction to the work of one of the most admired and widely read American novelists of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane and frequently affecting, For Esme - with Love and Squalor sits alongside Salinger's very best work - a gem that will be passed down for many generations to come.

The women of No. 13 Article Row know that joy is short lived in the London of 1941. It's a treacherous place, especially for the tender-hearted. As Valentine's Day approaches, the perils of war threaten life as they know it and all matters of the heart.

In the small university town of Salterton, Ontario, dreams are quietly taking shape, or falling apart.There's the Salterton Little Theatre Company, in which professional director Valentine Rich is tormented by the amateurish efforts of his actors. The families Vambrace and Bridgetower almost go to war over a fake notice of engagement in the local paper. And a family fortune is lavished on an aspiring singer because there is no male heir to claim it.Tracing the lives and incidents of a small community in the middle of the last century, "The Salterton Trilogy" peels off the public veneer of geniality and respectability to reveal the private passions churning beneath.

It is the summer of 1940, and all of England fears an invasion by Hitler's army. Norah lies in bed listening to the anxious voices of her parents downstairs. Then Norah is told that she and her brother, Gavin, are being sent to Canada. The voyage across the ocean is exciting, but at the end of it Norah is miserable. The rich woman who takes them in prefers Gavin to her, the children at school taunt her, and as the news from England becomes worse, she longs for home. As Norah begins to make friends, she discovers a surprising responsibility that helps her to accept her new country.

In this book we follow the life of Sarah Rainborough from age 3 in 1851 to the end of her life in 1948. In the opening chapter Sarah is taken to Britain’s *Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace where she catches a glimpse of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Throughout the novel Spring gives his readers the opportunity to share Sarah’s perspective on English history which for Sarah from age 3 on is somehow magically, metaphorically, reflected on the glass windows of the Crystal Palace. As a matter of fact, we learn in the author’s foreword that the title of this book comes from an old music hall song with the words, “You could see the Crystal Palace if it wasn’t for the houses in between.”