Rupert Thomson

On a warm, sunny day in July 1964, Thomson returned home from school to discover that his mother had died suddenly while playing tennis. Twenty years later, Thomson and his brothers get word that their father has died alone in hospital. This title works Thomson's memories into a mosaic that reveals the fragility of family life in graphic detail.

Katherine Carlye is an IVF baby. Stored as a frozen embryo for eight years, she is then implanted in her mother and given life. By the age of nineteen, Katherine has lost her mother to cancer, and feels her father to be an increasingly distant figure. Instead of going to college, she disappears, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scène for a courageous leap to true empowerment.

Having spent decades in prison for crimes gruesomely familiar to everyone in England, this murderer has finally died of natural causes but is no less notorious in death than she was in life. Billy Tyler, a career policeman, has been assigned the task of guarding her body--to make sure, he's told, that nothing happens. But alone on a graveyard shift his wife begged him not to accept, Billy has occasion to contemplate the various turns his life has taken, his complicated thoughts about violence in himself and society, the unease that distances him from marital disappointment and a damaged daughter, and, finally, why it is that this reviled murderer, in the eerie silence of the hospital morgue, seems to speak to him directly and know him more fully than anyone else. In this dark night of the soul, his own problems and anxieties gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance, giving rise to questions that should haunt us all: Whom do we love, and why? How do we protect our children? And what separates us from those we call monsters? A gripping revelation of crime, of punishment--and of what we desperately seek to hide from ourselves.

"A tight, hypnotic...fast-paced, almost cinematic narrative."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesFormer bouncer Barker Dodds wants nothing more than to flee his violent past for a quaint existence as a barber in London. Waif-like Glade Spencer drifts through life as a waitress at a Soho cafe. And ambitious marketing executive Jimmy Lyle, eager to please his new American boss, devises a revolutionary strategy for introducing a new, orange-colored beverage, Soft!, into an already oversaturated market.In this compulsively readable psychological thriller, these three unlikely souls meet. When leaks start to develop in Lyle's highly original though, illegal strategy, Barker is paid a visit by a friend from his old life, and is soon is presented with an unthinkable dilemma. And the person with whom he now shares a destiny--unbeknownst to her--is Glade. At turns harrowing and darkly humorous, Soft! is a magnificently surreal story, and a social satire of the highest literary order."Stimulating and seductive.... A pulp poetic melodrama."--San Francisco Chronicle"[A] twisted thriller that will keep you turning the pages until four in the morning."--DetailsFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

In the years preceding World War I, two young women meet, by chance, in a provincial town in France. Suzanne Malherbe, a shy seventeen-year-old with a talent for drawing, is completely entranced by the brilliant but troubled Lucie Schwob, who comes from a family of wealthy Jewish intellectuals. They embark on a clandestine love affair, terrified they will be discovered, but then, in an astonishing twist of fate, the mother of one marries the father of the other. As "sisters" they are finally free of suspicion, and, hungry for a more stimulating milieu, they move to Paris at a moment when art, literature, and politics blend in an explosive cocktail. Having reinvented themselves as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, they move in the most glamorous social circles, meeting everyone from Hemingway and Dalí to André Breton, and produce provocative photographs that still seem avant-garde today. In the 1930s, with the rise of anti-Semitism and threat of fascism, they leave Paris for Jersey, and it is on this idyllic island that they confront their destiny, creating a campaign of propaganda against Hitler's occupying forces that will put their lives in jeopardy.

Stepping out of his Amsterdam studio one April afternoon to buy cigarettes for his girlfriend, a dashing 29-year old Englishman reflects on their wonderful seven-year relationship, and his stellar career as an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer. But the nameless protagonist's destiny takes an unthinkably horrifying turn when a trio of mysterious cloaked and hooded women kidnap him, chain him to the floor of a stark white room to keep as their sexual prisoner, and subjected him to eighteen days of humiliation, mutilation, and rape. Then, after a bizarrely public performance, he is released, only to be held captive in the purgatory of his own guilt and torment: The realization that no one will believe his strange story.