Showing results by publisher "Picador" in Literature & Fiction

The working-class painter Terry Godden was on the brink of his first success. After a violent crisis, he finds himself outcast. Nearing 60 and with modest means, he has retreated to a small island. The island seems to be a closed, cold place. As the seasons turn, Terry comes to see that he is one of many people who have sought refuge here. These independent outsiders, all with their own considerable struggles, have made a precarious home. The island is owned by the businessman and art collector Alex Kaplan. 

Born to a Vietnamese family based in Melbourne, the narrator is haunted by the story of his grandfather whose ten-year imprisonment by the Communist government in Vietnam’s notorious Chi Hoa prison looms large over his own place in the world and his choice to become a human rights lawyer. As he oscillates between identities of his Australian upbringing and his Vietnamese heritage, it is the death of his grandfather in a Parisian suburb and the birth of his daughter that crystalise some of the strands that have shaped his life and thinking

Witty, candid, furious, and always compelling, Them! negotiates the fraught and fruitful space between the worlds of ‘online’ and the ‘outside’, and how they fuse and diverge in the imagination. Giles’ visual poetics create an unusually dynamic listening experience as she finds new ways ‘to sing, shout and strike in the cracks of what’s possible’. At a time when trans rights are to the fore in public discourse, Them! is a zestful poetic intervention from one of this generation’s most necessary poets.

Collecting pieces written for the New Yorker and the Paris Review between 1978 and 1982, including the seminal ‘Girl’, these stunning works announced a fully-formed, generational talent and firmly established the themes that Kincaid would continue to return to in her later work: the loss of childhood, the fractious nature of mother–daughter relationships, the intangible beauty of the natural world and the striving for independence in a colonial landscape.

A mother moves to Geneva with her husband and their two young children. In their beautiful new rented apartment, surrounded by their rented furniture, and several Swiss instructions to maintain quiet, she finds herself totally isolated. Her husband’s job means he is almost never present, and her entire world is caring for her children - making sure they are happy, and fed and comfortable, and that they can be seen as the happy, well-fed, comfortable family they should be. Everything is perfect. But, of course, it’s not....

In 1960s rural America two siblings grow up in a place of love and turmoil. Rene is the apple of her father’s eye: an overachiever, athletic, clever, the best brain in class and the best dancer in school. Her older brother, Leon, doted on by his mother, is shy, a stutterer, but also a brilliant dancer. Rene and Leon share a talent, but it is a gift their father adores in his daughter and loathes in his son, and that could make all the difference. These two children may be best friends, but life promises to take them down very different paths.... 

In each of the short poems in Billy Collins’s Musical Tables, the former United States Poet Laureate tempers his characteristically jocular voice with what he calls the “thrill of mortality” – flashes of profundity amongst the mundane, startling reminders of the wonder of being alive. Through the brevity of these poems, Collins’ knack for coaxing the poetry out of the everyday becomes ever more refined.

Nicholas and his wife, April, live in a remote cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains with their four-year-old son, Jack. They keep their families at a distance, rejecting what their loved ones think of as 'normal'. In the early hours of a Wednesday morning, they are driving home from a party when their car crashes on a deserted road and they are killed. This is the story of what happens after the tragedy. As the couple's grieving relatives descend on the family home, they are forced to decide who will care for the child Nicholas and April left behind.

Throughout the collection, a mother in her late 30s relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.

Jasmine Leong is the heiress apparent to Phoenix, her family’s billion-ringgit company known especially for its pork snacks. When her grandmother, the great Madame Leong, unexpectedly passes away, Jasmine discovers she is actually a Malay Muslim and this newfound identity threatens to upend her life and ambitions. Finding herself at the centre of a political controversy, and caught between two men who love her, The Accidental Malay examines the human cost of a country’s racial policies and paints a portrait of a woman unwilling to accept the fate history has designated for her.

Bread and Circus is a hybrid and palimpsestic memoir-in-verse: it combines poetry, photography and spectral imagining to explore the realities of economic necessity and marginal poverty through a personal lens. Examining the experience of the US urban Black community from a variety of perspectives, it draws heavily on the author’s archival research on Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish economist, as well as his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations.

When Jane meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it together. That is, until John leaves her.

Bonnie and Mansour are meant to be: two children abandoned by their mothers from opposite sides of the Black Atlantic, who find each other in New York in 1968 and set about making music that will change the world. Mansour’s sound is unique: a fusion of Senegalese prayer songs, and the wild beats of East Coast American jazz. His voice soars and lifts, carrying away the hearts of all who hear him; carrying away Bonnie, a lost American girl with her own troubled past. As they travel together from New York to Paris, to Rio and Switzerland, Mansour’s music forges connections and breaks new ground.

The island of Antigua comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the roads that pass through the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air. Ignoring the legacy of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who took her own life, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease amid his surroundings: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters.

A piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness. Kincaid inhabits each of her characters – a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England – as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future. Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, non-linear.