Kirjahaku

Joanna Kavenna went north in search of the Atlantis of the Arctic, the mythical land of Thule. Seen once by an Ancient Greek explorer and never found again, mysterious Thule came to represent the vast and empty spaces of the north. Fascinated for many years by Arctic places, Kavenna decided to travel through the lands that have been called Thule, from Shetland to Iceland, Norway, Estonia, and Greenland. On her journey, she found traces of earlier writers and travellers, all compelled by the idea of a land called Thule: Richard Francis Burton, William Morris, Anthony Trollope, as well as the Norwegian Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. She met wilderness-lovers; poets writing epics about ice; Inuit musicians and Polar scientists trying to understand the silent snows. But she came to discover that a darkness also inhabits Thule: the Thule Society, obsessed with the purity of the Nordic peoples; the 'war children' - the surviving progeny of Nazi attempts to foster an Aryan race; as well as ice-bound relics of the Cold War. Finally she arrived in Svalbard, a beautiful Arctic archipelago, at the edge of the frozen ocean. Blending travelogue, reportage, memoir, and literary essay, Joanna Kavenna explores the changing life of the far North in the 20th Century. The Ice Museum is a mesmerising story of idealism and ambition, wars and destruction, survival and memories, set against the haunting backdrop of the northern landscape.

'Fun and erudite' Sunday Times'Snort-inducingly funny' Daily Mail'One of the cleverest books you'll read this year' TelegraphEvery system, however immaculate, has a few little glitches.The latest in domestic tech should have predicted that businessman George Mann was about to murder his family. But instead it crashes and leads to the wrong man being caught and punished.Are there gremlins in digital giant Beetle's ubiquitous wearable tech, talking fridges and Dickensian droids? Have they been hacked, or is something even more sinister going on?With the clock ticking philandering Beetle CEO Guy Matthias, conflicted national security agent Eloise Jayne, depressed journalist David Strachey, and secretive hacker Gogol each try to uncover the truth in a darkly funny and horribly recognisable world only days ahead of our own.'Witty and horrifyingly relevant . . . Full of dark humour and refreshingly frank social commentary with a distinctly Orwellian flavour.' Scotsman

Vienna1865: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis has been hounded into a lunatic asylum, ridiculed for his claim that doctors' unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. The deaths of thousands of mothers are on his conscience and his dreams are filled with blood. 2153: humans are birthed and raised in breeding centres, nurtured by strangers and deprived of familial love. Miraculously, a woman conceives, and Prisoner 730004 stands trial for concealing it. London in 2009: Michael Stone's novel about Semmelweis has been published, after years of rejection. But while Michael absorbs his disconcerting success, his estranged mother is dying and asks to see him again. As Michael vacillates, Brigid Hayes, exhausted and uncertain whether she can endure the trials ahead, begins the labour of her second child. A beautifully constructed and immensely powerful work about motherhood that is also a story of rebellion, isolation and the damage done by rigid ideologies.

'One of the most brilliant British writers working today.' Spectator Who decides the rules of the games we play? In August 2007, or thereabouts, a young philosopher leaves Oslo, heading for Greece, on a mission to find Theodoros Apostolakis, the head of the Society of Lost Things. Fortunately, Apostolakis isn't lost, but everything else is: ancient libraries, entire civilisations, priceless books and a beautiful box, once used to play the world-famous game of Seven. The hunt for this small thing, among the countless lost things, becomes an absurdist quest through time and space: from the earliest human societies to the advent of AI. Told, shared and mythologised by our narrator, along with a wild cast of dreamers, philosophers, poets, rebels and optimists, Seven is an extraordinary, uplifting journey through an ever darkening world.

Cassandra White is a woman on a mission. Her Lakeland farm may be falling apart, but at least she's escaped the madness of modern life. But when her valley is invaded by bankers buying up second homes, she's determined to put up a fight. What begins as a hare-brained scheme with a few unruly locals soon has the whole community taking up arms - and, before she knows it, Cassandra's leading a revolution...

'Smart, strange, coping with death through Light' Margaret Atwood'Extraordinary, wise, funny, adventurous' A. L. Kennedy'So utterly startling and inventive, it's almost an act of resistance' Miriam Toews'I couldn't put it down. A cult following seems certain' Literary Review'Refreshing as well as disconcerting to read a novel that sets aside convention so resolutely' Guardian'Opts to push the boundaries of what the novel is' Telegraph'A comic metaphysical thriller' Scotland on Sunday In this darkly ironic novel - a quest for truth, a satire, an elegy - Joanna Kavenna displays fearless originality and wit in confronting the strangeness of reality and how we contend with the death of those we love. Beautiful, ethereal drawings by Oly Ralfe illustrate this haunting journey through time, space and human understanding.

From the winner of the 2008 Orange Award for New Writing comes a blistering, satirical novel about life under a global media and tech corporation that knows exactly what we think, what we want, and what we will do--before we do. One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm. Now, what to do with all these messy people? Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle's supposedly omniscient "lifechain" don't work, or, they've been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle's technotopia and life as we know it. Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes our moment--the ugliness and the beauty--perfectly.