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It’s January 1st and Brian Bilston is convinced that this year, his New Year’s resolution will change his life. Every day for a year, he will write a poem. It’s quite simple. Brian’s life certainly needs improving. His ex-wife has taken up with a new man, he seems to constantly disappoint his long-suffering son and at work he is drowning in a sea of spreadsheets and management jargon. So poetry will be his salvation.

Up the Down Staircase is the funny and touching story of a committed, idealistic teacher whose clash with school bureaucracy is a timeless lesson for students, teachers, parents – anyone concerned about public education. Bel Kaufman lets her characters speak for themselves through memos, letters, directives from the principal, comments by students, notes between teachers, and papers from desk drawers and wastebaskets, evoking a vivid picture of teachers fighting the good fight against all that stands in the way of good teaching.

In her debut novel, Rajaa Alsanea reveals the social, romantic, and sexual tribulations of four young women from the elite classes of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Originally released in Arabic in 2005, it was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia because of the controversial and inflammatory content, though black-market copies circulated widely.

A landmark in contemporary Spanish literature, Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy - Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Lab, and Nocilla Experience - presents multiple narratives of people and places that reflect America and the world in the digital age of the 21st century.

Tessa Gray is beginning to fight her way through the death of her child. Outside the gate of her preschool, her only child, Abby, was hit and killed by an unknown driver. The police claim there is little evidence and no witnesses. Abby's death is deemed unsolvable. Tessa, a staircase of emotion, reluctantly agrees to her husband's request that she see a therapist.

In turn-of-the-20th century Texas, the Berachah Home for the Redemption and Protection of Erring Girls is an unprecedented beacon of hope for young women consigned to the dangerous poverty of the streets by birth, circumstance, or personal tragedy. Built in 1903 on the dusty outskirts of Arlington, a remote dot between Dallas and Fort Worth’s red-light districts, the progressive home bucks public opinion by offering faith, training, and rehabilitation to prostitutes, addicts, unwed mothers, and “ruined” girls without forcibly separating mothers from children.

It’s 1977 and Tammy has a secret she can’t share with her conservative family. One she’s only shared in unsent letters to her hero Harvey Milk. She’s gay. Sharon is living in San Francisco - an exciting world full of punk, rebellion and new opportunities - but there is only one person who truly understands her. Her new pen pal Tammy. And so, the biggest year of their lives is about to begin, to the soundtrack of Blondie, Patti Smith and the Ramones, full of protest and rebellion and the discovery that they no longer have to blend in....

A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

Izzy Edgewood is a wannabe bookstore owner, quote queen, and Lord of the Rings nerd who has been waiting for Prince Charming to sweep her off her sneakered feet. But it’s hard to meet people when you spend more time with fictional humans than real ones. Which is why her pragmatist cousin Josephine decides to take Izzy’s future into her own meddling hands and create an online dating profile for the hopeful romantic. To Izzy’s shock (and suspicion), Josie’s plan works.

My dearest love, where are you now? Spring, 1847, and Lady Franklin is back in London expecting to greet her hero husband, polar explorer Sir John Franklin, upon his triumphant return from the Northwest Passage. As weeks turn to months, she develops an unconventional friendship with Russell Square's gardener even as she reluctantly grows into her public role as Franklin's steadfast wife, the "Penelope of England.” In this novel that imagines a rich interior life of one of Victorian England's most intriguing women, the boundaries of friendship, propriety, and love are sure to collide.

Akiko "Jane" Thompson, a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian woman in her mid-30s, is attempting to forge a quietly happy life in the Bay Area with her fiance, Shiro. But after a bizarre car accident, things begin to unravel. An intruder ransacks their apartment but takes nothing, leaving behind only cryptic traces of his or her presence. Shiro, obsessed with government surveillance, risks their security in a plot to expose the misdeeds of his employer, the TSA. Jane's mother has seemingly disappeared, her existence only apparent online.

Told entirely through obituaries and ricocheting through time, Remember You Will Die is an innovative, genre-bending epic about the messy tapestry of human history and the threads that connect us, told through the eyes of Peregrine, an AI mother grappling with the unexpected death of her human daughter, Poppy.

'All minors stand to one side and hold your ears!' The hall was filled with excitement, this phrase was strange to all of us, it had been a long time since we had crossed the walls of puberty so we looked at Dishekre standing in front of us in amazement. Dishakre laughed devilishly and said, "He who has recited 'Jhootay Roop Ke Darshan' is an adult and he who is still deprived of it is a minor, so quickly decide which of you is the minor and the adult."

Sybil Van Antwerp is a mother and grandmother, divorced, retired from a distinguished career in law, an avid gardener, and a writer of letters. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books. Because at seventy-three, Sybil has used her letters to make sense of the world and her place in it.

In her letters to family and friends we come to know the life of Sybil Van Antwerp: stubborn, cantankerous, opinionated, always steadfast in her belief in the power of the written word. But as the clock begins to tick for Sybil, the need for a few post-scripts to the life she’s led becomes apparent. Fixing her difficult relationship with her children. Taking a final chance at romance. Atoning for an old legal case which has come back to haunt her. And finally, reckoning with a devastating loss that she has spent the last thirty years holding close to her chest.

Lady Susan Vernon, middle-aged and recently widowed, has retained her looks and appealing vivacity. She makes use of her bereavement and her loss of wealth by imposing herself on the hospitality of relatives, and by amusing herself in flirtation with the various men who fall under her spell. Lady Susan has a daughter, Frederica, who is bashful and innocent—in stark contrast to her unfeeling and manipulative mother. Her mother is anxious to marry Frederica off to a spouse of appropriate wealth and social standing, and also, perhaps, to capture a new mate for herself.

So how do I greet the New Millennium? In despair. I'm a single parent, I live with my mother...I have a bald spot the size of a jaffa cake on the back of my head...I can't go on like this, drifting into early middle-age. I need a Life Plan....

Adrian Mole is thirty, single and a father. His cooking at a top London restaurant has been equally mocked ('the sausage on my plate could have been a turd') and celebrated (will he be the nation's first celebrity offal chef?) And the love of his life, Pandora Braithwaite, is too busy as the newly elected MP for Ashby-de-la-Zouch to notice him. Frustrated, disappointed, and undersexed, Adrian despairs until a letter from his past changes everything.

Adrian Mole is an adult. At least that's what it says on his passport. But living at home, clinging to his threadbare cuddly rabbit 'Pinky', working as a paper pusher for the DoE and pining for the love of his life, Pandora, has proved to him that adulthood isn't quite what he expected.

Adrian Mole is thirty-nine and a quarter. He lives in the country in a semi-detached converted pigsty with his wife Daisy and their daughter. His parents George and Pauline live in the adjoining pigsty. But all is not well.