In the Heart of the Country

J.M. Coetzee

Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine. But when his embittered spinster daughter Magda feels shamed, this lurch across the racial divide marks the end of a tenuous feudal peace. A...

Beautiful Ruins

Jess Walter

The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition- a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American s...

The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty

Joseph Sassoon

The astonishing story of the Sassoons, one of the nineteenth century's preeminent commercial families and 'the Rothschilds of the East' The Sassoons were one of the great commercial dynasties of the nineteenth century, as eminent as traders as the Rothschilds were as bankers. In this rich and nuanced po...