What the books are about

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Mariam is only 15 when she is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, who is 30 years her senior. Nearly two decades later, in a climate of growing unrest, tragedy strikes 15-year-old Laila, who must leave her home and join Mariam’s unhappy household. Laila and Mariam are to find consolation in each other, their friendship to grow as deep as the bond between sisters, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter.

After Dark

The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician soon leaves with a promise to return before dawn. Shortly afterwards Mari will be interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville Hotel; a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, the girl has heard Mari speaks fluent Chinese and requests her help...

Thank You for Smoking

Nick Naylor is just a regular guy trying to earn a living. In these neo-puritanical times, it’s a challenge to defend the rights of smokers and a privilege to promote their liberty. Sure, it hurts a little when you’re compared to Nazi war criminals, but Nick’s just doing what it takes to pay the mortgage and put his son through school. As chief propagandist for the tobacco industry, he can handle the insults from the anti-smoking zealots, but death threats are a different matter.

The Lost Art of Keeping...

Set in the 1950s in an England still recovering from the Second World War, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is the enchanting story of Penelope Wallace and her eccentric family at the start of the rock ‘n roll era. Penelope longs to be grown-up and to fall in love, but various rather inconvenient things keep getting in her way. Like her mother, a stunning but petulant beauty widowed at a tragically early age, her younger brother Inigo, currently incapable of concentrating on anything that isn’t Elvis Presley, a vast but crumblng ancestral home, a severe shortage of cash, and her best friend Charlotte’s sardonic cousin Harry...

In the Country of Men

In Tripoli, Libya in 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman is shopping with his mother. His father is away on business, but Suleiman is sure he has just seen him, standing across the street... From a breathtaking new talent comes an utterly gripping, emotional novel told from the point of view of a young boy growing up in a terrifying and bewildering world where his best friend’s father disappears and is next seen on state television at a public execution; where a mysterious man sits outside the house all day and asks strange questions; and it seems his father has finally disappeared.