We've got 50 free books to give away! 20 from Random House and 30 from Harper Collins. Please choose carefully as our preference is only one book per member to the first who register. Joining the associated book club and adding the book to your shelf will qualify you for a free book.
Please ensure you write a review once read, we want to know what you think! See the additional information section at bottom of post for more information.
20 x copies to first members of The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell book club
10 x copies to first members of The Piano Teacher by Janice Y K Lee book club
10 x copies to first members of More by Austin Clarke book club
10 x copies to first members of The Art of Losing by Rebecca Connell book club
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan LittellWith its brilliant, frightening, furious, apocalyptic vision, The Kindly Ones is a literary tour de force, winner of the Prix Goncourt and other prizes and already an explosive bestseller across Europe, selling over 1 million copies.
This Faustian story with a terrifying twist is the fictional memoir of Dr Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, who has reinvented himself as a family man and owner of a lace factory in post-war France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat, who speaks out now not in self-justification but to set the record straight. He looks back at his life with cool-eyed precision: from a disrupted childhood and a turning point in his student days, to his role as observer and then participant in Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front, from Poland to the Caucasus; he is present at the siege of Stalingrad, at the death camps, and finally caught up in the rout of the Nazis and the nightmarish fall of Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures such as Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss, and Hitler himself.
Massive in scope, terrifying in subject matter, and shocking in its protagonist, Littell’s masterpiece is intense, hallucinatory, and terrifyingly compelling. Described by Le Figaro as ‘a monument of contemporary literature’, this transgressive and controversial work of literature has been compared to classics of world literature, including War and Peace. A huge novel about the seductive enormity of evil, about the ineffable horror of war, about man’s inhumanity and the malevolence of the Furies, this is a book that every thinking person should read and to which no one can be indifferent.
The Piano Teacher by Janice Y K LeeSometimes the end of a love affair is only the beginning...
In 1942, Will Truesdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong, falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their love affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese, with terrible consequences for both of them, and for members of their fragile community who will betray each other in the darkest days of the war.
Ten years later, Claire Pendleton lands in Hong Kong and is hired by the wealthy Chen family as their daughter's piano teacher. A provincial English newlywed, Claire is seduced by the colony's heady social life. She soon begins an affair…only to discover that her lover's enigmatic demeanour hides a devastating past.
As the threads of this compelling and engrossing novel intertwine and converge, a landscape of impossible choices emerges – between love and safety, courage and survival, the present and above all, the past.
More by Austin ClarkeFrom the winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize comes a mesmerising, powerful, inspiring and beautifully controlled story of a mother’s loss of her son to the world of gang crime, and her memories of life in the Caribbean.
At the news of what has happened to her son BJ, Idora Morrison collapses in her basement apartment. For four days and nights she retreats into a vortex of memory, pain, and disappointment that becomes a riveting exposé of her life as a black immigrant from the Caribbean. While she struggled to make ends meet for twenty-five years, her deadbeat husband abandoned her for a better life in New York. Left alone to raise her son, Idora has done her best to survive against immense odds.
But now that BJ has disappeared into a life of crime, she recoils from his loss and tries to understand how her life has spiralled into this tragic place.
More is an extraordinary story of oppression, redemption and hope. From a master of the novel form, this is very much a book for our times.
‘MORE may stand as one of the crowning achievements of Clarke’s career’ QUILL & QUIRE
‘a novelist of exceptional gifts’ NEW YORK TIMES
The Art of Losing by Rebecca ConnellHaunted by childhood loss, 23-year-old Louise takes on her late mother's name and sets out to find Nicholas, the man she has always held responsible for her death. Now a middle-aged lecturer, husband and father, Nicholas has nevertheless been unable to shake off the events of his past, when he and Louise’s mother, Lydia, had a clandestine, destructive and ultimately tragic affair. As Louise infiltrates his life and the lives of his family, she forms close and intimate relationships with both his son and his wife, but her true identity remains unknown to Nicholas himself. Tensions grow and outward appearances begin to crack, as Louise and Nicholas both discover painful truths about their own lives, each other, and the woman they both loved.
Told alternately from the perspectives of Louise and Nicholas, and moving between the past and the present, The Art of Losing is a stunning debut novel that shows how love, desire and loss can send out more complicated echoes across our lives than we can ever imagine.
Additional Information
To ensure you receive a free copy, follow these steps:
Join the book club and add the featured book to your "I want to read" bookshelf (the first members to do this will get a copy of the book).
Ensure your address details are filled out in your profile so we can send you the book.
Please help us make this a success by being one of the first Booktagger members to write a book review. The more interest we generate the more likely our publishers will expand the program.
To write a review hover over the book cover on Booktagger.com and select "Book info" for the book you're reviewing, then select "Review book" and start writing!
If you have any general questions or comments about the book you can post them in the book club.
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