false 240714 2 0 427085 0385662246 9780385662246 45 <![CDATA[Novel About My Wife]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/427085.Novel_About_My_Wife 3.35 149 Novel About My Wife is narrated by Tom Stone as he searches through the mysteries his wife has left him with. The reader is left to discover what dark thing has come between him and his beloved partner.

Tom Stone is, as well as being cheerfully neurotic, madly in love with his wife Ann, an Australian in self-imposed exile in London. Pushing forty and newly pregnant, they buy their first house in Hackney. It seems they are moving into a settled future, despite spiralling money troubles. But Ann is dogged by a local homeless man whose constant presence comes to feel like a terrible omen. As her pregnancy progresses Ann finds solace in her new friendship with Kate, a woman Tom is both repelled by and peculiarly drawn to. Their home is beset with vermin, smells and strange noises. Is this normal for London, or is the measure of normality in this city actually mad?

Novel About My Wife is Tom’s effort to understand this woman he has been so blindly in love with, and to peel back the past to see where the real threats in their lives were hiding. It is an investigation of guilt, love, forgiveness, and the perils of forgetting.

She wasn’t one of those women who hate their feet, who hate their bodies, the kind who turn the sight of their ass in broad daylight into a state secret. (God, you just find yourself dying for a glimpse, you’ll do anything to get it, hover outside the bathroom door, hide under a table, pull back the sheets when she’s sleeping. Then because of all the mystery you end up, when you’re finally feasting your eyes, thinking, ‘hey, maybe she has got something to worry about.’) Ann didn’t care. Her body was open for viewing. It was one of the ways she distracted you from what was inside her head.
--from Novel About My Wife]]> 240714 3.46 248 59 2008 427083 0385486642 9780385486644 2 <![CDATA[Not Her Real Name]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1223664579m/427083.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1223664579s/427083.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/427083.Not_Her_Real_Name 4.12 42 Not Her Real Name is the stylish debut of a new and startlingly young international literary voice. A collection of twelve stories peopled by over-sensitive twenty-somethings, Not Her Real Name transcends the self-indulgence that generally plagues the slacker genre and brings modern life into harsh and comic focus.

With a cinematic vision for character and dialogue and a cast of young and painfully vulnerable metropolitans, Perkins speaks to twenty-somethings like no one else. With unnerving wit and insight, these stories deal with diverse subjects, from a chance meeting with an old lover in a supermarket to a couple's ill-fated trip to discover the real Prague, to a drama student pissed off by Clown class Not Her Real Name presents an essential guide to post-modern romance, to the vagaries of city life and to a chronically self-absorbed generation whose love affairs are never as good as the last movies they've seen.]]> 240714 3.46 248 59 1996 427082 0060196610 9780060196615 2 <![CDATA[Leave Before You Go]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174660848m/427082.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174660848s/427082.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/427082.Leave_Before_You_Go 3.53 17 Leave Before You Go is about Daniel, an average guy whose determination to escape the daily grind of London drives him to risk his life. Lured by a free trip and the promise of ten thousand dollars, Daniel boards a plane to pick up a "delivery" for an acquaintance. Shortly after his plane lands, he finds himself trafficking heroin from Thailand, penniless, and paranoid on the other side of the world.

Daniel's misadventures as a drug smuggler leads him into the netherworld of grungy hostels and casinos in New Zealand, where he wins--and loses--a fortune in one night. Reduced to petty thievery, he must beg, borrow, and steal in order to live from hand to mouth. His desperate searches for shelter and employment steer him in many directions, all of which seem to lead directly to Kate.

Kate works as a disgruntled usher in a cinema in Auckland, constantly drifting in the shadow of her more successful sister, Nina. As she wrestles with what to do with her life, she contends with some not-so-latent feelings for her ex-boyfriend, Frank. When Daniel arrives unexpectedly to stay with her best friends, Lucy and Josh, Kate suspects that she has seen him somewhere before. Wasn't he the stranger she caught sneaking into the cinema? Or was he the one she'd noticed shoplifting at the bookstore? Only when Daniel moves into her ex-boyfriend's empty apartment does Kate begin to piece together some of the coincidences that have brought them together.

With humor and insight, Leave Before You Go charts the seeming randomness of relationships in early adulthood. When Daniel's and Kate's worlds collide, their relationship offers a witty portrait of a new kind of lost generation.

]]> 240714 3.46 248 59 1998 427084 0330376012 9780330376013 3 <![CDATA[The New Girl]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174660849m/427084.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174660849s/427084.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/427084.The_New_Girl 3.15 13 240714 3.46 248 59 0 6355168 0747596506 9780747596509 0 <![CDATA[Novel About My Wife]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6355168-novel-about-my-wife 4.00 2 240714 3.46 248 59 2009 2125582 342661099X 9783426610992 0 <![CDATA[Das Blau im Auge der Biene.]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2125582.Das_Blau_im_Auge_der_Biene_ 0.0 0 240714 3.46 248 59 1999