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Nicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable: he’s fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at school. Then, one day in geometry class, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body.

At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily - it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question their friends never ask: what happened next? Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact it is only the beginning.

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort—a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny", and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon"....

At sixty-four Mickey Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous; sex is an obsession and a principle, an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose great taste for the impermissible matches his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction...

The theme that unites these stories in this dazzling first collection by Curtis Sittenfeld is how even the cleverest people tend to misread others and how much we all deceive ourselves. Sharp and tender, funny and wise, this collection shows Sittenfeld’s knack for creating real, believable characters while also skewering contemporary mores with brilliant dry wit.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka Isawa has severe spine curvature and uses an electric wheelchair and ventilator. Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on an erotica website. One day, a new male carer reveals he has read it all – the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Her response? An indecent proposal…

It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.

Life can’t go on like this – can it? This book is for everyone who has ever wanted more: more time, more meaning, more connection. Discontent is an audacious, darkly funny novel and perfect summer read about a young woman in Madrid whose carefully crafted office persona threatens to crack when she’s forced to attend her company’s annual retreat On the surface, Marisa’s life looks enviable. She lives in a nice apartment in the heart of Madrid, her friendly neighbour and lover Pablo lives downstairs, and she’s risen quickly through the ranks at a successful advertising agency.

Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f****n junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total f***n embarrassment tae the selfish, f****d-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Twenty-four-year-old Megan may have her whole life ahead of her, but it already feels like a dead end, thanks to her dreadful job as a gastroenterologist's receptionist and her heart-clogging resentment of the success and happiness of everyone around her. But no one stokes Megan's bitterness quite like her coworker, Jillian, a grotesquely optimistic, 35-year-old single mother whose chirpy positivity obscures her mounting struggles.

Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week. There's a Kinga for every day: on Mondays, you can catch Kinga A deleting food delivery apps. By Friday, Kinga E is happy to spend the days soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath. Kingas A-G, perhaps unsurprisingly, live a varied life—between them is a professional matchmaker, a scent-crazed perfumer and a window cleaner, all with varying degrees of apathy, anger, introversion and bossiness. At least three of them are Team Toxic.

No one in Lily Lennox’s life can understand why each of the past five summers, she has shut her successful business and chosen instead to be paid minimum wage life-guarding at the exclusive Riovan Wellness Resort in a sun-soaked Caribbean island. Fortunately for her, they also aren’t aware of the mysterious deaths that have occurred on the island every time she’s there. Lily always tries to avoid bringing attention to herself. But this year (ridiculously gorgeous) guest Daniel Black is asking a few too many inconvenient questions.

'He left you some money.' Mickey felt her mouth drop open. The first half of that sentence had rung clear and true. The second half had not. Her father was one to take, not give. After he left them for his new family, Mickey resolved never to think of her father again. She's fine without him; yes, she drinks, but only sometimes and, really, she can’t not. But with only $181 to her name, she’s not above attending some mandated therapy to access her inheritance. She’ll kneel at the Kleenex alter and soon be bingei

Years on from Trainspotting Sick Boy is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London. Having failed spectacularly as a hustler, pimp, husband, father and businessman, Sick Boy taps into an opportunity which to him represents one last throw of the dice. However, to realise his ambitions within the Adult industries, Sick Boy must team up with old pal and fellow exile Mark Renton.

It’s Hester’s fortieth birthday when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and sets off. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two make their way across the country.

When 34-year-old Ms Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace—a company that manufactures cardboard tubes—she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day, she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups—because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is...Ms Shibata is not pregnant.

In the land of Lapvona, the lord of the land Villiam is cheating the local villagers of their food, their water, their livelihoods. Grotesque and ridiculous, he marries the pregnant and tongueless ex-nun Agata, whom he believes will make him God, and his son will be the second Christ.

Once, serial killer Alvie Knightly was living the dream. Unlimited cash. An Italian getaway. A hot new boyfriend.... How the mighty fall. One year - and one very unfortunate incident - later, Alvie is homeless, surviving on meal deals and counting her dwindling pennies. It's time for one last hit, and if anyone can pull it off - in six inch heels - it's Alvie. But if she's to succeed in her mission to avenge her ex, win back her money and secure her future, she'll have to face her most terrifying enemy yet.

Republican congressman Alexander Paine Wilson is determined that nothing will stop him in his campaign for re-election. Not the fact that he is a bachelor, not the fact that his main adversary Nancy Beavers - married, with children - is rising in the polls. Nothing. That is, until one hot day in August, he receives a large parcel via FedEx. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark.

Inside every hospital exists a world no outsider is allowed to see: a storm of malpractice, corruption, sex, drink and drop-dead exhaustion. But for first day junior doctors, their initiation into this world - the 'Killing Season' - is about to begin. A whistle-blowing despatch from the frontlines of hospital life, Jed Mercurio's Bodies takes us on a nerve-jangling journey through one junior doctor's loss of innocence and his desperate, dangerous attempts to right his - and his colleagues' - wrongs.