Newman, Sandra – The Bell Bookshop

Julia

Emma — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

“a fascinating reflection on totalitarianism as refracted through Orwell’s times and our own” The GuardianLondon, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It’s 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother, Julia is a model citizen – cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics. She knows how to survive in a world of constant surveillance, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink, child spies and the black markets of the prole neighbourhoods. She’s very good at staying alive.But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department – a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith, she comes to realise that she’s losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.Seventy-five years after Orwell finished writing his iconic novel, Sandra Newman has tackled the world of Big Brother in a truly convincing way, offering a dramatically different, feminist narrative that is true to and stands alongside the original. For the millions of readers who have been brought up with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, here, finally, is a provocative, vital and utterly satisfying companion novel.

Julia

Emma — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The men

Emma — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

*Selected for 2022 previews by the Observer, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, & the Irish Times* ‘Intriguingly strange’ The Bookseller, Editor’s ChoiceIn a single moment, in every part of the world, every person with an Y chromosome vanishes: lovers, children, parents – even foetuses from the womb. Jane Pearson wakes on a mountainside the next morning to find her husband and son missing from their tent. Frantic and grieving, she sets out to find the one person she thinks can help – Evangelyne Moreau, the brilliant, charismatic leader of the Commensalist Party of America, whose heart she broke many years before. While Jane searches for those she has lost, a radically different society emerges, one that seems – at first – to be suddenly, blissfully safer than what came before. And then The Men appears online: uncanny video footage that shows the missing being herded through bizarre, otherworldly landscapes. Is it a hoax, or could The Men hold the key to bringing back those who were lost? And if so, what might be the cost? From the author of The Heavens, The Men is a gripping, beautiful, and disquieting novel of impossible sacrifices that asks: what might we be prepared to give up to create a better world?

The Men

Emma — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Heavens

Emma — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

New York, 2000. Kate and Ben meet at a party and fall instantly, irrevocably in love. Around them, the city glows. It is the first year without a war anywhere. A woman is president, and an air of camaraderie permeates the streets of Manhattan. Kate falls asleep, knowing she is loved. London, 1593. Kate wakes as Emilia - the mistress of a nobleman - and finds the plague at her door. Afflicted by premonitions of a burnt and lifeless city, she sets out to save the world. Each decision she makes will change her life with Ben for ever. A story of love and alternate universes, madness and time travel, 'The Heavens' is a dream bound up in a strange awakening; it is a novel of what we have lost, and what we might yet be able to save.