In America

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Alan Lightman

"While rushing to his office one warm summer morning, Bill Chalmers, a junior executive, realizes that he cannot remember where he is going or even who he is. All he remembers is the motto of his company: The maximum information in the minimum time.". "When Bill's memory returns, "his head pounding, remembering too much," a strange numbness afflicts him, beginning as a tingling in his hands and gradually spreading over the rest of his body. As he attempts to find a diagnosis of his illness, he descends into a nightmare, enduring a blizzard of medical tests and specialists without conclusive results, the manic frenzy of his company, and a desperate wife who decides that he must be imagining his deteriorating condition."--BOOK JACKET.

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Jean Thompson

The fifteen stories in this collection - three never before published - illuminate real and imagined human needs and, in doing so, tell us something new about ourselves. A young woman has an epiphany, walking along the snow-drifted shoulder of a monotonous highway in the Midwest. The quiet rhythm of a suburban neighborhood is disrupted by peculiar activity at the local firehouse. A city cop on the graveyard shift internalizes the desperation of those he encounters night after night. And the formidable vastness of the Pacific Ocean humbles an urban junkie and his girlfriend in search of salvation. In precise and unsparing prose, Thompson dispels the comfort of taking life - and love - for granted, begging the very question of identity. Who are you? Who do you love?

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Zadie Smith

Grand Union Stories is a celebrated work by Zadie Smith (Orange Prize Winner, Whitbread Award Winner), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.

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Robin Robertson

Walker, a young Canadian recently demobilised after war and his active service in the Normandy landings and subsequent European operations. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and unable to face a return to his family home in rural Nova Scotia, he goes in search of freedom, change, anonymity and repair. We follow Walker through a sequence of poems as he moves through post-war American cities of New York, Los Angles and San Francisco.