Private View, A

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Anita Brookner

I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life is finished, that one's failures remain indelible and one's successes illusory.' Elizabeth and Betsy are old school friends. Born in 1948 and unready for the sixties, they had high hopes of the lives they would lead, even though their circumstances were so different. When they meet again in their thirties, Elizabeth, married to the safe, older Digby is relieving the boredom of a cosy but childless marriage with an affair. Betsy seems to have found real romance in Paris. Are their lives taking off, or are they just making more of the wrong choices without even realising it?

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Brian Moore

From the award-winning author of 'The Colour of Blood', this is the story of Mary Dunne. Mary has had several past lives and more than one husband - her true nature is revealed in this brilliant exploration of female desire and sexuality.

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Christopher Tilghman

In The Way People Run, one of America's finest writers gives us a new collection of short stories, fiction about the deep emotional connections, and disconnections, between people and within people's inner lives. Against the backdrop of vivid settings, especially the Chesapeake Bay region and the American West, Tilghman writes with passion, generosity, and grace about the ways people confront themselves and the lives they've created. In "The Way People Run," chosen by Robert Stone for the 1992 Best American Short Stories volume, a man goes west to find a new job and, out of the framework of the familiar, loses his hold on his family and his old life. In "Something Important," Peter Ramsey undertakes a reunion with his long-lost brother, and discovers that his wife is in love with someone else. In "Things Left Undone," chosen by Tobias Wolff to appear in the 1994 Best American Short Stories, a young couple tries to survive a tragedy. As Andre Dubus said about In a Father's Place, Christopher Tilghman "is a spiritual writer who often looks at things the rest of us cannot see." Life's truths are at the heart of these stories by a modern American master.

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Fatima Bhutto

In this beautifully observed novel, individuals are pushed to make terrible choices. And as the events of this single morning unfold, one woman is at the center of it all.