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Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

North America

• USA
• Canada

• 

  Mimi by Lucy Ellmann

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  This wonderful romp, packed with martinis, plastic surgery, and the most fabulous parties Manhattan has ever seen follows the romance that blooms in the aftermath of a chance encounter with surgeon of note Harrison Hannifan, and the elusive but alluring Mimi. A glorious book, bringing all the best of a New York romance to life. Neurosis, drama, comedy, but most of all, love. A treat!

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  Canada by Richard Ford

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  John Banville called it 'the best novel out of America in many years...Simply, a masterpiece'. Haunting, complex and momentous in scope, this truly is a visionary novel, and already a favourite with Daunt staff.

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  The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

  Price: £10.99    Add to Basket

  Refreshing, quietly philosophical fiction from the occasionally bleak Cormac McCarthy. The Border Trilogy tells the story of two young boys from the Mexican border and their gradual coming of age in this silent, searing, rocky landscape.

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  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  A tremendous, kaleidoscopic meditation on modern America, which recently beat Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom to the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award in America. At the centre of the sprawling narrative are a handful of colourful, interlinking characters: an unsuccessful music producer; a kleptomaniac; a young man obsessed with the pauses between songs. Egan weaves their lives together to produce a hilarious, powerful exploration of time and disconnection.

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  Angel Esmeralda by Don Delillo

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  Don Delillo's first collection of short stories are an excellent introduction to his fiction, and a delight to those already familiar with his novels.

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  Toronto Noir

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  An anthology of 16 original noir stories set in different areas of Toronto. Contributors include Michael Redhill and Gail Bowen.

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  Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage by Alice Munro

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  One of the most exciting contemporary short story writers, Canadian Alice Munro writes with deadly accuracy and occasional cruelty. Contains the story The Bear Came Over the Mountain about a woman with Alzheimer's, which was made into a film with Julie Christie. Highly recommended.

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  Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  With her bold, unflinching narratives, utterly believable characters and clear prose, this is one of Alice Munro's most self-assured and satisfying collections of short stories. The title story is one of the most dazzling and beautiful we've read.

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  Dear Life by Alice Munro

  Price: £18.99    Add to Basket

  The release of a new collection of Alice Munro's short stories is always a cause for celebration, and this latest volume is no exception. Capturing the essence of humanity, the chance encounters and moments of fate which influence the whole course of a life, and the very real strangeness of even the most ordinary life. Set mostly in her native Canada, the last four stories are loosely autobiographical, forming an unprecedented admission into Munro's own childhood.

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  The Great Night by Chris Adrian

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  A beguiling retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in the Buena Vista Park in San Francisco.

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  Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

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  A gloriously entertaining fairytale of 1930s New York, reminiscent of Capote and Fitzgerald: slick, witty and elegant.

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  Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

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  Set in the unrelenting wilderness of 1920s Alaska, Jack and Mabel strive to make a new life for themselves, haunted by the loss of their baby many years before. With simple, clear prose, Ivey creates a haunting fairy tale where the starkness of the frozen landscape provides the backdrop to a drama of friendship, love and survival.

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  The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

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  A compassionate and graceful novel about the subtle complexities of being an Indian immigrant in America, which has earned Lahiri a loyal and well-deserved fan base. The story follows Gogol, the American-born son of an Indian couple, and his search for a true identity.

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  May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

  Price: £16.99    Add to Basket

  A highly-anticipated novel by A. M. Homes, author of This Book Will Save Your Life, May We Be Forgiven portrays a deeply fractured family, a tale of two brothers whose lives begin to spiral out of control. A dark and dazzling inventive satire on contemporary America, it is considered her most ambitious and accessible novel yet.

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  Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

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  Dubbed the Catch 22 of the Iraq war, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is set on the home front, in 2004 or thereabouts, over one long Thanksgiving Day match at the Dallas Cowboys' stadium. Nineteen-year-old Lynn is home from Iraq. And he's a hero. Billy and the rest of Bravo Company were filmed defeating Iraqi insurgents in a ferocious firefight. Now their three minutes of extreme bravery is a YouTube sensation and the Bush Administration has sent them on a nationwide Victory Tour. But Lynn knows that there is more to heroism than a few moments of glory.

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  On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry

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  From the apparent safety and serenity of the American coastline, eighty-nine year-old Lilly recounts the traumatic and lyrical events of her life as though enthralled by a half-remembered dream. An Irish emigrant to the American ‘promised land’, Lilly has spent her adult life as an outsider, accepting the hand life has dealt her with a stoic equanimity. An exquisite, quiet and almost unbearably poetic novel.

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  Fallen Land by Patrick Flanery

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  Patrick Flanery's book departs South Africa, where the American set his first nove, Absolution, and instead finds itself in another community where issues of race bubble away under the surface, this time in Flanery's native mid-western America. But this gripping novel is concerned with more than race, it is about the American Dream and how it has failed so many, and how those many are simply not noticed by those comparative few who have 'made it'.
  
  Is is the story of Paul Krovik, whose dream of a better lfe was smashed, and the people who moved into the house he loved and was forced to give up. A taut thriller, and yet a sublime literary novel that spares no one and stabs deeply at the way we view America and ourselves, it has all the makings of a modern classic.

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  Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn by Paul Watkins

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  The coast of New England: beautiful but savage, where storms can whip up out of nowhere, and the wrecks can wash up on the beach. James Pfeiffer, a young collage dropout, is baptised into the grueling world of the trawler boats, where he discovers the thrill and terror of life at sea.

  Paul Watkins's gripping novel tells the brutal story of life on the trawlers, the danger, the comradeship and the secrets buried deep beneath the surface.

  'Watkins combines the open-eyed wonder of a boy being baptised into a man's maritime world ... with the sea-hunter's mysticism of Moby Dick' - Observer.

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  The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

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  Egon Loeser - the central character of Beauman's sprawling, Booker-longlisted novel - is, as his name suggests, a bit of a loser, hanging on at parties, drinking and paying no attention at all to the evolving social changes in 1930s Germany. After a chance encounter with a girl who promptly leaves the country, Egon embarks on an aimless and futile search that takes him to Paris, New York and Hollywood. Strange and energetic - sometimes frustratingly so - Beauman's second novel is reminiscient of Tom McCarthy's epic C.

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  Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Price: £20.00    Add to Basket

  'Americanah: noun: an insult used in Nigeria to label other Nigerians who have become too "Americanized."
  
  ,As teenagers in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America. There she suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.
  
  Thirteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a blogger. But after so long apart and so many changes, will they find the courage to meet again, face to face?
  
  Fearless, gripping, spanning three continents and numerous lives, ‘Americanah’ is a richly told story of love and expectation set in today’s globalized world.

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  The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott

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  An emotive and tightly-wound debut novel that opens with the aftermath of a tragic accident and concludes just before it takes place. Divorced from his gregarious wife and estranged from his only son, the recently-retired Henry Cage is unaware that he has become a grandfather until his ex-wife is diagnosed with cancer. As Henry visits her, he moves towards a reconciliation with his son and begins to build a close, but fated, bond with his eight-year old grandson. An ideal choice for fans of Philip Roth.

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  The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

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  Winner of the National Book Award and told by Ernest Hemingway 'Mr. Algren, boy, you are good', Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm is the gritty, human and tragic tale of Frankie Machine, a hood in the Chicago underworld with an addiction to heroine.

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  Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende

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  A departure from her characteristic magic realism, Allende’s broad-canvassed novel tells the story of young slave-girl Tété and her tireless attempts to escape her cruel master. Set on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue and in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans, between 1770 and 1810, Island Beneath the Sea revels in vibrant period detail – the dress, the food, the smell of the plantations.

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  Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

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  An under-appreciated depiction of the struggles and dissatisfaction of small-town life in the early twentieth century. An evocative novel.

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  Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany

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  While less powerful than his bestseller The Yacoubian Building, this new novel by Alaa Al Aswany about the intertwining of lives of Egyptians and Americans on a University campus in Chicago is still full energy, gossip and sex with his typical carnival of characters and soap-like gripping stories.