Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
With prose that is every bit as raw, intense and bitingly honest as the world it depicts, Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave contains a new afterword by the author in Penguin Modern Classics.
Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a troubled teenager growing up in the small Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley. Treated as a failure at school, and unhappy at home, Billy discovers a new passion in life when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk. Billy identifies with her silent strength and she inspires in him the trust and love that nothing else can, discovering through her the passion missing from his life. Barry Hines’s acclaimed novel continues to reach new generations of teenagers and adults with its powerful story of survival in a tough, joyless world.
Shortlisted for this month
Our Man in Havana – Graham Greene
MI6’s man in Havana is Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true…
First published in 1959 against the backdrop of the Cold War, Our Man in Havana remains one of Graham Greene’s most widely read novels. It is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire of government intelligence that still resonates today.
The Orchard Keeper – Cormac CcCarthy
John Wesley Rattner is a young boy when his father is murdered. Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger, strangled him to death.
By chance, John and Marion will meet. They will not recognise each other; John will not know what this man has done.
An experimental debut following in the footsteps of William Faulkner, this is a magnificent conjuring of an American landscape – and a devastating portrayal of innocence lost.