Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami

Book Description:

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

About the author:

HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949. He met his wife, Yoko, at university and they opened a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. The massive success of his novel Norwegian Wood (1987) made him a national celebrity. He fled Japan and did not return until 1995 when he came to regard the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack as twin manifestations of a violence just beneath the surface of Japanese life.

God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens

Book Description:

'Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no beter than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.' From the introduction to God Is Not Great.

In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. In a series of acute readings of the major religious texts, he demonstrates the ways in which religion is man-made, dangerously sexually repressive and distorts the very origins of the cosmos. With robust clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

God is Not Great marvels at the possibility of society without religion, arguing that the concept of an omniscient God has profoundly damaged humanity. Hitchens proposes instead that the world might be a great deal better off without `him'.

About the Author:

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and Visiting Professor in Liberal Studies at the New School in New Yrok. He was named as one of the world's 'Top 100 Public Intellecutals' by Foreign Policy and Prospect. His books include Love, Poverty & War and Blood, Class & Empire. His biography of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man was published by Atlantic Books in 2006.

What's Left - Nick Cohen

Book Description:

From the much-loved, witty and excoriating voice of journalist Nick Cohen, a powerful and irreverent dissection of the agonies, idiocies and compromises of mainstream liberal thought. Nick Cohen comes from the Left. While growing up, his mother would search the supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit and despair.

When, at the age of 13, he found out that his kind and thoughtful English teacher voted Conservative, he nearly fell off his chair: 'To be good, you had to be on the Left.' Today he's no less confused. When he looks around him, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, he sees a community of Left-leaning liberals standing on their heads. Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam that stands for everything the liberal-Left is against come from a section of the Left?

After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the Left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal-Left, but not, for instance, China, the Sudan, Zimbabwe or North Korea? Why can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a liberal literary journal as in a neo-Nazi rag?

It's easy to know what the Left is fighting against - the evils of Bush and corporations - but what and, more to the point, who are they fighting for? As he tours the follies of the Left, Nick Cohen asks us to reconsider what it means to be liberal in this confused and topsy-turvy time. With the angry satire of Swift, he reclaims the values of democracy and solidarity that united the movement against fascism, and asks: What's Left?

'The book is a superbly sustained polemic.' - Sunday Times

About the author:

Nick Cohen is a columnist for the Observer and New Statesman. He does occasional pieces for many other publications, including the London Evening Standard and New Humanist. Cruel Britannia, a collection of his journalism, was published by Verso in 1999, and Pretty Straight Guys, a history of Britain under Tony Blair, was published by Faber in 2003.

Stories We Could Tell - Tony Parsons

Book Description:

A brilliant portrayal of growing up and being young, about sex and love and rock and roll and about the dreams of youth colliding head-on with the grown-up world. A pivotal moment in many a young person's life and for the author, this time in question was 1977, the year Elvis died. And yet, the youth of today will find much in the book that resonates with their life now just as it will for the youth of the '70s and '80s.

About the Author:

Tony Parsons is a columnist for the ‘Mirror’. He has written for among others, ‘NME, The Face, Arena, Vox, The Daily Telegraph, Telegraph magazine, The Spectator, Guardian, Daily Mail, GQ, Esquire’ and ‘Marie Claire’. He regularly appears on BBC TV’s ‘The Late Show’ and in his own television documentaries.