Atlantic Books

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2011

Bruno Littlemore; linguist, artist, philosopher. A life defined by a soaring mind, yet bound by a restrictive body. Born in down-town Chicago, Bruno's precocity pulls him from an unremarkable childhood, and under the tuition of Lydia, his intellect dazzles a watching world. But when falls in love with his mentor, the world turns on them with outrage: Bruno is striving to be something he is not, and denying everything that he is. For despite his all too human complexities, dreams and frailties, Bruno's hairy body, flattened nose and jutting brow are, undeniably, the features of a chimpanzee.

Like its protagonist, this novel is big, abrasive, witty, perverse, earnest and accomplished. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore goes beyond satire by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human — to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.

Plato is perhaps the most significant philosopher who has ever lived and The Republic, composed in Athens in about 375BC, is widely regarded as his most famous dialogue. Its discussion of the perfect city — and the perfect mind — laid the foundations for Western culture and, for over two thousand years, has been the cornerstone of Western philosophy.

In this book, Simon Blackburn explains the judicial, moral and political ideas in the Republic and examines its influence on the modern world. He shows why, from St Augustine to twentieth-century philosophers such as Whitehead and Bergson, Western thought is still conditioned by this most important of books.

Winner of the O2 X Award

'Dynamic'-— Daily Telegraph
'Dazzling'-— Guardian
'Ambitious and virtuoso'-— Financial Times
'Unforgettable'-— The Times
'Ingenious… shimmering'-— New Statesman

On July 21, 1969 two astronauts set foot on the moon; far below, in ravaged Mozambique, a young revolutionary — hailed as the saviour of his country — is murdered by a package bomb.

From these two unconnected events, Simon Ings weaves a great and glittering web that entangles four lives: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a man who sows disaster wherever he treads.

As the twentieth century unravels, Burden, Cogan, Chavez and Jinks are powerless to escape the connections that bind them. This is not fate, but its opposite: the weight of numbers.

On the eve of this thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them to live in. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we discover a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.

From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at the age of fifteen, Jason Sheehan has worked at all kinds of restaurants across America, from Buffalo to Tampa to Albuquerque: at a French colonial and an all-night diner, at a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. In Cooking Dirty he tells the story of one man's addiction to the urgency, stress, and adrenalin of minimum-wage kitchen work. His universe becomes 'a small, steel box filled with knives and meat and fire', where the kitchen is a fraternity with its own rites and initiations: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, drugs everywhere.
Restaurant cooking sets a series of seemingly endless personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. The kitchen itself is a place in which life's mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried — a place where people from the margins find their community and their calling.
Cooking Dirty is a passionate, funny, electrifying memoir of addiction: an addiction to kitchen work. It reveals the hell and glory of restaurant life, as told by a survivor. Jason Sheehan is his own unforgettable central character — edgy, driven, irresistible. Eating out will never be the same again.

The hilarious first novel from Simpsons writer Larry Doyle — and soon to be a major flim directed by Chris Columbus and starring Hayden Panettiere.
Denis Cooverman wanted to say something really important in his high school graduation speech. So, in front of his 512 classmates and their 3,000 relatives, he announced: 'I love you, Beth Cooper.'
It should have been such a sweet, romantic moment. Except that Beth, the head cheerleader, has only the vaguest idea who Denis is. And Denis, the captain of the debate team, is so not in her league that he is barely even of the same species. And then there's Kevin, Beth's remarkably large boyfriend, who's in town on leave from the US Army. Complications ensue…

A huge international bestseller, with over 2 million copies sold worldwide, Night Train to Lisbon is an utterly compelling novel about one man's escape from a humdrum life in search of passion and spontaneity.
Night Train to Lisbon tells the story of mild-mannered, middle-aged Classics scholar Raimund Gregorius. When, one afternoon, he walks out of his class while in the middle of giving a lesson, his uncharacteristic impulsiveness surprises him as much as his students. This break from his usually predictable routine is driven by two chance encounters that morning on his way to work — the first with a mysterious Portuguese woman, and the second with a book discovered in a forgotten corner of an old bookshop, the journal of an enigmatic Portuguese aristocrat. With the book as his talisman, Mundus finds himself boarding the night train to Lisbon on a journey to find out more about its author, Amadeu del Prado — who was this man whose words both haunt and compel him, seeming somehow clairvoyant?
His investigations lead him all over the city, and bring him into contact with those who were entangled in Prado's life. Gradually, he makes unexpected friends and the picture of an extraordinary man emerges: a difficult, brilliant, charismatic man, a doctor and a poet, and a rebel against Salazar's dictatorship. And as Prado's story comes to light so, too, Gregorius himself begins his life anew.
Hurtling through the dark, Night Train to Lisbon is a rich tale, wonderful told, propelled both by the mystery at its heart and its evocative subject.

Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond is a British fictional character, created by H. C. McNeile and published under his pen name “Sapper”. Following McNeile's death in 1937, the novels were continued by Gerard Fairlie and later Henry Reymond. After an unsuccessful one-off appearance as a policeman in The Strand Magazine, the character was reworked by McNeile into a gentleman adventurer for his 1920 novel Bulldog Drummond. McNeile went on to write ten Drummond novels, four short stories, four stage plays and a screenplay before his death in 1937. The stories were continued by his friend Gerard Fairlie between 1938 and 1954; further books were published in the 1960s and one in 1983. Drummond is a First World War veteran, brutalised by his experiences in the trenches and bored with his post-war lifestyle. He publishes an advertisement looking for adventure, and soon finds himself embroiled in a series of exploits, many of which involve Carl Peterson—who becomes his nemesis—and Peterson's mistress, the femme fatale Irma. After his first adventure Drummond marries his client, Phyllis Benton; in later episodes she becomes involved in Drummond's exploits, often as the victim of kidnapping by Drummond's enemies. In 1921 an adaptation of the first novel was staged in London, with Gerald du Maurier playing the role of Drummond; the play was further adapted and resulted in the 1922 silent film Bulldog Drummond, with Carlyle Blackwell in the lead role. Several other Drummond films have followed, either based on McNeile's stories or with unique storylines.

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been claimed as the first detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his “tales of ratiocination”.

The Riddle of the Sands is one of the earliest examples of the spy novel genre, and became hugely popular shortly after its publication. Childers carefully interweaves fiction with real-world places, events, and politics, making for an extremely convincing story of invasion—so convincing that some (perhaps erroneously) credit the novel with spurring the creation of new English naval bases. The framing device, where Childers pretends to be an editor presenting a factual account, only adds to the believability of the story.
The novel begins with Carruthers, an official in the Foreign Office, accepting an invitation from his friend Davies for what he assumes is a pleasure trip on a sailboat in the Baltic sea. As the two embark on their journey, it quickly becomes apparent that not everything is at it seems on the German coast.