Hill of Content Summer Catalogue 2016/17 | Page 4

Fiction Hag-Seed Margaret Atwood Days Without End Sebastian Barry Homegoing Yaa Gyasi PB $29.99 Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. He’s staging a Tempest like no other. But after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. After twelve years, revenge arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. PB $32.99 Having signed up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-inarms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, they find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of the West to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. PB $32.99 Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader's wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow. Taking us from the Gold Coast of Africa to the cotton-picking plantations of Mississippi; from the missionary schools of Ghana to the bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, Yaa Gyasi has written an intimate, gripping story with a vivid cast of characters. Swing Time Zadie Smith Commonwealth Ann Patchett Moonglow Michael Chabon PB $32.99 Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties. Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and true identity, how they shape us and how we can survive them. PB $29.99 A powerful story of two families brought together by beauty and torn apart by tragedy, the new novel by the author of Bel Canto is her most astonishing yet. Told with equal measures of humour and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a powerful and tender tale of family, betrayal and the far-reaching bonds of love and responsibility. A meditation on inspiration, interpretation and the ownership of stories, it is Ann Patchett's most moving work to date. HB $39.99 Moonglow begins with the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather". Chabon has written a gripping, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the twentieth century. Collapsing an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week, Moonglow is a lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir.