FREE/BARGAIN — Fiction (everything else)

[Cactus Chef]

Closing Time by Joseph Heller is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American classic Catch-22.

Joseph Heller revisits the unforgettable characters of Catch-22, now facing the twilight of their lives and the end of the century. The generation that fought in World War II—Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, along with newcomers little Sammy Singer and giant Lew—are bound together in uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but the inevitability of The End. Closing Time deftly satirizes the realities and the myths of postwar America with the same ferocious humor as his masterpiece, Catch-22, exploring the absurdity of our politics, the decline of our society and great cities, and the greed and hypocrisy at the heart of our business and culture.

Outrageously funny yet deadly serious, and as brilliant as Catch-22 itself, Closing Time is a fun-house mirror reflecting, at once grotesquely and accurately, who we truly are.

Only recently got around to reading Catch-22. Not sure I wanna jump straight into a sequel, but I might grab it now for when I have appetite later.

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by sufue

I used to post Simon Scarrow's Cato/Macro Eagles series under mystery, since that is the section I first found them in, in UK bookstores, on business trips there, way back when the series was new. But over time, they came to seem (to me, at least) to be more historical/military fiction with mysterious elements, and so I'm posting here.

I'm on book 4 of this series right now and yes, definitely historical fiction/military.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is on sale for $2.99 at Amazon and Kobo (probably other places). $2.99

[salty-horse]

So Lucky by Nicola Griffith is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

From the author of Hild, a fierce and urgent autobiographical novel about a woman facing down a formidable foe

So Lucky is the sharp, surprising new novel by Nicola Griffith—the profoundly personal and emphatically political story of a confident woman forced to confront an unnerving new reality when in the space of a single week her wife leaves her and she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Mara Tagarelli is, professionally, the head of a multimillion-dollar AIDS foundation; personally, she is a committed martial artist. But her life has turned inside out like a sock. She can't rely on family, her body is letting her down, and friends and colleagues are turning away—they treat her like a victim. She needs to break that narrative: build her own community, learn new strengths, and fight. But what do you do when you find out that the story you've been told, the story you've told yourself, is not true? How can you fight if you can't trust your body? Who can you rely on if those around you don't have your best interests at heart, and the systems designed to help do more harm than good? Mara makes a decision and acts, but her actions unleash monsters aimed squarely at the heart of her new community.
This is fiction from the front lines, incandescent and urgent, a narrative juggernaut that rips through sentiment to expose the savagery of America's treatment of the disabled and chronically ill. But So Lucky also blazes with hope and a ferocious love of self, of the life that becomes possible when we stop believing lies.

[Dr. Drib]

The Midnight Timetable, a literary Sci-Fi novel by Bora Chung, is available from Kobo UK for £0.99

Advertised as "From the International Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Cursed Bunny".

(If anyone wishes to inform the Sci-Fic readers over at the Sci-Fi Forum, go for it.)

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

(If anyone wishes to inform the Sci-Fic readers over at the Sci-Fi Forum, go for it.)

Horror is a better fit. These are presented as ghost stories.
Review by Ian Mond

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Horror is a better fit. These are presented as ghost stories.
Review by Ian Mond

Go for it.

[salty-horse]

Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

A moving and funny novel about an exuberant, closeted family man living as himself for the first time in over 60 years, from the Booker-prize winning author of Girl, Woman, Other.

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life.

Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character with a dapper taste in retro suits and a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly lovers with his great childhood friend, Morris.

His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?

Mr Loverman is a ground-breaking exploration of Britain's older Caribbean community, which explodes cultural myths and fallacies and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.

[issybird]

Not fiction, but about novels:

A biography of the novelist Richard Yates, most recently running over $23 after jumping up from a long stretch at $14.99, is down to $2.99:

https://www.amazon.com/Tragic-Honest...dp/B00D6KO8SG/

I must admit I'd never heard of it until running across it while looking at something else by the author in question, as you do, but the reviews are good and it sounds fascinating, an examination of the tragic life of an artist within the zeitgeist of many American alcoholic writers. I'm a huge fan of Revolutionary Road; I couldn't resist.

Same price at Kobo, which is where I bought it.

[Crossposted from nonfiction.]

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by issybird

Not fiction, but about novels:

A biography of the novelist Richard Yates, most recently running over $23 after jumping up from a long stretch at $14.99, is down to $2.99:

https://www.amazon.com/Tragic-Honest...dp/B00D6KO8SG/

I must admit I'd never heard of it until running across it while looking at something else by the author in question, as you do, but the reviews are good and it sounds fascinating, an examination of the tragic life of an artist within the zeitgeist of many American alcoholic writers. I'm a huge fan of Revolutionary Road; I couldn't resist.

Same price at Kobo, which is where I bought it.

[Crossposted from nonfiction.]

I'm a big fan of Revolutionary Road, so I need to check out this literary biography, especially (and finally!) at a sane price.

Thank you.

[ZodWallop]

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins is $2 at Amazon and Kobo

It's been thirty years since I last read this one, but I loved this book and still think about it.

Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.

[salty-horse]

Trust by Hernan Diaz is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Youtube video from someone who mostly covers SFF.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Trust by Hernan Diaz is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Youtube video from someone who mostly covers SFF.

Got it!

Thank you!

[salty-horse]

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is $2 in the US (Amazon only for now, but price-matchable on Kobo)

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.

The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is $2 in the US (Amazon only for now, but price-matchable on Kobo)

Perhaps the most incredible book of linked short stories I have ever read.

[salty-horse]

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

A young man uncovers the truth behind his mother’s death in this haunting debut that takes you from New York to Tehran.

Cyrus Shams has always been lost. He’s grown up tangled in the mysteries of his past – an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields, a haunting work of art by an exiled painter, and his mother, whose plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby.

Now, newly sober and maybe in love, he’s headed for an encounter that will transform everything he thought he knew. Can a final revelation change the truth of Cyrus's life?