Shelfology Book Pairing

by Charles Dickens

One of Dickens's most haunting and bizarre novels, The Old Curiosity Shop is the story of `Little Nell' and her persecution by the grotesque and lecherous Quilp. This edition uses the Clarendon text, the definitive edition of the novels of Charles Dickens, and includes the original illustrations, five appendices of deleted passages, and details of Little Nell on stage.

A Novel

by David Szalay

From Booker Prize-winning author David Szalay, comes a propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour—a married woman close to his mother’s age—as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control. As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely. Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.