After one of the most divisive and contentious campaigns in the country’s history, today America goes to the polls to elect the next leader of the free world. The rest of us watch and wait with bated breath. After a year of political turmoil around the world, nobody can predict the result of today’s vote. So on the day of the most nail-biting political event of the year, distract yourself with our 4 by 4th list of essential reading (in no particular order) for exploring the real issues facing the most powerful nation on earth, and understanding the enigma that is the United States
Merry Christmas! If, like us, you’ve had your dinner and would like to take yourself to a quiet corner with something good to read and a cup of tea (or a second Christmas dinner- why not?) , rather than get into yet another discussion about politics or similar tricky topics with your aunt’s husband, then we have a treat for you.
Kindle have discounted a whopping 12 of our bestselling titles. Just click on the tiny price next to each title below and you’ll be able to read Wolf Hall, Americanah, All the Light We Cannot See, Pretty Honest and many more in an instant. With enough titles to take you through to 2016, you’ll have a very happy new year too. Read more…
This month our blog theme is Family Reunion, and last month it was Love In All Its Forms, so for this edition of 4x4th Estate we’ve combined the two, with icky results. But icky is at may be, incest has always been an important theme in literature, from the epic poetry of Classical Greece to the latest blockbuster book adaptation on HBO. Here are four sets of fictional siblings who prove that when it comes to a good romantic plot, sometimes it’s more interesting to keep it in the family:
Coming to the end of February, with Valentine’s Day long passed, we also come to the end of our monthly theme on love. You’ll either be basking still in the warm glow of affection, or feeling as wilted as the bouquets now look in their vases. Hopelessly in love or hopeless at love, here are a few characters who are a bit of both.
‘BBC Culture, the arts section of the international BBC site, polled “several dozen” US critics to find the greatest novels written so far this century, with 156 novels in all named by experts from papers including the New York Times, Time magazine, Newsday, Kirkus Reviews and Booklist.’ On this list, we were delighted to see, are SIX 4th Estate novels.
Discovering Lena Dunham’s hit TV series Girls was a light-bulb moment for me. It was as if somebody had taken my disastrous early twenties, transported them to New York City, cast them in a mellow, instagrammed hue, added an achingly-cool soundtrack and committed them to screen. I was elated, I raised my frustrated fists to the sky and shouted ‘yessss!’ Read more…
To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Tom Killingbeck explains why he is still haunted by’ The Virgin Suicides’ Cecilia Lisbon…
On the first page of Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, thirteen-year-old Cecilia Lisbon tries to kill herself in the bath, ‘slitting her wrists like a Stoic’. In one short, shocking paragraph, Eugenides introduces a character who has remained indelibly etched on my mind ever since I read the novel as a teenager, like initials on the bark of a tree. Read more…
