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William Heinemann
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Generation A
by Douglas Coupland
In the near future bees are extinct - until five unconnected individuals, in different parts of the world, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated searately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together, and their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined.
Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991’s Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defences we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world. Like much of Coupland’s writing, it occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday, apocalyptic paranoia, and is his most ambitious and entertaining novel to date.
William Heinemann • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 04/02/2010 • 320 pages • Demy Octavo
• ISBN: 0434019925
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Killing Time: One Man's Race to Stop an Execution
by
How does it feel to defend a serial killer? To tell a young man that he will be executed in twenty minutes’ time? To explain to your five-year-old son that you’re late because you couldn’t help someone? To realise that a death row convict whose life you hold in your hands is actually innocent?
David Dow is a leading death row attorney in Texas, a state where 99% of execution appeals are rejected.He defends convicted murderers for the simple reason that he feels putting them to death is wrong. He knows his clients are vicious, violent monsters, but killing a murderer is homicide, and homicide, as David sees it, is morally insupportable.
Yet this routine of resignation – to the fate of both his clients and his young family, whom he can feel slipping away from him by the day – is interrupted by the worst thing that could happen to him: the realization that a client is innocent. Not just undeserving of his imminent execution, like all his other clients, but actually innocent.
In this gripping and hauntingly honest memoir, David confronts a bleak yet stirring scenario: to lose this fight, as he knows is nearly inevitable, will be to watch an innocent man be murdered. Written with searing immediacy, Killing Time is both a masterpiece of personal narrative, and a morally overwhelming exploration of justice, integrity, and humanity.
William Heinemann • RRP £12.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 04/02/2010 • 288 pages • Demy Octavo
• ISBN: 0434020141
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Pocket Notebook
by Mike Thomas
Meet Jacob Smith. Your good-old British policeman. The sort revered around the world. But Jacob’s no ordinary ‘tit-wearing’ beat bobby. He’s a tactical firearms officer – a handsome, popular, financially secure specialist, no less. He’s also married, with two children; a connoisseur of fine cinema, who also enjoys the occasional hit from his expansive collection of do-it-yourself ‘art’ DVDs (the latest of which was ‘borrowed’ from a flat during a drugs warrant); an amateur historian, with a keen interest in the Vietnam War. And he does like to keep himself in shape, hence the rather large steroid habit – and the even larger amount of money he owes to his dealer. And did we mention he’s partial to women’s feet? That the local shoe shop is his lap-dance palace? And the girlfriend, his little Christmas treat to himself, who’s desperately trying to shrug him off now it’s the New Year? Or what about his parents – do we really need to go there?
And now the his family and friends are starting to worry about our Jake ... and his police superiors are increasingly taking notice of the way he conducts himself. As you can see, Jake’s a very busy boy. And his life is about to get a lot more complicated...
Pocket Notebook is the debut novel from serving police officer Mike Thomas. An angry black comedy, it follows Jacob’s very public breakdown and subsequent fall from grace, all of which he meticulously records in his police notebook.
William Heinemann • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 04/02/2010 • 288 pages • Demy Octavo
• ISBN: 0434020087
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