Niven: 159 books

From the author of ‘Black Bread White Beer’. The East Coast of America, 1980. Anna Brown, a dying artist, works on her final portrait. Obsessive and secretive, it is a righting of her past failures; her final statement. John Brown, her husband and life-long muse, has left; walked out of their...

A concise introduction to the process which led to the division of Germany in 1949, and its unification in 1990, this book also explores the economic, social and cultural divisions between and east and west, which still exist in post-unification Germany. Dividing and Uniting Germany covers...

This collection examines theological and ethical issues of ageing, disability and spirituality, with an emphasis on how ageing affects people who have mental health and developmental disabilities. The book presents ways of moving towards more effective relationships between carers and older...

For David Cameron and ‘Big Society’ Tories, folk culture means organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness. Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about a singular ‘folk’ is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But what is being held in check...

The church of St Bride was dedicated around 1150, and formed the nucleus to the early community of East Kilbride with agriculture the keystone of the growth of the village. In the early eighteenth century, brothers William and John Hunter were born in the village and later rose to become world-famous...

OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2012 LONGLISTED FOR THE DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE Amal is driving his wife Claud from London to her parents’ country house. In the wake of Claud’s miscarriage, it is a journey that will push their relationship – once almost perfect – towards possible collapse....

Spanish Bit Ranch is the insular domain of Senator Jackson McCanles; a kingdom carved from the Texas soil in the 1880's and containing thousands of acres of “steers and wire, mesa and windmills and horses, cap rock and barren trail and pleasant river shallows.”   A way of life ruled by the...

All four were against him, and four were all it took. A bogus hunting trip on a sweet windy range of a Texas ranch was used to get the gang together and, as they sat around the campfire, the jaws of the trip snapped shut. Fifty-two year old Jed Basco, president of Basco and Western, was fired. The...

Caspar Damion Splane, pitchman extraordinaire, had a voice so compelling that no one could pass within earshot without looking to see what kind of man was talking. He could sell anything. At a time when nylon stockings were impossible to find and very expensive, Caspar popped open his sample case,...

An aged and penniless man shakes a fist in the faces of the dynastic, arrogant lords of the great Railroad Bank of San Francisco and demands an accounting of his rights. Andy O'Toole holds a worn and yellowed passbook to an account opened by his father the year he was born and a contract in the flyleaf...

Mr. Big, the leader of a powerful and dangerous new movement in Germany, is a seductive orator with a godlike remoteness intent on luring Bertha Carrington to his lair using a handsome young captain as bait.  Bertha―tall, blond, Junoesque―is a teacher from America who is visiting Germany...

Dan Prader is “the perfect figure of a man.” A has-been stunt man and actor looking for the way back into a profession for which he was once flawlessly suited.  Few remember him, but among those who do is his neglected and bitter son, Harold, overshadowed since childhood by the sheer size...

“If you locked the window, the past crept under the door.” As Jessica Saxe lies dying in a hospital, the story of the Saxe family — Anchylus, her husband, and Pamela, Alexandra, and Sharon, their three daughters — slowly unfolds, meandering backward and forward in time as the author...

  With action moving from the fast-track of Silicon Valley to a Moroccan prison cell, from secret war games in the California desert to sexual espionage in the nation's capital, this story tells of a young man brought up in the weapons business–and disgusted with it – who is suddenly...