{"title":"Steven Amsterdam","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"what-the-family-needed-book-steven-amsterdam-9780099565932","title":"What the Family Needed","description":"'Okay, tell me which do you want: to be able to fly or to be invisible?'   This question leads to thirty years of discoveries, extraordinary strengths and closely guarded secrets.   'To tell you the narrative concens a family whose members have superpowers is only to graze the surface of a moving and beautifully realised meditation on what it is to be an ordinary human being' Australian   'A wonderful novel: imaginative, intelligent, empathetic... Like a cross between The Corrections and The Slap'  Sydney Morning Herald   SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 ENCORE AWARD","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49517450068241,"sku":"GOR011601823","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49654846292241,"sku":"GOR006586100","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0099565935.jpg?v=1751163102"},{"product_id":"things-we-didn-t-see-coming-book-steven-amsterdam-9780099547044","title":"Things We Didn't See Coming","description":"Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the nine-year-old narrator as he flees the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown.  Next he is a teenager with a growing criminal record, taking his grandparents for a Sunday drive. In a world transformed by battles over resources, he teaches them how to steal.  In time we see him struggle through strange, horrific and unexpectedly funny terrain as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival. Despite the chaos of his world, he keeps his eyes on the exit door, his heart open and his mind on what he thinks is going to happen next.  Longlisted for the Guardian first book award.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49517678199057,"sku":"GOR003021717","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50696951922961,"sku":"NGR9780099547044","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51882855432465,"sku":"GOR003484011","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/009954704X.jpg?v=1750737397"},{"product_id":"what-the-family-needed-book-steven-amsterdam-9781846555800","title":"What the Family Needed","description":"This is a story about family life. Its ups, its downs and how one family found incredible ways to get through the hard times.  It all started with a question: 'Okay, tell me which do you want: to be able to fly or to be invisible?'   And led to thirty years of discoveries, extraordinary strengths and closely guarded secrets. It turned out to be just what the family needed.  A novel with a touch of strange magic and super powers.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49571962421521,"sku":"GOR004221172","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1846555809.jpg?v=1751447791"},{"product_id":"things-we-didn-t-see-coming-book-steven-amsterdam-9780307473608","title":"Things We Didn't See Coming","description":"Richly imagined and darkly comic, \u003ci\u003eThings We Didn't See Coming \u003c\/i\u003efollows a single man over three decades as he tries to survive in an increasingly savage apocalyptic world that is at once utterly fantastic and disturbingly familiar. Here, coming-of-age is complicated not only by family troubles and mercurial love affairs, but treacherous weather, unstable governments, pandemic, and technology run amuck.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49583464251665,"sku":"GOR013392997","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49999967093009,"sku":"GOR013832983","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52734892114193,"sku":"NIN9780307473608","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0307473600.jpg?v=1751037448"},{"product_id":"things-we-didn-t-see-coming-book-steven-amsterdam-9781846553660","title":"Things We Didn't See Coming","description":"Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, Things We Didn't See Coming follows a man over three decades as he tries to survive - and to retain his humanity - in a world savaged by successive cataclysmic events.   Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid which signals the world's transformation and decline. In the wake of this develop strange, sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny circumstances as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harrassed (and possibly infected) by a man wracked with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of 'the state'; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips.   Yet despite the violence and brutality of these days, we learn that even as the world is spinning out of control essential human impulses still hold sway - that we never entirely escape our parents, envy the success of those around us and, chiefly, that we crave love.  Things We Didn't See Coming is haunting, vividly imagined and beautifully crafted - a stunning debut.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49585250140433,"sku":"GOR002171187","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49620753645841,"sku":"GOR002273055","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1846553660.jpg?v=1751412039"},{"product_id":"easy-way-out-book-steven-amsterdam-9781786480842","title":"The Easy Way Out","description":"EVAN IS A SUICIDE ASSISTANT. HIS JOB IS LEGAL - JUST.  'A poignant, sharply funny story that raises questions about life, death, and love' Louise O'Neill  'You might just want to find and hug a nurse after finishing this thoughtful and ethically nuanced novel' Guardian  Shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal 2017.   Evan is the one at the hospital who hands out the last drink to those who ask for it.   Evan's friends don't know what he does during the day. His mother, Viv, doesn't know what he's up to at night. And his supervisor suspects there may be trouble ahead.   As he helps one patient after another die, Evan pushes against the limits of the law - and his own morality. And with Viv increasingly unwell, his love life complicated, to say the least, Evan begins to wonder who might be there for him, when the time comes.  From an award-winning author, The Easy Way Out is a brilliantly funny and exquisitely sad novel that gets to the heart of one of the most difficult questions each of us may face: would you help someone die?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49603140288785,"sku":"GOR008752861","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50785600274705,"sku":"GOR008496765","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51748045455633,"sku":"GOR012811784","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1786480840.jpg?v=1750897600"},{"product_id":"easy-way-out-book-steven-amsterdam-9781786480835","title":"The Easy Way Out","description":"Evan's job is to help people die.   Evan is a nurse - a suicide assistant. His job is legal - just. 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From an award-winning author, The Easy Way Out is a brilliantly funny and exquisitely sad novel that gets to the heart of one of the most difficult questions each of us may face: would you help someone die?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49612031459601,"sku":"GOR007938660","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49618914148625,"sku":"GOR008305320","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1786480832.jpg?v=1751059323"},{"product_id":"what-the-family-needed-book-steven-amsterdam-9781594486395","title":"What the Family Needed","description":"Okay, tell me which you want, Alek asks his cousin at the outset of What the Family Needed. To be able to fly or to be invisible? And soon Giordana, a teenager suffering the bitter fallout of her parents' divorce, finds that she can, at will, become as invisible as she feels. Later, Alek's mother, newly adrift in the disturbing awareness that all is not well with her younger son, can suddenly swim with Olympic endurance. Steven Amsterdam's incandescent novel follows the members of this gorgeously imagined extended family over three decades, as they each discover, at a moment of crisis, that they possess a supernatural power. But instead of crimes to fight and villains to vanquish, the family confronts inner demons, and their extraordinary abilities prove to be not so much magic weapons but expressions of their fears and longings as they struggle to come to terms with who they are and what fate deals them. 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