Историческая литература
12705 кн.
In a country at war, a secret inheritance reveals a dark conspiracy …On a sunlit afternoon in seventeenth-century Dorset, a young girl falls in love with a stranger.But when her Puritan brother tries to force her into an unbearable marriage she flees, taking with her only the gift left to her by her unknown father, a gold pendant sealed by an engraving of an axe, and the words: St Matthew.One of four intricately wrought seals – each holding a secret within – it can, when combined with the other...
| Автор | Bernard Cornwell |
‘A Year in Tibet’ follows the author as she lives for eighteen months in a remote village in Tibet.Sun Shuyun, a Chinese writer and historian, takes the reader to a tiny and isolated village in Tibet, known for its anti-Chinese stance. She and a team who were half Chinese and half Tibetan, lived and worked there for eighteen months, filming and recording daily life. ‘A Year in Tibet’ is an insight into the relationship between the Chinese and Tibetans, the history behind it, and the way the two...
| Автор | Sun Shuyun |
Spanning the 20th century Ami McKay takes a primitive and superstitious rural community in Nova Scotia and creates a rich tableau of characters to tell the story of childbirth from its most secretive early practices to modern maternity as we know it.Epic and enchanting, ‘The Birth House’ is a gripping saga about a midwife's struggles in the wilds of Nova Scotia.As a child in the small village of Scot's Bay, Dora Rare – the first female in five generations of Rares – is befriended by Miss...
| Автор | Ami McKay |
Terrific novel set in the Roaring Twenties, reissued to accompany Philippa Gregory’s bestselling novel, The Other Boleyn GirlLily Valance wants to forget the war. She's determined to enjoy the world of the 1920s, with its music, singing, laughter and pleasure. When she meets Captain Stephen Winters, a decorated hero back from the Front, she's drawn to his wealth and status. In Lily he sees his salvation – from the past, from the nightmare, from the guilt at surviving the Flanders plains where so...
| Автор | Philippa Gregory |
An electrifying, tumultuous story of inner demons, desire and devastation.On an unnamed island, in a Gothic hospital sitting in the shadow of a volcano, a wordless orphan girl works on the wards housing the insane and the incapable. She counts amongst her patients a virgin, an archangel, a duke and a witch.Everything appears fine until a silent, unmoving and unnerving new patient arrives from foreign climes. He claims to be immortal. Suddenly strange phenomena occur, bizarre murders take place,...
| Автор | Andrew McGahan |
Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction 2011.Life is on the up.We are wealthier, healthier, happier, kinder, cleaner, more peaceful, more equal and longer-lived than any previous generation. Thanks to the unique human habits of exchange and specialisation, our species has found innovative solutions to every obstacle it has faced so far.In ‘The Rational Optimist’, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley comprehensively refutes the doom-mongers of our time, and reaches back into...
| Автор | Matt Ridley |
A delightful and fascinating social history of Victorians at leisure, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of nineteenth-century men and women, from the author of the bestselling ‘The Victorian House’.Imagine a world where only one in five people owns a book, where just one in ten has a knife or a fork – a world where five people out of every six do not own a cup to hold a hot drink. That was what England was like in the early eighteenth century. Yet by the close of the...
| Автор | Judith Flanders |
J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy story about the adventures of a bewitched toy dog, written before The Hobbit.While on holiday in 1925, four-year-old Michael Tolkien lost his beloved toy dog on the beach at Filey in Yorkshire. To console him, his father, J.R.R.Tolkien, improvised a story about Rover, a real dog who is magically transformed into a toy and is forced to seek out the wizard who wronged him in order to be returned to normal.This charming tale, peopled by a sand-sorcerer and a terrible...
| Автор | Джон Толкин |
‘The perfect summer read… Gorgeously compelling’ Good Housekeeping‘Full of mystery and long-reaching shadows of the past . . . richly drawn and compelling’ Rosanna LeyIt’s 1951. In Europe’s post-war wreckage, the glittering Italian Riviera draws an eclectic cast of characters; lured by the glamour but seeking an escape.Amongst them, two outcasts: Hal, an English journalist who’s living on his charm; and Stella, an enigmatic society beauty, bound to a profiteering husband. When Hal receives a...
| Автор | Lucy Foley |
A gripping account of both an individual caught on the horns of an excruciating moral dilemma and a continent at a turning point.When Michela Wrong's Kenyan friend John Githongo appeared one cold February morning on the doorstep of her London flat, carrying a small mountain of luggage and four trilling mobile phones he seemed determined to ignore, it was clear something had gone very wrong in a country regarded until then as one of Africa's few budding success stories.Two years earlier, in the...
| Автор | Michela Wrong |
Two sisters: united by blood, divided by the crown…Mary and Elizabeth is an unforgettable story of a powerful love affair that changed the course of history, perfect for fans of The Tudors and Philippa Gregory.They shared childhood memories and grown-up dreams…Mary was England's precious jewel, the surviving child of the tumultuous relationship between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. However, when Henry fell passionately in love with the dark-eyed Anne Boleyn, he cast his wife and daughter...
| Автор | Emily Purdy |
‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring Up the Bodies’, the first two instalments in Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, have gathered readers and praise in equal and enormous measure. They have been credited with elevating historical fiction to new heights and animating a period of history many thought too well known to be made fresh.Through the eyes and ears of Thomas Cromwell, the books’ narrative prism, we are shown Tudor England, the court of King Henry VIII. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a...
| Автор | Hilary Mantel |
‘A deeply moving read – I loved it’ Dinah Jeffries, author of The Tea Planter’s WifeAs a child in the Second World War, Klara was interned in a Japanese prison camp on Java during the occupation. Her childhood years became an extraordinary and harrowing story of survival, a story that few people have heard.Jenni is a ‘ghost’: she writes the lives of other people – and Klara is her latest subject. Haunted by a childhood tragedy, Jenni finds it easier to take refuge in the memories of others than...
| Автор | Isabel Wolff |
The electrifying story of India’s struggle for independence, told in this classic account (first published in 1975) by two fine journalists who conducted hundreds of interviews with nearly all the surviving participants – from Mountbatten to the assassins of Mahatma Gandhi.This edition does not include illustrations.On 14 August 1947 one-fifth of humanity claimed their independence from the greatest empire history has ever seen. But 400 million people were to find that the immediate price of...
| Автор | Dominique Lapierre |
An alluring, exotic novel based on the life of the famous and much-painted courtesan, La Belle Phanariote. Perfect for fans of Painting Mona Lisa.‘Stories precede her. Whispers of delighted amusement at her exotic beauty, her mysterious past. Some swear she has been a Sultan’s odalisque. Others that she is a Greek princess. Princes praise her exquisite manners and her pleasing ways. And the King of Poland leads her in the polonaise.’Sophie, the Countess Potocki, is travelling with her entourage...
| Автор | Eva Stachniak |
A wonderful new novel from Liverpool’s best-loved author. A tale of loss and love set in post-Second World War England and France.This is the story of a young Liverpool woman widowed in the Second World War before she can know the happiness of having a family. With the blessing of her mother, with whom she runs a B&B, she goes to Normandy to see where her husband was killed in the D-Day landings. Once she is there, she meets an impoverished French poultry farmer, now reduced to driving a beaten...
| Автор | Helen Forrester |
A wonderful collection on topical themes from the controversial ‘product-placement’ author of The Bulgari Connection.A superb new collection of stories: shrewd, sharp, insightful, with a cheerfully dark view of the world.The wronged wife remains a lingering presence even after the mistress has moved in to her home. Oriole, an enormously successful businesswoman married to the ineffectual Hugh, begins to re-evaluate her life, when her best crockery keeps mysteriously flying through the air. A...
| Автор | Fay Weldon |
‘A book of such quality as to persuade you that historical novels are the true business of the writer.’Daily TelegraphA gripping, shocking story of history, enlightement and slavery from the bestselling author of THE FANATIC. JOSEPH KNIGHT confirms James Robertson as one of our foremost novelists.Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to...
| Автор | James Robertson |
Perfect for fans of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, this is a remarkable love story with a background of religious and political turmoil in Tudor England.The year is 1527. Hans Holbein makes his first visit to England, sent by the great Erasmus to paint Thomas More, courtier, scholar, patron, and his family. More's splendid house on the river in Chelsea is at the centre of Tudor society, frequented by distinguished astronomers, artists, politicians and men of religion, as well as wards of court,...
| Автор | Vanora Bennett |
A deeply moving saga of a young couple with high hopes for a bright future in rural Ireland, only to find themselves embroiled in the uprising of 1916 and having to make a new life for themselves in Birmingham.Rosie’s family doesn’t have much money, but she’s rich in other ways: she loves her life on the farm, her sisters, her friends, and even her spoilt baby brother. When Danny Walsh asks her to walk out with him one Sunday, it’s a dream come true.Everyone agrees that they are made for each...
| Автор | Anne Bennett |
‘As gripping as any spy thriller, Hastings’s achievement is especially impressive, for he has produced the best single volume yet written on the subject’ Sunday Times‘Authoritative, exciting and notably well written’ Daily Telegraph‘A serious work of rigourous and comprehensive history … royally entertaining and readable’ Mail on SundayIn ‘The Secret War’, Max Hastings examines the espionage and intelligence machines of all sides in World War II, and the impact of spies, code-breakers and...
| Автор | Макс Хейстингс |
‘A heartwarming read’ My Weekly ‘A delightful, nostalgic read’ Woman MagazineFar from home, an adventure they’ll never forget…June 1940. Evacuee twins Connie and Jessie are reminded every day of the differences between a Yorkshire summer and what they had previously known in London’s Bermondsey.Life at Tall Trees vicarage, Harrogate, is full of adventure, with the arrival of a mischievous pony called Milburn who soon sets about showing who’s boss.But Auntie Peggy is bracing herself for bad news...
| Автор | Katie King |
Ezekial Murphy, a West Indian immigrant, takes up a new job as an attendant at a large London lavatory. The supervisor, Josiah Reynolds, and Jason, a third West Indian, explain that their main problem is the casual sex which takes place in the cubicles.Under pressure from the council authorities to reduce such behaviour, they expect Ez to help them in 'cleaning out the swamp'.Each of the protagonists brings his own moral assumptions to the question. Ez, a devout Adventist, is shocked by such...
| Автор | Warwick Collins |
A moving family drama of one young woman’s fight to survive and to find a place to call home1938: Sixteen-year-old Kate Monroe is living in Birmingham, far away from her family in Ireland. Her parents have always doted on her siblings, Sally and James, leaving no time for her. Kate harbours a dark secret, a deep longing for her cousin. Feelings she must suppress in this deeply staunch Irish-Catholic community – even if they are reciprocated.Crazed by her infatuation, Kate is left with no option,...
| Автор | Anne Bennett |