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19049 кн.
'One of her funniest novels . . . Spark at her sharpest, her purest and her most merciful' ALI SMITH In The Finishing School Muriel Spark is once again at her biting, satirical best. On the edge of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, a struggling would-be novelist and his wife run a finishing school of questionable reputation to keep the funds flowing. When a seventeen-year-old student's writing career begins to show great promise, tensions begin to run high. A keen portrait of...
| Автор | Muriel Spark |
In the early 1800s, Rachel Greenhow, a young Quaker, goes missing in the Canadian wilderness. Unable to accept the disappearance, her brother Mark leaves his farm in England, determined to bring his sister home. What follows is a gripping account of Mark's odyssey and his travels with the voyageurs – the men who canoe Canada's fur-trade route. As adventure and discovery propel the plot forward, Elphinstone takes the reader back in time and intertwines the story with enduring themes of...
| Автор | Margaret Elphinstone |
While eleven-year-old Nazie has long been engaged to her cousin Moussa and anxiously awaits her marriage, fifteen-year-old Flora has been abandoned by her husband in the midst of a difficult pregnancy. In a novel brimming with vitality and sensuality – smells, colours and textures float effortlessly off the page – Rabinyan examines the lives of these young Jewish girls in a Persian village at the beginning of the twentieth century. Persian Brides is a widely-acclaimed, vibrant and...
| Автор | Dorit Rabinyan |
Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed. Japan is in ruins and occupied by the Americans. Takuya, an ex-officer in the Imperial Army, has returned to his native village only to learn that the Occupation authorities are intensifying their efforts to apprehend suspected war criminals. And those who are found guilty are being sentenced to death. Fearing that his role in the execution of a number of American pilots, Takuya takes to the road and becomes a fugitive in his own country. One...
| Автор | Akira Yoshimura |
A haunting, compelling historical novel, The Sea Road is a daring re-telling of the 11th-century Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Gudrid lives at the remote edge of the known world, in a starkly beautiful landscape where the sea is the only connection to the shores beyond. It is a world where the old Norse gods are still invoked, even as Christianity gains favour, where the spirits of the dead roam the vast northern ice-fields, tormenting...
| Автор | Margaret Elphinstone |
'Half Scotland sniggered and the other half scowled, when in letters to the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, I put forward my suggestion that prisoners in Scottish jails be allowed to wear their kilts as their national birthright if such be their wish.' From his origins as an illegitimate child in the slums of Glasgow, Fergus Lamont sets out to reclaim his inheritance and to remake his identity as soldier, poet and would-be aristocrat. Covering the years from the turn of the...
| Автор | Robin Jenkins |
Henry Molise, a fifty-year-old successful writer, returns to the family home to help with the latest drama; his elderly parents want to divorce. Henry's tyrannical, bricklaying father, Nick, despite being weakened by age and alcoholism, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons. His mother, ill and devoutly Catholic, still has the power both to comfort and confuse her children. Nick has been offered some well-paid work to build a smokehouse in the hills, and Henry, realising this...
| Автор | John Fante |
Scott-Heron's highly successful two novels are now packaged together for the first time. The Vulture relates the strange story of John Lee's murder – telling it in the words of four men who knew him when he was just another kid working after school, hanging out, waiting for something to happen. Just who did kill John Lee and why? A hip and fast-moving thriller. The Nigger Factory is a biting satire set on the campus of Sutton University, Virginia. The failure of Sutton to embrace the...
| Автор | Gil Scott-Heron |
The year is 1858. Thomas Glover is a gutsy eighteen-year-old who grasps the chance of escape to foreign lands and takes a posting as a trader in Japan. Within ten years he amasses a great fortune, learns the ways of the samurai, and, on the other side of the law, brings about the overthrow of the Shogun. Yet beneath Glover's astonishing success lies a man cut to the heart. His love affair with a courtesan – a woman who, unknown to him, would bear him the son for which he had always longed –...
| Автор | Alan Spence |
Caught in the melting pot of social injustice, revolution, war, and pacifism, this powerful book gives a vivid account of the experiences and struggles of a Glasgow family from the First World War and into the Depression at the end of the Twenties. It is a story of Glasgow apprentices, their lives dignified with a desire for art and learning and the ideal of reforming the world. The book follows the fortunes of one particular family, the Macdonnels. The mother dreams of social success while...
| Автор | Edward Gaitens |
Brilliantly observed and superbly characterised, The Haunted Major recounts the epic golfing match between the outrageously pompous Major and the reigning Open Champion, Jim Lindsay. The prize? The chance to propose to the captivating (and extremely wealthy) Mrs Gunter. Despite being 'the finest sportsman living', the Major despises golf, has never played it and considers a week's practice in secret in his hotel bedroom at St Andrews quite enough to whip the upstart. But events...
| Автор | Robert Marshall |
Na'ama Newman wakes up one morning to a new reality. Her husband Udi, formerly a healthy, active tour guide, announces that he can no longer move his legs. The paralysis is diagnosed as psychosomatic – Udi has gone on strike and Na'ama must cope with the crisis, while balancing the demands of work and motherhood. The plot moves swiftly from this starting point, and Shalev depicts the complexities of intimate relationships with daring perceptiveness. It is a unique and intense novel,...
| Автор | Zeruya Shalev |
An easy-riding, ball-busting comedy of bad manners, this is one of the most surprising and entertaining literary debuts of recent years. Pablo Baloo Miralles, a fat, useless and flatulent thirty-year-old, is the black sheep of his obscenely wealthy family. While he dedicates his days to online philosophy chatrooms and his nights to whatever pleasures he can find, his brother, 'The First,' is president of his booming family business. But, when 'The First' suddenly...
| Автор | Pablo Tusset |
'Exquisite' Daily Telegraph 'A haunting tale' Irish Times Twenty years ago, Oona left the island of Inis for the very first time. A wind-blasted rock of fishing boats and turf fires, where girls stayed in their homes until they became mothers themselves, the island was a gift for some, a prison for others. Oona was barely more than a girl, but promised herself she would leave the tall tales behind and never return. The Island Child tells two stories: of the girl who...
| Автор | Molly Aitken |