Али Смит3.3 Случайные - или почти случайные встречи, запрограммированные судьбой и ведущие нас к банальным житейским драмам или к великим личностным переменам - вот острейшая загадка, которую в романе "Случайно" занимает внимание Али Смит. Чтобы попытаться разрешить эту загадку, автор использует различные литературные "ключики" в зависимости от характера персонажа - где поток сознания, где поэтическое творчество, где почти детективную интригу. Внешне благополучная, но раздираемая внутренними противоречиями семья случайно принимает в свое лоно то ли путешественницу, то ли авантюристку, которая превращает их жизнь в неожиданное, опасное и упоительное приключение.
Таш Ау5.0 Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, and Anthony Burgess have shaped our perceptions of Malaysia. In Tash Aw, we now have an authentic Malaysian voice that remaps this literary landscape.
The Harmony Silk Factory traces the story of textile merchant Johnny Lim, a Chinese peasant living in British Malaya in the first half of the twentieth century. Johnny's factory is the most impressive structure in the region, and to the inhabitants of the Kinta Valley Johnny is a hero—a Communist who fought the Japanese when they invaded, ready to sacrifice his life for the welfare of his people. But to his son, Jasper, Johnny is a crook and a collaborator who betrayed the very people he pretended to serve, and the Harmony Silk Factory is merely a front for his father's illegal businesses. This debut novel from Tash Aw gives us an exquisitely written look into another culture at a moment of crisis.
The Harmony Silk Factory won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award and also made it to the 2005 Man Booker longlist.
Рэйчел Цадок0.0 "She just sat there hardly moving, staring at the drive. Black marks formed under her eyes where her lashes bled their waxy coating onto her skin. Her rouged cheeks were smudged. Mother looked like she was melting in the heat."
Faith leads an isolated existence on her family's drought stricken farm in the Northern Transvaal of South Africa. When the rain stopped, her father took to the road as a travelling salesman, returning only at weekends. Now Faith lives with her mother Bella and dog Boesman anticipating his visits - until one day he stops coming and Bella's health begins to go into rapid decline.
Fifteen years later Bella has died incarcerated in the Sterkfontein asylum for the criminally insane. Faith has not spoken to her mother for ten years and is on the brink of a breakdown of her own. Now, with her mother's death, she inherits the farm and must return to confront the dark mysteries of the past . . .
In prose as lithe and imaginative as that of Alexandra Fuller, Rachel Zadok te Riele recreates the voice of a young girl growing up during the height of apartheid unrest in South Africa. As Faith struggles to make sense of the complex world in which she lives and come to terms with the beliefs her society and upbringing have inculcated in her, what emerges is a richly compelling, emotionally resonant tale of courage set against the backdrop of a chaotically divided and deeply beautiful country.
К. Томпсон0.0 THE NEW POLICEMAN: a wonderfully intriguing story going right to the heart of Irish magic, folklore and music, from the twice honoured recipient of the Irish Children`s Book of the Year Bisto Award.
Кристофер Лог0.0 Helen, the world's most beautiful woman, the wife of Lord Menelaos of Sparta, left Greece in the company of Paris, the son of Priam, King of Troy. To repossess her, a thousand Greek ships sailed to Troy. Nine years have passed. The Greeks have not achieved their aim. Indeed, after a quarrel between Achilles their leader and Agamemnon their king, the Trojans, led by Paris's brother, Prince Hector, have driven the Greeks off the plain of Troy and back behind the palisade protecting their ships. Achilles refuses to help them. It is night . . .
The scene is set for Cold Calls, the fifth and penultimate instalment of Logue's Homer, an ongoing project - a piece of performance-art for the page rather than the stage - which has taken several decades to unfold, and has been described by Derek Mahon as 'Less a translation than an adaptation. Less an adaptation, in fact, than an original poem of considerable power.'
“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life.
Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second half of the biography that began with the acclaimed The Unknown Matisse) shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that now seem effortlessly serene, radiant, and stable.
Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse’s models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson and the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his studio manager, secretary, and companion in the last two decades of his life.
But every woman who played an important part in Matisse’s life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in the Second World War.
If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame public image as Matisse could have painted such rich, powerful, mysteriously moving pictures, let alone produced the radical cut-paper and stained-glass inventions of his last years, here is the answer. They were made by the real Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last from start to finish by his first biographer, Hilary Spurling.
Книга названа КНИГОЙ ГОДА.