Иэн Макьюэн3.8 Известный нейрохирург Генри Пероун вполне доволен жизнью: он сумел реализоваться в профессии и у него прекрасная семья. Однако однажды утром он попадает в историю, которая имеет неожиданное и трагическое продолжение. Дорожное происшествие, знакомство со странным преступником - и вот уже в его богатом доме появляется нежданный гость, который угрожает жизни Пероуна и его близких... Иэн Макьюэн - один из самых известных и популярных современных английских писателей, лауреат Букеровской премии. Роман "Суббота" удостоен старейшей в Великобритании литературной премии имени Джеймса Тейта Блэка, которая присуждается с 1919 года. Среди ее лауреатов такие классики английской литературы, как Ивлин Во, Айрис Мердок и Грэн Грин.
André Brink0.0 A magical novel from a world class writer about a remarkable historical figure.
In his early years, growing up on a Dutch farm in the deep interior of the southern African Cape, Cupido Cockroach became the greatest drinker, liar, fornicator and fighter of his region. Coming under the spell of the soap-boiler Anna, and under the influence of the great Dr Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp of the London Missionary Society, Cupido is made the first Khoi or "Hottentot" missionary ordained at the Cape of Good Hope.
Received into the fold of the Church, Cupido passionately turns against all his early beliefs. After being drawn into the fierce struggle between the missionaries and the Dutch colonists, he rises to some prominence and is appointed as missionary in a remote and arid region in the North-western Cape. But this also marks the beginning of his decline, as the Society abandons him to his fate. One by one, the members of his congregation disappear into the desert, so that in the end, abandoned even by his wife and children, he is left to preach to the stones and thorn trees and tortoises, returning to the dream-world of his people.
Кадзуо Исигуро4.0 Тридцатилетняя Кэти вспоминает свое детство в привилегированной школе Хейлшем, полное странных недомолвок, половинчатых откровений и подспудной угрозы. Она словно путешествует во времени, остро чувствуя произошедшие вокруг изменения, и рассказывает о том, что случилось. «Не отпускай меня» – это не просто история любви, дружбы и памяти, это предельное овеществление метафоры «служить всей жизнью».
А еще это роман-притча о настоящем и прошлом, вызывающий душевное смятение и боль. Боль, которая исцелит, но останется с вами надолго после прочтения.
Joyce Carol Oates0.0 Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even—from an unexpected source—a nurturing love.
Uzodinma Iweala4.2 As civil war rages in an unnamed West-African nation, Agu, the school-aged protagonist of this stunning debut novel, is recruited into a unit of guerilla fighters. Haunted by his father’s own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander.
While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started—a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family, still intact. As he vividly recalls these sunnier times, his daily reality continues to spin further downward into inexplicable brutality, primal fear, and loss of selfhood. In a powerful, strikingly original voice, Uzodinma Iweala leads the reader through the random travels, betrayals, and violence that mark Agu’s new community. Electrifying and engrossing, Beasts of No Nation announces the arrival of an extraordinary new writer.
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.
Сью Придо4.5 Although almost everyone recognizes Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream, hardly anyone knows much about the man. What kind of person could have created this universal image, one that so vividly expressed all the uncertainties of the twentieth century? What kind of experiences did he have? In this book, the first comprehensive biography of Edvard Munch in English, Sue Prideaux brings the artist fully to life. Combining a scholar’s precision with a novelist’s insight, she explores the events of his turbulent life and unerringly places his experiences in their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual contexts.
With unlimited access to tens of thousands of Munch’s papers, including his letters and diaries, Prideaux offers a portrait of the artist that is both intimate and moving. Munch sought to paint what he experienced rather than what he saw, and as his life often veered out of control, his experiences were painful. Yet he painted throughout his long life, creating strange and dramatic works in which hysteria and violence lie barely concealed beneath the surface. An extraordinary genius, Munch connects with an audience that reaches around the world and across more than a century.
Роджер Пирсон0.0 With its tales of illegitimacy, prison, stardom, exile, love affairs, and tireless battles against his critics, priests and king, Roger Pearson’s Voltaire Almighty brings the father of Enlightenment to vivid life.
Voltaire Almighty provides a lively look at the life and thought of one of the major forces behind European Enlightenment. A rebel from start to finish (1694-1778), Voltaire was an ailing and unwanted bastard child who refused to die; and when he did consent to expire some eighty-four years later, he secured a Christian burial despite a bishop’s ban.
During much of his life Voltaire was the toast of society for his plays and verse, but his barbed wit and commitment to human reason got him into trouble. Jailed twice and eventually banished by the king, he was an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution. His personal life was as colorful as his intellectual life. Of independent means and mind, Voltaire never married, but he had long-term affairs with two women: Emilie, who died after giving birth to the child of another lover, and his niece, Marie-Louise, with whom he spent the last twenty-five years of his life. The consummate outsider; a dissenter who craved acceptance while flamboyantly disdaining it; author of countless stories, poems, books, plays, treatises, and tracts as well as some twenty thousand letters to his friends: Voltaire lived a long, active life that makes for engaging and entertaining reading.
Александр Мастерс4.8 In this extraordinary book, Alexander Masters has created a moving portrait of a troubled man, an unlikely friendship, and a desperate world few ever see. A gripping who-done-it journey back in time, it begins with Masters meeting a drunken Stuart lying on a sidewalk in Cambridge, England, and leads through layers of hell…back through crimes and misdemeanors, prison and homelessness, suicide attempts, violence, drugs, juvenile halls and special schools–to expose the smiling, gregarious thirteen-year-old boy who was Stuart before his long, sprawling, dangerous fall.
Shocking, inspiring, and hilarious by turns, Stuart: A Life Backwards is a writer’s quest to give voice to a man who, beneath his forbidding exterior, has a message for us all: that every life–even the most chaotic and disreputable–is a story worthy of being told.
Макс Эгремонт0.0 Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. While a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility.
In 1918, Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster, while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the artistocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of Bright Young Things who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon's subsequent conversion to Catholicism.
From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont's definitive biography.
Роджер Найт0.0 The acclaimed naval historian Roger Knight has written a magisterial biography of one of the greatest military heroes of world history. How did Horatio Nelson achieve such extraordinary success? Roger Knight places him firmly in the context of the Royal Navy of his time. Nelson was passionate and relentless from the outset of his career; his leadership in battle was unrivalled. But his success depended also on the strength of intelligence available to him, the quality of the ships he commanded, the potency of his guns, and the skill of his seamen.
Based on a vast array of new sources, this biography demolishes many of the myths that have surrounded Nelson for two centuries. Knight demonstrates that this great Romantic hero was in his time a shrews political operator and often a difficult subordinate. He was occasionally naïve, often impatient, and only happy when completely in command. While capable of great acts of generosity, he could be deeply ruthless--both aboard ship and in his personal life.
Destined to be the definitive account of Horatio Nelson's life for generations, this dazzling biography greatly enriches our understanding of this extraordinary man--brilliant, severely flawed, and never to be crossed.
Найджел Фарндейл0.0 William and Margaret Joyce - Lord and Lady Haw-Haw - became one of the most mythologized, feared and ridiculed partnerships of the Second World War. His 'Germany Calling' broadcasts and her pro-Nazi wireless talks were part of the very fabric of the Home Front. Yet, when the couple were captured in May 1945, only William was charged with high treason - despite its becoming apparent that he wasn't actually a British subject.
Authorized by William Joyce's daughter, Heather, and based on new interviews and unpublished letters, diaries and recently declassified Secret Service files, "Haw-Haw" is a meticulously researched biography: an incisive and shocking study of two people whose beliefs overrode everything.
'Makes Joyce's belief in the eventual victory of British fascism seem credible to today's readers. . . masterful use of source material' James Wood, "Scotland on Sunday"
'Exciting and endlessly fascinating' Craig Brown, "Mail on Sunday " (5 stars)
'Well-researched and fast-paced' Michael Burleigh, "Sunday Times"
