Andrea Levy4.4 The novel is based on four main characters: Hortense, Queenie, Gilbert and Bernard and the story is told from each of their points of view. Its main plot is set in 1948 and focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own "small island," move to England, the Mother Country, for which the men have fought during World War II. Their reception is not quite the warm embrace that they have hoped for. Some chapters skip to an earlier time as the characters describe the time when they were growing up.
Ширли Хаззард0.0 The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.
Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith's sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.
Джумпа Лахири4.1 "Тезка" - первый роман Джумпы Лахири - тонко написанная история, трогательная семейная драма, которая освещает такие близкие автору темы, как жизнь эмигрантов, столкновение разных культур, конфликты поколений.
Первый сборник рассказов Джумпы Лахири - "Толкователь болезней" потряс литературный мир и получил Пулитцеровскую премию в 2000 году.
У героя романа уникальное имя - Гоголь....
Он из принципа не открывает книгу своего "тезки", подаренную ему отцом. Гоголь меняет имя, пытается обзавестись семьей, но в какой-то момент вдруг осознает, что его избранницы-американки ему чужды. Неужели всему виной тот, чья фамилия стала его судьбой?
Сочувствуя и проникая глубоко в суть проблемы, автор рассказывает, какие надежды на нас возлагают наши родные и как мы все-таки становимся теми, кто мы есть.
Маргарет Этвуд4.2 Ошалевшая планета на пороге катастрофы: терроризм, эпидемии, генетический беспредел, мутации. Безумный ученый, бывшая порнозвезда и фигляр-неудачник превращают мир потребительского абсурда в безлюдную пустыню. Чтобы уничтожить человечество, хватит тщательно разработанного вируса и нескольких месяцев эпидемии. На место людей пришло новое племя - травоядное, невинное и прекрасное. Посреди заброшенного парка живут Дети Коростеля, и фигляр-неудачник, единственный живой человек на Земле, сочиняет им сказки для новой жизни.
Одри Ниффенеггер4.1 Они познакомились, когда ей было шесть, а ему тридцать шесть.
Они поженились, когда ей было двадцать три, а ему тридцать один.
Потому что Генри страдает редким генетическим заболеванием — синдромом перемещения во времени; его исчезновения из жизни Клэр непредсказуемы, появления — комичны, травматичны и трагичны одновременно. Эта невероятная история невероятной любви стала, пожалуй, самым поразительным международным бестселлером нового века (перевод на 40 языков, общий тираж свыше 7 миллионов экземпляров). Права на экранизацию книги были куп лены Брэдом Питтом и Дженнифер Энистон (звезда телесериала «Друзья») еще до публикации самой книги; постановщиком фильма предполагался Гас ван Сент, но в итоге им выступил Роберт Швентке, главные роли исполнили Эрик Бана и Рейчел Макадамс.
Джоан Лондон0.0 Book DescriptionGilgamesh is a rich, spare, and evocative novel of encounters and escapes, of friendship and love, of loss and acceptance, a debut that marks the emergence of a world-class talent. It is 1937, and the modern world is waiting to
Monica Ali3.5 Amazon.comWildly embraced by critics, readers, and contest judges (who put it on the short-list for the 2003 Man Booker Prize), Brick Lane is indeed a rare find: a book that lives up to its hype. Monica Ali's debut novel chronicles the life
Джиллиан Слово0.0 Irina Davydovna is a cleaner. She has no time for politics or even for that matter, people: 'rules and rulers may come and go, but dirt never changes.' Boris Aleksandrovich is a revolutionary. He thinks he understands power. But this is Leningrad in 1933 and Stalin is about to turn against their city. When the life of his beloved daughter Natasha is threatened and his old friend Anton saves a skinny little orphan he finds on a Moscow train, Boris' faith in his ideals are put to the test. While Irina, watching it all, must learn the power of loyalty and love.
Rose Tremain4.7 Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from Norfolk to New Zealand in search of new beginnings and prosperity. But the harsh land near Christchurch threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in the creek he is seized by a rapturous obsession with the voluptuous riches awaiting him deep in the earth. Abandoning his farm and family, he sets off alone for the new gold-fields over the Southern Alps, a moral wilderness where many others, under the seductive dreams of 'the colour', are violently rushing to their destinies.
By turns both moving and terrifying, The Colour is about a quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and explore the sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of happiness.
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Чимаманда Нгози Адичи4.3 Отец шестнадцатилетней Камбили, героини бестселлера нигерийской писательницы Чимаманды Адичи - богатый филантроп, борец с коррупцией и фанатичный католик. Однако его любовь к Богу для жены и детей оборачивается лишь домашней тиранией, страхом и насилием. И только оказавшись в гостеприимном доме тетушки, Камбили понимает, что бывает другая любовь, другая жизнь... Уникальный лиловый куст гибискуса станет символом духовного освобождения.
Sarah Hall0.0 Book Description Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo , an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy -- a consumptives' hotel in a fading English
Дина Ли Кюнг0.0 You can't keep a good man down . . . even when he's dead!
Nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction, this is a light-hearted story of friendship defying the barrier of time to share life's upheavals great and small.
When an American mother and ex-journalist is overwhelmed by her new Swiss home, a visitor pops out of nowhere offering to relieve her son's asthma, her husband's distracted absence and her problems grappling with village life. Is he the village crackpot or - as he claims - the Greatest Mind of the Eighteenth Century? This talkative intruder, a skinny egotist in kneebreeches and a powdered wig, is the last straw. Though she begs him to disappear, he unpacks his moldy trunk and a lifetime of stories instead. Slowly "V." becomes her stalwart best friend as they laugh, bicker and he teaches her the best lesson of all: how to live life to its fullest.
"In the tradition of the best self-help novels, Voltaire teaches her how to live a happy and full life," writes Nicholas Cronk in "The Cambridge Guide to Voltaire."
Стиви Дэвис0.0 Mara and Frankie are cousins and best friends, growing up in the stifling atmosphere of Swansea in the 1950s, amid a bickering yet close-knit extended family. But their passionate friendship comes under threat as they reach adolescence in the heady atmosphere of the Sixties—a decade in which the conventions of family and kinship are overturned. Years later, as Mara begins to confront the questions surrounding Frankie's death, she is drawn back into their secret past and the struggles of a generation betrayed by its own values. Stevie Davies’ last novel, The Element of Water, was longlisted for the 2004 Booker and Orange Prizes.
Мэгги Джи0.0 President Bliss is handling a tricky situation with customary brio, but after months of ceaseless rain the city is sinking under the floods. The rich are safe on high ground, but the poor are getting damper in their packed tower blocks, and the fanatical ‘Last Days’ sect is recruiting thousands.
When at last the sun breaks through the clouds Lottie heads off to the opera, husband Harold listens to jazz and their ditsy teenage daughter Lola fights capitalism by bunking off school. Shirley takes her twin boys to the zoo. The Government – eager to distract attention from a foreign war it has waged – announces a spectacular City Gala. But not even TV astrologer Davey Lucas can predict the extraordinary climax that ensues.
Maggie Gee was chosen as one of Granta’s ‘Best Young British Novelists’ in 1983. Since then she has published eight novels to great acclaim, including Grace, The Ice People, Light Years and The White Family which was shortlisted for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2004. She is the first woman Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.
Anne Tyler4.7 Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in Baltimore, he was smitten, and in the heat of World War II fervour, they marry in haste. From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counter-culture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayers of later years, we watch their lives unspool and see the consequences of their very mismatched marriage.
Тони Моррисон3.8 Билл Коузи, бизнесмен и общественный деятель, сумел сделать невозможное – даже после смерти он продолжает влиять на судьбы близких людей. Отец, муж, любовник – он успел примерить на себя разные образы. Некоторые ему очень шли, а в некоторых Билл был настоящим чудовищем. Но книга эта не о нем, а о женщинах, окружавших его, и о чувствах, которые он у них вызвал. У каждой из героинь будет шанс рассказать свою историю, полную приятных и не очень воспоминаний. А нам останется лишь выслушать их и решить: чего было больше в их жизни – любви или ненависти.
Сара Мэй0.0 Set in a Macedonian refugee camp during the 1999 Kosovo crisis, The Internationals spans seventy-eight tense days from the commencement of NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia to the withdrawal of Serb forces from Northern Kosovo. As the spotlight of the world's media is turned on a small, landlocked country, an extraordinary cast of aid workers and diplomats finds itself becoming inextricably involved with refugees, advertising executives and an Albanian mayor in ways none of them expected.
The weeks pass, temperatures soar and, gradually, the Internationals jettison more and more of the certainties they came with, until the only certainty they're left with is that no form of contraception exists against corruption - least of all purity of motive.
Зои Хеллер3.9 Школа во все времена была непростым местом, где сталкиваются зрелость и юность, где порой буйно расцветает махровое ханжество, пытаясь задушить первую любовь. Именно в такой мир попадает свободолюбивая и открытая Шеба Харт, преподавательница гончарного мастерства. Аристократичная и раскрепощённая Шеба невольно становится школьной сенсацией. К ней тянет не только учителей, но и учеников. Старейшина учительского клана Барбара старается завоевать её дружбу, а юный Конноли - любовь. И вскоре Барбара оказывается единственной свидетельницей - аморального с общепринятой точки зрения - романа между подростком и сорокалетней женщиной. И как результат - скандал, ставший благодаря прессе едва ли не национальным. Но всё ли очевидно в этой ситуации? И что движет участниками скандала? И так уж ли виноваты одни и невинны другие?
"Хроника одного скандала" - книга, в которой отчётливо пульсирует реальная жизнь, c её ложью, любовью и одиночеством. Роман Зои Хеллер стал литературным событием последних лет. С ироничной отстранённостью она рассказывает неоднозначную историю, не навешивая ярлыков и не морализируя.
Stella Duffy0.0 Jack and Cindy are immediately attracted to one another from the moment they meet at a friend's party, and in time this first infatuation develops into a passionate and enduring love affair. A celebrated cartographer, Cindy maps the contours of their developing relationship as they explore its depth and test its boundaries." Five years later, Jack and Cindy believe that they have navigated every obstacle when a sudden crisis threatens their blissful state. Cindy falls dangerously ill, and as she battles her body's betrayal, the couple must also confront their diverging paths and uncharted future.
Рупа Баджва0.0 Ramchand, a tired shop assistant in Sevak Sari House in Amritsar, spends his days patiently showing yards of fabric to the women of "status families" and to the giggling girls who dream of dressing up in silk but can only afford cotton. When Ramchand is sent to show his wares to a wealthy family preparing for their daughter's wedding, he is jolted out of the rhythm of his narrow daily life. His glimpse into a different world gives him an urgent sense of possibility. And so he attempts to recapture the hope that his childhood had promised, arming himself with two battered English grammar books, a fresh pair of socks, and a bar of Lifebuoy soap. But soon these efforts turn his life upside down, bringing him face to face with the cruelties on which his very existence depends. Reading group guide included.
