Лиза МакИнерни0.0 One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, Maureen threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight . . .
Biting, moving and darkly funny, The Glorious Heresies explores salvation, shame and the legacy of Ireland's twentieth-century attitudes to sex and family.
Кейт Аткинсон4.1 В высшую лигу современной литературы Кейт Аткинсон попала с первой же попытки: ее дебютный роман "Музей моих тайн" получил престижную Уитбредовскую премию, обойдя "Прощальный вздох мавра" Салмана Рушди, а цикл романов о частном детективе Джексоне Броуди, успевший полюбиться и российскому читателю ("Преступления прошлого", "Поворот к лучшему", "Ждать ли добрых вестей?", "Чуть свет, с собакою вдвоем"), Стивен Кинг окрестил "главным детективным проектом десятилетия".
И вот за поразительным мировым бестселлером "Жизнь после жизни", рассказывавшим, как методом проб и ошибок наконец прожить XX век правильно, следует его продолжение — "Боги среди людей". И если Урсула Тодд прожила много жизней, то ее брат Тедди — лишь одну, зато очень длинную. Он изучал в Оксфорде поэзию Уильяма Блейка, а потом убирал урожай в южной Франции, он за штурвалом четырехмоторного "галифакса" бомбил Берлин, а потом уверился, что среди людей есть боги: ведь, по выражению Эмерсона, сам человек — это рухнувшее божество...
Бекки Чамберс3.8 Добро пожаловать на борт "Странника"!
Розмари Харпер не ждала чего-то особенного, присоединяясь к экипажу старенького "Странника". Конечно, это уже не раз починенное судно видало лучшие деньки, зато тут тебе и кровать, и шанс исследовать далекие-далекие галактики, и — самое главное — правильное расстояние от прошлого. Правда, Розмари никогда еще не встречала настолько разношерстную компанию, как экипаж "Странника", состоящий из пилота-рептилоида Сиссикса и болтливых инженеров Киззи и Дженкса во главе с благородным капитаном Эшби… А жизнь на борту корабля оказалась просто сумасшедшей! Особенно когда экипаж взялся за эту прибыльную (и чертовски опасную) работенку на далекой маленькой планете.
И теперь Розмари, привыкшей полагаться только на себя, предстоит научиться доверию к окружившим ее чудикам, ведь отныне они — одна семья, а это не такая уж плохая штука.
Ширли Барретт4.0 An impassioned, charming, and hilarious debut novel about a young woman's coming-of-age, during one of the harshest whaling seasons in the history of New South Wales.
1908: It's the year that proves to be life-changing for our teenage narrator, Mary Davidson, tasked with providing support to her father's boisterous whaling crews while caring for five brothers and sisters in the wake of their mother's death. But when the handsome John Beck-a former Methodist preacher turned novice whaler with a mysterious past-arrives at the Davidson's door pleading to join her father's crews, suddenly Mary's world is upended.
As her family struggles to survive the scarcity of whales and the vagaries of weather, and as she navigates sibling rivalries and an all-consuming first love for the newcomer John, nineteen-year-old Mary will soon discover a darker side to these men who hunt the seas, and the truth of her place among them.
Swinging from Mary's own hopes and disappointments to the challenges that have beset her family's whaling operation, RUSH OH! is an enchanting blend of fact and fiction that's as much the story of its gutsy narrator's coming-of-age as it is the celebration of an extraordinary episode in history.
Синтия Бонд4.0 Ephram Jenkins has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, "the kind of pretty it hurt to look at," is already quite damaged, but Ephram is forcibly drawn to her. As soon as she becomes a young woman and has any power of her own, Ruby flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York City. Years later, when a funeral forces her to return home, 30-year-old Ruby will find herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town's dark past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised and stood by him, and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy. With a sense of the poetry and power of Toni Morrison, and an ingenious structure and breathtaking, lyrical prose all her own, Cynthia Bond carries the listener along in a rush: through the red dust and gossip of Main Street, to the pit fire where men swill bootleg outside Bloom's Juke, to Celia Jenkins's kitchen where a cake is being made, yolk by yolk, that Ephram will use to try to begin again with Ruby.
Geraldine Brooks0.0 Peeling away the myth to bring the Old Testament's King David to life in Second Iron Age Israel, Brooks traces the arc of his journey from obscurity to fame, from shepherd to soldier, from hero to traitor, from beloved king to murderous despot and into his remorseful and diminished dotage.
The Secret Chord provides new context for some of the best-known episodes of David’s life while also focusing on others, even more remarkable and emotionally intense, that have been neglected. We see David through the eyes of those who love him or fear him—from the prophet Natan, voice of his conscience, to his wives Mikhal, Avigail, and Batsheva, and finally to Solomon, the late-born son who redeems his Lear-like old age. Brooks has an uncanny ability to hear and transform characters from history, and this beautifully written, unvarnished saga of faith, desire, family, ambition, betrayal, and power will enthrall her many fans.
Клио Грей0.0 In a small salt-mining town, Philbert is born with a ‘taupe’, a disfiguring inflammation of the skull. Abandoned by both parents and with only a pet pig for company, he eventually finds refuge and companionship in a travelling carnival, Maulwerf’s Fair of Wonders, as it makes its annual migration across Germany bringing entertainment to a people beset by famine, repression and revolutionary ferment.
Philbert soon finds a caring family in Hermann the Fish Man, Lita, the Dancing Dwarf, Frau Fettleheim, the Fattest Woman in the World and an assortment of ‘freak show’ artists, magicians and entertainers.
But then Philbert meets Kwert, ‘Tospirologist and Teller of Signs’, and when he persuades the boy to undergo examination by the renowned physician and craniometrist, Dr Ullendorf, both Kwert and Philbert embark on an altogether darker and more perilous journey that will have far-reaching consequences for a whole nation.
Элизабет Маккензи3.3 An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor
The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel.
Hannah Rothschild0.0 Wickedly funny, this totally engaging, richly observed first novel by Hannah Rothschild is a tour de force. Its sweeping narrative and cast of wildly colorful characters takes you behind the scenes of a London auction house, into the secret operations of a powerful art dealer, to a flamboyant eighteenth-century-style dinner party, and into a modest living room in Berlin, among many other unexpected settings.
In The Improbability of Love we meet Annie McDee, thirty-one, who is working as a chef for two rather sinister art dealers. Recovering from the end of a long-term relationship, she is searching in a neglected secondhand shop for a birthday present for her unsuitable new lover. Hidden behind a rubber plant on top of a file cabinet, a grimy painting catches her eye. After spending her meager savings on the picture, Annie prepares an elaborate birthday dinner for two, only to be stood up.
The painting becomes hers, and as it turns out, Annie has stumbled across a lost masterpiece by one of the most important French painters of the eighteenth century. But who painted this masterpiece is not clear at first. Soon Annie finds herself pursued by interested parties who would do anything to possess her picture. For a gloomy, exiled Russian oligarch, an avaricious sheikha, a desperate auctioneer, and an unscrupulous dealer, among others, the painting embodies their greatest hopes and fears. In her search for the painting’s identity, Annie will unwittingly uncover some of the darkest secrets of European history—as well as the possibility of falling in love again.
Irreverent, witty, bittersweet, The Improbability of Love draws an unforgettable portrait of the London art scene, but it is also an exuberant and unexpected journey through life’s highs and lows and the complexities of love and loss
Anne Enright3.4 A darkly glinting novel set on Ireland's Atlantic coast, "The Green Road" is a story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion - a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them. The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she's decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold. Anne Enright is addicted to the truth of things. Sentence by sentence, there are few writers alive who can invest the language with such torque and gleam, such wit and longing - who can write dialogue that speaks itself aloud, who can show us the million splinters of her characters' lives then pull them back up together again, into a perfect glass.
