Тим Пирс0.0 This overwhelmingly hot summer everything seems to be slowing down in the tiny Devon village where Alison lives, as if the sun is pouring hot glue over it. 'This idn't nothin',' says Alison's grandmother, recalling a drought when the earth swallowed lambs, and the summer after the war when people got electric shocks off each other. But Alison knows her grandmother's memory is lying: this is far worse. She feels that time has stopped just as she wants to enter the real world of adulthood. In fact, in the cruel heat of summer, time is creeping towards her, and closing in around the valley.
Эндрю Бэрроу0.0 This novel is set around a retired civil servant and ageing patriarch, whose love of music halls and metropolitan life is mixed with great insecurities and curious prejudices.
Клэр Томалин4.2 When Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857, she was 18: a professional actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep. He was 45: a literary legend, a national treasure, married with ten children. This meeting sparked a love affair that lasted over a decade, destroying Dickens's marriage and ending with Nelly's near-disappearance from the public record. In this remarkable work of biography, Claire Tomalin rescues Nelly from obscurity, not only returning the neglected actress to her rightful place in history, but also giving us a compelling and truthful account of the great Victorian novelist. Through Dickens's diaries, correspondence, address books, and photographs, Tomalin is able to reconstruct the relationship between Charles and Nelly, bringing it to vivid life. The result is a riveting literary detective story - and a portrait of a singular woman.
Alan Bennett4.0 Alan Bennett sealed his reputation as the master of observation with this series of 12 groundbreaking monologues, originally filmed for BBC Television.
At once darkly comic, tragically poignant and wonderfully uplifting, Talking Heads is widely regarded as a modern classic.
This edition, which contains the complete collection of Talking Heads, as well as his earlier monologue, A Woman of No Importance, is a celebration of Alan Bennett's finest work.
Колин Таброн0.0 Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron set off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to the borders of Burma. He travelled through the wind-swept wastes of the Gobi desert and finished at the far end of the Great Wall. What Thubron reveals is an astonishing diversity, a land whose still unmeasured resources strain to meet an awesome demand, and an ancient people still reeling from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.
Timothy Mo0.0 Shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize, this novel explores the clans and conflicts of Soho's Chinatown, where the Chen family arrive and want to succeed as restaurateurs in the 1960s. No family can survive for long without encountering the Triads. By the author of "The Redundancy of Courage".
Bruce Chatwin4.1 Fascinated by Patagonia ever since an early childhood lust for his Grandma's scrap of hairy Giant Sloth skin, Bruce Chatwin is intrigued by odd miners, Darwin, the Welsh and the log cabin built by Butch Cassidy. From Rio Negro to the southernmost town of Ushuaia, Chatwin depicts all in writing as spare as the Patagonian desert and as vibrant as the purple clouds off Last Hope Sound.
Robert Nye0.0 The most beloved comic figure in English literature decides that history hasn't done him justice -- it's time for him to tell the whole unbuttoned story, his way. Irascible and still lecherous at eighty-one, Falstaff spins out these outrageously bawdy memoirs as an antidote to legend, and in the process manages to recreate his own.
This splendidly written novel is a feast, opening wide the look and feel of another age and bringing Shakespeare's Falstaff to life in a totally new way. Like Jack Falstaff himself, it's sprawling, vivid, oversized -- big as life. We return in an instant to an England that was ribald, violent, superstitious, coursing with high spirits and a fresh sense of national purpose. We see what history and the Bard of Avon overlooked or avoided: what really happened that celebrated night at the windmill when Falstaff and Justice Shallow heard the chimes at midnight; who really killed Hotspur; how many men fell at the Battle of Agincourt; what actually transpired at the coronation of Henry V ("Harry the Prig"); and just what it was that made the wives of Windsor so very merry.
Falstaff "tells all" about Prince Hal, John of Gaunt ("that maniac"), Pistol, Bardolph, Doll Tearsheet, and Jane Nightwork. At the same time, his racy narrative offers us a tapestry of the Middle Ages: the Black Death and May Day; an expedition to Ireland and a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; nights at the Boar's Head; the splendor of London Bridge; and hundreds of other sights and sounds and people zestfully recalled between scabrous opinions and irreverent meditations -- in sum, the very flavor of a great age.
Falstaff brandishes a spirit that seems to come out of that age as well as comment on it. The voice is unmistakably Falstaff's and his great drama swaggers, laughs, and shouts across every page.
David Lodge3.7 Euphoric State University with its whitestone, sun-drenched campus and Englands damp red-brick University of Rummidge have an annual professorial exchange scheme, and as the first day of the last year of the tumultuous sixties dawns, Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp are the designated exchangees. They know theyll be swapping class rosters, but what they dont know is that in a wildly spiraling transatlantic involvement theyll soon be swapping students, colleagues, and even wives. Changing Places is a hilarious send-up of academic life, intellectual fashion, sex, and marriage by a writer Anthony Burgess has called "one of the best novelists of his generation."
Оливер Сакс4.2 Книга, которая легла в основу одноименного знаменитого голливудского фильма с Робертом Де Ниро в главной роли!
История, которая читается как хорошая фантастика, хотя в действительности в ней описана правда!
Michael Frayn0.0 When a mercurial Moscow blonde and a visiting British businessman conduct an affair through their Russian interpreter it reveals all the deceptions of love and East-West relations.
Алистер Хорн4.0 The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 is the second book of Alistair Horne's trilogy, which includes The Fall of Paris and To Lose a Battle and tells the story of the great crises of the rivalry between France and Germany.
The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. Its aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death and a battleground whose once fertile terrain is even now a haunted wilderness.
Alistair Horne's classic work, continuously in print for over fifty years, is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there. It shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.
'Verdun was the bloodiest battle in history ... The Price of Glory is the essential book on the subject'
Sunday Times
'It has almost every merit ... Horne sorts out complicating issues with the greatest clarity. He has a splendid gift for depicting individuals'
A.J.P. Taylor, Observer
'A masterpiece'
The New York Times
'Compellingly told ... Alastair Horne uses contemporary accounts from both sides to build up a picture of heroism, mistakes, even farce'
Sunday Telegraph
'Brilliantly written ... very readable; almost like a historical novel - except that it is true'
Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery
One of Britain's greatest historians, Sir Alistair Horne, CBE, is the author of a trilogy on the rivalry between France and Germany, The Price of Glory, The Fall of Paris and To Lose a Battle, as well as a two-volume life of Harold Macmillan.
