Лауро Мартинес4.2 Впервые на русском - история любви прекрасной вдовы Лореданы и доминиканского мистика-революционера Орсо, разворачивающаяся в начале XVI века в существующей на двух уровнях Венеции - воплощенном идеальном городе Леонардо да Винчи.
Уильям Ньютон0.0 "Our dream, our obsession, was to own a tram. This all started with an advertisement which showed a picture of a London tram with the words: 'Trams surplus to the requirements of the London Omnibus and Tramcar company for sale at their depot at Acton, London for £2 each.' I doubt if there was a day afterwards when the tram did not enter our conversation..."
The year was 1937, and Hitler had just walked into Austria. It was also a marvelous year for clouded yellow butterflies.
Wilfred and Duncan live in a big old house in Sussex, England. They spend their days catching butterflies and dreaming of escape, and only ever see their parents on Wednesdays for lunch. When their mother elopes and their already distant father takes up with other ladies, they decide that enough is enough. And they have a plan: they will leave home, go to London, and buy a tram, decommissioned by the bus and tram company, that they have seen advertised in the paper for two pounds sterling. Soon the brothers find that their adventures have begun in earnest-as they become proprietors of an old-fashioned horse-drawn tram service, then local celebrities whose tram advertises for a seaside merchant, and finally such heroes of the war effort that they receive a visit from royalty.
Destined to become a new family classic, The Two-Pound Tram is a bittersweet testament to youth and its triumph over hardship.
Margaret Kaine0.0 Despite an early life marked by tragedy and hardship, Beth Sherwin dreams of staying on at school and even going to university - a heady ambition for a Potteries girl in 1956. Then a brutal encounter leaves her pregnant at seventeen.
Unwilling to break her widowed mother's heart, Beth bears her secret alone and gives up her baby daughter for adoption.
It seems her desperate gamble has succeeded. She finishes school, takes on a challenging job and meets Michael, charming eldest son of the wealthy Rushton family. She has to fight both class prejudice and the jealousy of her old enemy Ursula to win him - but when he asks her to marry him, Beth faces a dilemma.
Does she dare tell Michael her guilty secret and risk losing him? And even if he stands by her, can she bear the certainty that the brutal stranger who fathered her child will be at her wedding?
Цви Ягендорф0.0 An enchanting blend of humour and crisp observation in a story of Jewish exiles in Britain. Set in wartime and post-war England Wolfy and the Strudelbakers is a comic take on the disaster zone of displacement and exile. Wolfy lives with the ‘strudelbakers’—his super-critical aunt and melancholy uncle—in the surrealistic world of refugees granted shelter from persecution. He is an expert at living in two cultures—the chaotic, dark world of uprooted people desperately hanging on to their Jewish religion—and the vitality, variety and temptation he finds in London’s streets.
"A most impressive novel full of narrative power and unforgettable description."—Jewish Chronicle
"The delight is in the comic detail, even when the matter is serious."—The Times
Michael Richardson0.0 'Your mind's full of rubbish, Morley, just like that pig bin.' The Pig Bin is a laugh-out-loud novel about the embarrassing escapades of a war time adolescent. Morley Charles is a shy Catholic boy with a stammer. His mother disapproves of most of his friends; his father is away at the war; his uncle is a black marketeer, and the drunk lodger staying with them is a source of shame. Morley has started exploring his body, and is desperate to find the right word to describe the sinful pleasure he's just discovered so he can make his confession and not go straight to hell if a bomb falls on him. Things start to look up, however, when the American serviceman who's sweet on his neighbor gives him a brand new lumber jacket. May, his aunt, is generous with the affection his mother seems unable to show. If he pretends to be French his stammer miraculously vanishes, and his artistic talent might give him a future at the Balsley School of Art. With the war nearly over, all he needs to do now is find that word.
David Crackanthorpe0.0 As a student in France under the German occupation, Stephen Seagrave risked his life for the Resistance. But with the German defeat come dangers of another but no less frightening kind as he searches for the Gypsy whore he tried to save from the camps. His only weapon is a compromising photograph of a collaborator, now a powerful man in the new government, whom he must blackmail into helping him. But such a dangerous game will lead him into a deadly labyrinth of deceptions and betrayals where it is no longer possible to tell friend from foe.
Ingrid Mann0.0 Published under a pseudonym, A E Ellis, and appearing in 1958 to considerable acclaim, The Rack is a novel about the ordeal of being deathly ill. A young English student, Paul, is sent to a Swiss sanatorium just after the end of the second world war. At a time when effective medication for tuberculosis was unknown, Paul undergoes an unimaginable regime of regimented medical intervention, both physical and mental. His fellow patients fare no better. Yet, as the poet Edwin Muir wrote in his original review in the Observer: 'The Rack does not deal obviously with disease and suffering; it describes, sometimes very amusingly, the life of the sanatorium: the sardonic professional kindness of the doctors, liable suddenly to break under pressure, the badness of the food, the endless pre-occupation of the patients with their symptoms, and the sexual promiscuity...Behind the book one has the impression of an unusual and powerful mind.' Graham Greene considered it a masterpiece; the Times Literary Supplement believed 'the book exercises a complete fascination...a deeply impressive performance', and Time and Tide hailed The Rack as '...terrific. To read it is itself an experience.'Penelope Mortimer wrote: 'It is often glibly said that a work of art is an experience - The Rack is one of the rare instances of this actually being so. It is a book which must, inevitably, have a permanent effect on the reader. In this case the usual terms of praise become almost meaningless. So powerful is Mr Ellis's inspiration, so driven by the urgent necessity of expression, that one is not so much conscious of having read a account of an ordeal as of having lived through two years of unbearable physical and mental agony - and survived.' Long out of print, the original Heinemann and Penguin editions cut out some 60,000 words of the author's original text. Elliott & Thompson's Gold Edition will restore the complete text to provide today's reader with a chance to discover the definitive edition of one of the great English novels of the last century.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan0.0 A powerful three-generational saga of a Sri Lankan family's search for coherence and continuity in a country broken by colonial occupation and riven by ethnic wars.
Barbara Hardy0.0 London Lovers is an account of a woman's search for sensual and social liberation. The novel follows Florence Jones from South Wales in the 1930s and '40s to the literary London of the 1970s and '80s, re-creating the story through the twists and loops of memory. A subtle and humorous first-person narrative cuts across chronology and sequence to interweave memories of Florence's marriage and love-life and her affair with the American scholar Mick Solomon, which lasts from their meeting until his death fifteen years later.
G.B. Hummer0.0 This novel is set in a town of the same name in the far west of the United States. On the eve of World War II, for four hot days of summer, the townspeople are caught up in a pursuit of justice that ends when, inevitably, the innocent among them are made to suffer.
Brian ODoherty0.0 This is the story of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, celebrated for his discovery of animal magnetism, or mesmerism, who takes on the case of an 18-year-old girl, blind since birth for no apparent reason. A thriller-like narrative based on an actual case.
Hugh Leonard0.0 The leader of the struggle for Irish independence and the daughter of an English clergyman risk everything to become lovers during the reign of Queen Victoria.
