Розалинд Белбен0.0 Philomena, fat and lazy when she is requisitioned from an English field at the start of the First World War, sails for Egypt with the territorial regiment, the Dorset Yeomanry. She serves faithfully, charging the dervishes in the Western Desert and enduring the privations of Allenby’s great campaign in Palestine. She recovers from wounds to swelter through a summer in the Jordan Valley. She takes part in the triumphant advance on Damascus – only to be sold off in Cairo among the 22,000 horses left behind by the War Office after the Armistice.
By 1921, the forceful Griselda Romney, a war widow – in the author's Hound Music she was a child – has discovered that her old hunter, Philomena, could be still alive. With her six-year-old daughter, and of course Nanny, Mrs Romney sets out to Egypt, to find Philomena and to rescue her…
Our Horses in Egypt depicts the work of a troop-horse in the Army – and of exotic Cairo, in political unrest – as meticulously and exuberantly as Hound Music recreated the milieu of Edwardian fox-hunting.
Джи Уильямс0.0 A short break in a shoreline cottage is an ideal place to struggle with your demons. For Elly and Martin it is the chance to forget their hasty exit from Paradise following classroom scandal. But she makes a life-changing find on the tideline, a diamond dress-ring with finger bones still attached.
Mohsin Hamid3.7 Invited to join the mysterious stranger at a Lahore cafe for tea, you learn his name and what led this speaker of immaculate English to seek you out. For he is more worldly than you might expect; better travelled and better educated. He knows the West better than you do. And as he tells you his story, of how he embraced the Western dream - and a Western woman - and how both betrayed him, so the night darkens. Then the true reason for your meeting becomes abundantly clear...
Daniel Mason0.0 From the bestselling author of The Piano Tuner, a stunning novel about a young girl’s journey through a vast, unnamed country in search of her brother.
Fourteen-year-old Isabel was born in a remote village with the gift and curse of “seeing farther.” When drought and war grip the backlands, her brother Isaias joins a great exodus to a teeming city in the south. Soon Isabel must follow, forsaking the only home she’s ever known, her sole consolation the thought of being with her brother again.
Джон Бернсайд0.0 Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life yet still feels like an outsider. Married but rather distant from his wife, he reads in the local paper that a school friend, Moira Birnie, has killed herself and her two sons by setting their car on fire; but she has spared her 14-year-old daughter Hazel. Michael uneasily recalls his past connections to Moira. As teenagers, Michael and Moira had a brief romance, yet more troubling to Michael is the fact that he was responsible for the death of Moira’s brother, the town bully. In the wake of the tragedy, Michael becomes obsessed with Hazel, who is just old enough to be his daughter. Aware of his obsession, Hazel convinces Michael to take her away from the village and her father, an abusive and violent man.
Setting his story against the untamed Scottish landscape, John Burnside has written a chilling novel that explores the elemental forces of everyday life: love, fear, grief, and the hope of redemption. In its ability to evoke and exploit our most primal fears, The Devil’s Footprints prompts comparisons to the best of Stephen King. In both language and imagery, it is a novel of mysterious beauty, written with the clarity and power of a folktale
Розмари Хилл0.0 Pugin was one of Britain’s greatest architects and his short career one of the most dramatic in architectural history. Born in 1812, the son of the soi-disant Comte de Pugin, at 15 Pugin was working for King George IV at Windsor Castle. By the time he was 21 he had been shipwrecked, bankrupted and widowed. Nineteen years later he died, insane and disillusioned, having changed the face and the mind of British architecture. Pugin’s bohemian early career as an antique dealer and scenery designer at Covent Garden came to a sudden end with a series of devastating bereavements, including the loss of his first wife in childbirth. In the aftermath he formed a vision of Gothic architecture that was both romantic and deeply religious. He became a Catholic and in 1836 published Contrasts, the first architectural manifesto. It called on the 19th century to reform its cities if it wanted to save its soul. Once launched, Pugin’s career was torrential. Before he was 30 he had designed 22 churches, three cathedrals, half a dozen extraordinary houses and a Cistercian monastery. For eight years he worked with Charles Barry on the Palace of Westminster creating its sumptuous interiors, the House of Lords and the clock ‘Big Ben’ that became one of Britain’s most famous landmarks. He was the first architect-designer to cater for the middle-classes, producing everything from plant pots to wallpaper and early flat-pack furniture. God’s Architect is the first full modern biography of this extraordinary figure. It draws on thousands of unpublished letters and drawings to recreate his life and work as architect, propagandist and romantic artist as well as the turbulent story of his three marriages, the bitterness of his last years and his sudden death at 40. It is the debut of a remarkable historian and biographer.
Simon Sebag Montefiore4.1 A revelatory account that finally unveils the shadowy journey from obscurity to power of the Georgian cobbler’s son who became the Red Tsar—the man who, along with Hitler, remains the modern personification of evil.
What makes a Stalin? What formed this merciless psychopath who was, as well, a consummate politician, the dynamic world statesman who helped create and industrialize the USSR, outplayed Churchill and Roosevelt, organized Stalingrad, took Berlin and defeated Hitler?
Young Stalin tells the story of a charismatic, darkly turbulent boy born into poverty, of doubtful parentage, scarred by his upbringing but possessed of unusual talents. Admired as a romantic poet and trained as a priest—both by the time he was in his early twenties—he found his true mission as a fanatical revolutionary. A mastermind of bank robbery, protection rackets, arson, piracy and murder, he was equal parts terrorist, intellectual and brigand. Here is the dramatic story of his friendships and hatreds, his many love affairs—with women from every social stratum and age group—his illegitimate children and his complicated relationship with the Tsarist secret police. Here is Stalin the arch-conspirator and escape artist whose brutal ingenuity so impressed Lenin that Lenin made him, along with Trotsky, top henchman. Montefiore makes clear how the paranoid criminal underworld was Stalin’s natural habitat, and how murderous Caucasian banditry and political gangsterism, combined with pitiless ideology, enabled Stalin to dominate the Kremlin—and create the USSR in his flawed image.
Based on ten years of research in newly opened archives in Russia and Georgia, Young Stalin—companion to the prizewinning Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar—is a brilliant prehistory of the USSR, a chronicle of the Revolution, and an intimate biography. A thrilling work of history, unparalleled in its scope, full of astonishing new evidence and utterly fascinating: this is how Stalin became Stalin.
Ричард Ривз0.0 The definitive life of John Stuart Mill, one of the heroic giants of Victorian England
Richard Reeves' sparkling new biography can be read as an attempt to do justice to this eminent thinker, and it succeeds triumphantly. He reveals Mill as a man of action—a philosopher and radical MP who profoundly shaped Victorian society and whose thinking continues to illuminate our own. The product of an extraordinary and unique education, Mill would become in time the most significant English thinker of the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay On Liberty, and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off weekly articles demanding Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free-speech, and opposed slavery—and, in his private life, for two decades pursued a love affair with another man's wife. To understand Mill and his contribution to his time and ours, Richard Reeves explores his life and work in tandem. The result is both a riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised by his father to promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.
Майкл Грей0.0 By the time he died in 1959, Blind Willie McTell was almost forgotten. He had never had a hit record, and his days of playing on street corners for spare change were long gone. But this masterful guitarist and exquisite singer has since become one of the most loved musicians of the prewar period, spurring Bob Dylan to write, “Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” Now this richly evocative and wide-ranging biography illuminates for the first time the world of this elusive and fascinating figure, a blind man who made light of his disability and a performer who exploded every stereotype about blues musicians.
Traveling the back roads of Georgia, interviewing relatives and acquaintances, and digging up fascinating archival material, author Michael Gray weaves together his discoveries to reveal an articulate and resourceful musician with a modest career but a mile-wide independent streak. Whether selling high-quality homemade bootleg whisky out of a suitcase, bragging about crowds of women chasing him, or suffering a stroke while eating barbecue under a tree, McTell emerges from this book a cheerful, outgoing, engaging individualist with seemingly limitless self-confidence.
This moving odyssey into a lost world of black music and white power is also an unprecedented portrait of the culture, language, and landscape of the deep South--the violence, the leisurely pace of life--and of the blues preservationists who ventured into its heart. A long, thoughtful stare into the world of Blind Willie McTell, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is sure to find a place among the classics of American music history.
