Зэди Смит3.6 "Белые зубы" Зэди Смит - один из самых ярких и успешных дебютных романов, появившихся за последние годы в британской литературе. Блестящее комическое повествование, в котором рассказывается о дружбе, любви, войне, землетрясении, трех культурах, трех семьях на протяжении трех поколений и одной очень необычной мыши.
Mohsin Hamid5.0 Available for the first time from Riverheada. The debut novel from the bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid’s deftly conceived first novel, immediately marked him as an uncommonly talented and ambitious young writer to watch when it was published in 2000. It tells the story of Daru Shezad, who, fired from his banking job in Lahore, begins a decline that plummets the length of Hamid’s sharply drawn, subversive tale. Fast-paced and unexpected, Moth Smoke was ahead of its time in portraying a contemporary Pakistan far more vivid and complex than the exoticized images of South Asia then familiar to the West. It established Mohsin Hamid as an internationally important writer of substance and imagination, a promise he has amply fulfilled with each successive book. This debut novel, meanwhile, remains as compelling and deeply relevant to the moment as when it appeared more than a decade ago.
Justin Hill0.0 When Space Rocket Factory Number Two closes down in the small Chinese town of Shaoyang, it is the signal for the old culture to confront the new. Party Secretary Li cannot cope, and commits suicide, but not before daubing a series of slogans onto sheets of rice paper and hanging them outside his bedroom window (Our Leaders Are Drunk On The Taste Of Corruption reads one; The Party Officials Are Screwing Our Daughters, reads another).Those left behind have to clear up after him: Old Zhu has to keep Party Secretary Li's ashes in the bottom of his wardrobe. On the other side of the courtyard, their aria singing neighbour Madam Fan is temporarily silenced by the tragedy. Meanwhile Old Zhu's son, Da Shan, has returned from the city and fallen in love with not one but two childhood sweethearts.
Maggie O'Farrell0.0 A distraught young woman boards a train at King's Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London.
AFTER YOU'D GONE follows Alice's mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story that is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at the family's heart.
Вивьен Келли0.0 Sam Glass wants to go far. But not up the career ladder. Sam wants to go to Antarctica.
Sam is a slave to his pager. A drone in the advertising industry, he spends his days being insulted by bosses, ad agency creatives and clients alike, and his evenings drinking with friends. At twenty-five, he's stuck in a rut of post-university, first-job existence. And he hates it. When he notices an advert for a research job in Antarctica, Sam is galvanised into action: this magical land of snow, ice and utter serenity represents the ultimate escape. While he and his best friend, Henry, endure the gruelling selection procedure, he embarks on both the destruction of his ordered, career-orientated, tidy life, and a string of well-organised, casual affairs. What Sam doesn't bargain for, however, is falling in love.
Lively, funny and incredibly perceptive, Take One Young Man is a profoundly intelligent and moving novel.
Patrick Neate0.0 The close resemblance of Patrick Neate's fictitious state of "Zambawi" to contemporary Zimbabwe, makes Musungu Jim and Great Chief Tuloko a tall but politically perceptive tale in which Neate takes the reader on a humorous tour of the downfall of a corrupt neo-colonial government.
Weaving from presidential palace to rural homestead, and from intercontinental hotel to red light district, this is a splendid farce, full of pathos and biting humour, reminiscent of Tom Sharpe. A clear sense of each character's humanity prevails as Neate entwines the destinies of a young English teacher whose naiveté saves him as he finds himself centre-stage in a growing rebellion, a herb-smoking witchdoctor who exercises mystical powers with uncanny skill, presidents down on their luck whose attempts to exercise any power are increasingly futile, the blessed-into-boredom presidential offspring who slowly learn to control their own destiny, and a disenchanted soldier who wishes he had stayed a poet. Storytelling is the framework for this tale, as Neate constructs whole oral histories, and local myths through which the characters come to find themselves. With frequent reference to Latin maxims, and "Zamba" proverbs, ancestral powers are invoked to unfold the rich tapestry of "Zamba" legend. The "Zamba" language and proverbs are cleverly close to, but not quite identifiable as Shona and Swahili, giving the whole farce an extraordinary credibility and life. --Oliver Phillips
