Ted Hughes4.0 Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year.
Джоан Роулинг4.7 «Заговор, Гарри Поттер. Заговор – в этом году в Хогвартсе, школе колдовства и ведьминских искусств, произойдут ужаснейшие события».
Лето у Гарри Поттера состояло из самого ужасного дня рождения в жизни, мрачных предупреждений от домового эльфа по имени Добби и спасения от Дурслеев, когда его друг Рон Уизли прибыл за ним на волшебной летающей машине! Вернувшись в школу колдовства и ведьминских искусств «Хогварц» на второй курс, Гарри слышит странный шепот, который эхом раздается в пустых коридорах. А потом начинаются нападения. Студентов находят будто превращенными в камень… Кажется, что зловещие предсказания Добби начинают сбываться.
Raymond Briggs3.8 Poignant, funny, and utterly original, Ethel & Ernest is Raymond Briggs's loving depiction of his parents' lives from their first chance encounter in the 1920s until their deaths in the 1970s.Ethel and Ernest are solid members of the working class, part of the generation (Brokaw's "Greatest Generation") that lived through the tumultuous era of the twentieth century. They meet during the Depression -- she working as a chambermaid, he as a milkman -- and we follow them as they encounter, and cope with, World War II, the advent of radio and t.v., telephones and cars, the atomic bomb, the moon landing. Briggs's portrayal of his parents as they succeed, or fail, in coming to terms with their rapidly shifting world is irresistably engaging -- full of sympathy and affection, yet clear-eyed and unsentimental.
The book's strip-cartoon format is deceptively simple; it possesses a wealth of detail and an emotional depth that are remarkable in such a short volume. Briggs's marvelous illustrations and succinct, true-to-life dialogue create a real sense of time and place, of what it was like to experience such enormous changes. Almost as much a social history as it is a personal account, Ethel & Ernest is a moving tribute to ordinary people living in an extraordinary time.
