Jackie Kay0.0 "Supremely humane.... Kay leaves us with a broad landscape of sweet tolerance and familial love". The New York Times Book Review
In her starkly beautiful and wholly unexpected tale, Jackie Kay delves into the most intimate workings of the human heart and mind and offers a triumphant tale of loving deception and lasting devotion.
The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret, one that enrages his adopted son, Colman, leading him to collude with a tabloid journalist. Besieged by the press, his widow Millie flees to a remote Scottish village, where she seeks solace in memories of their marriage. The reminiscences of those who knew Joss Moody render a moving portrait of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, one that preserved a rare, unconditional love.
Anne Michaels3.7 Athos and I stood together on deck and looked across the water at the bright city. From this distance no one would guess the turmoil that had torn apart Greece . The sea began to darken, and Athens, glowing in the distance, seemed to float on the horizon like a bright ship.
Jakob Beer is seven years old when he is rescued from the ruins of a buried village in Nazi-occupied Poland. He is the only one of his family to have survived the invasion. Adopted by his saviour, the Greek geologist Athos, Jakob must steel himself to excavate the horrors of his own history.
A novel of astounding beauty and wisdom, Fugitive Pieces is a profound meditation on the resilience of the human spirit and love's ability to restore even the most damaged of hearts.
Шеймас Дин3.9 "Чтение в темноте" - дебютный роман Ш. Дина. Во многом это автобиографическое сочинение. В центре сюжета - жизнь семейства ирландских католиков, связанных судьбой с движением ИРА. В реальные действия убедительно вплетены ирландские сказания и мифы, исполненные поэзии.
Candia McWilliam0.0 This is the story of six characters sailing a yacht from Tahiti to New Zealand. Three of them are Scottish, and as they sail from island to island, each colonised in its different way, the small northern country that has formed them exerts its own magnetic pull.
Pat Barker3.4 It is the spring of 1918, and Britain is faced with the possibility of defeat by Germany. A belaguered government and a vengeful public target two group as scapegoats: pacifists and homosexuals. Many are jailed, others lead dangerous double lives, the "the eye in the door" becomes a symbol of the paranoia that threatens to destroy the very fabric of British society.
Central to this novel are such compelling, richly imagined characters as the brilliant and compassionalte Dr. William Rivers; his most famous patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon; and Lieutenant Billy Prior, who plays a central rold as a domestic intelligence agent. The Eye in the Door is a triumph that equals Regeneration and the third novel in the trilogy, the 1995 Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road, establishing Pat Barker's place in the very forefront of contemporary novelists.
Аласдер Грей4.0 `Бедные-несчастные` - прихотливо построенный любовный роман с элементами фантастики, готики и социальной сатиры. В нем сталкиваются различные версии весьма увлекательных событий, происходящих в Шотландии в конце XIX века.
Полин Мелвилл0.0 A collection of short stories dealing with post-colonial life in the Caribbean, notably in the author's native Guyana, as well as of some stories set in London. Many of the characters, most of them displaced people from former colonies struggling to come to terms with a new life in Britain, attempt to find an identity, to reconcile their past and to escape from the restlessness hinted at in the title.
Кэрол Лейк0.0 In this collection of linked short stories the author paints a haunting picture of the contemporary British inner city and provides social comment on the poverty and unemployment of the 1980s.
Peter Benson0.0 The Somerset Levels, where fields bleed water and the land meets the sky in a damp blur, are home to Billy. He is a basket maker and a thinker. His idyllic world is undisturbed until the day Muriel and her mother move into the district and Billy, innocent of their urban ways, falls in love.
Питер Акройд3.5 Питер Акройд — один из самых титулованных английских писателей, член Королевского общества литературы, командор Ордена Британской Империи. Мировую известность приобрели его бестселлеры "Дом доктора Ди", "Чаттертон", "Процесс Элизабет Кри", "Журнал Виктора Франкенштейна" Исторический детектив "Хоксмур" получил сразу две награды: премию Уитбреда, одну из наиболее авторитетных литературных премий Великобритании, и премию "Гардиан". В начале ХVIII века архитектор Николас Дайер (прототип знаменитого зодчего, Николаса Хоксмура) возводит в Лондоне шесть церквей взамен пострадавших от Великого пожара. Он, последователь религиозного культа, в основания этих построек кладет обязательную жертву — невинного ребенка. Двести пятьдесят лет спустя детектив Скотланд-ярда Н. Хоксмур расследует серию убийств, совершенных в церквях Дайера. Между Дайером и Хоксмуром сущеcтвует определенная связь, но в чем она состоит? Автор заставляет читателя самостоятельно искать разгадку этой тайны.
Джеймс Баллард4.3 Баллард, написавший несколько книг и известный всему миру как фантаст, прежде всего знаменит автобиографическим романом `Империя Солнца` о нескольких годах своей мальчишечьей жизни в концентрационном лагере в Китае в период японской оккупации в годы Второй мировой войны. Эта правдивая и жестокая история о выживании в условиях голода, смертей и жестокости людей по отношению друг к другу не содержит моральных оценок и потрясает той непосредственностью, с которой одиннадцатилетний Джим приспосабливается к войне.
Грэм Свифт3.7 "Земля воды" — самое известное произведение Грэма Свифта, которое в 1992 году экранизировал Стивен Джилленхол, один из режиссеров культового сериала "Твин Пикс".
В романе букеровского лауреата речь пойдет о судьбе человека – простого учителя, который хочет оставить память о себе в сердцах своих подопечных. Человеческий век короток, а от прошлого не скрыться за стенами школы, и Том Крик прекрасно понимает это. Перед ним стоит сложная задача: честно рассказать о собственной жизни, полной страха и сомнений. Вот только найдутся ли люди, готовые его слушать?
Джон Бэнвилл3.9 Драматические моменты в судьбе великого математика и астронома Иоганна Кеплера предстают на фоне суровой и жестокой действительности семнадцатого века, где царят суеверие, религиозная нетерпимость и тирания императоров. Гениальный ученый, рассчитавший орбиты планет Солнечной системы, вынужден спасать свою мать от сожжения на костре, терпеть унижения и нужду, мучится от семейных неурядиц.
Дамбудзо Маречера0.0 This explosive, award-winning novella of growing up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), told in exquisite, imaginative prose, touches the reader’s nerve through the author’s harrowing portrait of lives disrupted by white settlers, a young disillusioned black man, and individual suffering in the 1960s and 1970s. Marechera’s raw, piercing writings secured his place in African literature as a stylistic innovator and rebel commentator of the ghetto condition. While The House of Hunger is the centerpiece of this collection, readers are also treated to a series of short sketches in which Marechera, with angry humor, further navigates themes of madness, violence, despair, and survival.
Нил Джордан0.0 First published when he was barely twenty-five, these stories introduce us to a young builder in despair as he enters the primeval atmosphere of a public bath; teenaged boys lolling about seaside resorts, boasting about their exploits with women; a young man and an older woman playing out the last movement of their affair; and an adolescent musician who prostitutes his talent. This book, which won raves at its first publication, shows all the hallmarks of the writer who became the award-winning film director so well known today.
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.
Beryl Bainbridge4.2 The basics-only, going nowhere lives of Freda and scruffy Brenda, the only two English women in a London bottle factory full of Italian immigrants, are shattered during a Sunday picnic.
