Лиза Сент-Обен де Теран0.0 To Lisa Veta, Cesar remained as much of an enigma after two years of their nomadic exile together as he had that first day in Clapham when he took up his peculiar vigial in her mother's kitchen and showed no signs of shifting out of her life, ever.
William Boyd4.0 An Ice-Cream War is William Boyd's sparkling debut novel on the grimly comic side of conflict, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'What do you think would happen if I shot an elephant in the balls?' 'I think it would hurt a great deal.' Millions die on the Western Front but in East Africa a quite different war is being waged - one with little point and which is so ignored that it will carry on after the Armistice because no one bothers to tell both sides to stop. As the conflict sweeps up natives and colonials, so those left at home and those fighting abroad find themselves unable to escape the tide of history bearing down on them.
Э. Н. Уилсон0.0 A.N. Wilson's biography is one of the few studies of Scott to pay due attention both to his life and to his phenomenal literary output. Scott's genius, his humaneness, and his splendid qualities of stoicism and sympathy shine through, in this enthusiastic reassessment of the man who Byron `longed to get drunk with', and who influenced figures as diverse as Queen Victoria, Dickens, Donizetti, Pugin, and Victor Hugo.
Э. Н. Уилсон0.0 Evelyn Tradescant. A recent failure in love, with a passion for natural history, timid and rather lonely.
By accident she meets Theo Gormann in the park, an old man with a chequered, enigmatic past (baron, ex-intimate of Goebbels, pacifist, drama critic... who knows?). A strange quasi-erotic friendship develops as Gormann delicately and cleverly draws Evelyn into his net. Suddenly, Evely discovers she is controlling a balance of power, power she relishes manipulating. Or is she?
Тим Джил0.0 Derek Cushing - thirtyish, balding, unassuming archivist/researcher into European expansion in East Africa - is also the son of Gilbert, father of Giles, and husband of Diana. On the last count, though, he has begun to fear that he is wearing cuckold's horns. His plan for addressing the crisis leads him to take his wife, son and ageing father to stay at the Cornish mansion of the smooth-talking gallery owner he believes to be his wife's lover. But this, at least, is a place where disputes may be brought to a head.
Сьюзен Хилл0.0 Nobody likes Duncan, and he knows it. He's afraid of everyone, he's afraid of his mother, he's afraid of the sea. Only Ted Flint, the fisherman sometimes has a word for him. One night the lifeboat is launched in a storm, and after that Duncan begins to hate everyone.
Шива Найпол0.0 The Khojas are an important Indian family in Trinidad. At their head is Mr Khoja, piously enshrined by his flock of quarrelsome sisters, and at the bottom of the hierarchy is the girl who becomes Mrs Lutchman, who scrapes a living by running a roadside vegetable stall, the heroine of this novel.
Ангус Колдер0.0 The 1939-45 conflict was, for Britain, a 'total war'; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy. In this comprehensive and engrossing narrative Angus Calder presents not only the great events and leading figures but also the oddities and banalities of daily life, and in particular the parts played by ordinary people: air raid wardens and Home Guards, factory workers and farmers, housewives and pacifists. Above all, his book reveals how, in those six years, the British people came closer to discarding their social conventions than at any time since Cromwell's republic.
Melvyn Bragg4.0 Disillusioned with his successful life in London, Richard Godwin moves to a remote Cumberland village in search of a more fulfilling existence. His arrival coincides with a birth of an illegitimate child to a local woman, binding her to a future she had hoped to escape. As these two outsiders struggle to come to terms with themselves - and each other - their passion, desperation and delight draw all those around them into conflict.
Angela Carter4.2 This crazy world whirled around her, men and women dwarfed by toys and puppets, where even the birds are mechanical and the few human figures went masked... She was in the night once again, and the doll was herself.'
Melanie walks in the midnight garden, wearing her mother's wedding dress; naked she climbs the apple tree in the black of the moon. Omens of disaster, swiftly following, transport Melanie from rural comfort to London, to the Magic Toyshop.
To the red-haired, dancing Finn, the gentle Francie, dumb Aunt Margaret and Uncle Phillip. Francie plays curious night music, Finn kisses fifteen-year-old Melanie in the mysterious ruins of the pleasure gardens. Brooding over all is Uncle Philip: Uncle Philip, with blank eyes the colour of wet newspaper, making puppets the size of men, and clockwork roses. He loves his magic puppets, but hates the love of man for woman, boy for girl, brother for sister...
Anthony Masters0.0 When Jamie nearly drowns in a rough sea, his life is saved by a magnificent white Sea Horse with green eyes. One stormy night the Sea Horse comes ashore and is imprisoned in a lonely stable. First published in 1966 this fantasy fixture tells, through the mind of a small boy, the story of Jamie's quest to save the Sea Horse.
Маргарет Дрэббл4.2 Margaret Drabble’s affecting novel, set in London during the 1960s, is about a casual love affair, an unplanned pregnancy, and one young woman’s decision to become a mother. Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one night stand. Although single parenthood is still not socially acceptable, she chooses to have the baby rather than to seek an illegal abortion, and finds her life transformed by motherhood.
Джулиан Митчелл0.0 The White Father] was to be a State of the Nation novel, about the end of Empire, contrasting the last generation of men who'd served it, and the new one which was just breaking out from the long dullness of the post-war years, but didn't really know where it was going...' Julian Mitchell, from his new Preface
Mitchell's fourth novel, published in 1964, earned him both the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. Its protagonist Hugh Shrieve is District Officer in charge of the Ngulu, a small tribe in an African colony on the verge of independence. Fearing 'his' tribe will be overlooked in the politics of a constitutional conference set to take place in London, Hugh returns to England for the first time in years. But there he soon feels lost in his own country.
Нелл Данн0.0 Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In the space of 120 perfect pages, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry. Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful and timeless testimonial to it.
David Storey0.0 This moving story is recounted by Margaret, the daughter of a Yorshire miner, who falls in love with a married teacher and goes to live with him in a room in Camden Town, London. Many critics have observed and almost lawrentian fidelity in the descriptions of their love-making and the intricacies of their emotional responses to one another. But in the end family ties prove too strong for an ambiguous relationship which begins to disclose a chasm of emptiness and bitterness.
