Хилари Мантел4.5 Генрих VIII Тюдор, король Англии, потратил долгие годы, чтобы покорить Анну Болейн, порвал с католической церковью, пошел на интриги, подлости и преступления ради женитьбы на ней.
Но страсть мужчины преходяща, а Анна так и не сумела подарить Генриху и Англии долгожданного наследника. Более того, острый ум супруги раздражает тщеславного Генриха, а ее независимость в решениях отвращает от трона многих старых друзей монарха.
Могущественный придворный Томас Кромвель, один из самых умных, подлых и беспринципных людей своей эпохи, намерен исполнить приказ Генриха и любой ценой избавиться от Анны. Однако погубить Болейнов будет не так-то просто…
Тан Тван Энг4.2 Малайя, 1951. Юн Линь – единственная, кто выжил в тайном японском концлагере. В этом лагере она потеряла свою любимую сестру – та разделила ужасную судьбу тысяч заключенных. Единственное, что Юн Линь может сделать для сестры, – исполнить ее мечту, создав дивной красоты японский сад. Юн Линь ненавидит японцев, отнявших у нее близких и чуть не убивших ее саму. Но ей приходится обратиться к японцу Аритомо, в прошлом императорскому садовнику, который готов обучить ее своему искусству.
Она понимает, что у Аритомо есть тайна, и его неожиданное исчезновение подтверждает ее предположения. Пройдет целая жизнь, прежде чем Юн Линь удастся приблизиться к разгадке этой тайны…
Дебора Леви3.2 Когда две семейные пары приезжают на виллу недалеко от Ниццы, их ждет сюрприз – выходящая из бассейна обнаженная женщина. Ее зовут Китти Френч, она называет себя ботаником и странно себя ведет. Эта женщина-загадка внесет раздор в хрупкое устройство семьи. Кто она на самом деле? Что она делает на вилле? И почему ей разрешают остаться? "Заплыв домой" – роман с секретами. И главное, что волнует автора, – непознаваемая сущность человека.
Элисон Мур2.0 The Lighthouse begins on a North Sea ferry, on whose blustery outer deck stands Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. Spending his first night in Hellhaus at a small, family-run hotel, he finds the landlady hospitable but is troubled by an encounter with an inexplicably hostile barman. In the morning, Futh puts the episode behind him and sets out on his week-long circular walk along the Rhine. As he travels, he contemplates his childhood; a complicated friendship with the son of a lonely neighbour; his parents’ broken marriage and his own. But the story he keeps coming back to, the person and the event affecting all others, is his mother and her abandonment of him as a boy, which left him with a void to fill, a substitute to find. He recalls his first trip to Germany with his newly single father. He is mindful of something he neglected to do there, an omission which threatens to have devastating repercussions for him this time around. At the end of the week, Futh, sunburnt and blistered, comes to the end of his circular walk, returning to what he sees as the sanctuary of the Hellhaus hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence.
Will Self3.0 In these culturally straitened times few writers would have the artistic effrontery to offer us a novel as daring, exuberant and richly dense as Umbrella. Will Self has carried the Modernist challenge into the twenty-first century, and worked a wonder John Banville Umbrella is his best book yet ... It makes new for today the lessons taught by the morals of Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five, The Tin Drum, also Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold Alasdair Gray Umbrella is old-school modernism. It isn't supposed to be a breeze. But it is, to use the literary critical term of art, kind of amazing ... I think this may be Will Self's best book -- Sam Leith Observer This is by far Will Self's best novel; clever, intense, ambitious and risky. It is a novel so arch that it bends over backwards, joining together its own extremities of kindness and indifference, with and banality, of forgetting and remembering, love and loathing, first page, last page -- Tom Adair Scotsman An astonishing achievement, a novel of exhilarating linguistic invention and high moral seriousness. Certainly, he deserves to win the prize; but more significantly, this is a novel which will be read and re-read, as much for its emotional weight as its technical virtuosity ... With this book he reveals himself as the most determinedly and delightfully literary novelist of his generation -- Stuart Kelly Scotland on Sunday There are echoes of Joyce and Eliot, but also of Flaubert ... there is also a great deal of humour -- Brian Dillon New Statesman One cannot help recalling Joyce ... Umbrella is a magnificent celebration of modernist prose, an epic account of the first world war, a frightening investigation into the pathology of mental illness ... Self's ambition and talent have produced something of real cultural significance ... Umbrella must be recognised as, above all, a virtuoso triumph of emotional and creative intelligence -- Stig Abell, Spectator Extraordinary -- Sheena Joughin Sunday Telegraph
Джит Тайил4.0 Jeet Thayil’s luminous debut novel completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. This is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and god, and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with the subcontinent’s familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. Written in Thayil’s poetic and affecting prose, Narcopolis charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis.
Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the late 1970s, as its narrator first arrives from New York to find himself entranced with the city’s underworld, in particular an opium den and attached brothel. A cast of unforgettably degenerate and magnetic characters works and patronizes the venue, including Dimple, the eunuch who makes pipes in the den; Rumi, the salaryman and husband whose addiction is violence; Newton Xavier, the celebrated painter who both rejects and craves adulation; Mr. Lee, the Chinese refugee and businessman; and a cast of poets, prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters.
Decades pass to reveal a changing Bombay, where opium has given way to heroin from Pakistan and the city’s underbelly has become ever rawer. Those in their circle still use sex for their primary release and recreation, but the violence of the city on the nod and its purveyors have moved from the fringes to the center of their lives. Yet Dimple, despite the bleakness of her surroundings, continues to search for beauty—at the movies, in pulp magazines, at church, and in a new burka-wearing identity.
After a long absence, the narrator returns in 2004 to find a very different Bombay. Those he knew are almost all gone, but the passion he feels for them and for the city is revealed.
