In the turbulent final years of the Yuan Dynasty, Wang Meng is a low-level bureaucrat, employed by the government of Mongol conquerors established by the Kublai Khan. Though he wonders about his own complicity wit this regime--the Mongols, after all, are invaders--he prefers not to dwell on his official duties, choosing instead to live the life of the mind.
Wang is an extraordinarily gifted artist. His paintings are at once delicate and confident; in them, one can see the wind blowing through the trees, the water rushing through rocky valleys, the infinite expanse of China's natural beauty.
But this is not a time for sitting still, and as "The Ten Thousand Things" unfolds, we follow Wang as he travels through an empire in turmoil. In his wanderings, he encounters, among many memorable characters, other master painters of the period, including the austere eccentric Ni Zan, a fierce female warrior known as the White Tigress who will recruit him as a military strategist, and an ugly young Buddhist monk who rises from beggary to extraordinary heights.
"The Ten Thousand Things" is rich with exquisite observations, and John Spurling endows every description--every detail--with the precision and depth that the real-life Wang Meng brought to his painting. But it is also a novel of fated meetings, grand battles, and riveting drama, and in its seamless fusion of the epic and the intimate, it achieves a truly singular beauty. A novel that deserves to be compared to the classic Chinese novels that inspired it, "The Ten Thousand Things" is nothing short of a literary event.
Новый роман корифея английской литературы Мартина Эмиса в Великобритании назвали «лучшей книгой за 25 лет от одного из великих английских писателей». Книга, которая рассказывается с точек зрения трёх начальников концлагеря и изобилует немецкой лексикой, была отвергнута всеми немецкими издательствами. Новый роман классика современной литературы Мартина Эмиса «Зона интересов» — это глубоко оригинальное, отчасти провокативное высказывание, вновь — и совсем по-новому — фиксирующее внимание читателя на теме Холокоста и Второй мировой войны. Эмис привносит в разговор об ужасах прошлого интонации и оттенки, никогда прежде не звучавшие в подобном контексте. «Зона интересов» — это одновременно и любовный роман (двое из трех героев-рассказчиков — комендант концлагеря и служащий в нем офицер — любят одну женщину, а третий — еврей-заключенный — готов на убийство или самоубийство ради спасения жены, попавшей в лапы нацистов), и антивоенная сатира в лучших традициях «Бравого солдата Швейка» (комендант лагеря выведен в откровенно комических и гротескных тонах), и классический пример литературной полифонии. Однако ключевая идея романа далеко выходит за рамки предсказуемых «всюду жизнь» и «банальность зла»: мелодраматизм и обманчивая легкость сюжета служат Эмису лишь средством, позволяющим ярче высветить абсурдность и трагизм ситуации и, на время усыпив бдительность читателя, в конечном счете высечь из него искру по-настоящему глубокого сопереживания.
«Арктическое лето» – так озаглавил свой последний роман классик английской литературы XX века Эдвард Морган Форстер. В советское время на произведения Форстера был наложен негласный запрет, и лишь в последние годы российские читатели получили возможность в полной мере оценить незаурядный талант писателя. Два самых известных его романа – «Комната с видом на Арно» и «Говардс-Энд» – принесли ему всемирную славу и входят в авторитетные списки лучших романов столетия. Дэймон Гэлгут, сумевший глубоко проникнуться творчеством Форстера и разгадать его сложный внутренний мир, написал свое «Арктическое лето», взяв за основу один из самых интересных эпизодов биографии Форстера, связанный с жизнью на Востоке, итогом которого стал главный роман писателя «Путешествие в Индию». Гэлгуту удалось создать удивительно яркое живописное полотно с пряным восточным колоритом, в котором нашли свое отражение и философское осмысление творческого пути, и тайна, ставшая для Форстера унизительным клеймом и сокровенным источником счастья.
Set during and just after the First World War, The Lie is an enthralling, heart-wrenching novel of love, memory and devastating loss by one of the UK’s most acclaimed storytellers.
Cornwall, 1920, early spring.
A young man stands on a headland, looking out to sea. He is back from the war, homeless and without family.
Behind him lie the mud, barbed-wire entanglements and terror of the trenches. Behind him is also the most intense relationship of his life.
Daniel has survived, but the horror and passion of the past seem more real than the quiet fields around him.
He is about to step into the unknown. But will he ever be able to escape the terrible, unforeseen consequences of a lie?
At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice. Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and her “mid-climacteric” approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby – alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller – believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it. From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.
A new novel by the author Julian Barnes called “one of the best British writers to emerge in the last decade”
Set in North Africa and Sicily at the end of World War II, In the Wolf’s Mouth follows the Allies’ botched “liberation” attempts as they chased the Nazis north toward the Italian mainland. Focusing on the experiences of two young soldiers—Will Walker, an English field security officer, ambitious to master and shape events; and Ray Marfione, a wide-eyed Italian American infantryman—the novel contains some of the best battle writing of the past fifty years. Eloquent on the brutish, blundering inaccuracy of war, the immediacy of Adam Foulds’s prose is uncanny and unforgettable.
The book also explores the continuity of organized crime in Sicily through the eyes of two men—Angilù, a young shepherd; and Cirò Albanese, a local Mafioso. These men appear in the prologue and in the book’s terrifying final chapters, making it evident that the Mafia were there before and are there still, the slaughter of war only a temporary distraction.
In the Wolf’s Mouth has achieved an extraordinary resurrection, returning humanity to the lives lost in the writing of history.
kaleidoscopic masterpiece of empire and rebellion by Kamila Shamsie, the Orange Prize shortlisted and Granta Best of Young British Novelist
In the summer of 1914 a young Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer, finds herself fulfilling a dream by joining an archeological dig in Turkey. Working alongside Germans and Turks, she falls in love with archaeologist, Tahsin Bey, and joins him in his quest to find an ancient silver circlet. The outbreak of war in Europe brings her idyllic summer to a sudden end, and her friends become her nation’s enemies.
The following spring, in the battlefields of Europe, Qayyum Gul, a Lance Corporal from Peshawar fighting for the British, loses an eye, and is sent to recover in a Royal Pavilion in England, where he slowly begins to doubt his loyalties to the King.
Returning home, Qayyum shares a train carriage with Vivian Rose whose search for the circlet has led her to Peshawar in the heart of the British Raj. Fifteen years later, they will meet again, and their loyalties will be tested once more amidst massacres, cover-ups, and the disappearance of a young man they both love.
Китай, 14 век.