Надифа Мохамед4.4 1952 год. Кардифф, район Тайгер-Бэй, пристанище сомалийских и вест-индских моряков, мальтийских дельцов и еврейских семей. Эти люди, само существование которых в чужой стране целиком зависит от удачи, оберегают ее, стараются приманить, холят и лелеют, и вместе с тем в глубине души прекрасно понимают, что без своей удачи они бессильны.
Махмут Маттан — муж, отец, мелкий аферист и рисковый малый. Он приятный собеседник, харизматичный мошенник и удачливый игрок. Он кто угодно, но только не убийца. Когда ночью жестоко убивают хозяйку местного магазина, Махмуд сразу же попадает под подозрение. Он не сильно беспокоится, ведь на своем веку повидал вещи и похуже, тем более теперь он находится в стране, где существует понятие закона и правосудия. Лишь когда с приближением даты суда его шансы на возвращение домой начинают таять, он понимает, что правды может быть недостаточно для спасения.
Clare Mac Cumhaill, Rachael Wiseman0.0 A vibrant portrait of four college friends--Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley--who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away fighting World War II.
The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war's darkest revelations.
Neither the great Enlightenment thinkers of the past, the logical innovators of the early twentieth century, or the new Existentialist philosophy trickling across the Channel, could make sense of this new human reality of limitless depravity and destructive power, the women felt. Their answer was to bring philosophy back to life. We are metaphysical animals, they realized, creatures that can question their very being. Who am I? What is freedom? What is human goodness? The answers we give, they believed, shape what we will become.
Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a lively portrait of women who shared ideas, but also apartments, clothes and even lovers. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman show how from the disorder and despair of the war, four brilliant friends created a way of ethical thinking that is there for us today.
AJ West0.0 Belfast, 1914. Two years after the sinking of the Titanic, high society has become obsessed with spiritualism in the form of seances that attempt to contact the spirits of loved ones lost at sea.
William is a man of science and a sceptic, but one night with everyone sat around the circle something happens that places doubt in his heart and a seed of obsession in his mind. Could the spirits truly be communicating with him or is this one of Kathleen’s parlour tricks gone too far?
This early 20th century gothic set in Northern Ireland contains all the mystery and intrigue one might expect from a Sarah Waters novel. Deftly plotted with echoes of The Woman in Black, readers will be thrilled to discover West’s chilling prose.
Based on the true story of William Jackson Crawford and famed medium Kathleen Goligher, and with a cast of characters that include Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, The Spirit Engineer conjures a haunting tale that will keep readers guessing until the very end.
Chris Lloyd0.0 Paris, Friday 14th June 1940.
The day the Nazis march into Paris. It made headlines around the globe.
Paris police detective Eddie Giral - a survivor of the last World War - watches helplessly on as his world changes forever.
But there is something he still has control over. Finding whoever is responsible for the murder of four refugees. The unwanted dead, who no one wants to claim.
To do so, he must tread carefully between the Occupation and the Resistance, between truth and lies, between the man he is and the man he was.
All the while becoming whoever he must be to survive in this new and terrible order descending on his home.
Алан Олпорт0.0 A sweeping, groundbreaking epic that combines military with social history, to illuminate the ways in which Great Britain and its people were permanently transformed by the Second World War.
Here is the many-faceted, world-historically signficant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict, Alan Allport seeks to answer questions such as could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the rights ones? How well did the British organize and fight? How well did the British live up to their own values? What difference did the war make in the end to the fate of the nation?
In answering these and other essential questions he focuses--unlike many historians--on the human contingencies of the war, looking directly at the roles of individuals and the outcomes determined by luck or chance. Moreover, he looks intimately at the changes in war-time and post-war British society and culture. Whether discussing the mixing of classes during the war or the labor party movement, he shows us in great detail the effects of the war, again not only on the institutional, but on an individual level as well. For better or worse, much of Britain today is ultimately the product of the experiences of 1939-1942.
Меган Камписи4.0 Can you uncover the truth when you’re forbidden from speaking it?
A Sin Eater’s duty is a necessary evil: she hears the final private confessions of the dying, eats their sins as a funeral rite, and so guarantees their souls access to heaven. It is always women who eat sins – since it was Eve who first ate the Forbidden Fruit – and every town has at least one, not that they are publicly acknowledged. Stained by the sins they are obliged to consume, the Sin Eater is shunned and silenced, doomed to live in exile at the edge of town.
Recently orphaned May Owens is just fourteen, and has never considered what it might be like to be so ostracized; she’s more concerned with where her next meal is coming from. When she’s arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, however, and subsequently sentenced to become a Sin Eater, finding food is suddenly the last of her worries.
It’s a devastating sentence, but May’s new invisibility opens new doors. And when first one then two of the Queen’s courtiers suddenly grow ill, May hears their deathbed confessions – and begins to investigate a terrible rumour that is only whispered of amid palace corridors.
Set in a thinly disguised sixteenth-century England, The Sin Eater by Megan Campisi is a wonderfully imaginative and gripping story of treason and treachery; of secrets and silence; of women, of power – and, ultimately, of the strange freedom that comes from being an outcast with no hope of redemption for, as May learns, being a nobody sometimes counts for everything . . .
Эндрю Тейлор4.4 From the No.1 bestselling author of The Ashes of London and The Fire Court comes the next book in the phenomenally successful series following James Marwood.
A royal scandal that could change the face of England forever…
London 1667. In the Court of Charles II, it’s a dangerous time to be alive – a wrong move may lead to disgrace, exile or death. The discovery of a body at Clarendon House, the palatial home of one of the highest courtiers in the land, could therefore have catastrophic consequences.
James Marwood, a traitor’s son, is ordered to cover up the murder. But the dead man is Edward Alderley, the cousin of one of Marwood’s acquaintances. Cat Lovett had every reason to want her cousin dead. Since his murder, she has vanished, and all the evidence points to her as the killer.
Marwood is determined to clear Cat’s name and discover who really killed Alderley. But time is running out for everyone. If he makes a mistake, it could threaten not only the government but the King himself…
Тоби Грин0.0 Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, Cundill History Prize, Fage and Oliver Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award
Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019
'Astonishing, staggering' Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph
A groundbreaking history that will transform our view of West Africa
By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in t
Jane Healey4.0 A debut novel for fans of Sarah Perry and Kate Morton: when a young woman is tasked with safeguarding a natural history collection as it is spirited out of London during World War II, she discovers her new manor home is a place of secrets and terror instead of protection.
In August 1939, thirty-year-old Hetty Cartwright arrives at Lockwood Manor to oversee a natural history museum collection, whose contents have been taken out of London for safekeeping. She is unprepared for the scale of protecting her charges from party guests, wild animals, the elements, the tyrannical Major Lockwood and Luftwaffe bombs. Most of all, she is unprepared for the beautiful and haunted Lucy Lockwood.
For Lucy, who has spent much of her life cloistered at Lockwood suffering from bad nerves, the arrival of the museum brings with it new freedoms. But it also resurfaces memories of her late mother, and nightmares in which Lucy roams Lockwood hunting for something she has lost.
When the animals appear to move of their own accord, and exhibits go missing, they begin to wonder what exactly it is that they might need protection from. And as the disasters mount up, it is not only Hetty’s future employment that is in danger, but her own sanity too. There’s something, or someone, in the house. Someone stalking her through its darkened corridors
Диана Сеттерфилд4.1 Новый роман Дианы Сеттерфилд, прославленного автора «Тринадцатой сказки», признанного шедевра современной английской прозы, который заставил критиков заговорить о возвращении золотого века британского романа, овеянного именами Шарлотты и Эмили Бронте и Дафны Дюморье, и разошелся по всему миру на 40 языках тиражом свыше 2 миллионов экземпляров.
В самую темную и длинную ночь в году, в день зимнего солнцестояния, в древний трактир «Лебедь» на берегу Темзы вваливается израненный незнакомец с мертвой девочкой на руках. Однако несколько часов спустя девочка оказывается живой. Что это — чудо? Волшебство? Или можно найти научное объяснение? И главное — кто она такая? Пропавшая два года назад дочь мистера и миссис Воган? Или, может быть, внучка фермера Роберта Армстронга, о существовании которой он узнал лишь накануне да так и не успел повидать? Ведь «Лебедь» — не просто древнейший трактир в округе; уже давно сюда приходят для того, чтобы слушать и рассказывать истории — злободневные анекдоты, или старинные предания и легенды, или волшебные сказки. Так что история таинственной девочки должна вплестись в полотно, ткущееся опытными рассказчиками уже много веков…
Ben Macintyre4.4 A thrilling Cold War story about a KGB double agent, by one of Britain's greatest historians - now with a new afterword
On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket.
The man was a spy. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more to damage the KGB. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia. So began one of the boldest and most extraordinary episodes in the history of spying. Ben Macintyre reveals a tale of espionage, betrayal and raw courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever...
Жаркий июньский день. На причале в Дептфорде подвешен за крюк труп мужчины, со следами ужасных пыток и с клеймом раба.
Несколько дней спустя к капитану Гарри Коршэму приходит сестра Тэда Арчера, его старого друга.
Она утверждает, что он собирался обнародовать правду, которая может нанести непоправимый ущерб британской рабовладельческой индустрии. А теперь и вовсе пропал... Чтобы узнать, что случилось с Тэдом, Гарри вынужден заняться расследованием и проникнуть в самое сердце заговора, который раскрыл Тэд.
Это расследование поставит под угрозу будущее Гарри в политике и счастье его семьи, заставит встретиться лицом к лицу с темными секретами из прошлого, которые способны уничтожить его.
Ralf Rothmann3.8 The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier
Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son—the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel—is curious about Walter’s experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story on those pages, leading his son to fill in the gaps himself, rightly or wrongly, with what he can piece together of his father’s early life.
This, then, is the story of Walter and his dangerously outspoken friend Friedrich Caroli, seventeen-year-old trainee milkers on a dairy farm in northern Germany who are tricked into volunteering for the army during the spring of 1945: the last, and in many ways the worst, months of the war. The men are driven to the point of madness by what they experience, and when Friedrich finally deserts his post, Walter is forced to do the unthinkable.
Leanda de Lisle0.0 WINNER HISTORICAL WRITERS ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN 2018
From the New York Times Bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the critically acclaimed story of Charles I, his warrior queen, Britain's civil wars and the trial for his life.
Barely forty years after the England's golden age under Elizabeth, the country was at war with itself, split between loyalty to the Crown and Parliament, with armies raised in Scotland and Ireland, and fighters arriving from Europe to wage war on English soil for the last time in England's history. The English Civil War would set family against family, friend against friend, and its casualties were immense—a greater proportion of the population than in World War I. England had become a failed state.
At the head of the disintegrating kingdom was the figure of the king: Charles I. In this vivid portrait—newly informed by previously unseen manuscripts, including royal correspondence between the king and his queen, some of it written in code—Leanda de Lisle depicts a man who was not cruel enough for his cruel times. He would not persecute his opponents in the bloody style of his Tudor antecedents, or throw his servants to the wolves to save his own skin in the time-honored royal style. He was tutored by his father in the rights and obligations of kings, but had none of his father's political subtlety and experience in survival. In a court of remarkable women he was happily married—but to a French Catholic princess, which caused consternation to his protestant subjects. Principled and high minded, he would pay a terrible price for the personal honor he so valued, and for having enemies more ruthless than he was. Nothing, however, would reflect on his character as much as the scene at his terrible death, speaking on the scaffold as a “martyr of the people.”
In his own destruction Charles did not sow the seeds of the monarchy's destruction but its rebirth. England's revolution lasted eleven unhappy years and the Crown was then restored, to national rejoicing. Today England enjoys rule by parliament and monarch while the Church of England has the bishops Charles was determined to preserve. More radical religious experimenters took their faith to the New World and the seeds of a republic, leaving England to mend its wounds and restore its fortunes and future as the world's preeminent constitutional monarchy.
„Estoril“ je čuveno letovalište kraj Lisabona, koji je tokom Drugog svetskog rata, zahvaljujući portugalskoj neutralnosti, bio centar nekih od sudbinskih događaja po Evropu i svet, ali i stecište najvažnijih poznatih i anonimnih aktera veka.
Neposlušnost jednog portugalskog konzula spasla je smrti hiljade ljudi pred Hitlerovim nacizmom. Tako je Lisabon, kao tada najveći izbeglički logor (za razliku od onih – koncentracionih) privremeno udomio ljude svih nacionalnosti kako bi im obezbedio put za Ameriku. Među njima su se našli špijuni svih zaraćenih strana, avanturisti, diplomate, vagabundi, bivši kraljevi, sirotani i bogataši – sve do porodica Rotšild i Habzburg.
Glavni jugoslovenski/srpski lik je dvostruki tajni agent koji bi se mogao ovako predstaviti: „Zovem se Popov... Duško Popov.“ Asocijacija na Džejmsa Bonda je ispravna – to je istorijska ličnost, čovek po kojem je Jan Fleming stvorio lik o Džejmsu Bondu. Reč je o nemačko-britanskom dvostrukom agentu koji je imao jednu od najvažnijih uloga u događajima pred japansko bombardovanje američke vojne luke Perl Harbor i savezničko iskrcavanje u Normandiji. Šef Ef-Bi-Aja Edvard Huver nije poslušao njegovo upozorenje, Britanija mu je dodelila orden, porodica Bajloni ga volela, a njemu su u srcu bili porodica, Beograd i Dubrovnik. Družio se u Lisabonu i Evropi s Jovanom Dučićem i svetskim džet-setom, prošao kroz živote Miloša Crnjanskog i Antoana de Sent Egziperija... U stvari, spasavao je svet. Ova knjiga govori o tome. I o mnogo čemu još.
Dejan Tiago-Stanković napisao je izvrstan, uzbudljiv roman-prvenac.
Ян Мак-Гвайр3.8 Охота на китов — занятие для настоящих мужчин! На судне, идущем по направлению к Антарктике, встретились двое бездушных людей: опустившийся гарпунер Генри Дракс и военный врач Патрик Самнер, скрывающийся от следствия. Первый прослыл жестоким, опустившимся человеком, второй — беглец, который скрывается от суда за выдуманной биографией. Дракс опасается за свое будущее на борту корабля, а Самнер — за собственную шкуру. Остаться в живых должен только один из них…
Джерри Броттон0.0 In 1570, when it became clear she would never be gathered into the Catholic fold, Elizabeth I was excommunicated by the Pope. On the principle that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', this marked the beginning of an extraordinary English alignment with the Muslim powers who were fighting Catholic Spain in the Mediterranean, and of cultural, economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age. England signed treaties with the Ottoman Porte, received ambassadors from the kings of Morocco and shipped munitions to Marrakesh. By the late 1580s hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Elizabethan merchants, diplomats, sailors, artisans and privateers were plying their trade from Morocco to Persia.
These included the resourceful mercer Anthony Jenkinson who met both Süleyman the Magnificent and the Persian Shah Tahmasp in the 1560s, William Harborne, the Norfolk merchant who became the first English ambassador to the Ottoman court in 1582 and the adventurer Sir Anthony Sherley, who spent much of 1600 at the court of Shah Abbas the Great. The previous year, remarkably, Elizabeth sent the Lancastrian blacksmith Thomas Dallam to the Ottoman capital to play his clockwork organ in front of Sultan Mehmed. The awareness of Islam which these Englishmen brought home found its way into many of the great cultural productions of the day, including most famously Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice. The year after Dallam's expedition the Moroccan ambassador, Abd al-Wahid bin Mohammed al-Annuri, spent six months in London with his entourage. Shakespeare wrote Othello six months later.
This Orient Isle shows that England's relations with the Muslim world were far more extensive, and often more amicable, than we have appreciated, and that their influence was felt across the political, commercial and domestic landscape of Elizabethan England. It is a startlingly unfamiliar picture of part of our national and international history.
Beth Underdown4.0 It's 1645. When Alice Hopkins' husband dies in a tragic accident, she returns to the small Essex town of Manningtree, where her brother Matthew still lives. But home is no longer a place of safety. Matthew has changed, and there are rumours spreading through the town: whispers of witchcraft, and of a great book, in which he is gathering women's names. To what lengths will Matthew's obsession drive him? And what choice will Alice make when she finds herself at the very heart of his plan?
Cecilia Ekback2.8 A compelling historical thriller set in 1700s Sweden from an exciting new literary talent. "Exquisitely suspenseful, beautifully written, and highly recommended."
-Lee Child
"Visually acute, skillfully written; it won't easily erase its tracks in the reader's mind."
- Hilary Mantel
"Wolf winter,'" she said, her voice small. "I wanted to ask about it. You know, what it is."
He was silent for a long time. "It's the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal," he said. "Mortal and alone."
Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija, her husband Paavo and her daughters Frederika and Dorotea arrive from their native Finland, hoping to forget the traumas of their past and put down new roots in this harsh but beautiful land. Above them looms Blackåsen, a mountain whose foreboding presence looms over the valley and whose dark history seems to haunt the lives of those who live in its shadow.
While herding the family's goats on the mountain, Frederika happens upon the mutilated body of one of their neighbors, Eriksson. The death is dismissed as a wolf attack, but Maija feels certain that the wounds could only have been inflicted by another man. Compelled to investigate despite her neighbors' strange disinterest in the death and the fate of Eriksson's widow, Maija is drawn into the dark history of tragedies and betrayals that have taken place on Blackåsen. Young Frederika finds herself pulled towards the mountain as well, feeling something none of the adults around her seem to notice.
As the seasons change, and the "wolf winter," the harshest winter in memory, descends upon the settlers, Paavo travels to find work, and Maija finds herself struggling for her family's survival in this land of winter-long darkness. As the snow gathers, the settlers' secrets are increasingly laid bare. Scarce resources and the never-ending darkness force them to come together, but Maija, not knowing who to trust and who may betray her, is determined to find the answers for herself. Soon, Maija discovers the true cost of survival under the mountain, and what it will take to make it to spring.
The war is over, but Berlin is a desolate sea of rubble. There is a shortage of everything: food, clothing, tobacco. The local population is scrabbling to get by. Kasper Meier is one of these Germans, and his solution is to trade on the black market to feed himself and his elderly father. He can find anything that people need, for the right price. Even other people.
When a young woman, Eva, arrives at Kasper's door seeking the whereabouts of a British pilot, he feels a reluctant sympathy for her but won't interfere in military affairs. But Eva is prepared for this. Kasper has secrets, she knows them, and she'll use them to get what she wants. As the threats against him mount, Kasper is drawn into a world of intrigue he could never have anticipated. Why is Eva so insistent that he find the pilot? Who is the shadowy Frau Beckmann and what is her hold over Eva?
Under constant surveillance, Kasper navigates the dangerous streets and secrets of a city still reeling from the horrors of war and defeat. As a net of deceit, lies and betrayal falls around him, Kasper begins to understand that the seemingly random killings of members of the occupying forces are connected to his own situation. He must work out who is behind Eva's demands, and why - while at the same time trying to save himself, his father and Eva.
Kate Worsley2.5 It is 1740 and Louise Fletcher, a young dairy maid on an Essex farm, has been warned of the lure of the sea for as long as she can remember--after all, it stole away her father and brother. But when she is offered work in the bustling naval port of Harwich, as a lady's maid to a wealthy captain's daughter, she leaps at the chance to see more of the world. There she meets Rebecca, her haughty young mistress, who is unlike anyone Louise has encountered before: as unexpected as she is fascinating.
Intertwined with her story is fifteen-year-old Luke's: He is drinking in a Harwich tavern when it is raided by Her Majesty's Navy. Unable to escape, Luke is beaten and press ganged and sent to sea on board the warship Essex. He must learn fast and choose his friends well if he is to survive the brutal hardships of a sailor's life and its many dangers, both up high in the rigging and in the dark below decks.
Louise navigates her new life among the streets and crooked alleys of Harwich, where groaning houses riddled with smugglers' tunnels are flooded by the spring tides, and love burns brightly in the shadows. Luke, aching for the girl he left behind and determined to one day find his way back to her, embarks on a long and perilous journey across the ocean.
The worlds they find are more dangerous and more exciting than they could ever have imagined, and when they collide the consequences are astonishing and irrevocable.
Марго Стедман4.4 Том Шербурн — смотритель маяка. Изабель — его молодая жена. На далеком острове они ведут тихую и размеренную жизнь, и их единственная мечта — иметь детей. И однажды к берегу прибивает лодку, в которой оказывается новорожденная девочка. Кто она? Есть ли у нее родители? Это подарок судьбы или… чья-то трагическая потеря? Немедленно сообщить о ребенке на материк или воспитывать его как собственного — решение, которое предстоит принять Тому и Изабель, решение, цена которого может быть слишком велика…
Роберт Уилтон0.0 July 1805: Napoleon's army masses across the Channel - Britain is within hours of invasion and defeat. Only one thing stands in the way - an obscure government bureau of murky origins and shadowy purpose: The Comptrollerate General for Scrutiny and Survey. And, rescued from a shipwreck, his past erased, Tom Roscarrock is their newest agent. In England, the man who recruited Roscarrock has disappeared, his agents are turning up dead, and reports of a secret French fleet are panicking the authorities. In France, a plan is underway to shatter the last of England's stability. Behind the clash of fleets and armies, there lies a secret world of intrigue, deception, treachery and violence - and Roscarrock is about to be thrown into it headfirst.
