Дидье Декуэн3.3 Япония, XII век. Кацуро был лучшим рыбаком во всей империи, но это не уберегло его от гибели. Он поставлял карпов для прудов в императорском городе и поэтому имел особое положение. Теперь его молодая вдова Миюки должна заменить его и доставить императору оставшихся после мужа карпов. Она будет вынуждена проделать путешествие на несколько сотен километров через леса и горы, избегая бури и землетрясения, сталкиваясь с нападением разбойников и предательством попутчиков, борясь с водными монстрами и жестокостью людей.
И только память о счастливых мгновениях их с Кацуро прошлого даст Миюки силы преодолеть препятствия и донести свою ношу до Службы садов и заводей.
Джон Харви0.0 'John Harvey, who is fascinated by the creative process involved in the making of art, finds the perfect subject in Rubens' painting "Peace and War" and its themes that intrigue and inspire a contemporary English artist. The result is a many-layered novel, impressively skillful and deeply absorbing.’ ANITA DESAI When artist Stephen Bloodsmith creates a series of images inspired by Rubens' trip to London in 1629, he enters a historical world of suspicion and intrigue. But will the manipulations he portrays in art spill over into the real world? When he practises deception inside his own marriage, falling in love with his model even as the romance of his wife Robyn unravels, the corrosive parallels between Bloodsmith's and Rubens' lives – the discovery of intimate secrets, the pain caused by desire and jealousy, the consequences of power and conflict – become hard to live with and impossible to ignore.
Rubens believed he could make peace between the warring powers of Europe. To succeed he must win over Charles I of England, while in Paris 'the Cardinal' is working to frustrate him. Will nation cheat nation as people deceive one another in their personal lives? At once an intimate portrait of sexual pain in two centuries and a gripping depiction of international deal-making, Pax is a rich, compelling study of desire, power, art – and the search for private and public peace.
Джеймс Фрей2.2 В Париже он был безрассудным, импульсивным, ослепленным искусством и глубоко влюбленным. Он мечтал стать писателем, зажечь этот мир, поделиться с каждым своим внутренним огнем. А двадцать пять лет спустя в Лос-Анджелесе он стал богатым, знаменитым и опустошенным. Самоубийство? Он уже был готов к нему, если бы не анонимное сообщение. Кажется, незнакомка из прошлого может вернуть его к жизни?.. Или же разбить на мелкие осколки.
Кристофер Боллен0.0 Recommended as Summer Reading by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, Vogue, New York Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Seattle Times, Yahoo!, Refinery29, BBC, PopSugar, Boston Herald, New York Social Diary, Library Journal, Bookstr, Kirkus
“Beautiful people visiting glamorous places, being wicked enough to bring Patricia Highsmith to mind. It just isn’t summer without this kind of globe-trotting glamour to read about, especially when most of it is set in the Aegean. Bollen is stylish enough to know what sells.... Escapism, as calculating as it gets.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times
"Equal parts Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Destroyers is at once lyrical and suspenseful, thoughtful and riveting." —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“The Destroyers is one superb novel, a tightly woven and fast-moving narrative set in beautifully crafted prose. A read-all-night of a book.” —Alan Furst, author of A Hero of France
When Charlie and I were young, we played a game called Destroyers. . . . We were sharpening our instincts, jettisoning attachments. We were honing strategies for survival. . . .
Arriving on the Greek island of Patmos broke and humiliated, Ian Bledsoe is fleeing the emotional and financial fallout from his father’s death. His childhood friend Charlie—rich, exuberant, and basking in the success of his new venture on the island—could be his last hope.
At first Patmos appears to be a dream—long sun-soaked days on Charlie’s yacht and the reappearance of a girlfriend from Ian’s past—and Charlie readily offers Ian the lifeline he so desperately needs. But, like Charlie himself, this beautiful island conceals a darkness beneath, and it isn’t long before the dream begins to fragment. When Charlie suddenly vanishes, Ian finds himself caught up in deception after deception. As he grapples with the turmoil left in his friend’s wake, he is reminded of an imaginary game called Destroyers they played as children—a game, he now realizes, they may have never stopped playing.
An enthralling odyssey and a gripping, expansive drama, The Destroyers is a vivid and suspenseful story of identity, power and fate, fathers and sons, and self-invention and self-deception, from a writer at the very height of his powers.
Эрри Де Лука0.0 Don Gaetano è uomo tuttofare in un grande caseggiato della Napoli popolosa e selvaggia degli anni cinquanta: elettricista, muratore, portiere dei quotidiani inferni del vivere. Da lui impara il giovane chiamato “Smilzo”, un orfano formicolante di passioni silenziose.
Don Gaetano sa leggere nel pensiero della gente e lo Smilzo lo sa, sa che nel buio o nel fuoco dei suoi sentimenti ci sono idee ed emozioni che arrivano nette alla mente del suo maestro e compagno. Scimmia dalle zampe magre, ha imparato a sfidare i compagni, le altezze dei muri, le grondaie, le finestre - a una finestra in particolare ha continuato a guardare, quella in cui, donna-bambina, è apparso un giorno il fantasma femminile. Un fantasma che torna più tardi a sfidare la memoria dei sensi, a postulare un amore impossibile.
Lo Smilzo cresce attraverso i racconti di don Gaetano, cresce nella memoria di una Napoli (offesa dalla guerra e dall’occupazione) che si ribella - con una straordinaria capacità di riscatto - alla sua stessa indolenza morale. Lo Smilzo impara che l’esistenza è rito, carne, sfida, sangue. E così che l’uomo maturo e l’uomo giovane si dividono in silenzio il desiderio sessuale di una vedova, è così che l’uomo passa al giovane la lama che lo dovrà difendere un giorno dall’onore offeso, è così che la prova del sangue apre la strada a una nuova migranza che durerà il tempo necessario a essere uomo.
Steven Patrick Morrissey0.0 Beware the novelist . . . intimate and indiscreet . . . pompous, prophetic airs . . . here is the fact of fiction . . . an American tale where, naturally, evil conquers good, and none live happily ever after, for the complicated pangs of the empty experiences of flesh-and-blood human figures are the reason why nothing can ever be enough. To read a book is to let a root sink down. List of the lost is the reality of what is true battling against what is permitted to be true.
Ben Okri1.5 The Age of Magic has begun.
Unveil your eyes.'
Eight weary film-makers, travelling from Paris to Basel, arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain. Over the course of three days and two nights, the travellers will find themselves drawn in to the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, they will be disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way.
An intoxicating and dreamlike tale unfolds. Allow yourself to be transformed. Having shown a different way of seeing the world, Ben Okri now offers a different way of reading.
Манил Сури0.0 Mumbai has emptied under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation; gangs of marauding Hindu and Muslim thugs rove the desolate streets; yet Sarita can think of only one thing: buying the last pomegranate that remains in perhaps the entire city. She is convinced that the fruit holds the key to reuniting her with her physicist husband, Karun, who has been mysteriously missing for more than a fortnight.
Searching for his own lover in the midst of this turmoil is Jaz—cocky, handsome, and glib. "The Jazter," as he calls himself, is Muslim, but his true religion has steadfastly been sex with men. Dodging danger at every step, both he and Sarita are inexorably drawn to Devi ma, the patron goddess who has reputedly appeared in person to save her city. What they find will alter their lives more fundamentally than any apocalypse to come.
A wickedly comedic and fearlessly provocative portrayal of individuals balancing on the sharp edge of fate, The City of Devi brilliantly upends assumptions of politics, religion, and sex, and offers a terrifying yet exuberant glimpse of the end of the world.
Нэнси Хьюстон0.0 Award-winning author Nancy Huston follows her bestselling novel, Fault Lines, winner of the Prix Femina, with an intensely provocative story about a passionate yet emotionally-wounded woman’s sexual explorations.
After a troubled childhood and two failed marriages, Rena Greenblatt has achieved success as a photographer. She specializes in infrared techniques that expose her pictures’ otherwise hidden landscapes and capture the raw essence of deeply private moments in the lives of her subjects.
Away from her lover, and stuck in Florence, Italy, with her infuriating stepmother and her aging, unwell father, Rena confronts not only the masterpieces of the Renaissance but the banal inconveniences of a family holiday. At the same time, she finds herself traveling into dark and passionate memories that will lead to disturbing revelations.
Infrared is both an explicitly bold story of how sexuality is influenced by childhood, family, and culture, and a portrait of a woman coming to terms with the end of her father’s life. With exceptional flair and intelligence, Huston fearlessly investigates the links between family intimacies and our collective lives, between destruction and creation.
David Guterson0.0 A sweeping, propulsive, darkly humorous new novel by the best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars: a story of destiny, desire, and destruction that reimagines Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex for our own era.
In Seattle in 1962, Walter Cousins, a mild-mannered actuary—“a guy who weighs risk for a living”—takes a risk of his own, and makes the biggest error of his life. He sleeps with Diane Burroughs, the sexy, not-quite-legal British au pair who’s taking care of his children for the summer. Diane gets pregnant and leaves their baby on a doorstep, but not before turning the tables on Walter and setting in motion a tragedy of epic proportions. Their orphaned child, adopted by an adoring family and named Edward Aaron King, grows up to become a billionaire Internet tycoon and an international celebrity—the “King of Search”—who unknowingly, but inexorably, hurtles through life toward a fate he may have no power to shape.
An instant classic—David Guterson’s most daring and dazzling novel yet—that brings a contemporary urgency to one of the greatest stories of all time.
Рован Сомервилл0.0 Two young lovers arrive for an idyllic holiday in Greece but find that they can`t escape their past - a brilliant new novel from the author of the acclaimed THE END OF SLEEP.
Jonathan Littell4.3 A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss—even Hitler himself—play a role in Max's story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic, The Kindly Ones is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity—and the reader cannot look away.
Rachel Johnson0.0 Mimi and Ralph have left social climbing, pushy parenting and their marital problems behind them in London, and moved west to the bucolic green depths of the country. Or so they thought. Yes, there's mud and masses of fresh air, plenty of handsome hayseeds and there's Rose, Mimi's new best friend and Dorset's answer to Martha Stewart. But what should be Shire Heaven is, it turns out, just as tricky to navigate as Notting Hell.
There's low-level conflict between the racehorses in vintage/Diesel/Ralph Lauren and the brood mares in Barbour/Boden, there's guerrilla warfare between the landowners and eco-warriers and naked hostility between Old Money, New Money and No Money. Yes, in honeybourne, if you don't have:
1) A landscaped garden within 1000 acres (minimum) of prime land
2) A helipad for your trophy guests
3) An organic farm shop selling 16 sorts of home-made sausages
4) Four pony-mad polo-playing children
5) A literary festival in your mini-stately
6) A bottom that looks smackable in jodhpurs
Then, well...you're Mimi basically. And that's just the start of her problems. Mimi also has a secret. But can she keep it?
Norman Mailer0.0 No career in modern American letters is at once so brilliant, varied, and controversial as that of Norman Mailer. In a span of more than six decades, Mailer has searched into subjects ranging from World War II to Ancient Egypt, from the march on the Pentagon to Marilyn Monroe, from Henry Miller and Mohammad Ali to Jesus Christ. Now, in The Castle in the Forest, his first major work of fiction in more than a decade, Mailer offers what may be his consummate literary endeavor: He has set out to explore the evil of Adolf Hitler.
The narrator, a mysterious SS man who is later revealed to be an exceptional presence, gives us young Adolf from birth, as well as Hitler’s father and mother, his sisters and brothers, and the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence.
A tapestry of unforgettable characters, The Castle in the Forest delivers its playful twists and surprises with astonishing insight into the nature of the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all. At its core is a hypothesis that propels this novel and makes it a work of stunning originality. Now, on the eve of his eighty-fourth birthday, Norman Mailer may well be saying more than he ever has before.
Иэн Холлингсхед0.0 Twenty-five is far too young to be having a mid-life crisis, but Jack Lancaster is going to make a go of it anyway, and give it his best shot.
Two complicated ladies and an awful job with an even more awful boss is only half the size of it. Dimly aware that a life taken up with Excel spreadsheets and bottom lines is no life at all, our hero sets out to sabotage his career and save his soul. Superhuman amounts of backsliding, snoozing, and emotional incontinence will be needed if somehow Jack is going to dig himself out of the hole he has found himself in.
Dumping his girlfriend and falling head over heels in love with the office beauty, Jack begins a war of nerves with his sarcastic, Latin-spouting boss. A little light criminal damage might just be what it takes to get fired with a pay package. But his ex has her own plans. And soon Jack’s life spirals further into chaos.
With a hilarious cast of friends, family and workmates, and capturing a moment in life with which every twentysomething (current and former) will identify, Twentysomething is a rare gem by a stunning new writer that will appeal to everyone that’s ever hated their job…and had their heart broken.
Джайлс Корен0.0 A comic account of a man’s search for meaning, identity and a suitable response to the burden of history; Coren’s examination of the nature of Jewishness (and, incidentally, of Englishness), of the lies we tell to survive and the stresses of urban life, is irreverent, funny, provocative and brave.
Том Вулф3.8 Dupont University - the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition...Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from Sparta, North Carolina, who has come here on a full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. As Charlotte encounters Dupont's elite - her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, privileged Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Gellin, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's 'independent' newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavour on campus - she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence. But little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.
Анируддха Бахал0.0 A brilliant international thriller, set in contemporary Kashmir, about an investigative journalist, espionage, and the temptations of drugs, sex, and corruption in the Indian Army
Our hero, known as MM, is a pleasure-seeking journalist working for an upstart Indian newsweekly. He is also an ex-army cadet with political connections, able to secure exclusive and dangerous assignments in the armed forces with the promise that he'll write about his experiences. But MM has ulterior motives. Over a period of years he has been clandestinely investigating a source of corruption in the guerrilla war on India's frontier: in the midst of skirmishes with the "Mossies" in Kashmir, the sale of arms and drugs--often back to the insurgents they have been seized from--is an ever-renewable source of profit.
MM hits the jackpot when a brutal border-patrol raid on which he is tagging along uncovers an emormous cache of both arms and high-grade heroin; but the goods in hand also provide him with a tempting brokerage opportunity.
Knowing, cynical, highly capable, and deeply motivated, MM is an intriguing new postmodern hero. His action-packed narration of his daredevil, drug- and sex-drenched dangerous life is world-class suspense of an entirely new kind.
Венди Перриам0.0 "Lorna, thirty-nine, is married to misanthropic Ralph, who in turn is wedded to his twenty-seven pipes and his artificial-grass business. In fact, it's a menage a trois, the third party being Lorna's Monster, a gleefully sadistic personification of her panic attacks." The Monster has a field day when, after a botched foot operation, Lorna is sent to convalesce among the deaf and demented inmates of a nursing home from hell, where the staff have more problems than the patients. But, despite her surroundings, she begins to blossom, making new friends, discovering untapped talents and even a reawakened interest in sex, thanks to the attentions of an ardent young care-worker. She even gets offered a challenging new job. Meanwhile Ralph is being sued by a vindictive business client and fears he will lose his house and his livelihood.
Christopher Hart3.6 Daniel Swallow is in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. A PR stunt involving a hot air balloon has gone horribly wrong, and now he is jobless and broke. And single. Meanwhile, everybody else's life is flourishing. Miles is earning telephone numbers in the City, and has a green-eyed, enigmatic new girlfriend called Beth. Clive is in hot pursuit of an Indian princess called Amrita. But the only thing in Daniel's life is his new career: lucrative, mysterious, mostly nocturnal - and highly embarrassing, if the secret should ever get out. And then one day he is summoned to an appointment in Mayfair, and his life veers of course forever . . .
Comic, poignant and unexpectedly romantic, Rescue Me is a portrait of a generation for whom relationships are everything (and probably too much) and of two restless and heartsick souls trying to save each other's lives.
Шон Томас0.0 Three men and their rock ’n’ roll friendship from university through to their thirties.
Alex does sex, Eddie does, drugs, Tony does nine-to-five. They all want Elizabeth. She’s Tony’s wife. And Eddie’s sister.
Eddie is a privileged, drugged-up dole cheat; Alex is a lazy, cynical lad-magazine hack bored with writing articles on Why Men Like Burping; Tony has a wife he suspects of sleeping with the entire world except himself. Fifteen years ago they were just three undergraduates sharing hallucinogenic drugs in the lyrical beauty of the English countryside, now they are three semi-professionals sharing worries about love, death, politics, sport, money, children, art, religion, race and schoolgirls. Together and apart they assess their lives, their desires, their sexual exploits, their prejudices and their pride, with a candour and wit that will have the reader squirming with amusement, shock, and recognition.
Адриан Энтони Гилл0.0 A.A. Gill's first novel, SAP RISING, garnered a galaxy of reviews when it was published, from the enchanted 'Among the most original novels of the year' (Financial Times) to the hysterical 'Do not buy this book' (Guardian), from the delirious 'Extremely funny' (Time Out) to the outraged 'Frightful pile of garbage', to the contradictory 'He writes so brilliantly' (Daniel Farson, Evening Standard), 'Extremely badly written, hideously and unamusingly obscene' (A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard). It can reasonably be said that SAP RISING was one of the most visible books of the year.
Now comes something equally striking and completely different: STARCROSSED.
Like Byron, John Dart, poet and bookshop assistant, wakes up one morning and finds himself, if not quite famous, then the next best thing: in bed with someone famous. Lee Montana, singer, film star and the most famous woman in the world, wakes up one morning and finds she's had carnal knowledge of a shop assistant - which doesn't have quite the same exclamatory ring to it. Antigone doesn't wake up at all. She is a 2,000-year-old dead Greek girl with a truculent disposition and a bad dose of destiny. Tentatively, John and Lee embark on a sort of affair with three unequal partners: the two of them and Antigone's bitter shadow.
Is fame the beauty parlour of the dead? Can the gods fall in love? Should a poet fuck with his muse? In his dazzling new novel A.A. Gill flirts with capricious destiny and hitchhikes on the boulevard of fate.
Sebastian Faulks3.0 In 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission - officially, to run an apparently simple errand for a British special operations group and unofficially, to search for her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its agony in 'the black years'. Here is the full range of collaboration, from the tacit to the enthusiastic, as well as examples of extraordinary courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien, Charlotte meets his father, a Jewish painter whose inspiration has failed him.
In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is delineated, Faulks brings the story to a resolution of redemptive love. In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and its powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte Gray is a worthy successor to Birdsong.
Николас Ройл0.0 Dangerous and dark connections of the heart reveal themselves in this narrative of loss and redemption - a heart transplant in Victorian Knightsbridge is linked to near-death experience a century later; a man must face his father's imminent death; and a cardiologist falls for her patient's friend.
Дэвид Хаггинс0.0 Here in glamorous Swinging London, Steve Cork's marriage to ex-model Liz has gone from seven-year itch to nine-year eczema, his best friend and business partner Tony has wrecked his marriage and now his Porsche in a long-running battle with the bottle, and their knock-off designer clothing company is being taken over by Alan Denton, a man with the brand of self-confidence you can't buy from a therapist or a drug dealer. Plus, either Steve has begun hallucinating, or London's buildings are bursting into psychedelic bubbles -- and the brash Mr. Denton is a rapist and a murderer. Now, not knowing whom to trust and with no one trusting him, Steve must quickly find a way to establish who will be the hapless victim, who the evil villain, and, of course, who the triumphant hero of the Hitchcockian thriller his life has become.
Ray Richardson, a brilliant architechnologist, has created a dazzling new building: 'The Gridiron', in the heart of L. A.
The Gridiron represents the state-of-the-art in smart buildings: every aspect of the building, from temperature control to security, is controlled by an intricate computer system. On the eve of the building's official opening, a team gathers to put the finishing touches to Ray's new masterpiece. But there are a couple of unexplained deaths, which the team at first puts down to saboteurs. It is only when they discover how bizarre these deaths are that they realise the building - through its computer - is controlling them, and is set to destroy its creators.
