Beryl Bainbridge2.0 The sinking of the world's greatest luxury liner, the invincible and magnificent S. S. Titanic, has captured people's attention ever since that tragic April night in 1912, when 1500 people lost their lives. And no one has better dramatized this memorable event than Beryl Bainbridge in Every Man for Himself.
Нил Бартлетт0.0 In 1886, an architect called Richardson built a house on the South side of Chicago. In 1985, the "Daily Mirror" reported the death of Rock Hudson. Halfway through the century that falls between these dates a man who claims his name is Mr Page sits down by his gas-fire on a snowbound Christmas Eve and sets himself the task of explaining a story that connects these apparently unconnected events. Neil Bartlett's new novel spins a dark and erotic web of conjecture in the gaps of history. It takes its reader from the brittle glamour of the twenties into the violent repression of the fifties; from Mayfair dining rooms to the steam room of a gentlemen's Turkish Bath; from the ordinary world of Mr Page into the strange and unsettling world of the black-haired, well-dressed and immensely wealthy Mr Clive.
J.G. Ballard2.0 In the resort of Estrella de Mar, Charles Prentice has just arrived from London to save his brother, Frank, who has confessed to setting an explosive fire that has taken five lives. Convinced of Frank's innocence, Charles uncovers a vast network of drugs, pornography, and theft.
Патрик Макграт4.0 «Приют» Макграта – наиболее мрачная, реалистичная и в тоже время лучшая его книга. Название романа «Asylum» можно перевести двояко: «Приют» или «Дом сумасшедших». Издатель остановился на первом варианте. Это многоплановый роман, вызывающий сложные ассоциации, роман, в котором зло и страх принимают странные обличья, отражающиеся как в нашем воображении, так и в самом сюжете.
Грэм Свифт3.9 Четверо мужчин, близких друзей покойного Джека Доддса, лондонского мясника, встретились, чтобы выполнить его необычайную последнюю волю - рассеять над морем его прах. Несмотря на столь незамысловатый сюжет, роман `Последние распоряжения` - самое увлекательное произведение Грэма Свифта, трогательное, забавное и удивительно человечное. Лауреат премии Букера за 1996 год.
Fay Weldon0.0 From the hilarious opening to the satisfying final conflagration, Fay Weldon's Worst Fears is a taut, scathing revelation of the nature of marital intimacy. When Alexandra returns from her stint on the London stage to find her husband mysteriously dead of a heart attack and her female friends ominously invested in smoothing out all the complications of the tragedy, she begins to be suspicious. At first she attributes this to grief, then to paranoia. But she soon finds herself starting to crack, crank-calling her friends' psychiatrist, attacking people with kitchen chairs and breaking into their houses, searching furiously for evidence to confirm her husband's rampant adultery and her own worst fears. "A snappy whodunit of the heart....one of Weldon's best novels yet." -- The New York Times Book Review; "With a dash of murder mystery and a wink at Isben's grim tales of ruined marriages, this splendid and spiteful novel shows Fay Weldon to be in as fine form as ever." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer; "A hundred years hence, if people can still read, Weldon's books will likely have the unblunted edge of Jane Austen, an unsentimental Baedeker guide to sexual manners in an ill-mannered age. Fay Weldon breaks taboos like tape at a marathon, and she hasn't stopped running yet." -- Los Angeles Times.
John Lanchester3.2 Winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel and a New York Times Notable Book, The Debt to Pleasure is a wickedly funny ode to food. Traveling from Portsmouth to the south of France, Tarquin Winot, the book's snobbish narrator, instructs us in his philosophy on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of the menu. Under the guise of completing a cookbook, Winot is in fact on a much more sinister mission that only gradually comes to light.
Мэри Моррисси0.0 The story of one woman's search for home and family details the abduction of an infant and revelation of a middle-aged woman who begins to remember her shadow-life as the daughter of a different mother. 10,000 first printing.
Seamus Deane3.9 The story is told from the point of view of an anonymous young Irish Catholic boy. This novel-in-stories is about both the boy's coming of age and the "Troubles" of Northern Ireland from the partition of the island in the early 1920s through the post "Bloody Sunday" violence of the early-mid 1970s. Reading in the Dark was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize.
The setting mirrors mid-twentieth century Derry leading into the Troubles. Although the setting surrounds the narrator with violence, chaos, and sectarian division, Derry serves as a place for the narrator to grow, both physically and mentally. Despite the external surroundings, the narrator's tone never slips into complete despair, but maintains a sense of hope and humour throughout.
Джорджина Хэммик0.0 Hannah comes from a family beset by madness and sadness. Surrounded by the clever and the eccentric and the gloomy, can she unravel the mysterious past and escape her legacy? And will she ever get to Arizona?
A stunning adaptation for schools by the Children’s Laureate Anne Fine, of her much-loved children’s novel. Why is Tulip always in trouble? And why does Natalie find Tulip’s dangerous games so fascinating. A powerful story about troubled teenagers and their relationship to the adult world.
The Tulip Touch is suitable for class work, drama lessons and school productions. The resource material includes advice on staging the play, ideas for improvisation arising from the script, poems and extracts from fictional and non-fictional writing. The issues of parenthood, families, growing up and peer pressure are explored through drama, discussion and written work.
Russell Hoban0.0 The revered author of books for all ages, from Bread and Jam for Frances to Turtle Diary, gives the literary performance of a lifetime in this taut psychological thriller about a boy who tries desperately to stop failing. Things are already looking a little funny to Nick Hartley after he loses yet another fight with Harry Buncher--and gets his head bashed into a wall in the bargain. So he is less confused than he ordinarily would when he meets Moe Nagic, a homeless man with a puzzle and a secret to sell. Moe offers Nick a way to visit Trokeville, the world that exists at the edge of the picture puzzle. Nick has to go there, if he's ever going to change the way his life is going. But he soon discovers the devastating danger of the journey: His mind could leave him stranded there, with no way of returning! Written with the power and precision of a great author, The Trokeville Way is a provocative masterpiece for our time.
Philip Pullman4.0 Tick, tock, tick, tock! Some stories are like that. Once you've wend them up, nothing will stop them ... A tormented apprentice clock-maker, a deadly mechanical knight in armour - and the sinister Dr Kalmenius, who some say is the devil ... Wind up these characters, fit them into a story on a cold winter's evening, with the snow swirling down, and suddenly life and the story begin to merge in a peculiarly macabre - and unstoppable - way. Almost like clockwork ...
The poems in Seamus Heaney's collection The Spirit Level keep discovering the possibilities of 'a new beginning' in all kinds of subjects and circumstances. What is at stake, in poem after poem, is the chance of buoyancy and balance, physical, spiritual and political. Private memories, classical scenes, humble domestic objects - a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing - are endowed with talismanic significance, while friends and relatives are invoked for their promise and steadfastness. Throughout the collection, Heaney addresses his concerns, which inevitably include the political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry that never ceases to be fluid, alert and completely truthful.
Элис Освальд0.0 Alice Oswald's first book of poems, The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile is more confident and achieved than many first collections. Previously published in Anvil New Poets 2, a selection chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, and winner of the 1994 Eric Gregory Award, Oswald already clearly demonstrates a distinct voice. The poems here are extraordinarily beautiful: intensely musical, strewn with emotion, and full of energy and warmth. Influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the intangible in marvellously vivid language. The second part of the book features an entertaining long poem titled The Men of Gotham, a comical folk-legend about the three men who went to sea to try to catch the moon in a net. Taken together, this is a wonderful first collection by an exceptionally talented young poet.
Кристофер Рид0.0 Among the people and creatures to be met in Expanded Universes are the last sphinx in captivity, a flying prophet, the unorthodox compiler of a Contradictionary, Gertrude Stein's little-known sister and two exceptionally loud-mouthed dogs, Rolf and Garth. Questions of belief and imaginative freedom are approached from sometimes unlikely angles. The man who translated Katerina Brac and preserved the writings of Alfred Stoker, Christopher Reid here continues his project of finding significance in the marginal, the endangered, the aprocryphal and the downright absurd.
Полин Стейнер0.0 It has been that Pauline Stainer is a poet working at the margins of the sacred, conveying sensations with economy of means that is breathtaking - all of which aptly applies to this brilliant new collection. She draws from a wealth of sources, including medieval lyrics, Eastern and Western art, and Christian liturgy. In The Wound Dresser's Dream, her challenging fourth collection, several sequences include elegies, and explorations of light and music. The title poem is drawn from Keats's fancy to become a ship's surgeon.
Диармайд Маккалох0.0 Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was the archbishop of Canterbury who guided England through the early Reformation—and Henry VIII through the minefields of divorce. This is the first major biography of him for more than three decades, and the first for a century to exploit rich new manuscript sources in Britain and elsewhere.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the foremost scholars of the English Reformation, traces Cranmer from his east-Midland roots through his twenty-year career as a conventionally conservative Cambridge don. He shows how Cranmer was recruited to the coterie around Henry VIII that was trying to annul the royal marriage to Catherine, and how new connections led him to embrace the evangelical faith of the European Reformation and, ultimately, to become archbishop of Canterbury. By then a major English statesman, living the life of a medieval prince-bishop, Cranmer guided the church through the king's vacillations and finalized two successive versions of the English prayer book.
MacCulloch skillfully reconstructs the crises Cranmer negotiated, from his compromising association with three of Henry's divorces, the plot by religious conservatives to oust him, and his role in the attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey as queen to the vengeance of the Catholic Mary Tudor. In jail after Mary's accession, Cranmer nearly repudiated his achievements, but he found the courage to turn the day of his death into a dramatic demonstration of his Protestant faith.
From this vivid account Cranmer emerges a more sharply focused figure than before, more conservative early in his career than admirers have allowed, more evangelical than Anglicanism would later find comfortable. A hesitant hero with a tangled life story, his imperishable legacy is his contribution in the prayer book to the shape and structure of English speech and through this to the molding of an international language and the theology it expressed.
Rosemary Ashton0.0 There were other women writers in the 19th century, but Eliot alone left the family circle to follow her own devices at a time when unmarried women generally kept house for others. What is more, she moved in unconventional and Bohemian circles. Her long and loving relationship with the previously married G. H. Lewes scandalized even her closest friends. She was generally admired but shunned socially, except by the boldest radicals and feminists. Rosemary Ashton examines "Adam Bede, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt" and the unsurpassed "Middlemarch," which all explore the tension between the urge to conform and the imperatives of both the heart and the mind - a paradox which is reflected in George Eliot's life. This magnificent biography is a detailed examination of the life and the writing of George Eliot. Rosemary Ashton illuminates our understanding of both and reveals the choices and originality of a most remarkable woman.
Флора Фрейзер0.0 "There are two types of British queens," says Columbia University historian David Cannadine."Those who hold the position strictly as wife of the king, and those (few) who have ruled as sovereign in absence of a male heir." Queen Caroline, who briefly held title when King George IV was crowned in 1820 is numbered among the former. Vulgar, selfish, and undisciplined, she fled from the husband she hated and became nearly as well known for her promiscuity as King George IV himself. Viewed by the public as a wronged woman, she survived George's attempts to dissolve the marriage, but opinion turned against her and she died in 1821.
Джеймс Ноулсон0.0 Damned to Fame is the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive master of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on
Книга названа КНИГОЙ ГОДА.