While solving the mystery of an old man's disappearing fortune, Nancy ends a family feud and reveals the identity of an orphan of unknown parentage. Views: 651
Helen Edmundson's celebrated and 'exemplary adaptation' (The Times) of Leo Tolstoy's enduring classic is a vibrant and deeply moving meditation on the nature of love. Anna is beautiful and admired but empty - until a chance meeting throws her into emotional turmoil and a scandalous affair. Contrasting with this tale of destructive love is the story of Levin, an idealistic man striving to find meaning in life - and a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself. Originally produced by Shared Experience, winning the Time Out Award for Outstanding Theatrical Event of 1992. This edition was published alongside a revival of the play at the Arcola Theatre, London, in 2011. 'Theatre this engrossing is rare' - Time Out 'The aim is not to report the novel but to recreate it as a piece of theatre... a dramatisation which is symbolically accurate as well as theatrically compelling' - Guardian Views: 651
** Outer Dark** is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
*From the Trade Paperback edition.* Views: 651
A new edition published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin’s death, including a new introduction by an important contemporary writer
Since its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written.
“A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity.” —Langston Hughes, The New York Times Book Review
“Written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace.” —Time
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 651
Mary Renault’s inventive debut novel: A love-triangle drama set against the backdrop of hospital life
Working in a hospital in 1930s Britain, two colleagues fall into an emotionally charged relationship. Vivian and Mic work demanding jobs and must endure long gaps between their secret meetings. But it is their relationship with Vivian’s brother, Jan, a charismatic scientist, that really complicates their union. Before falling for Vivian, Mic had nursed feelings for independent-minded Jan. As for Vivian, her romantic experience has left her with doubts about commitment. For this fraught trio, big questions about love—what and whom it is for—demand answers.
In this powerful, sparklingly written debut tale of romance between the wars, Mary Renault showcases the talents that made her one of the twentieth century’s most beloved novelists. Views: 650
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written.
Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and surgeon, Stephen Maturin, sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts. Among them is a beautiful and dangerous spy — and a treacherous disease which decimates the crew.
The ingredients of a wonderfully powerful and dramatic O’Brian novel are heightened by descriptive writing of rare quality. Nowhere in contemporary prose have the majesty and terror of the sea been more effectively rendered than in the thrilling chase through an Antarctic storm in which Jack’s ship, under-manned and out-gunned, is the quarry not the hunter. Views: 650
When five dogs disappear from a seaside town and a dragon is sighted off-shore, the three investigators look into the situation. Views: 649
Barselow was used to having his orders obeyed in Azure City. But when he gave orders that the Queen must be found, he ran into unexpected opposition. For there were other determined to find the Queen ... Determined to risk their sanity, their very lives, to find her. There was Faye Jordan - she of the sensuous figure and the mind to match. And there was Mr. Trim - the fabulous Mr. Trim ... There was John Henry Conover, and the curvy, swervy girl called Sin, who had other things on their minds until a wounded mobster burst into their cottage and forced them to join the hunt. And when the waiter brought them the Queen of Diamonds instead of their tab at lunch the next day, they knew they were playing for keeps. Views: 649
Without setting foot on another planet, people like Shep Blaine were reaching out to the stars with their minds, telepathically contacting strange beings on other worlds. But even Blaine was unprepared for what happened when he communed with the soul of an utterly alien being light years from Earth. After recovering from his experience, he becomes a dangerous man: not only has he gained startling new powers - but he now understands that humankind must share the stars.
Hunted through time and space by those who he used to trust, Blaine undergoes a unique odyssey that takes him through a nightmarish version of small-town America as he seeks to find others who share his vision of a humane future. Blaine has mastered death and time. Now he must master the fear and ignorance that threatened to destroy him! Views: 649
A homeless man is found beaten and unconscious along the banks of the Seine. Inspector Maigret must connect him to a past--and a possible motive for for his attempted murder. The investigation provides Maigret with a chilling look at those who have rejected society and the small measure of justice it offers them. Views: 649
The autobiography of a general practitioner turned author, who went on to write such famous novels as Hatter's Castle, The Citidel, The Stars Look Down, etc, not forgetting the Dr Finlay series. Views: 649
The basis of the new major movie from Michel Gondry, starring Audrey Tautou, the beloved French modern classic hailed as "the most poignant love story of our time" by Raymond Queneau
The story is simple: Boy meets girl; boy marries girl; girl falls ill on their honeymoon with a water lily on the lung, which can only be treated by being surrounded by flowers; boy goes broke desperately trying to keep his true love alive.
First published in 1947, Mood Indigo perfectly captures the feverishly creative, melancholy romance of mid-century Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Recently voted number ten on Le Monde's list of the 100 Books of the Century (the top ten also included works by Camus, Proust, Kafka, Hemingway, and Steinbeck), Boris Vian's novel has been an icon of French literature for fifty years—the avant-garde, populist masterpiece by one of twentieth-century Paris's most intriguing cultural figures, a touchstone for generations of revolutionary young people, a jazz-fueled, science-fiction-infused, sexy, fantastical, nouveau-decadent tear-jerker that has charmed and beguiled hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. With the help of Michel Gondry and Audrey Tautou, it is set to seduce many, many more. Views: 648
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vries's well-read suburbanites. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece. Views: 648
