Atlantic Books strana 2 z 16

The Oslo police are baffled. Crime scenes are being found covered with blood, but there is no victim. Only an odd series of numbers is left behind. When a girl is brutally raped in her apartment, Detective Hanne Wilhelmsen is charged with solving the case. Hanne quickly notices strange similarities with the blood-stained crime scenes. But the victim's father has started an independent hunt for the rapist...and Hanne will have to race against time to prevent a victim becoming a vigilante.

Corpse-candles. Phantom funerals. The bird of death. It was insidious...' For Bethan, the schoolteacher, the old superstitions woven into the social fabric of her West Wales village are primitive and distasteful. Which is why she's pleased to welcome the sophisticated newcomers: London journalist Giles Freeman and his wife Claire. Surely they'll let in some fresh air? But the Freemans are keen to absorb this different culture, a whole new way of life - rejecting the advice of an old colleague who warns them of a hard and bitter land where they've always danced on the edge of the abyss. They soon learn that this community hides an ancient, bloody and pagan secret - one that will haunt them forever...

Britain in the 1980s was a polarized nation. With the two main political parties as far apart as at any time since the 1930s, the period was riven by violent confrontation, beginning with the explosion of rioting that rocked England's cities in 1981 and again in 1985; a year-long fight with the National Union of Mineworkers, and then with print workers in Wapping. There was the war to retake the Falkland Islands and the re-escalation of the troubles in Northern Ireland, which began with hunger strikes and peaked with the attempt to assassinate the entire Cabinet in the Brighton bombing. It was also a decade of political innovation - in the life and death of the Social Democratic Party, the mass privatization of state-owned industries, the sale of council houses and the deregulation of financial markets - and cultural ferment, with the rise and fall of indie pop, the emergence of house music, Channel 4 and the growth of alternative comedy; and Prince Charles's interventions on architecture. Graham Stewart's magnificent and comprehensive history of the eighties covers all these events, and many more, with exhilarating verve and detail, and also examines the legacy of a decade that sowed the seeds of modern Britain.

The Internet, in the memorable words of EDGE founder John Brockman, is 'the infinite oscillation of our collective consciousness interacting with itself. It's not about computers. It's not about what it means to be human - in fact, it challenges, renders trite, our cherished assumptions on that score. It is about thinking'. In How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, the latest volume in Brockman's cutting-edge Edge questions series, 154 of the world's leading intellectuals - scientists, artists and creative thinkers - explore exactly what it means to think in the new age of the Internet: from Nicholas Carr's reflections on what the Internet is doing to our brains, to Richard Dawkins's sanguine assessment of its long-term potential for good; and from Clay Shirky's assessment of the impact of the Internet on the dissemination and sharing of knowledge, to Ian and Joel Gold's observations on the seismic social changes it has brought about. Editor John Brockman has assembled a world-class array of contributors, which includes (in addition to those mentioned above) Daniel C. Dennett, Martin Rees, Steven Pinker, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sean Carroll, Brian Eno, Douglas Coupland, Matt Ridley, and scores of others at the epicentre of research in their respective disciplines.

Paris and London have long held a mutual fascination, and never more so than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they both vied to be the world's greatest city. Each city has been the focus of many books, yet here Jonathan Conlin uncovers the intriguing relationship between them for the first time. It is a history of surprises: Sherlock Holmes was actually French, the can-can was English and the first restaurant served English food in Paris. Tales of Two Cities examines and compares six urban spaces - the street, the cemetery, the apartment, the restaurant, the music hall and the nocturnal underworld. The citizens of Paris and London were the first to create these landmarks of the modern cityscape. By borrowing, imitating and learning from each other they invented the modern metropolis and so defined urban living for us all.

The thrilling story of the last, and greatest, generation of steam railway locomotives in regular main line service: a story of invention, skill and passion, Giants of Steam reveals how the true advocates of steam's glory days pushed its design and performance to remarkable limits, taking these powerful and beautifully designed machines to new heights against a backdrop of the political upheavals and military conflicts of the mid twentieth century. Glancey tells the stories of the greatest of the 'steam men', the charismatic engineers who designed these machines and put them to use. Giants of Steam also reveals how steam design has continued to progress against the odds in recent decades, while enthusiasm for the steam locomotive itself is far from burning out.

Snowdrops. That's what the Russians call them - the bodies that float up into the light in the thaw. Drunks, most of them, and homeless people who just give up and lie down into the whiteness, and murder victims hidden in the drifts by their killers. Nick has a confession. When he worked as a high-flying British lawyer in Moscow, he was seduced by Masha, an enigmatic woman who led him through her city: the electric nightclubs and intimate dachas, the human kindnesses and state-wide corruption. Y et as Nick fell for Masha, he found that he fell away from himself; he knew that she was dangerous, but life in Russia was addictive, and it was too easy to bury secrets - and corpses - in the winter snows...

This is the debut of 2011: A stunning novel of moral ambiguity, uncertainty and corruption in Moscow. ""Snowdrops" assaults all your senses with its power and poetry, and leaves you stunned and addicted". ("Independent"). Snowdrops. That's what the Russians call them - the bodies that float up into the light in the thaw. Drunks, most of them, and homeless people who just give up and lie down into the whiteness, and murder victims hidden in the drifts by their killers. Nick has a confession. When he worked as a high-flying British lawyer in Moscow, he was seduced by Masha, an enigmatic woman who led him through her city: the electric nightclubs and intimate dachas, the human kindnesses and state-wide corruption. Yet as Nick fell for Masha, he found that he fell away from himself; he knew that she was dangerous, but life in Russia was addictive, and it was too easy to bury secrets - and corpses - in the winter snows...This title is suitable for readers of William Boyd, James Meek's "People's Act of Love", Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger", John le Carre and Robert Harris.

After the critical and commercial success of her Orange Prize-shortlisted novel, Foreign Bodies (2012), Atlantic Books is proud to republish what is widely considered to be Cynthia Ozick's masterpiece, The Messiah of Stockholm Lars Andeming, perhaps overly intellectual and certainly eccentric, is the Monday book reviewer for a Stockholm daily. He is also the self-proclaimed son of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer who was executed by the Nazis before his last novel, The Messiah, could be published. When a manuscript of The Messiah mysteriously appears in Stockholm, in the possession of Schulz's 'daughter', Lars's circumscribed world of paper, apartment, and favorite bookstore turns upside down, catapulting him into a whirlwind of dream, magic, and illusion.

A New York Times bestseller, Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore is an entirely charming and lovable first novel of mysterious books and dusty bookshops; it is a witty and delightful love-letter to both the old book world and the new. Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone - and serendipity, coupled with sheer curiosity, has landed him a new job working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead they simply borrow impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he's embarked on a complex analysis of the customers' behaviour and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what's going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore...It is suitable for readers of Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y, Helen Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road and Jasper Fforde's First Among Sequels.

Why Steve Was Late is a book of hilarious (and even - occasionally - plausible!) reasons for tardiness, handily dreamed up by someone else. Here are 101 real corkers for you to enjoy. And maybe even borrow...* Overcome by the urge to alphabetise my pets * Forgot how trousers work * Became temporarily feral * Got stuck in a romantic montage.

In this book Steven Parissien examines the impact, development and significance of the automobile over its turbulent and colourful 130-year history. He tells the story of the auto, and of its creators, from its earliest appearance in the 1880s - as little more than a powered quadricycle - via the early pioneer carmakers, the advances of the interwar era, the 'Golden Age' of the 1950s and the iconic years of the 1960s to the decades of doubt and uncertainty following the oil crisis of 1973, which culminated in the global mergers of the 1990s and the bailouts of the early twenty-first century. This is not just a story of horsepower and performance. The Life of the Automobile is a tale of people: of intuitive carmakers such as Benz, Agnelli, Royce and Citroen; of exceptionally gifted designers such as Issigonis, Lefebvre, Michelotti and Bangle; and of visionary industrialists such as Ford, Tata and Porsche. Above all, The Life of the Automobile demonstrates how the epic story of the car mirrors the history of the modern era, from the brave hopes and soaring ambitions of the early twentieth century to the cynicism and ecological concerns of a century later.

The lotus, lily, sunflower, opium poppy, rose, tulip and orchid. Seven flowers: seven stories full of surprise and secrets. Where and when did these flowers originate? What is the nature of their power and how was it acquired? What use has been made of them in gardens, literature and art? These are both histories and detective stories, full of incident, unexpected revelations, and irony. The opium poppy, for example, returned to haunt its progenitors in the West; and while Confucius saw virtue and modesty in his native orchids, the ancient Greeks saw only sex. These are flowers of life and death; of purity and passion; of greed, envy and virtue; of hope and consolation; of the beauty that drives men wild. All seven demonstrate the enduring ability of flowers to speak metaphorically - if we could only decode what they have to say.

This is the phenomenal international bestseller, now in paperback. 'A treat for the mind. One of the best books I have read in a long time' - Isabel Allende.Raimund Gregorius is a mild-mannered, middle-aged professor of ancient languages. One morning, as he is teaching, he is seized by a restlessness that drives him to abandon his classroom then and there - shocking his students, and surprising even himself. His unusual impulsiveness is driven by two chance encounters - with a mysterious Portuguese woman in a red coat; and with a book he finds hidden in a dusty corner of a second-hand bookshop, the journal of an enigmatic Portuguese aristocrat, Amadeu de Prado.With the book as his talisman, Raimund boards the night train to Lisbon on a journey to find out more about Prado, whose words haunt and compel him. Gradually, a picture of an extraordinary man emerges: a difficult, brilliant, charismatic figure, a doctor and a poet, and a rebel against Salazar's dictatorship. And as Prado's story comes to light so, too, Gregorius himself begins his life anew. Hurtling through the dark, "Night Train to Lisbon" is a rich tale, wonderfully told, propelled by the mystery at its heart.

Since the 1950s, Herman Leonard's photographs of jazz musicians have been crucial in shaping the image of the music and the world in which it was created. Leonard's friendships with jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis gave him rare access to the innovators who made modern jazz and the places in which they made it. Leonard took his camera into the smoky clubs and after-hours sessions, to backstage parties and musicians' apartments, to build an incomparable visual record of one of the twentieth century's most significant art forms. His luminous images of Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and many others, both in performance and "off duty," are at once supreme examples of the photographer's art and a unique record of a musical revolution. For this definitive collection of his work, Leonard has retrieved scores of previously unseen photographs, published here for the first time, alongside his most famous and widely recognized images. Accompanied by an essay exploring the stories behind the pictures, and an interview with Leonard revealing his techniques, "Jazz" captures and preserves the glory days of the music that has been called "the sound of surprise."

Marc Schlosser is a doctor to the rich and famous. When his most famous patient, the actor Ralph Meier, invites him and his family on holiday, Marc finds that he can't refuse. But by the time the suntans fade, Ralph Meier is dead. The medical board accuses Marc of negligence. Ralph's wife, however, accuses him of murder...