Atlantic Books strana 29 z 32

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

CC is trapped by a job she no longer loves in an unfriendly city. So when her new boyfriend decides it's time to sell up and move to the South of France, she decides in seconds to change her life. After all, who wouldn't pick an azure sea, aperitifs and sunshine over a dreary commute and a rainy climate? She hadn't expected a tumbledown farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Or a motley assortment of surly builders, eccentric farmers and a resentful, terrifying neighbour - who happens to be her boyfriend's aunt. Suddenly, CC's dream of a place in the sun is looking more like a nightmare. Does she have the courage to stick it out, and make a home of her French house?

In Crybbe, only strangers walk at twilight...For four hundred years, the curfew bell has tolled nightly from the church tower of the small country town, Crybbe's only defence against the evil rising unbidden in its haunted streets. Radio reporter Fay Morrison came to Crybbe because she had no choice. Millionaire music tycoon Max Goff came because there was nothing left to conquer, except the power of the spirit. But he knew nothing of the town's legacy of dark magic - and nobody felt like telling him...

Hercules is a dachshund, and his new mistress Caroline is the greatest human being on earth. She's the one who rescued him from the animal shelter, who smells of summer and strawberries, and who laughs when the little pup snuggles up with her on the sofa. So when Caroline is badly treated by her bossy, dog-hating boyfriend, Hercules decides it's high time he rescued his mistress for a change. And so begins an epic quest to find his favourite woman the perfect man. Touching, original, and very funny, Puppy Love is a story about love, life, and the best friend a girl could ever have.

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.

This title is now a major film. Pascal Mercier's haunting novel of the paths not taken, the choices not made, the lives not lived, "Night Train to Lisbon" has captured the hearts of readers across Europe, with over two million copies sold worldwide. "Night Train to Lisbon" follows Raimund Gregorius, a 57-year-old Classics scholar, on a journey that takes him across Europe. Abandoning his job and his life and travelling with a dusty old book as his talisman, he heads for Lisbon in search of clues to the life of the book's Portuguese author, Amadeu de Prado. As he gets swept up in his quest, he finds that the journey is also one of self-discovery, as he re-encounters all the decisions he has made - and not made - in his life, and faces the roads not travelled. It is suitable for fans of the film, readers of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's "Shadow of the Wind", Nicole Krauss' "The History of Love", or Isabelle Allende's "The House of Spirits".

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.

For the reader who has lain awake fretting over his tenuous grasp of the Critiques of Immanuel Kant, or his unformed sense of the line of thought that descends from Hegel through Marx to 20th-century Soviet state socialism, or who struggles to call to mind the key strands in the thinking of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida - help is at hand. It comes in the comfortingly accessible form of Stephen Trombley's Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World, a concise history of modern thought from the Enlightenment to the present day. Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World opens with a substantial introduction that outlines the history of human ideas from the philosophers of classical Antiquity to the European eighteenth century, via the Christian scholastics of the Middle Ages and the development of Renaissance thought, culminating in the philosophy of Descartes and the development of scientific method. Having thus set the scene, Stephen Trombley traces the development of modern thought through a sequence of accessible profiles of the most influential thinkers in every domain of intellectual endeavour since 1789. No major representative of any significant strand of post-Enlightenment thought escapes Trombley's attention: the German idealists Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham and Mill; the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; Kierkegaard and the existentialists; founder sof new fields of inquiry such as Weber, Durkheim and C.S. Peirce; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore, Whitehead and Wittgenstein; political leaders from Mohandas K. Gandhi to Adolf Hitler; and - last but not least - the four shapers-in-chief of our modern world: the philosopher, historian and political theorist Karl Marx; the naturalist Charles Darwin, proposer of the theory of evolution; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; and the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, begetter of the special and general theories of relativity and founder of post-Newtonian physics."

21st Century Mumbai is a city of new money and soaring real estate, and property kingpin Dharmen Shah has grand plans for its future. His offer to buy and tear down a weathered tower block, making way for luxury apartments, will make each of its residents rich - if all agree to sell. But not everyone wants to leave, many of the residents have lived there for a lifetime, many of them are no longer young. As tensions rise among the once civil neighbours, one by one those who oppose the offer give way to the majority, until only one man stands in Shah's way: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher, once the most respected man in the building. Shah is a dangerous man to refuse, but as the demolition deadline looms, Masterji's neighbours - friends who have become enemies, acquaintances turned co-conspirators - may stop at nothing to score their payday...