Bloomsbury Publishing strana 4 z 87

Twelve-year-old Harriet is doing her best to grow up, which is not easy as her mother is permanently on medication, her father has silently moved to another city, and her serene sister rarely notices anything. All of them are still suffering from the shocking and mysterious death of her brother Robin twelve years earlier, and it seems to Harriet that the family may never recover. So, inspired by Captain Scott, Houdini, and Robert Louis Stevenson, she sets out with her only friend Hely to find Robin's murderer and punish him. But what starts out as a child's game soon becomes a dark and dangerous journey into the menacing underworld of a small Mississippi town.

The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise

Father Christmas, a sickly Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, an elf who gets locked in the workshop, the story of the birth of Jesus ...the list goes on in this wonderful volume of stories for young readers all about Christmas. Lavishly illustrated througho

The world is populated by some beastly dragons who care nothing for how much they pollute the oceans, chop down the trees, gobble up all the food and use everything up without stopping to think. Those dragons need to wake up to what they are doing to their world before it is too late ...An energy-filled picture book that addresses concerns about the environment in the most child-centric and delightful way possible.

An inescapable black pit, an innocent buried alive, and the deranged hallucinations of a murderer all haunt this collection of Edgar Allan Poe's most celebrated stories. The undisputed master of gothic horror, Poe probes every imaginable depth of terror in his claustrophobic nightmares of murder and madness, including the classic 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. Just as disturbing are the tales featuring the eccentric and ingenious Auguste Dupin - the first modern detective hero. In these chilling stories, Edgar Allan Poe's macabre imagination explores the darkest corners of the human mind and the furthest reaches of the paranormal.

In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this? He wonders August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, "Burnt Shadows" is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

The shocking thing about the girls was how nearly normal they seemed when their mother let them out for the one and only date of their lives. Twenty years on, their enigmatic personalities are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who now recall their shared adolescence: the brassiere draped over a crucifix belonging to the promiscuous Lux; the sisters' breathtaking appearance on the night of the dance; and the sultry, sleepy street across which they watched a family disintegrate and fragile lives disappear.

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County - to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto - pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River - John Irving's twelfth novel - depicts the recent half-century in the United States as 'a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course'. From the novel's taut opening sentence - 'The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long' - to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving's breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp. What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice - the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: 'We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly - as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth - the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives'.

WINNER of the 2010 Cilip Carnegie Medal, the Newbery Medal and the Booktrust Teenage Book Prize 2009, and shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Award Adult edition of Neil Gaiman's highly anticipated new novel, stunningly illustrated by Gaiman's long-time collaborator, Dave McKean.

Alice Schroeder

In a rural backwater in Wisconsin lies the rambling estate of Taliesin. Here tempestuous affairs rage behind closed doors broken hearts are tossed aside and fires have ripped through the wings of the house. Paparazzi lie in wait outside the front door hounding for the latest scandal the latest tragedy in this never-ending drama. For this is the home of the great architect of the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright a man of extremes in both his work and his private life: at once a force of nature - arrogant and infuriating - and an avalanche of need and emotion that sweeps aside everything in its path. This is the story of the wives and mistresses who fall under Frank\'s spell. There is the delusional Kitty his first wife convinced that his affair with the defiant Mamah can\'t possibly last. There is Miriam his crazed demented second wife hell-bent on wreaking revenge most public and most vicious after the bitter demise of their marriage. And there is Oglivanna the Serbian immigrant who waits with Frank in constant terror for the next wave of desolation from Miriam as she stalks them at every turn unleashing a torrent of sheriffs immigration officials bankers lawyers and journalists. Sharp savage and subtle in equal measure The Women plumbs the chaos horrors and uncontainable passions of a fascinating American icon.

Ava Gardner was the sex symbol who dazzled the other sex symbols. Elizabeth Taylor and Lana Turner thought her the most beautiful woman they had ever seen. She drove Frank Sinatra to the brink of suicide. Ernest Hemingway carried around one of her kidney stones as a sacred memento. Howard Hughes begged her to marry him: she punched out his front teeth. Her charismatic presence, jaw-dropping beauty and scandalous adventures fuelled the legend that she became. Yet she was a farmgirl who became a reluctant goddess, and who retreated from the world's gaze for the last years of her life. Filled with fresh insights gleaned from interviews with Ava's colleagues, friends and lovers, this is the definitive biography of Hollywood's most glamorous, restless and uninhibited star.

Jess and Fred are finally an 'item'. They have spent the remainder of their summer holidays just as they planned to, creating some fabulous comedy routines together. Until one fateful morning in the park just before term starts when Fred casually mentions

This is a story of persecution and poetry, love and war set in thirteenth century southern France. A troubadour, Bertran, witnesses the brutal murder of the Pope's legate, and risks his life to warn others of the war that he knows is certain to follow thi

Since their takeover of Obernewtyn, Elspeth and the Misfits have been preparing for the inevitable confrontation with the Council - developing their forbidden mental abilities so they are ready for battle. But in the midst of plans to rescue a powerful Mi