Picador strana 2 z 18

The Brighton to London line. The 07:44 train. Carriages packed with commuters. A woman applies her make-up. Another occupies her time observing the people around her. A husband and wife share an affectionate gesture. Further along, a woman flicks through

Cosmopolis is Don DeLillo's 13th novel. His reputation as one of the most provocative and innovative of American writers is assured, thanks to such books as Underworld and Americana, but this new outing is as likely to challenge the author's legion o f admirers as much as it will exhilarate them--and there's nothing wrong with that. DeLillo's protagonist this time is a well-heeled American, Eric Packer, who sets out one eventful day for a haircut. Gazing through the windows of his white limousine (and availing himself of its state-of-the-art technology), this self-made millionaire takes in the spectacle of financiers being murdered, the funeral of a rapper and some violent anti-globalisation protests. As we come to know DeLillo's anti-hero, we realise that Eric Packer is by no means the most ingratiating of individuals. Cheating on his new wife, he specialises in using people in a cynical and exploitative way. And as this self-serving captain of industry takes an ever-more dangerous jou rney through a bizarrely rendered New York, it's inevitable that comparisons with Tom Wolfe's classic Bonfire of the Vanities will spring to mind. Resemblances of plot aside, however, the book is a very different animal. Wolfe's narrative had the epi c spread of a latter-day War and Peace, whereas DeLillo sharpens and condenses his prose in Cosmopolis to produce an altogether more concise novel. There are two ways to approach Cosmopolis: as a rudely pointed dissection of the American Dream, or as a surreal, symbolic (and disturbing) road trip. This is not a comforting book, but a bracing and caustic one. --Barry Forshaw--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Lily's epilepsy means she's used to seeing the world in terms of angles -- you look at every surface, you weigh up every corner, and you think of your head slamming into it -- but what would she be like without her sharp edges? Prickly, spiky, up-fro nt honest and down-to-earth practical, Lily is thirty, and life's not easy but she gets by. Needing no-one and asking for nothing, it's just her and her epilepsy: her constant companion. But then her mother -- who Lily's not seen for years -- dies, a nd Lily is drawn back into a world she thought she'd long since left behind. Forced to renegotiate the boundaries of her life, she realises she has alot to learn -- about relationships, about the past, and about herself -- and some difficult decision s ahead of her. 'An eviscerating debut novel ...Its fast, furious plot, kaleidoscopic imagery, blunt observations and a wry, ingenuous, hugely compassionate heroine make Electricity a breathtaking assault on the senses' Guardian 'An energetic debut, bristling with talent ...It's black, savage, funny and rather uncomfortably haunting' The Times 'Ray Robinson's Electricity is a thorny, uncompromising novel, with attitude. It is also -- thanks to Lily O'Connor, its sharp-edged, hard-living, tough-t alking narrator -- mesmerising, uplifting and unexpectedly tender' JIM CRACE

It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Tóibín, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of succ ess. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclips ed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States-including the suicide of his father and the tr agic early death of his troubled sister Alice-to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English man servant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, high ly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction. The subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond p raise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true. Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life.

The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightcl ub in New York's history, he's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. Now it's time to move tothe next stage. But the future he gets is not he one he had in mind.

Moscow, 1929: a city that has lost its way amid corruption and fear, inhabited by people who have abandoned their morals and forsaken spirituality. But when a mysterious stranger arrives in town with a bizarre entourage that includes a giant talking cat and a fanged assassin, all hell breaks loose. Among those caught up in the strange and inexplicable events that transpire in the capital are the Master, a writer whose life has been destroyed by Soviet repression, and his beloved Margarita. Their adventures reveal a story that began two thousand years ago in ancient Jerusalem '" and its resolution will decide their fate.

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer." So beg ins Alice Sebold's stunning debut novel. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope. Her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, and do all the thin gs she never had the chance to do herselfbut life is not quite finished with Susie yet. This is a luminous novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting, and about finding light in the darkest of places."Painfully funn y, bracingly tough, terribly sad, it is a feat of imagination and a tribute to the healing power of grief."Michael Chabon

A father and his young son walk alone through burned and ruined America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind and those living off it, or trying to. They have nothing but a pistol to defend the mselves against the surviving stalkers of the road, the clothes they are wearing, a shopping cart of scavenged food and each other, living out a poetic nightmare that is both heartless and heartfelt.

This is a masterly work from one of our greatest writers. On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey - to receive his brother's remains, but also into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie's past. "Wish You Were Here" is both a gripping account of things that touch and test our human core and a resonant novel about a changing England. Rich with Graham Swift's love of the local, full of humour and tend erness in the face of tragedy, it is also, inescapably, about a wider, afflicted world. Moving towards an almost unbearably tense climax, it allows us to feel the stuff of headlines - the return of a dead soldier from a foreign war - as heart-wrenchi ng personal truth.

Helen Knightly has spent a lifetime trying to win the love of a mother who had none to spare. And as this electrifying novel opens, she steps over a boundary she never dreamt she would even approach. But while her act is almost unconscious, it also seems like the fulfilment of a lifetime's buried desire. Over the next twenty-four hours, her life rushes in at her as she confronts the choices that have brought her to this crossroads. 'Sebold writes brilliantly ...The Almost Moon is a mature, salutary and timely novel' Helen Dunmore, The Times 'Exhilarating, unforgettable ...This is a remarkable novel in which every word is vital, each nuance felt ...Candid, gut-wrenching, at times horribly funny and often beautifully touching ...The genius which guides The Almost Moon is its absolute, horrible, multiple truths; its staggering clarity' Irish Times 'As moving as it is unquestionably gripping' Observer

The lord of horses and cowboys follows a modern-day Texas manhunt -- and a botched drug deal -- in this hard-boiled cinematic thriller.

First published in 2006, Mother's Milk is the fourth novel in the critically acclaimed Patrick Melrose series. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year and won the 2007 Prix Femina Etranger and the 2007 South Bank Literature Award. The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril. Patrick Melrose, caught in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing and adultery, can only look on as his wife is consumed by motherhood and his mother is consumed by a New Age foundation. Only Patrick's five-year-old son Robert understands, and far more than he ought. Acerbically witty, disarmingly tender, Mother's Milk goes to the core of a family trapped in the remains of its ever-present past. In 2012 Picador celebrates its 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.

First published in 1985, White Noise won the National Book Award. It is now regarded as a classic of postmodern literature. Jack Gladney is a pioneering professor in the field of Hitler Studies at the bucolic Midwestern College-on-the-Hill. Married five times, he has a brood of children and stepchildren with his current wife, Babette. Over the course of an absurd, tragic year, Jack and Babette will each be forced to confront the question that keeps them awake at night: who will die first? In 2012 Picador celebrates its 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.

Even before its publication in 1991, American Psycho captured the attention and imagination of readers. Now an acknowledged modern classic and a multimillion-copy bestseller, it continues to be one of the most talked-about books of all time. A film based on the novel, starring Christian Bale, was released in 2000. Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America's greatest dream and its worst nightmare American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront. In 2012 Picador celebrates its 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.

A huge critical success on first publication in 2004, the novel went on to win that year's Man Booker Prize. It was adapted for television and broadcast on BBC2 in 2006. It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. As the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, while pursuing his own private obsession, with beauty a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. In 2012 Picador celebrates its 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.

All the Pretty Horses, the first novel of the Border Trilogy, published in 1992, was an international bestseller, winning both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It tells the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself the last bewildered survivor of generations of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he ever imagined. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. In 2012 Picador celebrates its 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.