Random House strana 3 z 44

Romulus and Fabiola are twins, born into slavery after their mother is raped by a drunken nobleman on his way home from a good night out. At 13 years old, they and their mother are sold: Romulus to gladiator school, Fabiola into prostitution, where she will catch the eye of one of the most powerful men in Rome, and their mother into obscurity and death in the salt mines. Tarquinius is an Etruscan, a warrior and soothsayer, born enemy of Rome, but doomed to fight for the Republic in the Forgotten Legion. Brennus is a Gaul; the Romans killed his entire family. He rises to become one of the most famous and feared gladiators of his day ndash; and mentor to the boy slave, Romulus, who dreams night and day of escape and of revenge. The lives of these four characters are bound and interwoven in a marvellous story which begins in a Rome riven by corruption, violence and political enmities, but ends far away, where Romulus, Brennus and Tarquinius find themselves fighting against the Parthians and overwhelming odds.

Jackie Malone has been murdered. Her body lies in a pool of blood in the North London flat where she worked as a prostitute. Deep knife wounds have been gouged into the corpse and the hands and feet are tied with coat hanger wire. For Detective Inspector Jack Delaney this is no ordinary case. He knew Jackie and she left desperate messages on his answer phone just hours before she was killed. There are no immediate leads and no obvious suspects, but the fear in Jackie's voice tells Delaney that this was no random act of violence. As Delaney tries to track down the killer, suspicions are raised about the nature of his relationship with the dead woman. His tough and uncompromising attitude has made him some powerful enemies on the force, and he soon finds himself caught in a deadly fight to clear his name.

When The Emperor of Ocean Park was published, the Observer declared: 'The book is superb, both as a thriller and as a novel of social observation.' Now, with that same astute social observation, narrative drive, and richness of plot and character, Stephen Carter returns us to the New England university town of Elm Harbor, where the murder of a renowned African-American economist opens a door on the racial complications of the town's past, on one family's secrets, and on the most hidden and powerful bastions of African-American political influence. At the centre are Lemaster and Julia Carlyle. He is president of the university, she is a dean at the divinity school ndash; African-Americans living in 'the heart of whiteness'. Lemaster's connections lead to the President of the United States, his old college room-mate. Julia is connected to the dead man, Kellen Zant, her lover before she met Lemaster. The meeting point of these connections ndash; a murder committed and covered up in Elm Harbor thirty years ago, and the shocking plans carried out by a fraternity of the 'darker nation' ndash; forms the core of a mystery that deepens even as Julia, guided by clues left her by Zant, closes in on the politically earth-shattering motive behind his murder. Suspenseful from first to last, galvanising in its exploration of the profound difference between allegiance to ideas and to people, New England White is a resounding confirmation of Stephen Carter's gifts as a writer of fiction.

Just when Karen and Joe Eastman thought they had it all the perfect marriage and the perfect family they learn that their young son, Ben, has a terminal illness. The only cure is for them to have a designer baby to provide him with a perfect match bone-marrow transplant. But in the process, a devastating family secret is revealed that not only jeopardises the one hope of their son having a future but also threatens to destroy their marriage...

This haunting, poignant and addictive story travels effortlessly across three generations and through time. Unravelling the years from the present to the 1950s, The Third Angel is a compelling novel, set mainly in London, about girls and women who make the wrong choices and have to live with the sometimes unbearable consequences. The Third Angel opens in London in the present day, when an envious sibling comes to her sister's wedding. Their mother's illness cast a shadow over their childhood, and both Madeline and Allie are still searching for something missing in their lives. Back in the Swinging Sixties, the bridegroom's conventional English mother, Frieda, behaves in a wholly unconventional way, and the ghosts of that era still haunt all their lives and a Knightsbridge hotel. Even before that, the seeds of tragedy are sown in the Fifties, when twelve-year-old Lucy first visits London and the same hotel. Precocious, impatient, wise beyond her years, Lucy becomes a go-between for two star-crossed lovers and then holds herself agonisingly responsible for what happens...

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg – an awkward maths prodigy and a painfully shy computer genius – were never going to fit in at elite, polished Harvard. Yet that all changed when master-hacker Mark crashed the university’s entire computer system by cre

Sophie Apperly has spent her whole life pleasing others – but when she realises her family see her less as indispensable treasure and more as general dogsbody, she decides she’s had enough.So when an old friend offers her the chance of a lifetime, she decides to swap Little England for the Big Apple, and heads off to the land of opportunity. From the moment Sophie hits the bright lights of Manhattan she’s determined to enjoy every minute of her big adventure.And when fate throws her together with Matilda, a spirited grande dame of New York society who invites her to Connecticut for Thanksgiving, she willingly accepts.English-born Matilda is delighted with her new friend – though her grandson Luke, undeniably attractive but infuriatingly arrogant, is anything but welcoming. When Luke arrives in England a few weeks later, Sophie hardly expects him to seek her out.But Matilda has hatched some complicated plans of her own – and so Luke has a proposal to make …

An international bestseller and French publishing sensation Consolation is a dazzling, heartbreaking tale of one man, two remarkable women and an unforgettable transvestite.Charles Balanda is forty-seven; a successful architect, he is constantly on the move. But from the moment he hears about the death of the woman he once loved.

An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation to the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

The pieces collected together in Memory Chalet range from the personal to the political and professional, by turns witty, poignant and devastatingly honest and affecting. In 'Edge People', Judt movingly discusses his lack of national identity. In 'Cars', we learn on his father's obsession with being head of a 'Citreon family'. 'Work' details why he always knew he'd be a historian; 'Girls' tells the story of how he met his first wife, and 'Revolutionaries' reminisces about The Beatles, London during the swinging '60s, and what it all meant. Memory Chalet also features 'Night', Judt's harrowing account of life with motor neurone disease, which was a sensation when first published by the New York Times (and then the Guardian) in Spring 2010.

One cold January day the police are called to a sleepy little hamlet in the north of Sweden where they discover a savagely murdered man lying in the snow. As they begin their investigation they notice that the village seems eerily quiet and deserted. Going from house to house, looking for witnesses, they uncover a crime unprecedented in Swedish history. When Judge Birgitta Roslin reads about the massacre, she realises that she has a family connection to one of the couples involved and decides to investigate. A nineteenth-century diary and a red silk ribbon found in the forest nearby are the only clues. What Birgitta eventually uncovers leads her into an international web of corruption and a story of vengeance that stretches back over a hundred years, linking China and the USA of the 1860s with modern-day Beijing, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and coming to a shocking climax in London’s Chinatown. The Man from Beijing is both a gripping and perceptive political thriller and a compelling detective story. It shows Henning Mankell at the height of his powers, handling a broad historical canvas and pressing international issues with his exceptional gifts for insight and chilling suspense.

Celebrated as one of the greatest writers of his generation, Javier Mar as is best known for his spy trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, which has been compared to Proust and hailed as one of the great modern European novels. In his first short story collection for fifteen years, expertly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, he brings together tales which span his entire writing career from the 1960s to the present day. Mar as' characters are slippery, and live on the edges of society: a tramp, a butler, a bodyguard, a ghost. They threaten the normal, rational world, and, compelled by desperation, are driven to perverse acts of obsession. In the title story an obscenely fat man fixated with his much younger lover endlessly videotapes her every move, and, in a chance midnight rendezvous, confides his shocking plans for her to a stranger; in 'The Resignation Letter of Se or of Santiesteban' a ghost is condemned to repeatedly resign from his job; and, in perhaps the most perfectly conceived story, when a man of impeccable taste and refinement meets his doppelg nger at a work dinner ('it was like dining opposite mirror made flesh'), he starts changing his dress and behaviour, in ways he previously would have abhorred, to mark the difference, only to find, at the next work convention, that his ghoulish twin has done exactly the same. Mesmerising, unexpected and disturbing, these creepy, haunting stories undermine the ordinary, and inspire the reader to look at the normal things of life aslant.

The five narratives which make up this posthumous collection draw upon William Styron's experiences in the US Marine Corps, giving the reader an insight into the early life of one of America's greatest modern writers.

The fourth novel featuring Jackson Brodie from the No.1 bestselling author of When Will There Be Good News?, winner of Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadnt bargained for. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracys humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn. Witnesses to Tracys Faustian exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie who has returned to his home county in search of someone elses roots. All three characters learn that the past is never history and that no good deed goes unpunished. Kate Atkinson dovetails and counterpoints her plots with Dickensian brilliance in a tale peopled with unlikely heroes and villains . Started Early, Took My Dog is freighted with wit, wisdom and a fierce moral intelligence. It confirms Kate Atkinsons position as one of the great writers of our time.

When Travis Boyette, a convicted felon, walks into a church in small-town Missouri, he carries with him a terrible secret. Nearly a decade earlier Nicole Yarber, a high school senior with her whole life ahead of her, vanished. For two weeks, her home town

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed init