Random House strana 47 z 51

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.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE - NOW AN HBO MINISERIES At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive's own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life-sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition-its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires. Praise for "Olive Kitteridge" "Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout's unforgettable novel in stories." "-O: The Oprah Magazine " "Fiction lovers, remember this name: "Olive Kitteridge." . . . You'll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. . . . Glorious, powerful stuff." "-USA Today" "Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she's not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her." -"San Francisco Chronicle" ""Olive Kitteridge" still lingers in memory like a treasured photograph." "-Seattle Post-Intelligencer" "Rarely does a story collection pack such a gutsy emotional punch." "-Entertainment Weekly" "Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. . . . [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air." "-The New Yorker"

These five stories remind us that Welsh is a master of the shorter form, a brilliant storyteller and, unarguably, one of the funniest and filthiest writers alive. In Rattlesnakes, when three young Americans find themselves lost in the desert, how is it that one find himself performing fallatio on another while being watched by the bare-breasted Madeline and two armed Mexicans? Who is the mysterious Korean chef who has moved in with Chicago socialite Kendra Cross, in The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park, and what does he have to do with the disappearance of her faithful pooch, Toto? In the title story, can Mickey Baker, an English bar-owner on the Costa Brava, manage to keep all his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid Teresa´s body weight at the sexual maximum while attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his persistent ex-wife and a pair of Spanish gangsters? In Miss Arizona, Raymond Wilson Butler is writing a biography of a legendary U.S. movie director. By what train of events does he end up as a piece of movie memorabilia? And how, in The Kingdom of Fife, will Jason King - diminutive ex-trainee jockey and Subbuteo star of Cowdenbeath- fare in the world of middle-class female equestrians? From the Trade Paperback edition.

Young Robinson Crusoe has a burning ambition to be a sailor. Paying no attention to his parents' warnings he runs away to sea to embark on a series of thrilling adventures: struggles with Barbary pirates, a shipwreck and the extraordinary meeting with Man Friday...Roy Marsden plays the older Robinson Crusoe looking back on a life of recklessness, daring and adventure - and the survival of twenty-eight years, two months and nineteen days on a desert island. Based on the real-life adventures of Alexander Selkirk, Robinson Crusoe was one of the very first adventure stories to be published in English literature. It remains as gripping today as it did on first publication in 1719, and this enthralling dramatisation perfectly evokes the excitement and adventure of the original book.

Bernadette Saint Clare is an FBI agent with a difference: she has an unerring but uncanny knack for apprehending killers. Her ability makes her a dangerous maverick in the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Her reward is a backwater posting to Minnesota, but on her very first day a mutilated body is found: the killing is the work of a vigilante killer intent on settling old scores. Soon more bodies appear up and down the Mississippi. All are evildoers who have preyed on the innocent. Forensic investigation is too slow for the dizzying sequence of events that now take place. Bernadette is catapulted from the heart-stopping sequence of slayings into a chase where stalker and prey swap places and where she will be taken to the very brink of sanity.

Born without social instincts many people take for granted, brought up in a troubled environment and possessed with an extraordinary musical talent, Mike Oldfield was thrust into the spotlight at the tender age of nineteen. His first album Tubular Be lls went on to sell fifteen million copies worldwide and catapulted him into a stardom he was ill equipped to cope with. From growing up with an alcoholic mother, to his feelings of alienation and struggles with depression, this book takes Mike from his early years, through his staggering fame, his broken marriages, years as a recluse, his rebirth experience at a controversial Exegesis seminar and beyond. Mike Oldfield has been on a journey few of us could ever imagine, and offers a message of h ope to anybody who feels they live on the edge of society.

Sarajevo, 2003. Best friends Frito and Bannerman roll into town, still in search of the fortune they missed out on in the dot-com years. For a while it seems that soaking up reconstruction money isn't the worst plan ever. But then they both meet Clare, a prosecutor with the international war crimes tribunal, and they both realise she is the best person they've has ever met, and that they can't both have her as much as they would, ideally, like. Meanwhile the city is awash with black marketeers, poker hustlers, intelligence officers, and expat hedonist, and by the time Frito and Bannerman have started bounty hunting men accused of war crimes, their lives have taken on all the risk - but very little of the money - that they'd bargained for...

Sarajevo, 2003. Best friends Frito and Bannerman roll into town, still in search of the fortune they missed out on in the dot-com years. For a while it seems that soaking up reconstruction money isn't the worst plan ever. But then they both meet Clare, a prosecutor with the international war crimes tribunal, and they both realise she is the best person they've has ever met, and that they can't both have her as much as they would, ideally, like. Meanwhile the city is awash with black marketeers, poker hustlers, intelligence officers, and expat hedonist, and by the time Frito and Bannerman have started bounty hunting men accused of war crimes, their lives have taken on all the risk - but very little of the money - that they'd bargained for...

An early novel from the great rediscovered Hungarian writer Sandor Marai," The Rebels" is a haunting story of a group of alienated boys on the cusp of adult life and possibly death during World War I. It is the summer of 1918, and four boys approaching graduation are living in a ghost town bereft of fathers, uncles, and older brothers, who are off fighting at the front. The boys know they will very soon be sent to join their elders, and in their final weeks of freedom they begin acting out their frustrations and fears in a series of subversive games and petty thefts. But when they attract the attention of a stranger in town an actor with a traveling theater company their games, and their lives, begin to move in a direction they could not have predicted and cannot control, and one that reveals them to be strangers to one another. Resisting and defying adulthood, they find themselves still subject to its baffling power even in their attempted rebellion."

Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and ndash; most extraordinary of all ndash; he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now ndash; the war took it away. Maybe it took him, too. Before Hitler and the bombs he was a boy in Staffordshire, helpless to defend his mother, to resist his abusive father. The RAF gave him order, skills, another family and a way to be a man. It taught him how to burn through lifetimes on night ops and brief, sweet leaves, surviving the unsurvivable. But it didn't prepare him for capture, for the prison camp and the chaos as the war wound down. It didn't prepare him for an empty peace. Now it's 1949 and Alfred is doing the impossible again, winding back time to see where he lost himself. He has taken the role of an extra in a POW film. Shipped out to Germany and an ersatz camp, he picks his way through the clicheacute;s that will become all that's left of his war and begins to do what he's never dared ndash; to remember. He is looking for some semblance of hope: trying to move forward by going back. A superbly realised novel about the brutal simplicities of war ndash; of horror, and the camaraderie found in the closeness to death ndash; and a moving exploration of the complexities of human emotion, Day is a wonderful piece of storytelling: the freight of history and humanity carried effortlessly by the beauty of the writing. For previous readers of A.L. Kennedy's books the dark humour, close observation and thrillingly original language will come as no surprise; for new readers, this novel will be a revelation.

Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and ndash; most extraordinary of all ndash; he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now ndash; the war took it away. Maybe it took him, too. Before Hitler and the bombs he was a boy in Staffordshire, helpless to defend his mother, to resist his abusive father. The RAF gave him order, skills, another family and a way to be a man. It taught him how to burn through lifetimes on night ops and brief, sweet leaves, surviving the unsurvivable. But it didn't prepare him for capture, for the prison camp and the chaos as the war wound down. It didn't prepare him for an empty peace. Now it's 1949 and Alfred is doing the impossible again, winding back time to see where he lost himself. He has taken the role of an extra in a POW film. Shipped out to Germany and an ersatz camp, he picks his way through the clicheacute;s that will become all that's left of his war and begins to do what he's never dared ndash; to remember. He is looking for some semblance of hope: trying to move forward by going back. A superbly realised novel about the brutal simplicities of war ndash; of horror, and the camaraderie found in the closeness to death ndash; and a moving exploration of the complexities of human emotion, Day is a wonderful piece of storytelling: the freight of history and humanity carried effortlessly by the beauty of the writing. For previous readers of A.L. Kennedy's books the dark humour, close observation and thrillingly original language will come as no surprise; for new readers, this novel will be a revelation.

Winner of the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Awards The setting: suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways -- from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) -- but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters -- some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it -- what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it, or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself -- the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. And then the murders start. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, "Black Hole" transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin...

After a trip to visit her teenage cousin, Daisy, in Camomile Cove, Poppy is desperate to be as cool as she thinks Daisy is. In order to fulfill her ambition, Poppy decides that the first thing she needs to help her become a bit cooler is money. Along with her best friend, Honey, Poppy dreams up some brilliant money-making schemes. The second thing Poppy thinks she needs is more freedom. She is fed up with being treated like a baby. Find out whether Poppy and Honey's money-making ideas are a success and more importantly, will they be allowed to sing backing vocals in Daisy's band and join Daisy and all her cool school friends for the end of term BBQ and bike ride at Camomile Cove? Join Poppy on her journey to become the Pocket Money Princess!

Z is a 23-year-old Chinese language student who has come to London to learn English. When the book begins she can barely ask for a cup of tea, but when language comes, so does love. As she gets to know British culture she also falls for an older English man who lives a resolutely bachelor life in Hackney. It's a million miles away from the small Chinese town she comes from, where her parents want nothing more for her than that she should follow them into the shoe business. Z learns about sex, humour, companionship and passion, but she also learns the painful truth that language is also a barrier and the more you know about it, the less you understand. Written in short chapters, each the definition of a word, this is a brilliantly clever book that pokes fun at England and China and explores the endless possibilities for misunderstanding between East and West, men and women.

Michael Harrison had it all: good looks, charm, natural leadership, a wicked sense of humor, and now, Ashley, his fiance. While out celebrating with a group of friends a few nights before the wedding, Michael suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself enclosed in a coffin equipped only with a flashlight, a dirty magazine, a walkie-talkie, and a tiny breathing tube. It's all in good fun payback for the grief his mates suffered due to his own penchant for tomfoolery that is until the four are killed in a drunk driving accident just moments after leaving Michael completely alone and buried alive. Detective Superintendent Gracehimself dealing with the pain of losing his wifeis brought on to the case when Ashley reports Michael missing. Suspicions are raised when Michael's only friend not at the bachelor party refuses to cooperate, and Ashley's faithfulnessnot to mention her increasingly mysterious pastare suddenly thrown in to question. As Superintendent Grace soon discovers, one man's disaster is another man's fortune.