Saraband / Contraband strana 2 z 2

''A Case of Matricide demonstrates literary talent of the highest order … few writers can rival Burnet.’ The SpectatorChief Inspector Gorski returns … In the unremarkable French town of Saint-Louis, a mysterious stranger stalks the streets; an elderly woman believes her son is planning to do away with her; a prominent manufacturer drops dead. Between visits to the town’s hostelries, Chief Inspector Georges Gorski ponders the connections, if any, between these events, while all the time grappling with his own domestic and existential demons. Graeme Macrae Burnet once again pierces the respectable bourgeois façade of small-town life in this, the concluding part of his trilogy of Gorski novels. He injects a wry humour into the tiniest of details and delves into the darkest recesses of his characters’ minds, but above all provides an entertaining, profound and moving read. 

Never underestimate a librarian.Fifty-something librarian Shona McMonagle is a proud former pupil of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls with a deep loathing for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which she thinks gives her alma mater a bad name.After a visit from Miss Blaine herself, involving a bad-tempered exchange about Robinson Crusoe and improper book shelving, Shona is sent spinning through time and space for another mission. She finds herself on an island, with little in the way of clues to help her decipher the purpose of her trip. Despite initially wondering if this might be a rare treat from Miss Blaine, she soon realises this is no holiday. Her island is not tropical; it’s in the Baltic Sea – and it’s the fifteenth century.Luckily she’s kitted out for all eventualities and finds her local languages are not too rusty, which is useful when she encounters pirates, Krakens and other monsters. As always, she’s nothing if not resourceful – after all, she is a librarian.

She smelled like jasmine. No, not exactly. She smelled like the earth beneath a jasmine plant on a hot day.   Most of us are poets, she said. It’s just a question of how it comes out.  When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague – the poet – it is not long before it begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn’t; she has everything he wants. While he writes about steel and sex, she dreams about the movements of swallows. While he tends to his budding career, she writes from her big, white house in the woods. As he slips between his old life and this new one, his fixation grows into something more powerful. The poet, his Kingfisher, is his sole focus. He is hypnotised.But when simultaneous illnesses threaten to destroy the precarious reality he clings to, he’s forced to question what he can and cannot take from someone. This is a novel about grief, power and desire – and the tangles in between that make up a life.

Understanding, loving and protecting butterflies—in all their enchantments.Butterflies have enchanted and intrigued us for centuries. From the eighteenth-century “aurelians”, through the Victorian “golden age” of collecting, to the twentieth-century focus on conservation, humans have chased glimpses of these beautiful but elusive creatures. Winding through literature, art, music, and dreams, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment uncovers why butterflies continue to inhabit such a profound place in our imagination.A first of its kind in combining the history of human interest in butterflies with a guide to practical observation, this pocket guide encourages us to nurture our curiosity and head out into our local environment, focusing on edgeland habitats that are home to many species.It is perhaps because butterflies are so fragile and fleeting that we are so beguiled by them. But now, as numbers dwindle, they have never been more difficult to spot. The Butterfly paves the way towards observing, identifying and ultimately protecting them.

From a Costa Book of the Year winner, Booker nominee and double Granta-selected Best Young British novelist comes a searing portrayal of trauma, police abuse and the power of hope. Teaching nine-year-olds on Zoom. A relationship interrupted by enforced distance. A teenaged son who cannot leave the house. Anna McCormick is already struggling to cope with the unwanted twists 2020 has served up. But when an unstamped envelope arrives overnight, her past begins to cast its own long shadow on the present.With an uncaring government compounding her woes and a hostile threat drawing closer, Anna must dig deep to keep hope alive for herself and those around her. This is a twisty, heart-racing page-turner and viscerally rendered portrayal of abuse of power by the state, by the police and by the villains much closer to home.