Vintage Books strana 11 z 48

On a beautiful starry night in the city of Kahani in the land of Alifbay a terrible thing happened: twelve-year-old Luka's storyteller father, Rashid, fell suddenly and inexplicably into a sleep so deep that nothing and no one could rouse him. To sav e him from slipping away entirely, Luka must embark on a journey through the Magic World, encountering a slew of phantasmagorical obstacles along the way, to steal the Fire of Life, a seemingly impossible and exceedingly dangerous task. With "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", Salman Rushdie proved that he is one of the best contemporary writers of fables, and it proved to be one of his most popular books with readers of all ages. While Haroun was written as a gift for his first son, "Luka and the Fire of Life", the story of Haroun's younger brother, is a gift for his second son on his twelfth birthday. Lyrical, rich with word-play, and with the narrative tension of the classic quest stories, this is Salman Rushdie at his very best.

At all times wonderfully evocative and poignant, Cider With Rosie is a charming memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a world that is tangibly real and yet reminiscent of a now distant past. In this idyllic pastoral setting, unencumbered by the callous father who so quickly abandoned his family responsibilities, Laurie's adoring mother becomes the centre of his world as she struggles to raise a growing family against the backdrop of the Great War. The sophisticated adult author's retrospective commentary on events is endearingly juxtaposed with that of the innocent, spotty youth, permanently prone to tears and self-absorption. Rosie's identity from the novel Cider with Rosie was kept secret for 25 years. She was Ros e Buckland, Lee's cousin by marriage. "From the Paperback edition."

Gypsies have always intrigued and fascinated - partly because of their mysterious origins, and partly because of the romance of nomadism. But because they resist assimilation, having survived as a distinct people for over a thousand years, they have also been the victims of other people's nationalism and xenophobia. In this fascinating and timely study, Fonseca focuses particularly on the gypsies in Eastern Europe (an estimated 6 million), and their future as a distinct race within a nationalist Europe. While researching the book, Fonseca learned Romany and stayed with the gypsies, becoming deeply involved with their lives, and befriending several gypsy kings. The result is a clolourful and frank book, filled with enthusiasm and curiosity, without lapsing into piety or romanticism.

In "Death in the Afternoon", Hemingway shares the sights, the sounds, the excitement, and above all, the knowledge which fuelled his passion for Spain and the bullfight. This remarkable book contains some of his finest writing, inspired by the intens e life, as well as the inevitable death, of those hot, violent afternoons.

A heart-stopping thriller from the international crime fiction star and top 5 bestseller that the Independent has called 'The next Stieg Larsson'.

The stories in Julian Barnes' long-awaited third collection are attuned to rhythms and currents: of the body, of love and sex, illness and death, connections and conversations. Each character is bent to a pulse, propelled on by success and loss, by n ew beginnings and endings. In "East Wind" a divorced estate agent falls in love with a European waitress, but is tempted, despite his happiness, to investigate her past; in "The Limner" a deaf painter discovers his patron's likeness after spending ti me among his staff. Anchored off the coast of Brazil, Garibaldi spies his future wife through a telescope, and in "Marriage Lines", a widower returns to a remote Scottish Island to relive a favourite holiday. These are also lives in flux - in the 'st ages, transitions, arguments; incompatibilities which grow' - as in the title story, where a man reflects on the break-up of his marriage, brought into new perspective by the actions of his parents; two writers, a 'good team', return from an event re hearsing familiar arguments; in "Gardener's World", a couple bond, fall out and bond again over flowers and vegetable patches. Positioned in between are a series of evenings at "Phil & Joanna's", where among the topics of conversation - the environme nt, politics, the Britishness of marmalade, toilet graffiti and the perils of smoking - we witness the guests' lives shift in sections over the course of a year. Ranging from the domestic to the extraordinary, from the vineyards of Italy to the Engli sh seaside in winter, the stories in Pulse resonate and spark, each imbued with the humour, poignancy and perception that marks all Julian Barnes' work. This is an imaginative and expertly-constructed new collection from a master of the form.

Meet Maggie Fortenberry. Her life seems pretty much perfect-she's beautiful, charming and successful, just as you'd expect of a former Miss Alabama. But, in fact, Maggie is perfectly miserable. By now she should have been living in an elegant house w ith an adoring husband and 2.5 children. Instead, she makes a living selling that dream to others-though her estate agency business has lately been going from bad to worse. But then Maggie comes up with the perfect plan. And that's when strange thing s start happening. As Maggie finds herself catapulted into one surprising discovery after another, she learns valuable lessons about the nature of friendship, the challenges of modern life and the dangers of impossible dreams. She also learns that ev erybody, dead or alive, has at least one little secret...

When a body surfaces in a lake, Inspector Sejer must uncover a dark secret of betrayal and paranoia. Early one September three friends spend the weekend at a remote cabin by Dead Water Lake. With only a pale moon to light their way, they row across t he water in the middle of the night. But only two of them return, and they make a pact not to call for help until the following morning. Inspector Sejer leads the investigation when the body is discovered. He is troubled by the apparent suicide and h as an overwhelming sense that the surviving pair has something to hide. Weeks pass without further clues, and then in a nearby lake the body of a teenage boy floats to the surface.

Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer's release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the 'notifiers' who might darken her door with the worst possible news. Recently estranged from her husband, Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit. Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days' leave being offered by th eir commander - a chance act that sent Avram into Egpyt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as a POW. In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy. Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the rea der, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world. Their walk has a 'war and peace' rhythm, as their conversation places the most hideous trials of war next to the daily joys and anguish of raising children. Never have we seen so c learly the reality and surrealityof daily life in Israel, the currents of ambivalence about war within one household, and the burdens that fall on each generation anew. Grossman's rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the gre at antiwar novels of our time.

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt. Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. Joseph Heller's unfo rgettable novel is a hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man's efforts to survive it. This fiftieth-anniversary edition celebrates Heller's masterpiece with an introduction by Howard Jacobson, rare images from Heller' s personal archive and essays by the likes of Norman Mailer, Anthony Burgess and Christopher Hitchens. "Reading Catch-22" is nothing less than a rite of passage. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.

David Franco, a talented young scholar, is introduced to Kathryn Van Owen, a beautiful and wealthy widow with a mysterious past. Van Owen owns a sketch of an amulet; a silver medallion with a carving of the Medusa's face on one side, and on the other a mirror reputed to confer the power of immortality upon any who look into it on a moonlit night - and she is prepared to pay David a million dollars to find it for her. If the rumours of the amulet's powers are true David could not only pay off his dying sister's medical bills - he could offer her a chance of survival. But David will need help if he is to find the clues scattered through art and history to the mirror's current location. And there are others who have heard of the mirror's power s, and they will stop at nothing to find it...In his stunning new thriller, Robert Masello blends past and present and fact and fiction to create a gripping race through history.

Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan wanders New York City, hiding from a past he escaped at terrible cost. But he made a fatal mistake: he spared the life of Bull O'Kane, a ruthless man who will stop at nothing to get his revenge. Too many witness es survived a bloody battle at his border farm, and now he wants them silenced, whether man, woman or child. O'Kane calls the Traveller, an assassin without pity or remorse, a killer of the purest kind. Back in Belfast, Detective Inspector Jack Lenno n, father of one the witnesses, is caught up in a web of official secrets and lies as he tries to uncover the whereabouts of his daughter. The closer he gets to the truth about the events on O'Kane's border farm, the more his superiors instruct him t o back off. When Fegan realises he can't shake off the trail of violence that has followed him across the world, he has no choice but to return to Belfast and confront his past. The Traveller awaits Fegan's return, ready for the fight of his life. A fast-paced thriller about duty and revenge, Collusion is the blistering sequel to The Twelve, one of the most highly acclaimed debuts of recent years.

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890 and after briefly training as a composer resolved to be a writer. He published a large number of collections of poetry, written under the burden of Soviet Russia's stringent censorship, before publishing his most famous work, Dr Zhivago, in 1958. This novel won him the Nobel Prize for Literature but the USSR's hostility to the West meant he was forced to turn it down. He died in 1960.

Andy Larkham, is a recently jilted lover, and resentfully underpaid publishing minion. Arriving late to the funeral of his favourite schoolteacher, he ends up in the wrong chapel with one other mourner, too embarrassed to leave. Pressured to sign the register, little does he realise what effect that signature will have upon his life.

In "While Mortals Sleep" men and machines, art and artifice, fortune and fame become curiously twisted. A travelling salesman falls in love a robot, Jenny, a refrigerator with personality. A man plays with his model trains too much until the women in his life decide to take matters into their own hands. A young typist receives a plea for help on her Dictaphone - it is from an escaped, dying murderer hiding somewhere in the works of her company's factory. In the title story, a hard-nosed reporter is called upon to judge the annual Christmas lights competition - a job that leads him to learn something about the true meaning of Christmas

The best prose writer in English' - Gore Vidal. Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, "A Single Man" is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. 'A virtuoso piece of work...courageous...powerful' - "Sunday Times".