Vintage Books strana 16 z 69

A beautiful hardback edition of Huxley's deeply eerie and prescient dystopia, introduced by Yuval Noah Harari. Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieves peace and stability by dispensing with monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills. This is the brave new world of Aldous Huxley's deeply sinister and prophetic novel, a society based on maximum pleasure and complete surveillance - no matter the cost.

A beautiful hardback edition of a great Japanese classic, the tale of a group of young boys with a warped sense of masculinity. Lyrical, suspenseful and deeply ominous. A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.

A beautiful hardback edition of a magical and special novel - enter the fantastical world of the Night Circus. The circus arrives without warning. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Against the grey sky the towering tents are striped black and white. A sign hanging upon an iron gates reads: Opens at Nightfall Closes at Dawn Full of breath-taking amazements and open only at night, Le Cirque des Reves seems to cast a spell over all who wander its circular paths. But behind the glittering acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists a fierce competition is underway. Celia and Marco are two young magicians who have been trained since childhood for a deadly duel. With the lives of everyone at the Circus of Dreams at stake, they must test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love.

A beautiful hardback edition of a unique book: one of the most funny, moving and brilliant novels of the twentieth century. Billy Pilgrim - hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier - has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out? Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.

A beautiful hardback edition of Atwood's iconic dystopian novel. Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state in what was formerly known as the United States. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford - her assigned name, Offred, means 'of Fred'. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire. As she recalls her pre-revolution life in flashbacks, Offred must navigate through the terrifying landscape of torture and persecution in the present day, and between two men upon which her future hangs. Masterfully conceived and executed, this haunting vision of the future places Margaret Atwood at the forefront of dystopian fiction.

A beautiful hardback edition of a Latin American classic - the enthralling saga of three generations of the Trueba family, their love, magic and fate. As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba. Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, The House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution.

Our modern-day cities might seem to represent our separation from the vitality of the natural world. Yet, as Ben Wilson reveals in this invigorating re-examination of urban landscapes across the globe, nature has always been at the heart of the city. Moving from Los Angeles and Delhi to Singapore and Amsterdam, Wilson explores how the bond between humans and nature has oscillated throughout history, and shows that – in a time of climate crisis – a new approach to rewilding may prove to be the city’s saviour.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024 Reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir finds love and hope in Shakespeare and Palestine. After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. On her arrival, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new. When Sonia meets the charismatic Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing with a dedicated, if competitive, group of men – yet as opening night draws closer, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life she once knew starts to give way to the exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.

The instant number one bestseller from the legendary Margaret Atwood My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don’t say, ‘My heart is broken.’ We say, ‘Are there any cookies?’ In this dazzling collection of stories we meet beloved cats, George Orwell, a daughter whose mother may or may not be a witch, a cabal of elderly female academics, and an alien tasked with retelling human fairy tales. And we meet and re-meet Nell and Tig, a long-married couple, and see the moments big and small that make up a life of love – and what comes after.

When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love. Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - which shaped Key's expectations of love - as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed. With profound candour and intimacy, Arrangements in Blue explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure. The result is a book which inspires us to live and love more honestly.

When Rachel loses five family members in five months, grief magnifies other absences. Running across moors and mountains used to help her feel at home in her body but now feels fraught with danger. Rachel goes in search of a new family: the foremothers who blazed a trail at the dawn of outdoor sport. She discovers Lizzie Le Blond who scaled the Alps in woollen skirts and photographed fearless women climbing, skating and tobogganing at breakneck speeds. Telling Lizzie's story alongside her own, Rachel runs her way from bereavement to belonging, inspired by the tenacious women, past and present, who insist that breaking boundaries outdoors is, and always has been, in her nature.

Drawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from World War Two. And then faltered. Timothy Garton Ash, our greatest writer about Europe, has spent a lifetime studying Europe and this deeply felt book is full of vivid experiences: from his father's memories of D-Day and his own surveillance at the hands of the Stasi to interviewing Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents. Homelands is at once a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress, a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong and an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

A transformational quest for the secrets of happy, healthy, whole-life running that will change the way you think about growing older. Colourful, informative and inspiring, The Race Against Time is a story of cold science and heart-warming resilience; of champions and also-rans; of sprinting centenarians and forty-something super-athletes barely touched by age. Its heroes are experts and enthusiasts - scientists, coaches, runners - from many countries, each with a different story to tell. This is a book for anyone who has ever felt the healing power of running – or simply wondered about the effects of ageing. It is both a very personal account of one man's journey from despair to hope, and an exhilarating guide, explaining how timely adjustments to lifestyle and training can slow the progress of physiological decay, while sheer human spirit can, if you are lucky, keep you running happily and healthily, all the way into extreme old age.

The essential introduction to the Middle Ages by the bestselling author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward and unchanging time characterised by violence, ignorance and superstition. By contrast we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong. As Ian Mortimer shows in this fascinating book, people's horizons - their knowledge, experience and understanding of the world - expanded dramatically. Life was utterly transformed between 1000 and 1600, marking the transition from a warrior-led society to that of Shakespeare. Just as The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England revealed what it was like to live in the fourteenth century, Medieval Horizons provides the perfect primer to the era as a whole. It outlines the enormous cultural changes that took place - from literacy to living standards, inequality and even the developing sense of self - thereby correcting misconceptions and presenting the period as a revolutionary age of fundamental importance in the development of the Western world.

An inspiring and life-affirming story of a difficult childhood transformed into happy adulthood through the power of nature Beloved author Marc Hamer writes about finding refuge in his tiny back garden in this highly original story of childhood, old age, and the restorative power of gardens. As a child, he kindled a deep love of the earth by watching plants and insects and exploring the world through a stack of old encyclopaedias he found in the shed. Now an old man, he creates a garden for himself in the neglected plot behind his house. A little book with a big heart: the insights glow as vivid as a flowerbed. If you want to be inspired, or you've lost your belief in the goodness of this world, this could be for you.

In the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga, 'victory city'. Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana's life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga's as she attempts to make good on the task that the goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception.