Vintage Books strana 44 z 69

Three of Murakami’s best-known and best-loved novels, brought together in one beautiful boxset. For nearly half a century Murakami has been delighting readers with his deceptively simple writing. His work is both fantastic and realistic, as gripping as it is beguiling. This boxset contains three of the best novels from Japan’s greatest living novelist. You might start with Norwegian Wood, a story of young love and the book that shot Murakami to literary stardom. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle displays many of Murakami’s distinctive storytelling tropes – mysterious women and missing cats among them. And Kafka on the Shore, the great masterpiece, is the genre-bending tale of a fifteen-year-old runaway.

When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals: What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam's depression was Allison's flesh? How much darker - or sexier - would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of heartbreak, each reality builds to complete a brilliant and painfully funny portrait of love's many promises and perils.

This is our world, as you've never seen it before. The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of this world. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, welcoming us into previously unfathomable dimensions - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. Showing us that in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.

A pressing graphic memoir on 'the talk' in which parents must break it to Black children that the world hates them, from the only winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning Darrin Bell was six years old when he had The Talk: his mother told him he couldn't have a realistic water gun. She said she feared for his safety, that police tend to think of little Black boys as older and less innocent than they really are. Through evocative illustrations and sharp humour, Bell examines how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles - and finding a voice through cartooning - Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbours and police officers, and thus of his mortality. Drawing attention to the brutal murders of African Americans, and showcasing revealing insights and cartoons along the way, he brings us up to the moment of reckoning when people took to the streets protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And now Bell must decide whether he and his own six-year-old son are ready to have The Talk.

This killer will get inside your head... The hunt is on and the police are running out of time. Two women are missing, their only connection being they attended the same party, hosted by a notorious real-estate magnate. When one of the women is found murdered, the police discover an unusual signature left by the killer, giving them reason to suspect he will strike again. They're facing a killer unlike any other. And catching him calls for a detective like no other. But the legendary Harry Hole is gone. Struck off the force, down and out in Los Angeles, it seems that nothing can entice him back to Oslo. Until the woman who saved Harry's life is put in grave danger, and he has no choice but to return to the city that haunts him and hunt for the murderer. To catch him will push Harry to the limit. He'll need to bring together a misfit team of former operatives to do what he can't do alone: stop an unstoppable killer. But as the evidence mounts, it becomes clear that there is more to this case than meets the eye... And for Harry, this just got personal.

The powerful rediscovered masterpiece of Kyiv during the Second World War, told by a young boy who saw it all. 'So here is my invitation: enter into my fate, imagine that you are twelve, that the world is at war and that nobody knows what is going to happen next...' It was 1941 when the German army rolled into Kyiv. The young Anatoli was just twelve years old. This book is formed from his journals in which he documented what followed. Many Ukrainians welcomed the invading army, hoping for liberation from Soviet rule. But within ten days the Nazis had begun their campaign of murdering every Jew, and many others, in the city. Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) was the place where the executions took place. It was one of the largest massacres in the history of the Holocaust. Anatoli could hear the machine guns from his house. This gripping book is the story of Ukraine's Nazi occupation, told by one ordinary, brave child. His clear, compelling voice, his honesty and his determination to survive guide us through the horrors of that time. Babi Yar has the compulsion and narration of fiction but everything recounted in this book is true.

The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries - from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie. In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl's mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana's comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga - literally 'victory city' - the wonder of the world. Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana's life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga's, from its literal sowing out of a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power. Whispering Bisnaga and its citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on the task that Parvati 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. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry - with Pampa Kampana at its center. Brilliantly styled as a translation of an ancient epic, this is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling.

Japanese fairy tales - enchanting, enigmatic stories of animals, human beings and the great natural world. Dark and innocent, sublime and whimsical, Miyazawa's stories have the ageless feel of the best fairy tales. There are animal allegories such as 'The Ungrateful Rat' where a rude rodent insults all the objects he meets - until he meets the Rat Trap/ There are morality tales such as 'The Restaurant of Many Orders', where two hunters become the hunted. There are also transcendent stories of childhood and mortality like Miyazawa's best-known 'Night Train to the Stars', where a magical steam train carries children through the night and up to the heavens. These stories reveal the unique brilliance of one of Japan's most beloved early twentieth-century writers.

A gorgeous novel of music, secrets and self-discovery from the brilliant young author of Braised Pork For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. With her marriage, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her desire to have a child. Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her long-buried family secrets. Soon strange parcels start to show up on the doorstep and Song Yan's dreams become troubling and claustrophobic. Striking out alone through the winter city, she finds herself pulled into the ancient hutongs to confront the source of her unease. In a still, silent room in a timeless house, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of all the pain and beauty in her life? Evocative, magical and endlessly surprising, Ghost Music is a captivating journey through memory, expression and self-discovery towards the shimmer of new beginnings.

The third volume of Alison Weir's magisterial history of the queens of medieval England Medieval queens were seen as mere dynastic trophies, yet many of the Plantagenet queens of the High Middle Ages dramatically broke away from the restrictions imposed on their sex, as Alison Weir shows in this gripping group biography of England's fourteenth-century consorts. Using personal letters and wonderfully vivid sources, Alison Weir evokes the lives of five remarkable queens: Marguerite of France, Isabella of France, Philippa of Hainault, Anne of Bohemia and Isabella of Valois. The turbulent, brutal Age of Chivalry witnessed the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years War against France and savage baronial wars against the monarchy in which these queens were passionately involved. Queens of the Age of Chivalry brilliantly recreates this truly dramatic period of history through the lives of five extraordinary women.