Vintage Books strana 5 z 48

Chris is in his forties: bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. He's a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a prostitute into his car. Roza is Yugoslavian, recently moved to London. She's in her twenties, but has already lived a life filled with danger, misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And though she's not a prostitute, when she's propositioned by Chris, she gets into his car anyway. Over the next few months Roza tells Chris the stories of her past. She's a fast-talking Scheherazade, saving her own life by telling it to Chris. And he takes in her tales as if they were oxygen in an otherwise airless world. But is Roza telling the truth? Does it even matter?

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar’s grandfather Babar: Qara Köz, ‘Lady Black Eyes’, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbeg warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerised by her presence, and much trouble ensues. The Enchantress of Florence is a love story and a mystery – the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other – the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia’s boyhood friend ‘il Machia’ – Niccolò Machiavelli – is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor’s story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he’s a liar, must he die?

From the master of literary mayhem and provocation, this is a full-frontal Triple-X novel that goes where no work of fiction has gone before. 'Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic'. 'Didn't one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie?' - Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera with six hundred men, "Snuff" unfolds from the perspectives of Mr 72, Mr 137 and Mr 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Who else but Chuck Palahniuk would dare do such a thing? Who else could do it so well, so unflinchingly and with such an incendiary (you might say) climax?

'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him'. Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers. When Angela Carter reviewed Barnes' first novel, "Metroland", she praised the mature way he wrote about death. Now, nearly thirty years later, he returns to the subject in a wise , funny and constantly surprising book, which defies category and classification - except as Barnesian.

In these seven interlinked stories the grown-up Peter reveals the secret journeys, metamorphoses and adventures of his childhood. Living somewhere between dream and reality Peter experiences magical transformations when he swaps bodies with William, the family cat, the baby Kenneth and, in the final story, wakes up as a twelve-year-old inside a grown-up body and experiences the adventure of falling in love.

With the festive season almost upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is winding down at work and gearing up socially - kicking off Christmas with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam. There are irritating flies in the ointment, though, including a missing wife, a nagging cocaine habit, a dramatic deterioration in his genital health, a string of increasingly demanding extra-marital affairs. The last thing he needs is a messy murder to solve. Still it will mean plenty of overtime, a chance to stitch up some colleagues and finally clinch the promotion he craves. But as Bruce spirals through the lower reaches of degradation and evil, he encounters opposition - in the form of truth and ethical conscience - from the most unexpected quarter of all: his anus. In Bruce Robertson, Welsh has created one of the most corrupt, misanthropic characters in contemporary fiction , and has written a dark, disturbing and very funny novel about sleaze, power, and the abuse of everything. At last, a novel that lives up to its name.

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs...

This story is a rare and utterly engaging experience. It tells the extraordinary story of a geisha -summoning up a quarter century from 1929 to the post-war years of Japan's dramatic history, and opening a window into a half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Her memoirs conjure up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most land's powerful men.

Seymour Levov, a devoted family man and inheritor of his father's factory, comes of age in thriving post-war America. His daughter Merry is the apple of his eye until America begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s, and Merry grows up to be a terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise.

"Between The Acts", one of Virginia Woolf's most lyrical works, was published shortly after her death in 1941. The story takes place at Pointz Hall, the country home of the Oliver family for 120 years. Its central focus is the performance of a village pageant, written and directed by the energetic Miss La Trobe, encompassing the whole history of England from the Middle Ages to the verge of war in the Summer of 1939. The comic events on stage, the reactions of the villagers in the audience, the blend of past and present are all presented with affection and insight affirming Virginia Woolf's belief in art as the unifying principle of life. This edition contains the original text that Virginia Woolf was working on when she died.

'A humane discourse on the fragility of our minds, of the bodies that give rise to them, and of the world they create for us.' - "Daily Telegraph". Oliver Sacks' compassionate tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological condition s have fundamentally changed the way we understand our own minds. In "Musicophilia", he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and everyday people - those struck by affliction, unusual talent and even, in one case, by lightning - to show not only that music occupies more areas of the brain than language does, but also that it can calm and organize, torment and heal.Always wise and compellingly readable, these stories alter our conception of who we are and how we function, and show us an essential part of what it is to be human. 'Fascinating. Music, as Sacks explains, "can pierce the heart directly". And this is the truth that he so brilliantly focuses upon - that music saves, consoles and nour ishes us' - "Daily Mail". 'Irresistible, astonishing and moving' - "Spectator". 'Deeply warm and sympathetic' - "Guardian".Upozornenie: Vzhľadom na častejšie obmeny vydaní tejto knihy v zahraničí, kus, ktorý vám zašleme, nemusí mať rovnakú obálku ako je zobrazená tu. Zobrazená obálka môže byť iba ilustračná. Obsah knihy aj cena budú však identické, bez ohľadu na obálku.

When the spoilt and haughty Dona Constanza tries to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, she starts a running battle with the locals. The skirmishes are so sever that the Government dispatches a squadron of soldiers led by the fat, brutal and stupid Figueras to deal with them. Despite visiting plagues of laughing fits and giant cats upon the troops, the villagers know that to escape the cruel and unusual tortures planned for them, they must run. Thus they plan to head for the mountains a nd start a new and convivial civilisation.Upozornenie: Vzhľadom na častejšie obmeny vydaní tejto knihy v zahraničí, kus, ktorý vám zašleme, nemusí mať rovnakú obálku ako je zobrazená tu. Zobrazená obálka môže byť iba ilustračná. Obsah knihy aj cena b udú však identické, bez ohľadu na obálku.

On a chilly February day two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence, Clive as Britain's most successful modern composer, Vernon as editor of the quality broadsheet, The Judge". Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact that will have consequences neither has foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life. A contemporary morality tale that is as profound as it is witty, this short novel is perhaps the most purely enjoyable fiction Ian McEwan has ever written. And why Amsterdam? What happens there to Clive and Vernon is the most delicious shock in a novel brimming with surprises."

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.

In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer and the men and women he meets in Italy with total conviction. Not only a novel of war, A Farewell to Arms is also a love story of immense drama and uncompromising pass ion.Upozornenie: Vzhľadom na častejšie obmeny vydaní tejto knihy v zahraničí, kus, ktorý vám zašleme, nemusí mať rovnakú obálku ako je zobrazená tu. Zobrazená obálka môže byť iba ilustračná. Obsah knihy aj cena budú však identické, bez ohľadu na obál ku.