Vintage Books strana 58 z 69

This title is presented with an introduction by Sir Ranulph Fiennes. "The Last Expedition" is Captain Scott's gripping account of his expedition to the South Pole in 1910-12. It was meant to be a voyage of scientific discovery and a heroic exploration of the last unconquered wilderness. Scott's expedition, carried in the Terra Nova, pitted him and his team not only against the elements but also against the Norwegian explorer, Amundsen. Ultimately, Scott was beaten by both. The journals are full of incident and drama, courage and endurance, hope and bitter disappointment. These journals were found, along with Scott's body, several months after his death and just 11 miles from base camp and safety.

This title is translated by TOM PAYNE. "The Art of Love" may have been written in the days of gladiators and emperors, but Ovid remains the smartest teacher on the subject of love in all of history, and his advice is enduringly useful and entertaining. Between these covers you'll find all you need to know about where to meet a new beau, how to handle illicit affairs and how to maintain your allure. This edition also contains the companion volume "The Cure for Love" - in case things don't work out. This title is presented with an introduction by Hephzibah Anderson.

This is a book about universes. It tells a story that revolves around a single extraordinary fact: that Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity describes a series of entire universes. Not many solutions to Einstein's tantalising universe equations have ever been found, but those that have are all remarkable. Some describe universes that expand in size, while others contract. Some rotate like a top, while others are chaotically unpredictable. Some are perfectly smooth, while others are lumpy. Some permit time travel into the past. Only a few allow life to evolve within them; the rest, if they exist, remain unknown and unknowable to conscious minds. Here, in "The Book of Universes", we are confronted with the most fantastic and far-reaching speculations within the entire realm of science.

This title is winner of the CORINE International Book Award 2011. It is from one of the most important neuroscientists at work today, a path-breaking investigation of a question that has confounded neurologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists and psychologists for centuries: how is consciousness created? Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In "Self Comes to Mind", he goes against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness - what we think of as a mind with a self - is in fact a biological process created by a living organism. The result is a groundbreaking investigative journey into the neurobiological foundations of mind and self.

A breathtaking feat of scholarship' The Times. 'I can do no more than praise, recommend, insist that you buy and read this book. It supersedes all other Dickens biographies' Anthony Burgess, Independent. In Peter Ackroyd's abridged edition of his classic biography of Charles Dickens, the acclaimed biographer takes us to the heart of one of the world's greatest writers. From Dickens's birth in Portsmouth to his death at the age of just fifty-eight, Ackroyd explores the life of this renowned author and the hundreds of characters who were born with Dickens but didn't die with him, living on for ever in the pages of his books, on the radio and the television and film screens.

A rediscovered masterwork from famed Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai, Portraits of a Marriage tracks the lifelong entanglement of a man and two women haunted by class differences and misdirected longings. Peter and Ilonka are a wealthy couple whose outwardly perfect marriage is undone by secrets. The insecure Ilonka believes she can never be elegant and refined enough for her husband, while Peter has long been tormented by his forbidden love for Judit, a peasant and servant in his childhood home. What Judit longs for most, however, is freedom from the constraints of the society that has ensnared all three in a vortex of love and loss. Set against the backdrop of Hungary between the wars, in a world on the verge of dramatic change, this exquisite novel offers further posthumous evidence of Marai’s brilliance.

Four nuns and a fifth woman are killed in a savage night-time attack in Africa. A year later, Inspector Kurt Wallander invesigates the disappearance of an elderly birdwatcher and discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder - a body impaled in a trap of sharpened bamboo poles. Then, another man is reported missing. Once again Wallander's life is put on hold as he and his team work tirelessly to find a link between the series of vicious murders. Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for Sidetracked.

It is the French Riviera in the 1920s. Nicole and Dick Diver are a wealthy, elegant, magnetic couple. A coterie of admirers are drawn to them, none more so than the blooming young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. When Rosemary falls for Dick, the Diver's calculated perfection begins to crack. As dark truths emerge, Fitzgerald shows both the disintegration of a marriage and the failure of idealism. "Tender is the Night" is as sad as it is beautiful.

It is the French Riviera in the 1920s. Nicole and Dick Diver are a wealthy, elegant, magnetic couple. A coterie of admirers are drawn to them, none more so than the blooming young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. When Rosemary falls for Dick, the Diver's calculated perfection begins to crack. As dark truths emerge, Fitzgerald shows both the disintegration of a marriage and the failure of idealism. "Tender is the Night" is as sad as it is beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.