Vintage Books strana 6 z 48

Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth.

Set in Italy in the Middle Ages, this work is not only a narrative of a murder investigation in a monastery in 1327, but also a chronicle of the 14th century religious wars, a history of monastic orders and a compendium of heretical movements.

In this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There, he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant. Ultimately, he arrives at the dark core of Sophie's past: her memories of pre-war Poland, the concentration camp and - the essence of her terrible secret - her choice.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011. Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. With a mixture of detailed research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men. This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful difference between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where 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; it exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures 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 powerful men.

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Rant is the oral history of one Buster Rant Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, detractors, lovers and relations have their say on the man who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time. Rant is a darkly glitterin g anti-hero whose recreational drug of choice is rabies, and whose own personal Viagra is the venom of a black widow spider. He soon leaves his half-feral hometown for the big city, where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Part y Crashing. On designated nights, the Party Crashers chase each other in cars in the hope of a collision, and all the while Rant, the 'superspreader', transmits his lethal disease...Upozornenie: Vzhľadom na častejšie obmeny vydaní tejto knihy v zahra ničí, 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.

The author of Slaughterhouse 5" and "Hocus Pocus" satirizes the horrors of plastic, disposable America with a mixture of cartoons and comic outbursts against rules and reason."

God Bless You Mr Rosewater is a novel about people - their pleasures, pains and perversions - and money. It is a penetrating satire on insanity - a millionaire's private lunacy, the inherited obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness that grips a whole nation.

It is the history of a revolution that went wrong-and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine,' wrote George Orwell for the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945. His simple and tragic f able, telling of what happens when the animals drive out Mr Jones and attempt to run the farm themselves, has since become a world-famous classic of English prose.Upozornenie: Vzhľadom na častejšie obmeny vydaní tejto knihy v zahraničí, kus, ktorý vá m 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.

The Ebony Tower" is a series of novellas, rich in imagery, exploring the nature of art. The story of the title - which the "Observer" described as 'the finest thing Fowles has written' - concerns a journalist visiting a celebrated but reclusive painter. He is intrigued by the complicated erotic relationship between the elderly painter and the beautiful young women who share their lives with him."

Graham Greene's gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinian town is considered one of his finest. It tells of Charley Fortnum, the 'Honorary Consul', a whisky-sodden figure of dubious authority taken by a group of revolutionaries. As Eduardo Plarr, a local doctor, negotiates with revolutionaries and authorities for Fortnum's release, the corruption of both becomes evident. In this spare, tense novel, Graham Greene explores the morality of a political system that turns priests into killers.

In 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparently simple errand for a British special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its agony in 'the black years'. Here is the full range of collaboration, from the tacit to the enthusiastic, as well as examples of extraordinary courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien, Charlotte meets his father, a Jewish painter whose inspiration has failed him. In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is delineated, Faulks brings the story to a resolution of redemptive love. In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and its powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte Gray" is a worthy successor to "Birdsong"."