Vintage Books strana 69 z 75

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?

As Tony Judt argues persuasively in "Reappraisals", we have entered an 'age of forgetting'. Today's world is so utterly unlike the world of just twenty years ago that we have set aside our immediate past even before we could make sense of it. We literally don't know where we came from, and the results of this burgeoning ignorance are proving calamitous, with the clear prospect of worse to come. We have lost touch with three generations of international policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and we have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting and defending the ideas that shaped their time.In "Reappraisals", Tony Judt resurrects key aspects of the world we have lost and reminds us how important they still are to us: now and to our hopes for the future. Judt draws provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust and the challenge of 'evil' in understanding the European past, to the rise and fall of the state in public affairs and the displacement of history by 'heritage'. Ranging with his trademark acuity and elan from Belgium to Israel, from the memory of Marxism to the practice of foreign policy, he takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it, and reveals how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth-making over understanding and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we urgently need.

Louisa is an imaginative and curious chambermaid who, while cleaning rooms at the New Yorker Hotel, stumbles across a man living permanently in room 3327, which he has transformed into a scientific laboratory. Brought together by a shared interest in the pigeons that nest in the hotel, Louisa discovers that the mysterious guest is Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant - and most neglected - inventors of the twentieth century. "The Invention of Everything Else" charts the relationship of the gi rl and the genius during the last week of Tesla's life, when sinister forces are closing in on him. However, as well as being an engaging literary mystery, this exceptional novel movingly tells the life story of this extraordinary man and also recoun ts the heartbreak and redemption of one ordinary family.

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. "The Gathering" is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

This title is presented with introductions by Valentine Cunningham And Carol Ann Duffy. In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.

"The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis" is the definitive collection of Sigmund Freud's writing. It covers the themes that Freud explored in his work from the meaning of dreams and the concept of the unconscious, instinctual and sexual life to the structure of the personality. Beautifully written and endlessly fascinating, the pieces collected here are the perfect guide to the principle concepts of psycho-analysis.

This title is presented with introductions by Valentine Cunningham And Carol Ann Duffy. In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.

Two prostitutes are murdered in Tokyo. Twenty years previously both women were educated at the same elite school for young ladies, and had seemingly promising futures ahead of them. But in a world of dark desire and vicious ambition, for both women, prostitution meant power. Grotesque is a masterful and haunting thriller, a chilling exploration of women's secret lives in modern day Japan.

Evening Standard `...a slight, charming story...'

Nemesis begins with a bank robbery. The teller is given 25 seconds to hand over the money. She does it within the time, but the robber raises the gun to her head and shoots her anyway. Then he escapes, having left no forensic evidence whatsoever.

Nemesis begins with a bank robbery. The teller is given 25 seconds to hand over the money. She does it within the time, but the robber raises the gun to her head and shoots her anyway. Then he escapes, having left no forensic evidence whatsoever.

Set in Denmark in the here and now, The Quiet Girl centers around Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown with a deep love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and an even deeper gambling debt. Wanted for tax evasion and on the verge of extradition, Krone is drafted into the service of a mysterious order of nuns who promise him reprieve from the international authorities in return for his help safeguarding a group of children with mystical abilities--abilities that Krone shares. When one of the children goes missing, Krone sets off to find the young girl and bring her back, making a shocking series of discoveries along the way about her identity and the true intentions of his young wards. The result is a fast-paced, philosophical thriller blending social realism with the literary fantastic and pitting art and spirituality against corporate interests and nothing less than the will to war by the industrialized world. The Quiet Girl is a masterful, inventive novel that marks the triumphal return of one of the great writers of the international literary world.

A young man accompanies his cousin to the hospital to check an unusual hearing complaint and recalls a story of a woman put to sleep by tiny flies crawling inside her ear; a mirror appears out of nowhere and a nightwatchman is unnerved as his reflection tries to take control of him; and more. This work presents a collection of stories.

Nemesis begins with a bank robbery. The teller is given 25 seconds to hand over the money. She does it within the time, but the robber raises the gun to her head and shoots her anyway. Then he escapes, having left no forensic evidence whatsoever.

On the night that Arlyn Singers father dies, she is certain her destiny will find her. Some hours later a young man shows up at her door. Lost in a strange town, John Moody is an architectural student, serious, reserved, and deliberate. And he has no inkling that the tall, red-haired girl whom he has asked for directions will haunt him for the rest of his life.John Moody takes Arlyn to live in a house made of glass, the Glass Slipper. Her life there is not the romantic destiny she envisaged. She dreams of escape for herself and her children, Sam and Blanca, but her eventual escape, too, is not the one she dreamed of...Years later, Arlyn is gone, and Meredith Weiss arrives at the Moody house. Sam, now a teenager, is careening down a path of drug-fuelled self-destruction, while John Moody is tormented by visions of a red-haired woman in white. Meredith sets out to try to save this troubled family. But will her devotion be enough to pull them back from the fate they seem to have chosen fo r themselves? Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules and have their own secrets. Told with Alice Hoffmans signature grace and originality, SKYLIGHT CONFESSIONS is a shimmering, powerful story of passion, heartbreak and families.A lice Hoffman is the bestselling author of eighteen acclaimed novels, including The Ice Queen, Practical Magic, Here on Earth, The River King, Blue Diary, Illumination Night, Turtle Moon, Seventh Heaven, and At Risk. She lives in Massachusetts.

Nemesis begins with a bank robbery. The teller is given 25 seconds to hand over the money. She does it within the time, but the robber raises the gun to her head and shoots her anyway. Then he escapes, having left no forensic evidence whatsoever.