Vintage Books strana 8 z 48

"Possession" is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems, they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.

This title includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury. Denis Stone, a naive young poet, is invited to stay at Crome, a country house renowned for its gatherings of 'bright young things'. His hosts, Henry Wimbush and his exotic wife Priscilla, are joined by a party of colourful guests whose intrigues and opinions ensure Denis' stay is a memorable one. First published in 1921, "Crome Yellow" was Aldous Huxley's much-acclaimed debut novel.

When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E. I. Lonoff, he soon finds himself enmeshed in the great Jewish writer's domestic life, with all its complexity, artifice and drive for artistic truth. As Nathan sits in breathlessly awkward conversation with his idol, a glimpse of a dark-haired beauty through a closing doorway leaves him reeling. He soon learns that the entrancing vision is Amy Bellette, but her position in the Lonoff household - student? mistress? - remains tantalisingly unclear. Over a disturbed and confusing dinner, Nathan gleans snippets of Amy's haunting Jewish background, and begins to draw his own fantastical conclusions...

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressue to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated small holding. For a time, his daughter's influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.

At its core The Time Traveler's Wife is an old-fashioned love story. A terrific book...startlingly original' Observer. 'Wonky, sexy, incredible' The Times. This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. In the face of this force they can neither prevent nor control, Henry and Clare's struggle to lead normal lives is both intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

In the chaotic world of his African village, the spirit-child Azaro still watches the tumultuous and tender lives of the Living, of his father who has been imprisoned for a crime he did not commit and of his mother who battles for justice. This final chapter in Azaro's adventures is a explosive and haunting climax to this masterful trilogy.

When Kathy, a young recovering alcoholic recently separated from her husband, fails to a open a series of tax letters that have been sent to her in error, the State of California seizes the house she and her brother have inherited from her father. The State sells the house at auction to Behrani, a former Iranian Air Force officer. Unable to parley his skills into a job in aerospace in the US, the house represents an entry into real estate and a passport to the future of his family and his own version of the American Dream. For Kathy, its loss is the last of a series of insults life has dealt her. When she becomes involved with a married policeman who takes up her cause, the stage is set for a gut-wrenching tragedy.

Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party, Palestinian identity, contemporary film and late-twentieth century race, religion and politics. Elsewhere he trains his eye on literature and fellow writers, from Julian Barnes on love to the politics of George Orwell's "Inside the Whale", providing fresh insight on Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, John le Carre, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon among others. Profound, passionate and insightful, "Imaginary Homelands" is a masterful collection from one of the greatest writers working today.

Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is not like other policemen. His methods appear unorthodox in the extreme: he doesn't search for clues, he ignores obvious suspects and arrests people with cast-iron alibis, he appears permanently distracted. In spite of all this his colleagues are forced to admit that he is highly successful - a born cop. When strange blue chalk circles start appearing overnight on the pavements of Paris, the press take up the story with amusement and psychiatrists trot out their theories. Adamsberg is alone in thinking this is not a game and far from amusing. He insists on being kept informed of new circles and the increasingly bizarre objects which they contain: a pigeon's foot, four cigarette lighters, a badge proclaiming 'I Love Elvis', a hat, a doll's head. Adamsberg senses the cruelty that lies behind these seemingly random occurrences. Soon a circle with decidedly less banal contents is discovered: the body of a woman with her throat savagely cut. Adamsberg knows that other murders will follow. "The Chalk Circle Man" is the first book featuring Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, one of the most engaging characters in contemporary detective fiction.

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children's book.

In this collection of profiles, essays and travel stories, Chatwin takes us to Benin, where he is arrested as a mercenary during a coup, to Boston to meet an LSD guru who believes he is Christ, to India with Indira Gandhi when she attempted a political comeback in 1978, and to Nepal where he reminds us that 'Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.

An Anglican lay community on an estate attached to a convent of Anglican nuns provides the setting for some quite melodramatic happenings - suicide, a wrecked marriage, an antiquarian cause celebre - among the small and eccentric band of idealists. Not si

This is the heart-rending story of a woman struggling to reclaim her dignity after a violent, abusive marriage and a worsening drink problem. Paula Spencer recalls her contented childhood, the audacity she learned as a teenager, the exhilaration of her romance with Charlo and the marriage to him that left her powerless. Capturing both her vulnerability and her strength, Doyle gives Paula a voice that is real and unforgettable.

Welcome to the village of Notwithstanding where a lady dresses in plus fours and shoots squirrels, a retired general gives up wearing clothes altogether, a spiritualist lives in a cottage with the ghost of her husband, and people think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed. Based on de Bernieres' recollections of the village he grew up in, Notwithstanding is a funny and moving depiction of a charming vanished England.

Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence.In “Confido,” a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention.In “Ed Luby’s Key Club,” a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town.In “Look at the Birdie,” a quack psychiatrist turned “murder counsellor” concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients.The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour. Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant Look at the Birdie reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut’s early style

Beware the falling snow... The first snowfall in Oslo brings a series of gruesome murders, and Harry Hole is pitted against a brutal killer who will drive him to the edge.