Weidenfeld & Nicolson strana 8 z 8

A mysterious toymaker who lives as a recluse in an old mansion, surrounded by the magical beings he has created...A sickly wife locked away in a hidden room...An enigma involving strange lights that shine out from the small island on which an old, disused lighthouse stands...A shadowy creature that hides deep in the woods...These are the elements of a mystery will bind 14-year-old Irene to Ismael during one magical summer spent in Blue Bay when her mother takes a job as a housekeeper for the enigmatic toymaker, Lazarus Jann. A novel of mystery, intrigue and romance from the author of THE PRINCE OF MIST and THE SHADOW OF THE WIND.

Rococo makes the finest chocolates in the world. Its founder, Chantal Coady, has been a pioneer of the nouveau chocolat revolution for 30 years. She established the award-winning Rococo chocolate business and school and continues to blaze the trail for chocolate creativity. In this beautiful and indulgent book, Chantal shares her expertise and chocolate alchemy. From the perfect ganache recipe to delicious salted caramel truffles, and from a stunning chocolate roulade to extreme chocolate combinations, Rococo celebrates gastronomy's finest, most complex and luxurious of ingredients - chocolate.

The Vikings famously took no prisoners, relished cruel retribution, and prided themselves on their bloody-thirsty skills as warriors. But their prowess in battle is only a small part of their story, which stretches from their Scandinavian origins to America in the west and as far as Baghdad in the east. As the Vikings did not write their history, we have to discover it for ourselves, and that discovery, as Neil Oliver reveals, tells an extraordinary story of a people who, from the brink of destruction, reached a quarter of the way around the globe and built an empire that lasted nearly two hundred years. Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light, Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? And just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1000 years ago? VIKINGS will explore many of these questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world's great empires of conquest.

The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China. The war in Europe appeared completely divorced from the war in the Pacific and China, and yet events on opposite sides of the world had profound effects. Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, and writing with clarity and compassion, Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert, to the Burmese jungle, SS Einsatzgruppen in the borderlands, Gulag prisoners drafted into punishment battalions, and to the unspeakable cruelties of the Sino-Japanese War. Moral choice forms the basis of all human drama, and no other period in history has presented greater dilemmas both for leaders and ordinary people, nor offered such examples of individual and mass tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of commanders, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable kindness. Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale, Beevor's THE SECOND WORLD WAR never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in this, the most terrible war in history.

Reflecting on the most challenging issues and events of his turbulent times, Pope John Paul II reveals his personal thoughts in a truly historic document. The world's greatest communicator offers a moving insight into his intellectual and spiritual journey and pastoral experience. Each chapter suggests the answer to a question which either exercised his mind or which he provoked in discussion with laymen and priests. Using the encounters at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo where conversations took place with leading intellectuals - philosophers as well as theologians - Pope John Paul II addresses in his book many of the questions which arose from these discussions. Here he leaves for posterity an intellectual and spiritual testament in an attempt to seek the answer to defining problems that vex our lives. The book ends with the Pope's first ever published comments on the assassination attempt upon his life in 1981. The conversational tone and form of this book indicates to the reader that this is not an academic thesis, more of a friendly talk. Each chapter is, as it were, the answer to a question which many of us carry in our heads or hearts.

In November 2011, Mona Eltahawy came to worldwide attention when she was assaulted by police during the Egyptian Revolution. She responded by writing a groundbreaking piece in Foreign Policy entitled 'Why Do They Hate Us'; 'They' being Muslim men, 'Us' being women. It sparked huge controversy. In Headscarves and Hymens, Eltahawy takes her argument further. Drawing on her years as a campaigner and commentator on women's issues in the Middle East, she explains that since the Arab Spring began, women in the Arab world have had two revolutions to undertake: one fought with men against oppressive regimes, and another fought against an entire political and economic system that treats women as second-class citizens in countries from Yemen and Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Eltahawy has travelled across the Middle East and North Africa, meeting with women and listening to their stories. Her book is a plea for outrage and action on their behalf, confronting the 'toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend.' A manifesto motivated by hope and fury in equal measure, Headscarves and Hymens is as illuminating as it is incendiary.