This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook. The makeshift family's neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is?at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region. Jemubhai, with his hunting rifles and ...
Ronald Keith Williamson's early life appeared charmed. A successful school and college baseball player, he seemed to have a world of opportunity at his feet. But, after injury put paid to his sporting career, he slowly began to show signs of mental illness, and drifted into a life of petty crime and misdemeanour. When in 1982 a local girl was found raped and murdered, he was in prison serving time for kiting cheques. Whilst there, another prisoner, looking for release, alleged he had overheard him confessing to the killing, and Williamson was arrested for the crime. What followed was one ...
Julie Orringer's astonishing first novel – eagerly awaited since the publication of her heralded best-selling short-story collection, How to Breathe Underwater ('Fiercely beautiful' – The New York Times) – is a grand love story and an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are torn apart by war.Paris, 1937. Andras L?vi, a Hungarian Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de S?vign?. As he becomes involved with the letter's recipient, his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena, ...
Рассказ вошёл в сборники:Dark Carnival (Тёмный карнавал)The October Country (Октябрьская страна)The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)
Russia, 1910. Young Valentina Ivanova charms St Petersburg's aristocracy with her classic Russian beauty and her talent as a pianist. She scandalises society when she begins a romance with Jens Friis, a Danish engineer. He brings to her life a passion and an intimacy she has never known. Unbending in their opposition, her parents push her into a loveless engagement with a Russian count. Valentina struggles for independence and to protect her young sister from the tumult sweeping the city, as Russia is bound for rebellion. The Tsar, the Duma and the Bolsheviks are at each other's throats. Valentina is forced to make a choice that changes her life for ever…
The Joy Luck Club, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1989, presents the stories of four Chinese-immigrant women and their American-born daughters. Each of the four Chinese women has her own view of the world based on her experiences in China and wants to share that vision with her daughter. The daughters try to understand and appreciate their mothers' pasts, adapt to the American way of life, and win their mothers' acceptance. The book's name comes from the club formed in China by one of the mothers, Suyuan Woo, in order to lift her friends' spirits and distract them ...
The Killer Angels (1974) is a historical novel by Michael Shaara that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. The book tells the story of four days of the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War: June 29, 1863, as the troops of both the Union and the Confederacy move into battle around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and July 1, July 2, and July 3, when the battle was fought. A film adaption of the novel, titled Gettysburg, was released in 1993.Reading about the past is rarely so much fun as on these pages.
A literary prize-winning epic novel that has been a record-breaking bestseller in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and is keenly anticipated in the English-speaking world. won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, as well as the Acad?mie Fran?aise's Prix de Litt?rature. It has sold more than one million copies in Europe alone. is the fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former Nazi officer who survived the war and has reinvented himself, many years later, as a middle-class entrepreneur and family man in northern France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, ...
Taut with suspense and rich in historical detail, The Kitchen Boy chronicles in an entirely new light the brutal slaying of Czar Nicholas II and his family. It was a crime to horrify, fascinate, and mystify the ages. On the night of July 16, 1918, Bolshevik revolutionaries murdered the entire Russian royal family in a hail of gunfire. No one survived who might bear witness to what really happened on that mysterious and bloody night. Or so it was thought. In masterful historical detail and breathtaking suspense, Robert Alexander carries the reader through the entire heartrending story as told through the eyes of a real but forgotten witness, the kitchen boy. Narrated by the sole witness to the basement execution, The Kitchen Boy is historical fiction at its best. But more than that, the accessible style and intricately woven plot – with a stunning revelation at its end – will keep readers guessing throughout.
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption. And it is also about the power of fathers over sons – their love, their sacrifices, their lies.The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner tells a sweeping story of family, love, and friendship against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, bringing to mind the large canvasses of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. But just as it is old-fashioned in its narration, it is contemporary in its subject – the devastating history of Afghanistan over the past thirty years. As emotionally gripping as it is tender, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful debut.
Amazon.com ReviewSet in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned ...
Following the enormous success of 2004 bestseller and critics' favorite Jonathan Strange Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke delivers a delicious collection of ten stories set in the same fairy-crossed world of 19th-century England. With Clarke's characteristic historical detail and diction, these dark, enchanting tales unfold in a slightly distorted version of our own world, where people are bedeviled by mischievous interventions from the fairies. With appearances from beloved characters from her novel, including Jonathan Strange and Childermass, and an entirely new spin on certain historical figures, including Mary, Queen of Scots, this is a must-have for fans of Susanna Clarke's and ...
Рассказ вошёл в сборники:Dark Carnival (Тёмный карнавал)The October Country (Октябрьская страна)The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)
A mesmerizing debut about a young girl whose steadfast belief and imagination bring everything she once held dear into treacherous balance.In Grace McCleen’s harrowing, powerful debut, she introduces an unforgettable heroine in ten-year-old Judith McPherson, a young believer who sees the world with the clear Eyes of Faith. Persecuted at school for her beliefs and struggling with her distant, devout father at home, young Judith finds solace and connection in a model in miniature of the Promised Land that she has constructed in her room from collected discarded scraps—the Land of Decoration. Where others might ...
The Cartel has come full circle with this fast-paced, groundbreaking novel, the finale to the hit series by New York Times bestsellers Ashley JaQuavis. Miamor is fighting for her life in the belly of the beast. She's been kidnapped, and she's staring death in the eye. Is the reign over for the head of the Murda Mamas? Carter is in federal custody and leaves the Diamond Empire to Zyir and Mecca. When the past comes back to haunt Mecca and the truth finally comes to light, will The Cartel rise or fall? Breeze is in the clutches of the crazed Ma'tee, and she desperately searches for a way out. Will she escape, or die his love slave? The answers to these questions lie inside the pages of Cartel 3: The Final Chapter. Open it to discover the shocking truth, and prepare yourself for the unpredictable conclusion of one of the best street series of all time.
The last decades of the nineteenth century were a violent period in China"s history marked by humiliating foreign incursions and domestic rebellion, ultimately ending in the demise of the Ch"ing dynasty. The only constant during this tumultuous time was the power wielded by one person: the resilient, ever-resourceful Tzu Hsi, or Empress Orchid, as readers came to know her in Anchee Min"s critically acclaimed novel covering the first part of this complex woman"s life.The Last Empress is the story of Orchid"s dramatic transition from a strong-willed, instinctive young woman to a wise ...
The Last Friend, the novel from internationally acclaimed author Tahar Ben Jelloun, winner of the 2004 International Dublin/IMPAC award, is a Rashamon-like tale of friendship and betrayal set in twentieth century Tangier. Written in Ben Jelloun's inimitable and powerfully direct style, the novel explores the twists and turns of an intense thirty-year friendship between two young men struggling to find their identities and sexual fulfillment in Morocco in the late 1950s, a complex and contradictory society both modern and archaic.From their carefree university days through their brutal imprisonment and ultimate release, the two rely on each other ...
