Berlin, 1940. The city is paralysed by fear.
But one man refuses to be scared.
Otto, an ordinary German living in a shabby apartment block, tries to stay out of trouble under Nazi rule. But when he discovers his only son has been killed fighting at the front he''s shocked into an extraordinary act of resistance, and starts to drop anonymous postcards attacking Hitler across the city. If caught, he will be executed.
Soon this silent campaign comes to the ...
Dr. Laing''s first purpose is to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible. In this, with case studies of schizophrenic patients, he succeeds brilliantly, but he does more: through a vision of sanity and madness as ''degrees of conjunction and disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent'' he offers a rich existential analysis of personal alienation.
The outsider, estranged from himself and society, cannot experience ...
"House of Hunger" not only won The Guardian fiction prize but stunned the imagination of readers with its view of the slums of colonial Salisbury. "Black Sunlight" gives a similar cockroach-eye view of London.
On the eve of the Muslim festival of Eid, Narguiss, who ‘never wanted anything to do with politics’, is more preoccupied with family problems than with the radio news of kidnappings and murders. Nearby, Leia, Januário and their young daughter are caught up in the pleasure and security of finally finding a flat of their own, while Mena, who was once the beauty of her village, overhears her husband plotting murder. Before dawn, these innocent people ...
Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau, stand on a garbage heap and look into their futures: Njoroge is to attend school, while Kamau will train to be a carpenter. But this is Kenya, and the times are against them: In the forests, the Mau Mau is waging war against the white government, and the two brothers and their family need to decide where their loyalties lie. For the practical Kamau, the choice is simple, but for Njoroge the scholar, the dream of progress through learning is a hard ...
On the heels of A&E’s blockbuster show Longmire—the latest New York Times bestseller in a “a top-notch tale of complex emotions and misguided treachery” (USA Today)
The recent A&E premiere of Longmire—a television series based on Craig Johnson’s New York Times bestselling Walt Longmire Mystery Series—was the highest ...
In Honour & Other People''s Children, Helen Garner examines the idiosyncratic and bothersome notions of honour by which her characters - adults and children - shape their untidy lives.
Honour is about a couple whose marriage, though abandoned in practice, persists in spirit. But the arrival of a new lover obliges them to make a proper separation and draw their child into the conflict.
Other People''s Children is a witty, sad story of ...
First time in paperback. The New York Times bestseller from the author of A Gesture Life and Native Speaker.
In this acclaimed first novel, Helen Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends who are living and loving in new ways.
Nora falls in love with Javo the junkie, and together they try to make sense of their lives and the choices they have made. But caught in an increasingly ambiguous relationship, they are unable to let go - and the harder they pull away from each other, the tighter the monkey grip. ...
Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of decency and of honour. For Eddie, it''s a privilege to take in his wife''s cousins, straight off the boat from Italy. But, as his niece begins to fall for one of them, it''s clear that it''s not just, as Eddie claims, that he''s too strange, too sissy, too careless for her, but that something bigger, deeper is wrong, and wrong inside Eddie, in a way he can''t face. Something which threatens the ...
Professor Timofey Pnin, previously of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously positioned at the heart of campus America. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding-house; and the trials of taking the wrong train.
Matthew''s parents are worried. At eleven, he''s much too old to have an imaginary friend, yet they find him talking to and arguing with a presence that even he admits is not physically there. This presence – Chocky – causes Matthew to ask difficult questions and say startling things: he speaks of complex mathematics and mocks human progress.
Then, when Matthew does something incredible, it seems there is more than the imaginary about Chocky. Which is ...
In Berlin there lived a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable and happy but one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress he loved. He was not loved in return, however, and his life ended in disaster. The original Russian text of this novel was published in 1933.
Self-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with a man he believes to be his double reveals a frightening ''split'' in Hermann''s nature. With shattering immediacy, Nabokov takes us into a deranged world, one full of an impudent, startling humour, dominated by the egotistical and scornful figure of a murderer who thinks himself an artist. ...
Part of the fabulous new hardback library of 22 Vladimir Nabokov books, publishing over the coming year, with an elegant new jacket and text design.
The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine ''Average Man'' party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has done away with individualism and freedom of thought. Only John Krug, a brilliant philosopher, stands up to the regime. His antagonist, the leader of the ...
Written in inimitable, magical prose, these sixty-five stories span Nabokov''s extraordinary life and career. Arranged chronologically to illuminate his development as a writer, the collection displays Nabokov''s astonishing range of technical and formal inventiveness: the dazzling sleight of hand, fanciful fairy tales, ingenious puzzles, enchanting vignettes and haunting melancholic narratives full of disturbing ambiguities. ...
Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest'', Nabokov wrote of King, Queen, Knave. Comic, sensual and cerebral, it dramatizes an Oedipal love triangle, a tragi-comedy of husband, wife and lover, through Dreyer the rich businessman, his ripe-lipped and mercenary wife Martha, and their bespectacled nephew Franz. ''If a resolute Freudian manages to slip in'' - Nabokov darts a glance to the reader - ''he or she should be warned that a number of cruel ...
Perhaps the funniest travel book ever written, Remote People begins with a vivid account of the coronation of Emperor Ras Tafari – Haile Selassie I, King of Kings – an event covered by Evelyn Waugh in 1930 as special correspondent for The Times. It continues with subsequent travels throughout Africa, where natives rub shoulders with eccentric expatriates, settlers with Arab traders and dignitaries with monks. Interspersing these ...
Between 1929 and 1935 Evelyn Waugh travelled widely and wrote four books about his experiences.
In this collection he writes, with his customary wit and perception, about a cruise around the Mediterranean; a train trip from Djibouti to Abyssinia to attend Emperor Haile Selassie''s coronation in 1930; his travels in Aden, Zanzibar, Kenya and the Congo, coping with unbearable heat and plagued by mosquitoes; a journey to Guyana and Brazil; and his return to Addis ...
In 1935 Italy declared war on Abyssinia and Evelyn Waugh was sent to Addis Ababa to cover the conflict. His acerbic account of the intrigue and political machinations leading up to the crisis is coupled with amusing descriptions of the often bizarre and seldom straightforward life of a war correspondent rubbing shoulders with less than honest officials, Arab spies, pyjama-wearing radicals and disgruntled journalists. Witty, lucid and penetrating, Evelyn Waugh ...
