Search results for ""holland house books""

Selected by Chris Patten in the Sunday Telegraph as ‘the novel which shows the best grasp of political life’. 'Tolstoyan . . . a wide-ranging, detailed and sympathetic portrayal of a whole society.' ANTHONY THWAITE, Observer; 'What a treat . . . stylish, politically interesting and immensely readable.' NINA BAWDEN, Daily Telegraph

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This is the story of Lili Pohlmann's incredible childhood and survival. During the Second World War she was helped by many people, sometimes by simply 'looking the other way'; but of especial significance were two remarkable non-Jews: a German woman working for the Nazi occupying forces in Lemberg, and a Greek Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop. After the war Lili came to London in the first of three transports of Jewish children from Poland. She arrived in the British capital on her sixteenth birthday. She still lives in London. The book consists of interviews with Lili, revealing her own voice, which is vivid, colourful and engaging. The conversations focus on Lili's childhood, wartime experiences, her arrival in London and years shortly after the war. They are accompanied by historical commentaries, as well as more personal pieces from the author, Anna Blasiak, framing and contrasting Lili's story and experiences with the story of somebody from a different generation, growing up years after the war in Poland, a place where the vanished Jews left a painful, gaping hole. Introduction by Philippe Sands Historical Context by Clare Mulley Illustrated with photographs throughout

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Without the horse, India would not be this India ... The history of the horse in India is an epic tale of life and war, of migration and intermingling, and points towards a greater history throughout the world, the history of humans and animals in symbiosis.

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Winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize. ‘A prose which is accomplished, poetic, incisive.’ A.S. BYATT.

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"Shika fit in with difficulty, neither here nor there, but she was content with herself, her family, and her world. She had needed nothing more until her father's death. After that, she wondered if there was another version of herself somewhere out there, a 'missingness' that could be found." A letter from a mother to her daughter reveals a life changing secret... Thousands of miles away, a woman is trapped in a loveless marriage... Shika has lived in the shadow of her sister's ghost all her life. The death of her father compels her to search for the answers to questions she had buried long ago. Determined to recover a scattered past and make sense of herself, Shika undertakes a journey which leads her across the world, to the heart of Kolkata. Mirrors is a story of identity, truth, and uncovering who we truly are.

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Matilda was always happy to live vicariously through her collection of classic films- but that was before Thomas brought his manic energy into her life. Can she find her way back to herself? Tilda is a young woman who did a terrible thing. How much self-punishment can one woman handle? Does she deserve to move on? Mother is the connection between the two women. They are both her daughter. Her only daughter. A strange, poetic story of what it is to be a young woman fractured by life.

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A haunting ode to those who paid the ultimate price-through the prism of the Maoist insurgency, Ashutosh Bhardwaj meditates on larger questions of violence and betrayal, love and obsession, and what it means to live with and write about death. From 2011 to 2015, Ashutosh lived in the Red Corridor in India wherein the Ultra-Left Naxalites, taking inspiration from the Russian revolution and Mao's tactics, work to overthrow the Indian government by the barrel of the gun. He made several trips thereafter reporting on the insurgents, on police and governmental atrocities, and on the lives caught in the crossfire. Ashutosh chronicles his experiences and bears witness to the lives and deaths of the unforgettable men and women he meets from both sides of the struggle, bringing home the human cost of conflict with astonishing power. Narrated in multiple voices, the book is a creative biography of the region, Dandakaranya, that combines the rigour of journalism, the intimacy of a diary, the musings of a travelogue, and the craft of a novel. The Death Script is one of the most significant works of non-fiction to be published in recent times, bringing often overlooked perspectives and events to light with empathy. Praised by India's topmost scholars and critics, the book has already won various awards.

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'There is nothing to forget' A young girl awakes alone next to a burning truck and befriends a nearby cloud; an Eritrean refugee studies interior design as he attempts to build his new home; a group of illegal immigrants embark on an arduous journey in the city as they desperately seek: Her. Darting from the dark underbelly of London to the sexually impenetrable home, Saleh Addonia writes stories of displacement and frustration. Tinged with isolation and alienation, each tale strikes the imagination as Addonia weaves the surreal into devastatingly human stories. With a fable-like wisdom and poignancy, The Feeling House is a compelling, sometimes moving, portrayal of years of a profound disorientation that has fractured time and memory.

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Greta Garbo, the immortal goddess of the silver screen, said that she wanted to be alone. What if she had been granted that wish? What if she had travelled further and further until she arrived at the North Pole? And what if she met a faithful dog along the way...

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Everyone has something interesting to say if you take the time to listen. The Interview Chain is a series of conversations-each interviewee was asked to nominate someone they admire as the next link. Starting from a casual conversation on a boat on the Thames, the chain wended its way for over 23,000 miles, alighting on three continents and gathering up personal perspectives on issues that really matter in the world today. The interviewees include a theatre director, a rabbi, a philanthropist, a sculptor, a New York Mayoral candidate, a pioneering documentary maker, and a man who rescues giant trees. Some have worked in challenging places-Kabul in the time of the Taliban, a Romanian orphanage, immigration detention centres, remote Indian villages-while others have found themselves caught up in extraordinary situations such as the Rwandan genocide, the Ferguson uprising, and the UN Climate Change Negotiations. This is the most lovely approach to tell social change stories that I have read about ever, and it is an overwhelming honor to be part of this book. Ruth Messinger, Global Ambassador to the American Jewish World Service and former New York City political leader.

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It’s 1997, three years after the end of Apartheid. Two girls, Leilah, who is mixed race, and Frankie, who is white, are drawn together when they start at a new school, one that remains racially divided despite the country’s new laws. Their friendship deepens and intensifies before suddenly falling apart when each tells the other secrets.

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The summer of 2006, and nineteen-year-old Layla returns to Lebanon. When she arrives she finds that her troubled younger brother is missing. She heads to Beirut to search for him, but her quest is cut short when Beirut comes under fire. A new war has begun, and she is trapped in the middle of it.

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'He gives us things in a few lines -- a human body, a crying child, a heavy lorry, so that we are made to see them simultaneously as the characters see them, and from some huge distance, as perfected instances of some terrible mystery of human existence.' A.S. BYATT; John Harvey writes with consistent authority.' ALLAN MASSIE;

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When artist Stephen Bloodsmith creates a series of images inspired by Rubens' trip to London in 1629, he enters a historical world of suspicion and intrigue. But will the manipulations he portrays in art spill over into the real world? When he practises deception inside his own marriage, falling in love with his model even as the romance of his wife Robyn unravels, the corrosive parallels between Bloodsmith's and Rubens' lives – the discovery of intimate secrets, the pain caused by desire and jealousy, the consequences of power and conflict – become hard to live with and impossible to ignore. Rubens believed he could make peace between the warring powers of Europe. To succeed he must win over Charles I of England, while in Paris 'the Cardinal' is working to frustrate him. Will nation cheat nation as people deceive one another in their personal lives? At once an intimate portrait of sexual pain in two centuries, and a gripping depiction of international 'deal-making', Pax is a rich, compelling study of desire, power, art – and the necessity of finding peace.

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A gripping series of moments - painful, loving, desperate - Rescuing Barbara is a bitterly funny, and even lyrical story about the inherent dangers of detachment ... and a reminder that predators are everywhere, waiting to fill in the gaps.

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This book has collaboration and translation at its heart: between people, words and images, languages, cultures. The poems came first, in Polish. Then came the photographic response to them. Then four translators, MARTA DZIUROSZ, MARIA JASTRZEBSKA, DANUSIA STOK and ELZBIETA WOJCIK-LEESE, took a set of 12 or 13 poems each and translated them into English. All people involved were women: the poet, the photographer, the four translators and the two editors. Together they arrived at 51 Polish poems, 51 English poems and 51 photographs making this collection. They raise themes such as cultural identity and migration, queerness, racism, isolation and family memories.

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Deidre is a victim, of her family, her society, her history. That is how she sees herself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical. Until the police take her back to her family home...

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When Daphne becomes pregnant, it isn’t only her life that changes… For her husband Amir, for their parents, and for their friends Guy and Abigail, the pregnancy and birth force them all to look at their own lives, at what they want, at their pasts and their futures. Each person has a different perspective of the delivery, and of the complexity of having a child: the difference between men and women, a changing self-perception of parents, conflicts between work and parenthood. Lives are changed, and the equilibrium each of them has achieved is fundamentally disturbed until, after the delivery, they can find a new balance for the future. “Giving birth is almost never depicted in fiction. I don’t remember ever reading such a description of a delivery, neither in Hebrew fiction nor in world literature.” Interview with Alit Karp, literary critic of Haaretz and Makor Rishon “The book focuses on daily issues and touches the deepest places… I loved the novel and kept thinking about it long after reading it.” Lee Yanini, reviewer in the The Israeli Librarian Journal “…a very profound novel, polished and complex. It is practically impossible to put it down until the very end. Barasch Rubinstein is an extraordinary writer…” Review in Chi Tarbut

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A vision, a peculiar international movement flooding the city, an Empress, and a strange artefact called the Chimaera… Petty Veniz will never be the same again, for it seems the Apocalypse is at hand.

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A Bird Flight: After the death of her father the narrator travels to an academic symposium in Chicago; her host seems fixated on her bereavement as he tries to reach understanding of his own recent loss through her experience.;Earrings: The narrator's choice of earrings becomes symbolic of her desire to establish her own identity separate from the clashing ways of her mother, born in Israel, and her grandmother who emigrated from Europe.;The Grammar Teacher: A teacher who is certain of the right and proper way to behave and teach, and who achieves the highest standards from her classes, finds everything she believes in challenged by a new, modern teacher.;Watch Dog: The consequences of an irrational fear of dogs for a young man seeking to make his way in the world.;Aura: A man lies in a hospital bed and experiences an internal world disconnected from his old life.

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Latif's life changes when he is appointed bellboy at the Paradise Lodge - a hotel where people come to die. After his father's death, drowned in the waters surrounding their small Island, it is 17 year-old Latif's turn to become the man of the house and provide for his ailing mother and sisters. Despite discovering a dead body on his first day of duty, Latif finds entertainment spying on guests and regaling the hotel's janitor, Stella, with made-up stories. However, when Latif finds the corpse of a small-time actor in Room 555 and becomes a mute-witness to a crime that happens there, the course of Latif's life is irretrievably altered. The Bellboy is as much a commentary on how society treats and victimizes the intellectually vulnerable as it is about the quiet resentment brewing against religious minorities in India today. With a mix of wry humour and heart-wrenching poignancy, the book narrates a young boy's coming-of-age on a small island, and his innocence that persists even in the face of adversity and inevitable tragedy.

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In the Ellis family, no-one talks about Susie but no-one can forget her - until Gina and Robert receive invitations to a family reunion by the sea in Cornwall. As the three days unfold, the stories and secrets of each character are mapped against England's changing society. The truth of Susie's disappearance over twenty years ago is gradually revealed. Three Days by the Sea is a subtle, funny and moving story of hope and renewal. With both dry, sharp humour and warmth, Helen E. Mundler unpicks the trials and tensions of family life.

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A book-length interview with the Mother of God. No questions, just answers. Mariamne is an old Jewish peasant woman from Galilee. She is visited by a young Greek man who came to see her to talk about her late son. Mariamne spins her story in a colourful and blunt language of a simple, old woman of natural intelligence and dry sense of humour.

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Part memoir, part biography, part book about creative writing and what really makes a novel, and also a brave book about failure, This Is Not A Book About Charles Darwin is unique and compelling.

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The story of Lili Pohlmann's childhood and survival. During the Second World War she was helped by many people, including a German woman working for the Nazi occupying forces in Lemberg, and a Greek Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop. After the war Lili came to London in the first transport of Jewish children from Poland.

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Tropical sun, walks on the beach, time for exercise and relaxation: life as an expat wife seems like a holiday. Reality proves disappointing and as boredom turns to despair, her fascination with the way her greyhounds hunt and kill develops into daydreams. She pushes herself ever closer to acts unthinkable at home. Is there a killer in us all?

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“…an extraordinarily immersive narrative, and a fascinating story of the little-known Ouled Nail dancers.” The Island Prize Judges "A compelling storyteller, fresh and engaging." Karen Jennings, An Island Tourists know it as the City of Joy. For Ouled Nail dancers, Bousaada is a city of horrors. It is 1931 when two sisters arrive in Bousaada bursting with dreams of becoming successful dancers. But the city, occupied by the ruthless French colonial army, changes their lives forever. When they kill a soldier in self-defence, Fahima and Salima must outsmart the French Colonel who will stop at nothing to uncover the truth. The sisters are driven further into a cycle of violence with every attempt to hide their crime. Risking their lives and the lives of their loved ones, the dancers find themselves at the heart of a civilizational clash. SAND ROSES is a tale of resistance, sisterhood and the shameful past of two colliding nations. This extraordinarily immersive narrative thrusts its reader into the Algerian city of Bousaada during the 1930s and the story of the Nailiya dancers.

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'Captivating . . . a sumptuous study of one of history's most infamous love triangles.' Independent; 'Excellent; I was taken by every page; more, every sentence. It is beautifully and startlingly written, the sudden shifts and turns, impulse and counter-impulse within and from these remarkable people. A very fine love story.' CHRISTOPHER RICKS

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A unique and beautiful book, profusely illustrated, A Certain Slant of Light was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Prize. Duncan White's moving novel reverberates with unspoken grief. A beautifully written meditation on impermanence, in which art and human life are seen as signal flares into the darkness.

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When Stephen Bloodsmith creates a series of images inspired by Rubens' trip to 1629 London, he is finds in a world of suspicion and intrigue. When he practises deception in his own marriage, falling in love with his model, the parallels between Bloodsmith's and Rubens' lives become hard to live with and impossible to ignore.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE "Those questions of what makes a life worth living, of identity and belonging, and the myths, memories and beliefs we live by, are the central threads running through this beautiful and immensely readable novel, carrying the reader onwards through the ever-shifting fabric of the wartime and post-war world." - Caroline Wyatt, European Literature Network; `In this heartbreaking novel, Jane Rogoyska writes with tragic power about one of the last century's foulest crimes - Stalin's mass murder of his Polish prisoners in 1940. In a fiction boldly using real names and events, she brings the victims of Katyn and the other murder sites, together with their families and the handful of traumatised survivors, back to brief life and hope.' NEAL ASCHERSON From acclaimed biographer and filmmaker Jane Rogoyska, Kozlowski: a new novel that explores the tragedy of the Katyn Massacre and the pain of post-war Polish exile. Kozlowski tells the story of a young Polish army doctor whose life is changed forever by a single, mysterious event: the disappearance, in April 1940, of 4,000 of his comrades from a Soviet interrogation camp in Starobelsk, Ukraine. Exiled in post-war London, Kozlowski builds a new life, working to convince himself that the past cannot affect him. In reality, the past is the only place he longs to be. As the silence surrounding his lost comrades deepens, his attempts to submerge his feelings threaten to destroy him. This is a novel about loss, memory and guilt, written in sparse and elegant prose.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE 'An Island concerns itself with lives lived on the margins, through the story of a man who has exiled himself from the known world only to find himself called to the service of others, themselves exiled from the world by cruelty and circumstance. It is on these grounds that this writer deftly constructs a moving, transfixing novel of loss, political upheaval, history, identity, all rendered in majestic and extraordinary prose.' Booker Prize Judges panel. "A gripping, terrifying and unforgettable story." Elleke Boehmer Samuel has lived alone for a long time; one morning he finds the sea has brought someone to offer companionship and to threaten his solitude... A young refugee washes up unconscious on the beach of a small island inhabited by no one but Samuel, an old lighthouse keeper. Unsettled, Samuel is soon swept up in memories of his former life on the mainland: a life that saw his country suffer under colonisers, then fight for independence, only to fall under the rule of a cruel dictator; and he recalls his own part in its history. In this new man's presence he begins to consider, as he did in his youth, what is meant by land and to whom it should belong. To what lengths will a person go in order to ensure that what is theirs will not be taken from them? A novel about guilt and fear, friendship and rejection; about the meaning of home.

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Everybody knows about Charles Darwin, and many know about others in his family, from Erasmus Darwin and Tom Wedgwood, the first photographer, to composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and poet and radical John Cornford, the first Briton to be killed in the Spanish Civil War. But when Charles and Emma Darwin's great-great-granddaughter, another Emma Darwin, tried to root her new novel in that history, the conflict between her complex heritage, and her own identity as a writer, became a battle that nearly killed her. This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin takes the reader on a writer's journey through the Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton clan, as seen through the lens of Emma's struggle. Along the way, her wry, witty and honest memoir becomes a brave book about failure - and, above all, a book about writing and how stories are told. Richly illustrated with over 40 black and white images.

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Grace Marlowe moves to the far west of Wales, hoping for a fresh start. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a dark, forgotten house. Even her `voices’ – her spirit-world companions – appear to abandon her. Except for one… A psychological exploration of a troubled mind, or a story of demonic possession in a haunted house?

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