Search results for ""vintage publishing""

Touching and wonderfully funny, In Custody is woven around the yearnings and calamities of a small-town scholar in the north of India. An impoverished college lecturer, Deven, sees a way to escape from the meanness of his daily life when he is asked to interview India's greatest Urdu poet, Nur - a project that can only end in disaster.

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Set in contemporary Bombay and other cities, these stories reflect the kaleidoscope of urban life - evoking the colour, sounds and white-hot heat of the city. Warm, perceptive, humorous and touched with sadness, Anita Desai's stories are peopled with intensely individual characters - the man spiritually transformed by the surface texture of a melon; the American wife who, homesick for the verdant farmlands of Vermont, turns to the hippies in the Indian hills; the painter living in a slum who fills his canvasses with flowers, birds and landscapes he has never seen.

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Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from Norfolk to New Zealand in search of new beginnings and prosperity. But the harsh land near Christchurch threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in the creek he is seized by a rapturous obsession with the voluptuous riches awaiting him deep in the earth. Abandoning his farm and family, he sets off alone for the new gold-fields over the Southern Alps, a moral wilderness where many others, under the seductive dreams of 'the colour', are violently rushing to their destinies. By turns both moving and terrifying, The Colour is about a quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and explore the sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of happiness.

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Just as Peter Ackroyd's bestselling London is the biography of the city, Thames: Sacred River is the biography of the river, from sea to source. Exploring its history from prehistoric times to the present day, the reader is drawn into an extraordinary world, learning about the fishes that swim in the river and the boats that ply its surface; about floods and tides; hauntings and suicides; miasmas and malaria; locks, weirs and embankments; bridges, docks and palaces.Peter Ackroyd has a genius for digging out the most surprising and entertaining details, and for writing about them in the most magisterial prose; the result is a wonderfully readable and captivating guide to this extraordinary river and the towns and villages which line it.

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In an idyllic American village, elderly romantic Lemuel Sears still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is under threat; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters involved in organised crime. Can Sears thwart the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilisation and save his beloved village?Cheever's wry fable of modern American is interlaced with musings on everything from the etiquette of supermarket queues to the evolution of the ice-skate.

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THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONTime Regained begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris and reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw material of literature - his past life. This edition includes the indispensable A Guide to Proust, compiled by Terence Kilmartin and revised by Joanna Kilmartin.

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The definitive translation of one of the greatest French novels of the twentieth centuryIn the opening volume of Proust's great novel, the narrator travels backwards in time in order to tell the story of a love affair that had taken place before his own birth. Swann's jealous love for Odette provides a prophetic model of the narrator's own relationships. All Proust's great themes - time and memory, love and loss, art and the artistic vocation - are here in kernel form.'Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century' Telegraph

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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MALOUFThrough the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half-mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aborigine artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. In a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibility of redemption.

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**WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE** 'A book of big questions, and big answers' Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? And what can it teach us about our current crisis? Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is a ground-breaking and humane work of popular science that can provide expert insight into our modern world.'The most absorbing account on offer of the emergence of a world divided between have and have-nots... Never before put together so coherently, with such a combination of expertise, charm and compassion' The Times

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A HARLOT'S PROGRESS reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. Dabydeen's novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, redeeming them for their cliched status as predators or victims. The protagonist - in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London's oldest black inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. He refuses however to supply parade of grievances, and to give a simplistic account of beatings, sexual abuses, etc. He will not embark upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader. Instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots as deftly as a harlot her client: he spins a tale of myths, half-truths and fantasies; recreating Africa and eighteenth-century London in startlingly poetic ways. What matters to him is the odyssey into poetry, the rich texture of his narrative, not its truthfulness. In this, his fourth novel, David Dabydeen opens up history to myriad imaginary interpretations, repopulating a vanished world with a strange, defiantly vivid and compassionate humanity.

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‘Graham Greene's beautiful and disturbing novel is filled with tenderness, humour, excitement and doubt’ The Times A leak is traced to a small sub-section of the secret service, sparking off the inevitable security checks, tensions and suspicions. The sort of atmosphere, perhaps, where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle, it is the end of the line anyway, and time for him to retire to live peacefully with his wife and child. But no-one escapes so easily from the lonely, isolated, neurotic world of the SIS.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY COLM TÓIBÍN

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How do you begin to understand the concept of nothing? Where does it begin and where does it end?From the zeros of the mathematician to the void of the philosophers, from Shakespeare to the empty set, from the ether to the quantum vacuum, from being and nothingness to creatio ex nihilo, there is much ado about nothing at the heart of things. Recent exciting discoveries in astronomy are shown to shed new light on the nature of the vacuum and its dramatic effect upon the explanation of the Universe. This remarkable book ranges over every nook and cranny of nothingness to reveal how the human mind has had to make something of nothing in every field of human enquiry.

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Cecilia, capricious and unable to love, inches reluctantly towards a second marriage to the kind, passionless Julian Tower. Meanwhile, her sister-in-law, Emmeline, is surprised to find the calm tenor of her life disturbed by her attraction to the predatory Mark Linkwater. Markie's appearance disrupts the lives of both women, but in the pain of misunderstanding, it is Emmeline who reveals her vulnerability in a violent and tragic act.Reissued alongside The Hotel and The Little Girls

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In 1837, two young African princes arrive at the court of Willem I in the Netherlands. They have been given to the Dutch by the King of the Ashanti as surety in a deal over illegal slave trading. The two boys think they have been sent to acquire a European education, but time passes. They forget their native language and become exiles. Treated as curiosities by white people, their friendship suffers and their paths diverge. Years later, as the twentieth century dawns, the elderly Kwasi, now owner of a coffee plantation in Java, sits down to write his autobiography. Based on a true story, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi is both a brilliant piece of storytelling and a moving portrayal of the search for identity and belonging.

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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TESSA HADLEYImposing, rich, unloved and with a genius for unreality; Eva Trout has a 'capacity for making trouble, attracting trouble, strewing trouble around her' that is endless. Eva Trout was Elizabeth Bowen's last completed novel, and in it her elegant style, her gift for social comedy and her intense sensibility combine to create one of her most formidable - and moving - heroines.

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'The best account in English of the early years of Elizabeth' Evening Standard A woman in a man's world, Queen Elizabeth I was to become England's most successful ruler. Confident in her destiny, intensely intelligent, passionately sexual yet (she said) a virgin, Elizabeth's reign was characterised by a self-assurance unusual for the time. Finding her way through the labyrinthine plots that surrounded the court, she had to live by her wits, surrounded by betrayal and suspicion, not knowing who to trust with her desire to be queen, or her desire to be a lover.David Starkey's portrait of the first female ruler of England is an enlightening account. Filled with lucid and clear scenes with fascinating insight throughout, Elizabeth is a truly masterful retelling of the life of a legendary monarch.'What a page turner!' Time Out'Fresh and lively... Vividly told' Sunday Times

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'Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.'One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald's life and work. In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story: the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of an era.

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For Arthur Rowe the charity fête was a trip back to childhood, to innocence, a welcome chance to escape the terror of the Blitz, to forget twenty years of his past and a murder. Then he guesses the weight of the cake, and from that moment on he's a hunted man, the target of shadowy killers, on the run and struggling to remember and to find the truth.

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Set in a world that has lost the comfort of national identity and individualism, this is a powerful and unusual love story told by one of the 20th century's greatest writers.Anthony Farrant is back home after lying and cheating his way through one job after another in the Far East. When his adoring sister Kate sets him up with a role in Stockholm as bodyguard to her boss and lover, megalomaniac financier Krogh, Anthony seems set on a path to redemption. But when he receives orders from Krogh that offend his own sense of decency, he begins to leak information to a down-at-heel journalist: a decision that will cost Anthony much more than just his job.First published in 1935, England Made Me is an early Greene novel and helped to cement his reputation as an important and exciting new writing talent.'Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature' John le Carré

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Martin believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional re-education. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendour at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. How will he survive it?

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An unsettling and absorbing tale from the bestselling author of The Woman in Black.Celibate, irreproachable and distinguished, Thomas Cavendish is in his mid-fifties and the obvious man to become Master of his college. But, walking by the river, Thomas sees a young girl standing on the bridge. It is an apocalyptic vision, one that alters Thomas's life irrevocably and tragically, but with the beauty and joy of a love never previously imagined.‘As light as a feather but as powerful as flight’ Observer

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A terrifying ghost story by the bestselling author of The Woman in Black.One dark and rainy night, Sir James Monmouth returns to London after years spent travelling alone. Intent on uncovering the secrets of his childhood hero, the mysterious Conrad Vane, he begins to investigate Vane’s life, but he finds himself warned off at every turn. Before long he realises he is being followed too. A pale, thin boy is haunting his every step but every time he tries to confront the boy he disappears. And what of the chilling scream and desperate sobbing only he can hear? His quest leads him eventually to the old lady of Kittiscar Hall, where he discovers something far more terrible at work than he could ever have imagined.‘Thoroughly frightening’ Daily Telegraph‘Chills the blood’ The Times

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Discover the life of one of the twentieth century's most significant and notorious war correspondents, and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway.Martha Gellhorn's journalism tracks many of the flashpoints of the twentieth century; as a young woman she witnessed the suffering of the American Depression and risked her life in the Spanish Civil War. Her dispatches from the front made her a legend, yet her private life was often messy and volcanic. Her determination to be a war correspondent - and her conspicuous success - contributed to the breakdown of her infamously stormy marriage to Ernest Hemingway. In this mesmerising biography of a life that spanned the twentieth century, Moorehead reveals how passionately Martha fought against injustice, and how determined she was to catch the human story.'A deeply sympathetic portrait... [it shows] an overwhelming sense of what it is to be human' Daily Telegraph

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The dramatic story of five key turning points in a thousand years of Western music - discoveries that changed the course of history. Who first invented 'Doh Re Mi...'?What do we mean by "in tune"?Looking back down the corridor of a thousand years, Howard Goodall guides us through the stories of five seismic developments in the history of Western music. His "big bangs" may not be the ones we expect - some are surprising and some are so obvious we overlook them - but all have had an extraordinary impact. Goodall starts with the invention of notation by an 11th-century Italian monk, which removed the creation of music from the hands of the players to the pens of the composers; moves on to the first opera; then to the invention of the piano, and ends with the story of the first recording made in history. Howard Goodall has the gift of making these complicated musical advances both clear and utterly fascinating. Racy and vivid in a narrative full of colourful characters and graphic illustrations of technical processes, he also gives a wonderful sense of the culture of trial and error and competition, be it in 11th-century Italy or 19th-century America, in which all progress takes place. Big Bangs opens a window on the crucial moments in our musical culture - discoveries that made possible everything from Bach to the Beatles - and tells us a riveting story of a millennium of endeavour.

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If you have ever wondered why women always bite your head off or why one guy gets all the girls, if you have ever pondered why some men bring you balloons while others leave you their genitals, then Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation is the book for you. It explains all this and much more. It discloses the best time to have a sex change, how to have a virgin birth, when to seduce your sisters or eat your lover. Quirky and brilliant, it takes as its starting point all creatures great and small worried about their bizarre sex lives, and the letters they write to the wise Dr Tatiana, the only agony aunt in all creation with a prodigious knowledge of both natural history and evolutionary biology.

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Annette runs away from her finishing school but learns more than she bargained for in the real world beyond; the fierce and melacholy Rosa is torn between two Polish brothers; Peter is obsessed by an indecipherable ancient script. This is a story of a group of people under a spell, and the centre of it all is the mysterious Mischa Fox, the enchanter.

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Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections. Atomised tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is the dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls' magazines. A dissection of modern lives and loves. By turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.

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Ali Khan and Nino Kipiani live in the cosmopolitan, oil-rich capital of Azerbaijan which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a melting-pot of different cultures. Ali is a Muslim, with his ancestors' passion for the desert, and Nino is a Christian Georgian girl with sophisticated European ways. Despite their differences, the two have loved each other since childhood and Ali is determined that he will marry Nino as soon as she leaves school. But there is not only the obstacle of their different religions and parental consent to overcome. The First World War breaks out. As the Russians withdraw, the Turks advance, and Ali and Nino find themselves swept up in Azerbaijan's fight for independence.

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Mishima’s literary powers are on full display in his penultimate novel that is a meditation on reincarnation and Buddhist philosophy. Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business, where he is granted an audience with a young Thai princess - an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. He is convinced she is a reincarnated spirit, and undertakes a long, arduous pilgrimage to the holy places of India, where, in the climactic scene, he encounters her once more, only to have his newfound beliefs shattered and his life bereft of all meaning.

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Down among the drab slums of Lambeth, eighteen-year-old Liza is the darling of Vere Street. Vibrant and bewitching, she is adored by the steady, loyal Tom. But then Liza meets Jim Blakeston, charming and worldy, new to the area, and married. Soon the streets are wise to their passionate affair and Liza's fall from grace is fast and fatal. Written while Maugham was a medical student, and his first published novel, Liza of Lambeth is a vividly realistic portrayal of working-class London life.

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Graham Greene's 'long journey through time' began in 1904, when he was born into a tribe of Greenes based in Berkhamstead at the public school where his father was headmaster. In A Sort of Life Greene recalls schooldays and Oxford, adolescent encounters with psychoanalysis and Russian roulette, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism, and how he rashly resigned from The Times when his first novel, The Man Within was published in 1929. A Sort of Life reveals, brilliantly and compellingly, a life lived and an art obsessed by 'the dangerous edge of things'.

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From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong. Even with his improvised bat (the Collins Classic edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion. At sex he is not so adept, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis Team and stalwart of the Kardomah coffee bar, his game improves.Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

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Black Dogs is a dark and brooding masterpiece from Booker-prize winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan.In 1946, June and Bernard set off on their honeymoon. Fired by their ideals and passion for one another, they had planned an idyllic holiday, but in France they witness an event that alters the course of their lives entirely. Forty years on, their son-in-law is trying to uncover the cause of their estrangement and is led back to this moment on honeymoon and an experience of such darkness it was to wrench the couple apart.‘Powerful... Unforgettable’ Sunday Telegraph‘Thoughtful and compassionate’ London Review of Books

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It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air. Stella discovers that her lover Robert is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself. Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella's life begin to crumble.

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Burgundy, 1808. One night Sobran Jodeau, a young vintner, meets an angel in his vineyard: a physically gorgeous creature with huge wings that smell of snow, a sense of humour and an inquiring mind. They meet again every year on the midsummer anniversary of the date. Village life goes on, meanwhile, with its affairs and mysteries, marriages and murders, and the vintages keep improving - though the horror of the Napoleonic wars and into the middle of the century, as science marches on, viticulture changes, and gliders fly like angels.Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

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Sartre's powerful political passions were united with a memorable literary gift, placing him foremost among the novelists, as well as the philosophers, of our time. Iris Murdoch's pioneering study analyses and evaluates the different strands of Sartre's rich and complex oeurve. Combining the objectivity of the scholar with a profound interest in contemporary problems, Iris Murdoch discusses the tradition of philosophical, political and aesthetic thought that gives historical authenticity to Satre's achievement, while showing the ambiguities and dangers inherent in his position.

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A FUTURISTIC COVER - COMES WITH 3D GLASSES!Welcome to Vermilion Sands, the fully automated desert-resort ready to fulfil your most exotic whims. Home to the idle rich it now languishes in uneasy decay, populated only by forgotten movie queens, solitary impresarios and the remittance men of the artistic and literary world. Discover prima donna plants programmed to sing operatic arias, dial-a-poem computers and psychosensitive houses capable of murder. These quintessentially Ballardian short stories of dystopian modernity are Ballard’s ‘guess at what the future will actually be like’.

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Two old friends - Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday - meet at the funeral of gorgeous, witty Molly Lane.Both men had been Molly's lovers years before their dazzling success; Clive is Britain's most eminent modern composer and Vernon is the editor of the respected broadsheet, The Judge. In the weeks that follow, Clive and Vernon's lives become bound together in ways neither could have imagined. Two dubious moral decisions and a pact made in extremis lead them both to the heart of Amsterdam, and to their doom.'The novel twists and turns unexpectedly...McEwan has a master's control over his instrument' Sunday Times

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In Martin Amis's short stories whole worlds are created - or inverted. In 'Straight Fiction', everyone is gay, apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community; in 'Career Move', screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in 'The Janitor of Mars', a sardonic robot gives us some strange news about life in the solar system. In 'Let Me Count the Times' a man has a mad affair with himself. 'Heavy Water', portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, and 'State of England' its weird resuscitation. And in 'The Coincidence of the Arts' an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler.

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From the bestselling author of Star of the Sea and Shadowplay, a thrilling novel about a father who takes the law into his own hands.'Gripping and moving...a taut, expertly crafted plot' GuardianDublin, June 1995: the hottest summer since records began. But Billy Sweeney, a middle-aged salesman with a failed marriage, a faltering career and a tumbledown house, has more than weather on his mind.His youngest daughter lies in a coma in hospital following a mysterious attack on the petrol station where she worked. Devastated by the unfolding consequences of that violent night and frustrated by the system, Billy finally decides to take the law into his own hands.'A game of psychological cat and mouse is at the core of The Salesman... Gripping' Harper's Bazaar

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'Martin Amis at his best... Wonderful... Extravagantly funny’ GuardianWhen 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Royce Traynor, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zizhen; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King.'As funny as Dead Babies, as blackly portentous as London Fields and as satirically on-the-nail as Money' Mail on Sunday

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A megalomaniac Boer frontiersman wreaks hideous vengeance on a Hottentot tribe for undermining the 'natural' order of his universe with their anarchic rival order, mocking him and subjecting him to the humiliations of his own all too palpable flesh. A specialist in psychological warfare is driven to breakdown and madness by the stresses of a project of macabre ingenuity to win the war in Vietnam. Both the 18th-century Jacobus Coetzee and the 20th-century Eugene Dawn are in the business of pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and are dealers in death who denounce their own humanity and spurn their feelings of guilt. In these two narratives, Coetzee has crystallized in their absurdity and horror the extremes of scientific evangelism and heroic exploration.

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A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of all human consciousness.

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When Alice Walker finished writing The Color Purple she realised that she needed to tell the story of Tashi, a minor character, who had "left Africa but had taken her wound with her to America". This is Tashi's story, told in her words and the voices of the people who loved her. This extraordinarily courageous and compelling novel explores the tragic consequences of Tashi's decision to go through the female initiation ceremony.

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What has made women unhappy in the last decade? Faludi writes 'is not their equality' - which they don't yet have - but the rising pressure to halt, even worse, women's quest for that equality.

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The second book in the trilogy which began with the Booker prize-winning The Famished Road.'A love story and an account of the conflict between the parties of the Rich and Poor... Okri's voice is all his own' IndependentHaving outwitted death, Azaro, the spirit child, remains in the land of the Living. Oppression and violence continue to plague the city, and while political factions battle, bar owner Madame Koto backs the 'Party of the Rich' with magical, bewitching force. But for Azaro, his adventure is tied up with his parents, and so his story takes on yet another heroic adventure to save them both from the forces of the world. 'Ben Okri writes beautifully...a triumph of inspiration over the everyday' The Times

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A well-know bibliophile is found hanged days after selling a rare manuscript of Alexander Dumas's classic, The Three Musketeers. Across Madrid, Spain's wealthiest book dealer has finally laid his hands on a 17th-century manual for summoning the devil. Lucas Corso, solitary and obsessive, is the detective hired to authenticate both texts. But the further he follows the trail of devil worship, the more it leads him back to Dumas. He's the unwitting protagonist in someone's evil plot, but is he sleuth or hero, Sherlock Holmes or d'Artagnan?

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''A perfect blend of cutting-edge science and compelling storytelling. Daniel Davis has a rare knack for making complex science comprehensible and thrilling'' BILL BRYSONWelcome to a revolution in the science of you. Recent and dramatic breakthroughs in our understanding of the body will profoundly change the experience of being human in the coming century. Already they are opening up boundary-breaking possibilities for intervention at every level, from our brains and genes to our microbiomes and immune systems. These will confer unprecedented powers over health, childhood development, our cognitive and physical abilities, and affect every aspect of how we live our lives and think about ourselves. As the secrets of our bodies are revealed, we all will face previously unthinkable choices with consequences we have yet to understand.Imagine knowing years in advance the precise likelihood of developing specific cancers, thanks to a bespoke understandi

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