Search results for ""Author Christopher Moseley""

In Tallinn in 1946 a young boy is transfixed by the beauty of a luxurious cream-coloured car gliding down the street. It is a Russian Pobeda, a car called Victory. The sympathetic driver invites the boy for a ride and enquires about his family. Soon the boy's father disappears. Ilmar Taska's debut novel captures the distrust and fear among Estonians living under Soviet occupation after World War II. The reader is transported to a world seen through the eyes of a young boy, where it is di cult to know who is right and who is wrong, be they occupiers or occupied. Resistance ghters, exiles, informants and torturers all nd themselves living in Stalin's long shadow. Ilmar Taska is best known in his native Estonia as a lm director and producer. Pobeda 1946: A Car Called Victory is his first full novel, and is based on a prize-winning short story from 2014.

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Unfortunately people and tribes degenerate. They lose their teeth, forget their language, until finally they're bending meekly on the fields and cutting straw with a scythe.Leemut, a young boy growing up in the forest, is content living with his hunter-gatherer family. But when incomprehensible outsiders arrive aboard ships and settle nearby, with an intriguing new religion, the forest begins to empty - people are moving to the village and breaking their backs tilling fields to make bread. Meanwhile, Leemut and the last forest-dwelling humans refuse to adapt: with bare-bottomed primates and their love of ancient traditions, promiscuous bears, and a single giant louse, they live in shacks, keep wolves, and speak to snakes.Told with moving and satirical prose, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is a fiercely imaginative allegory about a boy, and a nation, standing on the brink of dramatic change.

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This second volume of A.H. Tammsaare's monumental pentalogy portrays the education of Indrek who emerges here as the protagonist and will remain so throughout the next three volumes. This is a story of moving to the polyglot city and abandoning the countryside which at that time was the heartland of the Estonian language. This new environment is a vortex of prejudices and national rivalries nevertheless held together in practice by a strange and very human tolerance. Here Tammsaare writes with his trademark wit and deep understanding of human nature, and we find ourselves in the company of a vast gallery of larger-than-life characters who jostle, scheme and argue over both trivialities and the great issues of the human condition. They may do the latter out of their own intellectual narcissism or simply for the joy of debate, but the ensuing dialogues rival those of the great Russian novelists. The boarding school is as dysfunctional as any Dickensian one, but it is a great deal more benevolent. Russians, Germans, Poles, Latvians and Caucasians mix with the Estonian majority, speaking in a mix of Russian, German and Estonian, and somehow compromises are nearly always arrived at in spite of, or possibly because of some extraordinary theatrics, in which Mr Maurus must outperform not only all the other characters in the book but very probably all other celebrated headmasters created by European literature over the centuries. Indrek not only has to come to terms with this world so utterly unsuited to his shy and innocent rural upbringing, but he also has to deal with his first encounters with love and death.

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Satan has a problem: God has come to the conclusion that it is unfair to send souls to hell if they are fundamentally incapable of living a decent life on earth. If this is the case, then hell will be shut down, and the human race written off as an unfortunate mistake. Satan is given the chance to prove that human beings are capable of salvation - thus ensuring the survival of hell - if he agrees to live as a human being and demonstrate that it is possible to live a righteous life. St Peter suggests that life as a farmer might offer Satan the best chance of success, because of the catalogue of privations he will be forced to endure. And so Satan ends up back on earth, living as Jurka, a great bear of a man, the put-upon tenant of a run-down Estonian farm. His patience and good nature are sorely tested by the machinations of his scheming, unscrupulous landlord and the social and religious hypocrisy he encounters. The Misadventures of the New Satan is the last novel by Estonia's greatest twentieth-century writer, Anton Tammsaare (1876-1940), and it constitutes a fitting summation of the themes that occupied him throughout his writing: the search for truth and social justice, and the struggle against corruption and greed. Tammsaare combines a satire on the inequalities of rural life and absurdly rigid social attitudes with biblical themes, mythology, and bawdy folklore. The novel has proved to be an enduring classic of European literature.

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