Search results for ""Author Oonagh Stransky""
Quercus Publishing Beauty and the Inferno
Roberto Saviano is best known for his work on the Italian mafia, but Beauty and the Inferno, winner of the European Book Award 2010, also tackles universal themes with great insight and humanity, with urgency, and often with anger. This important collection includes essays across a remarkably wide field of interests, celebrating personal heroes as diverse as Frank Miller and Lionel Messi. However as with the bestselling Gomorrah, his fearless and unflinching condemnation of the mafia takes centre stage. Implicit in Saviano's tributes to writers, musicians, sportsmen and journalists is the message that there is an alternative to living in corruption and fear. Beauty and the Inferno is a searing polemic that encompasses Saviano's vision of life and of art, of the good to be found in humanity and the evil inherent in power. His commitment to truth resonates from every page.
£10.30
Hodder & Stoughton A Good Life
You are important. You are unique. You are a wonder of creation!This is Pope Francis' message to you today. It is the departure point for your birth or rebirth, whatever form that may take; it is the glowing centre that sustains life, whatever your age. You are a wonder of creation.Even when your face is lined with worries or fatigue, remember that you are always a light that shines through the night. This is the greatest gift you've ever received, and no one can take it away from you. Dream on! Never stop dreaming. Believe! Believe in even greater and more beautiful truths. Let yourself be surprised by love. This is what it means to Live Well. This is the greatest and most beautiful wish we can extend to each other. Always.Joy - the wholesome and concrete kind, the joy we have all been searching for since birth - will be the natural outcome. It won't be an easy path; life's difficulties and the pervasive pessimism and cynicism of our era will periodically make it difficult to recognize and welcome grace into our life. But the Pope guarantees us that is precisely when we open our hearts to providence and allow tenderness and mercy to enter that life becomes beautiful. It's comforting to know that we can always begin again, that God can rebuild a story within us from the fragments. By letting ourselves be inspired by Pope Francis' 15 Rules for a Good Life, we can revel in the wondrous creations that we are, and savour the experience of what it means to live authentically. And so, joy will spread, bringing goodness to all those who welcome and share its gift.
£18.99
Europa Editions (UK) Ltd The House on Via Gemito: Winner of the Strega Prize
The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If he didn’t have a family to feed, he’d be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment. His long-suffering wife and their four sons bear the brunt. It's his first-born who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble. Narrated against the background of a Naples still marked by WWII and steeped in the city’s language and imagery, The House on Via Gemito – first published 20 years ago - is a masterpiece of contemporary Italian literature.
£15.99
Hodder & Stoughton A Gift of Joy and Hope
'This is Christian hope: the certainty of walking towards something that exists, not something I hope might be there.' In response to the devastating loss the world faced during the pandemic, Pope Francis was inspired to write a book to help people find hope and meaning. God is joyful, he writes. And God's compassion is no less than the deepest expression of God's joy, and the heart of all Christian preaching. The liberating revolution of the Gospel is encapsulated here. We are not supposed to carry burdens heavier than those we already have, but to bear witness to a new, beautiful and surprising horizon: to share a joy that has been prepared for everyone. From the anxieties of the age to the importance of nature, A Gift of Joy and Hope encourages readers to look outside themselves to embrace authentic beauty, change attitudes that exclude others, overcome life's challenges with courage and, trust that joy and hope are still possible, even in challenging times; for joy has the last word - always.
£16.99