|
|
|
Faber and Faber
|
«An atmospheric mystery set in St Petersburg in the winter of 1867 sees detective Porfiry Petrovich taking his first murder case since Dostoevsky's «Crime and Punishment». When two frozen bodies are found in a park, he begins to suspect that the truth may be more complex than others wish him to believe, as his investigations lead him to a shocking discovery which reveals the city's darkest secrets. «A Gentle Axe» is utterly absorbing and tense from its dramatic opening through to its shocking climax.» |
|
It is the time of the Great Terror. Inspector Pekkala — known as the Emerald Eye — was the most famous detective in all Russia. He was the favourite of the Tsar. Now he is the prisoner of the men he once hunted. Like millions of others, he has been sent to the gulags in Siberia and, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he is as good as dead. But a reprieve comes when he is summoned by Stalin himself to investigate a crime. His mission — to uncover the men who really killed the Tsar and his family, and to locate the Tsar's treasure. The reward for success will be his freedom and the chance to re-unite with a woman he would have married if the Revolution had not torn them apart. The price of failure — death. Set against the backdrop of the paranoid and brutal country that Russia became under the rule of Stalin, Eye of the Red Tsar introduces a compelling new figure to readers of crime fiction. |
|
When Rachel Polonsky went to live in Moscow, she found an apartment block in Romanov Street, once a residence of the Soviet elite. One of those ghostly neighbours was Stalin's henchman Vyacheslav Molotov. In his former apartment, Rachel Polonsky discovered his library and an old magic lantern. Molotov — ruthless apparatchik, participant in the collectivizations and the Great Purge — was also an ardent bibliophile. Molotov's library and his magic lantern became the prisms through which Rachel Polonsky renewed her vision of Russia. She visited cities and landscapes associated with the books in the library — Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Akhmatova and many less well-known figures. Some were sent to the Gulag by the man who collected their books. |
|
St Petersburg. 1870. A child factory worker is mysteriously abducted. A society beauty is sensationally murdered. Two very different crimes show up the deep fissures in Russian society of the late tsarist period. The first is barely noticed by the authorities. The latter draws the full investigative might of St Petersburg's finest, led by magistrate Porfiry Petrovich. The dead woman had powerful friends — including at least one member of the Romanov family — so when the tsar's notorious secret police becomes involved, it seems that both crimes may have a political — not to say revolutionary — aspect. A trail of missing children leads to a shocking discovery that takes Porfiry inside the Winter Palace for a confrontation with the Tsar himself. The usually incisive magistrate grows increasingly unsure what to believe, who to trust and how to proceed. His very life appears to be in danger, though from whom he can't be sure... |
|
«'»The QI Book of the Dead» is a book about life. What an awful thing life is. It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless' — Gustave Flaubert. Around 90 billion people have existed since the human race began. From this huge number, the bestselling QI team selected 600 of the finest examples of our species and researched them in depth, distilling this immense banquet of life into an exquisite tasting menu of six-dozen crisp, racy mini-biographies, where the internationally and immortally famous rub shoulders with the undeservedly and (until now) permanently obscure. The object is to learn something about what it means to be alive and how we can make the most of the time we have. «The QI Book of the Dead» compares and contrasts the different ways individual human beings cope (or fail to cope) with the curves that the uncaring universe throws at us. Collected into themed chapters with thought-provoking titles such as 'There's Nothing Like a Bad Start in Life', 'Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone' and 'Is That All There Is?' here is a chance to share the secrets of the Dead, to celebrate their wisdom, to learn from their mistakes, and to marvel at their bad taste in clothes. The man who is not dead still has a chance. Lebanese Proverb — We don't rule out the alternative possibility of a compassionate God whose motives are beyond our ken.» |
|
he boy in the bed was just fifteen years old. He had been handsome, perhaps even recently; but now his face was swollen and disfigured by disease, and by the treatments his doctors had prescribed in the attempt to ward off its ravages. Their failure could no longer be mistaken. When Edward VI — Henry VIII's longed — for son — died in 1553, extraordinarily, there was no one left to claim the title King of England. For the first time, all the contenders for the crown were female. In 1553, England was about to experience the 'monstrous regiment' — the unnatural rule — of a woman. But female rule in England also had a past. Four hundred years before Edward's death, Matilda, daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conquerer, came tantalisingly close to securing her hold on the power of the crown. And between the 12th and the 15th centuries three more exceptional women — Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, and Margaret of Anjou — discovered, as queens consort and dowager, how much was possible if the presumptions of male rule were not confronted so explicitly. The stories of these women — told here in all their vivid humanity — illustrate the paradox which the female heirs to the Tudor throne had no choice but to negotiate. Man was the head of woman; and the king was the head of all. How, then, could a woman be king, how could royal power lie in female hands? |
|
The Soviet Union was founded on a fairytale. It was built on 20th-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche and sputniks would lead the way to the stars. And it's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. |
|
«It's Easter, 1872. Fires burn in St Petersburg, a prelude to the revolutionary turmoil that will shake Russia a generation later. As the springtime thaw begins, a body rises to the surface of the Winter Canal. Following an anonymous tip-off, magistrate Porfiry Petrovich is drawn into an investigation of the radical intellectuals who seek to fan the flames of revolution. In the meantime, junior magistrate Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky plays a dangerous game of his own. Following a chance meeting with a man he suspects of being an arsonist, he volunteers to infiltrate a terrorist cell. But the young man's loyalties appear divided, his motives conflicted. Will he track down the killers, or to use his position as a magistrate to further a cause with which he sympathises? The issue comes to a head in a shocking and violent confrontation between two generations. «The Cleansing Flames» is the fourth book in R.N. Morris' acclaimed series featuring the investigator from «Crime and Punishment».» |
|
This is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. |
|
It is 1939. In the Soviet Union, Stalin has placed his hopes on a 30-ton steel monster, known as the RED COFFIN. But the design is not yet complete. And when the weapon's secretive and eccentric architect is found murdered, Stalin sends for Pekkala, his most trusted investigator. He is convinced that a sinister group called the White Guild intends to bring about a German invasion before the RED COFFIN is ready. While engineers struggle to complete the design of the tank, Pekkala must expose plans to propel Germany and Russia into conflict. |
|
For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems, it is chosen by Martin Amis. 'Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh — or, in that curious phrase, 'laugh out loud' (as if there's another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? Larkin, often, is more than memorable: he is instantly unforgettable' — Martin Amis. |
|
Have you ever wondered why most books of quotations are stuffed full of quotes by people you've never heard of? It's a shame because a really good quotes book, one which gathered the truest and funniest insights of the best minds, a book which offered you a useful take on almost every situation life throws at you (from the death of your child's hamster to the unified theory of everything), well, that would be worth having. And, guess what? This is the elusive holy grail: a big, useful, funny and really very good book of quotations. |
|
«In the sprawling flatlands of Florida, 28-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York 7 years ago. What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father that he has been avoiding for years. Pulsing with the energy of Auster's previous novel, «Invisible», «Sunset Park» is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness — not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.» |
|
An elderly butler is on a five-day motoring trip through the West Country in the 1950's. The climax of his journey is to be a reunion with his former housekeeper. This 1989 Booker Prize-winner attempts to capture a period in British history and draw a portrait of a man in old age. |
|
From the internationally-renowned author of The Beach, a gripping mystery and stylistic tour de force that delves into the subconscious mind, with brilliantly disturbing results. The brilliant mindmessing thriller from the author of 28 Days Later and The Beach A big success in its original editions, the paperback looks set to become an essential lead title in all summer reading promotions The award-winning illustrations from Nicholas Garland make this a beautiful and atmospheric book Massive advertising campaign across the Underground, national press and magazines to make The Coma an unmissable summer highlight. |
|
Meet Mr Bones, the canine sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, the brilliant, troubled and altogether original poet-saint from Brooklyn. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza before them, they sally forth on a last great adventure... |
|
«Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones, and his 'damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother' Hugh, «Theft: A Love Story» once again displays Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption.» |
|
