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Picador
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This is the latest unputdownable Kinsey Millhone mystery — The Sopranos meets The Thomas Crown Affair. Las Vegas, 1986. A young college graduate is murdered when he is unable to pay back a loan funded by notorious criminal Lorenzo Dante. Two years later private investigator Kinsey Millhone finds herself assisting to apprehend a shoplifter — Audrey Vance — in a shopping centre. Events take a much darker turn when Audrey's body is discovered beneath the Cold Spring Bridge, a local suicide spot. Unable to believe she took her own life, Audrey's fiance Marvin Striker hires Kinsey to investigate. It soon emerges that the shoplifter had become caught up in a much larger operation. Meanwhile Lorenzo Dante has begun to grow weary of his life in organised crime and frustrated with his violent and impulsive younger brother Cappi. While the police net begins to close in on him, Dante meets the beautiful Nora, who exerts a powerful pull over the gangster. As Kinsey's enquiries reach a dramatic head, it becomes clear that she and Dante have one thing in common — they must be careful who they trust... |
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A dazzling urban satire of modern relationships? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something? Two diaries, two enduring best-sellers, one unforgettable character. This is Bridget Jones: The Singleton Years. |
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I know what my husband would say: that I have too much time on my hands; that I need to keep myself busy. That I need to take my medication. Empty nest syndrome, he tells his friends at the pub, his mother. He's always said I have a vivid imagination. Marta has been married to Hector for longer than she can remember. She has always tried hard to be a good wife. But now Hector has come home with a secret. And Marta is beginning to imagine — or revisit — a terrifying truth... |
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Oliver Sacks has become the world's best-known neurologist. His case studies of broken minds offer brilliant insight into the mysteries of consciousness. In his most extraordinary book, Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. These are case studies of people who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; and, who are no longer able to recognize people or common objects; whose limbs have become alien; who are afflicted and yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. In Dr. Sacks' splendid and sympathetic telling, each tale is a unique and deeply human study of life struggling against incredible adversity. Populated by a cast as strange as that of the most fantastic fiction... |
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When Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. Mr and Mrs Grace and their twin children Myles and Chloe appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Max grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years, shaping everything that was to follow. |
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The Wilderness Years are over. But not for long. At the end of Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget hiccuped off into the sunset with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy. Now, in The Edge of Reason, she discovers what it is like when you have the man of your dreams actually in your flat and he hasn't done the washing-up, not just the whole of this week, but ever. Lurching through a morass of self-help-book theories and mad advice from Jude and Shazzer, struggling with a boyfriend-stealing ex-friend with thighs like a baby giraffe, an 8ft hole in the living-room wall, a mother obsessed with boiled-egg peelers, and a builder obsessed with large reservoir fish, Bridget embarks on a spiritual epiphany. Bridget is back. V.g. Книга иллюстрирована кадрами из фильма. |
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From the white heat of Miami to the implants of LA, the glittering waters of the Caribbean to the deserts of Arabia, Olivia Joules pits herself against the forces of terror armed only with a hatpin, razor sharp wits and a very special underwired bra. How could a girl not be drawn to the alluring, powerful Pierre Ferramo, with his hooded eyes, impeccable taste, unimaginable wealth, exotic homes across the globe and a rather dubious French accent? But is it possible that Ferramo is actually a major terrorist, bent on the western world's destruction? Or is it all just a product of Olivia Joules's overactive imagination? Join Olivia in her heart-stopping and hilarious quest to save the world in this witty, contemporary and utterly unputdownable thriller. |
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As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders — two men and a dangerously magnetic woman — arrives on the woodland borders and puts up a make-shift camp. That same night, the local manor house is set on fire. Over the course of seven days, Walter Thirsk sees his hamlet unmade: the harvest blackened by smoke and fear, the new arrivals cruelly punished, and his neighbours held captive on suspicion of witchcraft. But something even darker is at the heart of his story, and he will be the only man left to tell it... Told in Jim Crace's hypnotic prose, Harvest evokes the tragedy of land pillaged and communities scattered, as England's fields are irrevocably enclosed. Timeless yet singular, mythical yet deeply personal, this beautiful novel of one man and his unnamed village speaks for a way of life lost for ever. |
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This title is now a major film starring Russell Crowe, Colin Farrell and Jessica Brown Findlay. One night in New York, a city under siege by snow, Peter Lake attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side. Though he thinks it is empty, the daughter of the house is home... Thus begins the affair between this Irish burglar and Beverly Penn, a young girl dying of consumption. It is a love so powerful that Peter will be driven to stop time and bring back the dead; A New York Winter's Tale is the story of that extraordinary journey. |
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Hides some of Stalin's darkest secrets... Shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger for Best Historical Crime Novel of the Year Shortlisted for the Ireland AM Crime Fiction Book of the Year Moscow, 1937. Captain Korolev, a police investigator, is enjoying a long-overdue visit from his young son Yuri when an eminent scientist is shot dead within sight of the Kremlin and Korolev is ordered to find the killer. It soon emerges that the victim, a man who it appears would stop at nothing to fulfil his ambitions, was engaged in research of great interest to those at the very top ranks of Soviet power. When another scientist is brutally murdered, and evidence of the professors' dark experiments is hastily removed, Korolev begins to realise that, along with having a difficult case to solve, he's caught in a dangerous battle between two warring factions of the NKVD. And then his son Yuri goes missing... A desperate race against time, set against a city gripped by Stalin's Great Terror and teeming with spies, street children and Thieves, The Twelfth Department confirms William Ryan as one of the most compelling historical crime novelists at work today. |
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Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. The characters go to the same schools. They eat at the same restaurants. They have sex with the same boys and girls. They buy from the same dealers. Fusing voices into an intense, impressionistic narrative that blurs genders, generations and even identities, these stories capture the lives of a group of people, connected in the way only people in L.A. can be — suffering from nothing less than the death of the soul. A writer at the peak of his powers... The book takes us from the first to the seventh circles of hell, from Salinger to de Sade. (Will Self). Ellis has the ability to capture modern reality with the ferocity of a collector driving a pin through a social butterfly. (Guardian). The Informers is spare, austere, elegantly designed, telling in detail, coolly ferocious, sardonic in its humor; every vestige of authorial sentiment is expunged. (New York Times). |
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Graham Robb's new book will change the way you see European civilization. Inspired by a chance discovery, Robb became fascinated with the world of the Celts: their gods, their art, and, most of all, their sophisticated knowledge of science. His investigations gradually revealed something extaordinary: a lost map, of an empire constructed with precision and beauty across vast tracts of Europe. The map had been forgotten for almost two millennia and its implications were astonishing. Minutely researched and rich in revelations, The Ancient Paths brings to life centuries of our distant history and reinterprets pre-Roman Europe. Told with all of Robb's grace and verve, it is a dazzling, unforgettable book. |
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It is 1660. The King is back, memories of the Civil War still rankle. In rural Westmorland, artist Alice Ibbetson has become captivated by the rare Lady's Slipper orchid. She is determined to capture its unique beauty for posterity, even if it means stealing the flower from the land of the recently converted Quaker, Richard Wheeler. Fired by his newfound faith, the former soldier Wheeler feels bound to track down the missing orchid. Meanwhile, others are eager to lay hands on the flower, and have their own powerful motives. Margaret Poulter, a local medicine woman, is seduced by the orchid's mysterious herbal powers, while Geoffrey Fisk, Alice's patron and former comrade-in-arms of Wheeler, sees the valuable plant as a way to repair his ailing fortunes and cure his own agonizing illness. Fearing that Wheeler and his friends are planning revolution, Fisk sends his son Stephen to spy on the Quakers, only for the young man to find his loyalties divided as he befriends the group he has been sent to investigate. Then, when Alice Ibbetson is implicated in a brutal murder, she is imprisoned along with the suspected anti-royalist Wheeler. As Fisk's sanity grows ever more precarious, and Wheeler and Alice plot their escape, a storm begins to brew, from which no party will escape unscathed. Vivid, gripping and intensely atmospheric, The Lady's Slipper is a novel about beauty, faith and loyalty. It marks the emergence of an exquisite new voice in historical fiction. |
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'A gripping read as well as an important one.' Rana Mitter, Guardian In October 1839, Britain entered the first Opium War with China. Its brutality notwithstanding, the conflict was also threaded with tragicomedy: with Victorian hypocrisy, bureaucratic fumblings, military missteps, political opportunism and collaboration. Yet over the past hundred and seventy years, this strange tale of misunderstanding, incompetence and compromise has become the founding episode of modern Chinese nationalism. Starting from this first conflict, The Opium War explores how China's national myths mould its interactions with the outside world, how public memory is spun to serve the present, and how delusion and prejudice have bedevilled its relationship with the modern West. 'Lively, erudite and meticulously researched' Literary Review 'An important reminder of how the memory of the Opium War continues to cast a dark shadow.' |
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Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, this novel traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. |
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The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history, he's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. Now it's time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind. 'A master stylist with hideously interesting new-fangled manners and the heart of an old-fashioned moralist' Observer 'Gets under the skin of our celebrity culture in a way that is both illuminating and frightening' Daily Telegraph 'Does for the cold, minimal '90s what American Psycho did for the Wall Street greed of the '80s. You name it, he manages to get it all in' Vogue 'Brilliant... He is fast becoming a writer of real American genius' GQ. |
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This is the spellbinding new novel from the international bestselling author of The House at Riverton, The Forgotten Garden and The Distant Hours. 1961: On a sweltering summer's day, while her family picnics by the stream on their Suffolk farm, sixteen-year-old Laurel hides out in her childhood tree house dreaming of a boy called Billy, a move to London, and the bright future she can't wait to seize. But before the idyllic afternoon is over, Laurel will have witnessed a shocking crime that changes everything. 2011: Now a much-loved actress, Laurel finds herself overwhelmed by shades of the past. Haunted by memories, and the mystery of what she saw that day, she returns to her family home and begins to piece together a secret history. This is a tale of three strangers from vastly different worlds — Dorothy, Vivien and Jimmy — who are brought together by chance in wartime London and whose lives become fiercely and fatefully entwined. Shifting between the 1930s, the 1960s and the present, The Secret Keeper is a spellbinding story of mysteries and secrets, theatre and thievery, murder and enduring love. |
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'Perfectly controlled, superbly written. Waterland is original, compelling and narration of the highest order' Guardian In the years since its first publication, in 1983, Waterland has established itself as one of the classics of twentieth-century British literature: a visionary tale of England's Fen country; a sinuous meditation on the workings of history; and a family story startling in its detail and universal in its reach. This edition includes an introduction, by the author, written to celebrate the book's 25th anniversary. 'Graham Swift has mapped his Waterland like a new Wessex. He appropriates the Fens as Moby Dick did whaling or Wuthering Heights the moors. This is a beautiful, serious and intelligent novel, admirably ambitious and original' Observer 'A 300-page tour de force... A burst of exuberant fictive energy' Evening Standard 'Waterland is a formidably intelligent book, animated by an impressive, angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need. The most powerful novel I have read for some time' New York Review of Books. |
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Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles upon a transaction gone horribly wrong. Finding bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice — leave the scene as he found it, or cut the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows, will change everything. And so begins a terrifying chain of events, in which each participant seems determined to answer the question that one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? 'No Country for Old Men is a severed head and shoulders over anything else written in America this year' Independent on Sunday 'A Western thriller with a racy plot and punchy dialogue, perfect for a lazy Sunday' The Times '[An] utterly absorbing, chilling tale ...One of the most sinister characters in modern American fiction' Herald 'A fast, powerful read, steeped with a deep sorrow about the moral degradation of the legendary American West' Financial Times 'It's hard to think of a contemporary writer more worth reading' Independent. |
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Llewlyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles upon a transaction gone horribly wrong. Finding bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice – leave the scene as he found it, or cut the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows, will change everything. And so begins a terrifying chain of events, in which each participant seems determined to answer the question that one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? 'No Country for Old Men is a compelling, harrowing, disturbing, sad, endlessly surprising and resonant novel' Robert Edric, Spectator 'No Country for Old Men is a severed head and shoulders over anything else written in America this year' Independent on Sunday 'A Western thriller with a racy plot and punchy dialogue, perfect for a lazy Sunday' Sarah Emily Miano, The Times '[An] utterly absorbing, chilling tale . . . One of the most sinister characters in modern American fiction' Herald 'A fast, powerful read, steeped with a deep sorrow about the moral degradation of the legendary American West' Lionel Shriver, Financial Times. |
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