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Книги издательства «Random House, Inc.»
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In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador in the far north-east of Canada, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once. Only three people share the secret — the baby's parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbour, Thomasina. Together the adults make a difficult decision: to go through surgery and raise the child as a boy named Wayne. But as Wayne grows up within the hyper-male hunting culture of his father, his shadow-self — a girl he thinks of as 'Annabel' — is never entirely extinguished, and indeed is secretly nurtured by the women in his life. As Wayne approaches adulthood, and its emotional and physical demands, the woman inside him begins to cry out. The changes that follow are momentous not just for him, but for the three adults that have guarded his secret. Haunting and sweeping in scope, this is a first novel as much concerned with its characters as it is with their predicament, as much about humanity as it is about a rigidly masculine culture that shuns the singular and the unique. Told with great elegance and empathy, Annabel is the powerfully moving story of one person's struggle to discover the truth and the strength to change, to find tenderness in a severe and unforgiving land. |
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Sometimes when the nightmare ends — the terror is only just beginning. For Hannah Shapiro, a beautiful young American student, this particular nightmare began eight years ago in Los Angeles, when Jack Morgan, owner of Private — the world's most exclusive detective agency — saved her from a horrific death. She has fled her country, but can't flee her past. The terror has followed her to London, and now it is down to former Royal Military Police Sergeant Dan Carter, head of Private London, to save her all over again. In central London, young women are being abducted off the street. When the bodies are found, some days later, they have been mutilated in a particularly mysterious way. Dan Carter's ex-wife, DI Kirsty Webb, is involved in the investigation and it looks likely that the two cases are gruesomely linked. Dan Carter draws on the whole resources of Private International in a desperate race against the odds. But the clock is ticking... Private may be the largest and most technologically advanced detection agency in the world, but the only thing they don't have is the one thing they need — time. James Patterson's white-knuckle rollercoaster has just reached London. Buckle up, it's one hell of a ride. |
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From the end of the last Ice Age (10,000 years ago) to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965, Adrian Sykes narrates the history and achievements of these islands, their inhabitants and their origins, through the stories of some 3000+ men and women who have shaped not just our history but the modern world. The story is interspersed with countless inventions, deeds of daring do and wickednesses, as well as the origins of innumerable words and phrases, often surprisingly early, from Nosey Parker — Elizabeth I of her Archbishop of Canterbury, to mayonnaise — the battle of Mahon, which the victorious French admiral celebrated by inventing mayonnaise and after which we hanged Admiral Byng who lost it to encourage the others, as Voltaire put it. Sykes astonishes on every page, whether with the origin of everyday phrases or nursery rhymes or the countless inventions of the British, from the lead pencil (1568), the tin can, the bicycle, screw propeller and jet engine to DNA, LCD crystals, cement, the electric kettle, the vacuum cleaner and Marmite. Beautifully illustrated and with maps of exceptional clarity, this is a book hard to put down in which you learn something very surprising on every page. |
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The English, Peter Ackroyd tells us in this fascinating collection, see more ghosts than any other nation. Each region has its own particular spirits, from the Celtic ghosts of Cornwall to the dobies and boggarts of the north. Some speak and some are silent, some smell of old leather, others of fragrant thyme. From medieval times to today, stories have been told and apparitions seen — ghosts who avenge injustice, souls who long for peace, spooks who just want to have fun. The English Ghost is a treasury of such sightings — which we can believe or not, as we will. The accounts, packed with eerie detail, range from the door-slamming, shrieking ghost of Hinton Manor in the 1760s and the moaning child that terrified Wordsworth's nephew at Cambridge, to the headless bear of Kidderminster, the violent daemon of Devon who tried to strangle a man with his cravat and the modern-day hitchhikers on Blue Bell Hill. Comical and scary, like all good ghost stories, these curious incidents also plumb the depths of the English psyche in its yearnings for justice, freedom and love. |
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This is an immortal love story. Have you ever loved someone so much that you'd do anything for them? When Dr Luke Findley turns up to his hospital shift in the small town of St Andrews, Maine, he's expecting just another evening of minor injuries and domestic disputes. But instead, Lanore McIlvrae walks into his life — and changes it forever. For Lanny is a woman with a past... Lanny McIlvrae is unlike anyone Luke has ever met. Hers is a story of love and betrayal that defies time and transcends mortality — but this tale cannot end until Lanny's demons are finally put to rest. Her two hundred years on this earth have seen her seduced by both decadence and brutality — yet through it all she has only ever had one true love in her life. Until now. An unforgettable novel about the power of unrequited love to elevate and sustain, but also to blind and ultimately destroy, The Taker is an immortal love story on an epic scale... |
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One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. The book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius — a thrillingly beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. The copying and translation of this ancient book, the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age, fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and, had revolutionary influence on writers from Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson. |
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When Frank Behr’s friend and mentor is murdered without any apparent motive, he thirsts for answers and retaliation. But before he can make headway in the dead-end investigation, a private firm approaches him with a delicate proposition: two of its detectives have gone missing, and the firm wants Behr to find out what happened to them. The search for the missing detectives takes Behr into the recesses of Indianapolis’s underworld, a place rife with brutality and vice where Behr uncovers a shocking thread connecting the missing detectives to his friend’s brutal murder, and, in the process, an ominous, deadly new breed of crime family. |
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S, M, L, XL presents a selection of the remarkable visionary design work produced by the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) and its acclaimed founder, Rem Koolhaas, in its first twenty years, along with a variety of insightful, often poetic writings. The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural projects, photos and sketches, diary excerpts, personal travelogues, fairy tales, and fables, as well as critical essays on contemporary architecture and society. The book's title is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. While Small and Medium address issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on what Koolhaas calls the architecture of Bigness. Extra-Large features projects at the urban scale, along with the important essay What Ever Happened to Urbanism and other studies of the contemporary city. Running throughout the book is a dictionary of an adventurous new Koolhaasian language — definitions, commentaries, and quotes from hundreds of literary, cultural, artistic, and architectural sources. |
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«The impulse to do AMERICAN MUSIC, writes famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, «came from a desire to return to my original subject and look at it with a mature eye. Bring my experience to it... make it a real American tapestry.» Her ambitious idea became AMERICAN MUSIC, a stunning collection of photographs of the musicians, places and people that enrich the landscape of American music. As «Rolling Stone's» chief photographer for over thirteen years, Leibovitz created a legendary body of work. Her portraits of some of the world's most talented musicians capture more than the performer, they convey the art of making music. For AMERICAN MUSIC, Leibovitz traveled across the country to juke joints in the Mississippi Delta, honkytonks in Texas, and jazz clubs in New Orleans «to take pictures in places that mean something.» In her signature style, she shares stunning portraits of American greats — B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Beck, Bob Dylan, Mary J. Blige, Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Earle, Ryan Adams, Miles Davis, Etta James, Pete Seeger, Emmylou Harris, Tom Waits, The Dixie Chicks, Dr. Dre, The Roots and many more. AMERICAN MUSIC includes a commentary about the American Music project by Leibovitz, short essays by musicians Patti Smith, Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle, Mos Def, Ryan Adams, and Beck as well as biographical sketches of all the musicians.» |
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This is an abridged edition of Peter Ackroyd's magisterial biography of the city of London. Prize-winning historian, novelist and broadcast, Peter Ackroyd takes us on a journey — historical, geographical and imaginative — through the city of London. Moving back and forth through time, Ackroyd is an effortless, exuberant guide to times of plague and pestilence, fire and floods, crime and punishment, and sex and theatre. He brings the ever changing streets alive for the reader and shows us what lies beneath our feet and above our heads. His biography is as rich in detail and fizzing with vitality as the city itself. |
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Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), a screaming comes across the sky, heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. Soon Tyrone is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. Gravity's Rainbow, however, doesn't follow such a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. Gravity's Rainbow is a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. |
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The facts about Pontius Pilate are very few — when he was born and when he died is unknown. Nor is anything known about his career before he became Governor of Judea, or after he was recalled by Tiberius. This book is about all the Pilates, real, half-real and invented. |
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Cassie is nothing if not organised. A successful journalist, she's ticked almost all the boxes: attentive boyfriend, own flat, good job, great friends... it's all fallen into place. In theory, at least. There's one part of Cassie's life, however, which is anything but organised, and that's her love for the Darling family. As the only child of ambitious parents, Cassie spent her childhood abandoned to the somewhat peremptory care of a series of nannies until one day, peeping over the garden wall, she met her nextdoor neighbours: Fritz and Ben, the boys who became her inseparable childhood friends, Gudrun, their father, and Phoebe Darling, the woman who took Cassie in and transformed her life. But now Phoebe is ill, and when she summons Cassie to ask of her the only favour she's ever requested, Cassie knows she can't say no. But what Phoebe asks is an impossibility: concerned about what will happen to Fritz and Ben after her death, she wants to see them safely married off. Yet entertaining as they were as children, they're terrible as adults. They're utterly charming, ridiculously sexy and completely irresistible, but they're also totally unemployable, hopelessly messy and irretrieva. |
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These are exciting times for the world's most romantic city. Traditionally a global centre for the arts, fashion, film, gastronomy, architecture, shopping and sport, the French capital has been transformed by incumbent mayor Bertrand Delanoe. Recent public initiatives have included Paris-Plage, creating inner-city beaches and outdoor leisure activities along the Seine for a month in summer, and Nuit Blanche, all-night museum openings in October. Paris is also in pole position to host the Olympic Games of 2012, and a positive decision in July 2005 would be a further boost to the city's global status. Without breaking with tradition — all major sights, museums and monuments are covered in-depth — the guide takes detours into the city's revolutionary history, modern architectural development and present-day cultural mix. |
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Bhupinder 'Puppy' Singh Johal — handsome, rakish and spiritually disenfranchised — has left behind the immigrant neighbourhood of Southall to mix with the elite of metropolitan London society. When sloaney rich-girl Sophie, falls for him, he grabs the chance to escape his past and pursue the woman of his dreams, the voluptuous sophisticate Sarupa, who happens to be engaged to Sophie's cousin. Using whatever and whoever he can, Puppy explores the grit and glamour of a city seething with the possibilities and politics of money, race and sex: an incendiary cocktail that explodes, changing him and those closest to him forever... Set in the long hot summer of 2002, Tourism is a filthy, unflinching and politically incorrect take on modern Britain. |
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A luminous tale of love and loss In this exquisite new novel by bestselling writer Elizabeth Berg, a young girl falls in love — and learns how sorrow can lead to an understanding of joy. Katie has moved to Missouri with her distant, occasionally abusive father. She feels very alone: her much-loved mother is dead; she finds it difficult to settle in, in her new school and her only friends fall far short of being ideal companions. When she falls through the ice while skating, she meets Jimmy. He is handsome, older than her, and married, but she is entranced. As their relationship unfolds, so too does Katie's awareness of the pain and intensity first love can bring. Beautifully written in Berg's irresistible voice, Joy School portrays the soaring happiness of real love, the deep despair felt when it goes unrequited, and the stubbornness of hope that will not let go. Joy School illuminates how the things that hurt the most can sometimes teach us the lessons that really matter. |
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Campion's glorious summer in Pontisbright is blighted by death. Amidst the preparations for Minnie and Tonker Cassand's fabulous summer party, a murder is discovered and it falls to Campion to unravel the intricate web of motive, suspicion and deduction with all his imagination and skill. |
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Five-year-old Kerrie-Ann Hill has an unusual neighbour. Mrs Ivanovich collects butterflies and she shows Kerrie-Ann how to catch them, take care of them, and even how to kill them using a jar and some funny-smelling liquid. Kerrie-Ann loves looking at these beautiful, delicate creatures, and imagines them flying free. This is Kerrie-Ann's story. She doesn't know who her father is, and her mother is a junkie. By the age of ten, she's selling drugs at school. By twelve, she's been beaten up by a customer, hidden stolen guns, done time in a girls' home, and already has a taste for whiz. And then there's Mark — her only true friend and the one person she can trust. Their friendship turns into a powerful love and together they are invincible. But in their world it's easy to lose control. On the drug-riddled estate with an atmosphere as lethal as a killing jar, it seems that Kerrie-Ann doesn't stand a chance. Unless she can make use of what Mrs Ivanovich taught her all those years ago. |
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Google is a dominant force on the Internet, guiding millions of searches and online purchases every day. Understanding how it works and how to make the most of it is therefore essential to anyone building or running a web site, whether for business or as a hobby. This easy-to-follow guide not only explains how Google sifts the billions of pages of information its index contains, but also shows you how you can improve the performance of your own web site in Google's search results, giving specific and detailed instructions about the priority issues you need to address. Superbly practical and readable, it will prove invaluable to web designers, business people and indeed anyone whose livelihood or interested depend on understanding the Internet better. 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Web Site will teach you how to: capture more of the top results for your market; keep your web site clear of Google's penalities; think more like your googling customers; win more traffic to your web pages; and, build a better web site. |
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Mark Thomas is one of the UK's most effective and best-known political activists, as well as being a highly successful stand-up comedian. His show, The Mark Thomas Product, ran for six highly acclaimed series on Channel Four. Amazingly, this is his first book. As Used On the Famous Nelson Mandela is a deeply funny, deeply disturbing account of Mark's rampage through the arms trade. Under a fairly flimsy disguise and with the use of some worryingly poor accents, Mark set off on a journey of discovery in the company of arms dealers, torture victims, politicians, cops, crusties and geeks. The result is a shockingly entertaining read. Embedded within the sharpness of his humour is the truth of an industry fraught with loopholes, complacency and greed; that allows corrupt regimes to kill, maim and displace, but whose deals are often subsidised by the British taxpayer. Hard-hitting, laugh-out-loud funny and extremely unsettling, As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela is never anything less than compulsive. |
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