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Книги издательства «Random House, Inc.»
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In a book, rich with characters and plants, this is a romantic and alluring leap into Spanish rural life with the author and his partner, a flamenco dancer, who buy a farm in a remote, steep valley and set about clearing land, planting and harvesting olives. |
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To Luca Matthews the dangers of the high mountain peaks are quite literally the air upon which he thrives. In the ruthless pursuit of his goals he would sacrifice anything — even another climber's life. His friends and family know and fear it. So when he sights a virgin peak in the Himalayas that exists on no map, no one is surprised when he becomes obsessed with being the first to scale it. Together with his climbing partner, Bill Taylor, they set off into a region of Tibet highly restricted by the Chinese. But a freak accident puts one of their team in mortal danger and it is left to a local Tibetan girl to lead them to Geltang, a monastery that has been hidden from the outside world since the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when most of the monasteries were pillaged and burned. Soon, as the Chinese secret police get wind of them, Luca and Bill find themselves embroiled in an age-old struggle, not for their lives but to protect the precious secret that Geltang hides and the legacy of Tibet itself. |
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Engineers of the Soul is the riveting story of how authors were forced to write in service of the Soviet Union's Communist ideology. Stalin first used the expression 'engineers of the soul' to refer to Soviet writers in 1932. It would become a well-known phrase and a feared concept. Together with the actual engineers, these engineers of the soul were supposed to contribute to the definitive establishment of the Communist paradise: by changing the appearance of the country with ambitious waterworks — Moscow Seaport — and by playing upon the souls of its inhabitants in books in such a way that the New Man would rise up. Combining investigative journalism with literary history, Westerman, himself once a student of hydraulic engineering, undertook two spectacular journeys: the first was to the Gulf of Kara Bogaz, now a muddy bay in the Caspian Sea but once described as a marvel of hydraulic engineering, and the second through the books — and the lives — of other Soviet writers including Maxim Gorki, Andrei Platonov and Isaak Babel. |
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Shannon Burke earned stunning reviews for his debut novel, Safelight, and now he returns with the same minimalist intensity in this arresting follow-up. Black Flies is the story of paramedic Ollie Cross and his first year on the job in mid-1990s Harlem. It is a ground's eye view of life on the streets: the shoot-outs, the bad cops, unhinged medics, and hopeless patients, the dark humour in bizarre circumstances, and one medic's fight to balance his instinct to help against the growing callousness within him that witnessing daily horrors seems to encourage. It is the story of lives that hang in the balance, and of a single job with a misdiagnosed newborn that sends Cross and his long-serving partner into a life-changing struggle between good and evil. A gripping and unforgettable novel about a young man's indelible experiences, Black Flies describes the passing of the torch from the older to the younger man, friendship in extreme conditions, deterioration, despair, and then redemption. |
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Set against the terrible struggle of the English Civil War and the dark plots of the Commonwealth, Rebels and Traitors tells of soldiers, adventurers, aristocrats and kings, tradesmen, politicians, radicals and scavengers — and the hopes and dreams that carried them through one of the most turbulent eras of English history. Men who never imagined fighting a war gladly risk their lives; women strive to keep families and businesses together through years of deprivation; innocents are caught up in bloodshed and terror. After years of struggle Gideon Jukes and Juliana Lovell, on opposite sides of the Parliamentarian/Royalist divide, are brought together by fate on one of the significant dates of the struggles and its aftermath. After adversity and loss, their mutual attraction may one day bring the comfort and companionship for which they both have yearned through a disastrous war. But a dark shadow lurks over them and even in peace the past is not far behind. Rebels and Traitors is an absolute epic masterpiece, poignant and convincing characterisation and razor-sharp historical realism. |
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Tatiana, a young Mexican woman, is adrift in Berlin. Choosing a life of solitude, she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive Doktor Weiss. Through him she meets 'an illustrator turned meteorologist' Jonas, a Berliner who has used clouds and the sky's constant shape-shifting as his escape from reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begins to change... |
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Peter Firstbrook spent many months in Kenya researching the history of Barack Obama's family, tracing Obama's roots from the present back through more than 20 generations, thanks to the Luo tribe's remarkable oral tradition. Seen though the eyes of the Obama family this will be the story of an African dynasty going back over 400 years. It is a truly astonishing drama culminating in the inauguration of Barack Obama on 20 January, 2009. This book establishes the early ancestry of the Obama family in the Alego region, telling the story of farmers and fishermen, of love and tribal warfare, of families lost and found. It traces the Obama roots from famous tribal warriors in the seventeenth century to the first encounters with the white man in the early 1900s; generation by generation we follow the family through colonial rule and the fight for Kenyan independence, including the Mau Mau and the relationship of Barack Obama's father with President Kenyatta. This is a book about a family whose destiny is unknown to them. |
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The year is 1895, Jeff. Salah Rajani, a troubled Muslim boy living in a dilapidated mansion surrounded by orange groves, suffers from peculiar visions about a disaster which is set to befall his people. His life is changed by the arrival of a handsome young man, a dynamic Jewish settler, new to the city, by the name of Isaac Luminsky. Luminsky covets both the fertile lands of the Rajani estate and Salah's beautiful mother Afifa, and his friendship with the boy is destined to lead to violence and tragedy. This rich and colourful novel is made up of the two opposing journals of Hilu's intriguing and extraordinary protagonists as they negotiate love, honour and betrayal in the changing world of nineteenth-century Palestine. |
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A young woman prays at her husband's bedside as he lies in a coma with a bullet in his neck. From outside come the sounds of tanks, gunshots, screaming and, most terrifying of all, silence. Inside, her two frightened daughters call to her from the hallway. As she tries to keep her husband alive, the woman rages against men, war, culture, God. Even as her mind appears to unravel, she becomes intensely clear-sighted. Now is her chance — her first ever — to speak without being censored. Her husband's body reminds her of the legend of the patience stone, a stone that hears all confessions until it explodes, and finally, spurred to new heights of daring, she spills out her most explosive secret. |
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In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's night storm. In the early hours of the next morning, all 84 men aboard died. Helen O'Mara is one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. Her story starts years after the Ranger disaster, but she is compelled to travel back to the 'February' that persists in her mind, and to that moment in 1982 when, expecting a fourth child, she received the call informing her that Cal was lost at sea. A quarter of a century on, late one winter's night, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son John, in another time zone, on his way home. He has made a girl pregnant and he needs his mother to decide what he should do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help. With grace and precision, and a shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the whole story to us. And just as, finally, we watch the oil rig go down, we see Helen emerging from her grief to greet a new life. |
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Sebastian and Oskar have been friends since their days studying physics at university, when both were considered future Nobel Prize candidates. But their lives took divergent paths, as did their scientific views. Whenever Oskar comes to visit from his prestigious research post in Geneva, there is tension in the air, and it doesn't help their friendship that he feels Sebastian has not lived up to his intellectual capacities, having chosen marriage and fatherhood as an exit strategy. A few days after a particularly heated argument between the two men, Sebastian leaves his son sleeping in the back seat while he goes into a service station. When he returns, the car has disappeared without trace. His phone rings and a voice informs him that in order to get his son back he must kill a man. As Sebastian's life unravels, the only person he can safely reach out to is Oskar. Then Detective Schilf comes on the scene, with a most unorthodox method of uncovering the truth. With intelligence, wit, precision, and grace, Juli Zeh crafts a philosophical thriller which uses the clash of the ideal and the material worlds, the bending of reality, and the search for a definition of time to explore the ideas of guilt and innocence and the infinite configurations of love. |
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Dublin 1907, a city of whispered rumours. A young actress begins an affair with a damaged older man, the leading playwright at the theatre where she works. Rebellious and flirtatious, Molly Allgood is a girl of the inner city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America. She has dozens of admirers but in the backstage of her life there is a secret. Her lover, John Synge, is a troubled genius, the son of a once prosperous landowning family, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions. Yet his life is hampered by convention and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives. Scarred by a childhood of loneliness and severity he has long been ill, but he loves to walk the wild places of Ireland. The affair, sternly opposed by friends and family, is turbulent, sometimes cruel, often tender. Many years later, an old woman makes her way across London on the morning after a hurricane. Christmas is coming. As she wanders past bombsites and through the city's forlorn beauty, a snowdrift of memories and lost desires seems to swirl. She has twice been married: once widowed, once divorced, but an unquenchable passion for life has kept her afloat as her dazzling career has faded. A story of love's commitment, of partings and reconciliations, of the courage involved in living on nobody else's terms, Ghost Light is a profoundly moving and ultimately uplifting novel. |
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Some crimes strike too close to home... Private detective Bill Smith is hurtled headlong into the most provocative-and personal-case of his career when he receives a chilling late night telephone call from the NYPD. They're holding his fifteen-year-old nephew Gary. But before he can find out what's going on, Gary escapes Bill's custody and disappears into the dark and unfamiliar streets... With his partner, Lydia Chin, Bill tries to find the missing teen and uncover what it is that has led him so far from home. Their search takes them to Gary's family in a small town in New Jersey, where they discover that one of Gary's classmates was murdered. Bill and Lydia delve into the crime-only to find it eerily similar to a decades-old murder-suicide... The situation is not helped by Bill's long term estrangement from his sister. But now, with his nephew's future at stake, Bill must unravel a long-buried crime and confront the darkness of his own past... |
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Na Ga was always in search of a better life. But now she sits, alone, in a hotel room in Wanting, a godforsaken town on the Chinese-Burmese border. Plucked from her wild life as a rural eel-catcher, Na Ga is first abandoned by her would-be rescuers in Rangoon. Later, as a teenager, she finds herself chasing the dream of a new life in Thailand — where further betrayals and violations await. Yet it seems that her fighting spirit will not be broken. But for how long can Na Ga belong nowhere and with no one? In the dingy hotel in Wanting, she is forced to confront her compulsion to keep running, and to ask herself why, until now, she's resisted the journey home. |
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This is the tale of three women — one witch, one mermaid and one missing — and how Ruby was caught up in between. The Black Country town of Cradle Cross — home to buttonmakers, canal folk, and more than its share of widows — is bounded by canals, grief and superstition. Caught within this web is motherless thirteen-year-old Ruby, who dreams of escaping the soot and smoke of her home-town for the clear air of the sea. When a mysterious stranger named Isa Fly appears in the doorway of Captin Len's Fried Fish Shop on a quest to find her dying father's missing wife and daughter, Ruby and Captin Len are both enchanted. But some of the townsfolk are instantly suspicious of the outsider and when Ruby introduces Isa to Truda Blick, the bluestocking graduate who has just inherited the town's button factory, the women are pushed to the brink of riot. Only Ruby knows enough to save them. But first she must save herself. |
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Maya Lowe is one of the world's biggest movie stars. Steve Watkins is her life-long friend. Both swear their relationship hasn't changed since they shared a school desk as London teenagers. But can a friendship like theirs really survive a fame as great as Maya's? Can a man like Steve, working away for a Heathrow logistics company, seriously remain part of her life? He certainly thinks so. But amid the twists and turns of Maya's public and private lives, the gulf between what Steve thinks and what is actually true gets ever wider. And in a world where the obsession with celebrity seems to make everyone want to be one, truth is hard to find. Set in modern-day Britain, America and France, Alastair Campbell's second novel is part psychological thriller, part exploration of the psychology of fame. Steve is a brilliantly ambiguous figure, narrating a story full of morally complex characters from the worlds of film, business, TV, journalism and private investigation. Whether through stars with a love-hate relationship with their public; agents milking the culture of celebrity; a media that cannot get enough because the public always want more, Campbell depicts a society feeding vainly on fame, and the dangerous consequences for those caught up in its frenzy. |
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Deepdene has been swept by what seems to be a vicious tropical disease. Luckily Eve and Jess are both healthy so they're taking their chance to enjoy the unseasonal heat wave. But then teenagers start to disappear. The spread of the disease worsens and the town is placed under lockdown. A demon is among them. It could be anybody. And now there's nowhere to go... The third title in this successful series. It is suitable for all fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed and Twilight. |
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'The whites want war and we will give it to them' — Sitting Bull. This is the archetypal story of the American West. Whether it is cast as a tale of unmatched bravery in the face of impossible odds or of insane arrogance receiving its rightful comeuppance, Custer's Last Stand continues to captivate the imagination. Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly reconstructs the build-up to the Battle of the Little Big Horn through to the final eruption of violence. Two legendary figures dominate the events: George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull. No longer the fresh-faced 'Boy-General' of the Civil War, Custer was now mired in financial, professional and political problems. A clear and just cause had been replaced by ambiguity and frustration — by ill-fated efforts at peace treaties, treachery and compromises on both sides. Forced to take to the plains to feed themselves, and increasingly outraged by the government's policies towards them, the Sioux and Cheyenne became infused with a new sense of collective identity and purpose. Between six and eight thousand people came together in the largest ever gathering of Native Americans. If the government should be foolish enough to pursue them, they would stand and fight. Sitting Bull was in his mid-forties, His charisma and political savvy had enabled him to emerge as their leader. A vision he received during a Sun Dance — of soldiers falling from the sky — was widely understood to presage a great victory. Nathaniel Philbrick brings vividly to life all those involved — from the Oglala Sioux warrior Crazy Horse and Major Marcus Reno who led the first attack, to Libby Custer waiting with the other army wives at Fort Lincoln. He evokes too the history, geography and haunting beauty of the Great Plains and provides the finest account to date of what happened there — and why — at the end of June 1876. |
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Time Out's resident team helps you get the best out of the City on the Bay, giving you the inside track on local culture plus hundreds of independent venue reviews. As well as covering visitor essentials. Time Out San Francisco explores the city's diverse neighborhoods and highlights its independent and creative spirit with a tour of its thriving gay, art, food, shopping and cultural venues. |
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«Present day Iraq: A country torn apart by war and anarchy. Thieves roam the streets. People are being killed in broad daylight. Security is non-existent. And now, terrorists have seized a Van Gogh painting worth 25 million from one of Saddam's palaces. They are offering it to the highest bidder. The painting's original owner, a Kuwaiti prince, from whom it was seized during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in the First Gulf War, has asked for the British Government's help in retrieving it. They owe the Prince a favour for backing them during the Iraq War, so they agree to help. But rather than agreeing to pay the terrorists' ransom — which they fear will be pumped into funding terrorist operations across the world — Her Majesty's Government decides to send in a team of hardened ex-Special Forces, led by ex-SAS hero Mick Kilbride and his sidekick «East End» Eddie. Sent undercover in a deniable operation called Desert Claw, their brief is simple: retrieve the painting and eliminate the terrorists at the earliest possible opportunity. The mission sounds simple enough. But as Mick and his team are drawn into a dark and violent world, things are not always as they seem. And in the final climactic scene, a horrible and shocking truth awaits the men.» |
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