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Random House, Inc.
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«Vintage Monsters» is a limited edition gift pack which consists of beautifully designed separate volumes of «Frankenstein» by Mary Shelley and Jeanette Winterson's «Sexing the Cherry». «Vintage Monsters» is just one of ten «Vintage Classic Twins» to collect. Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought-provoking combination. «Frankenstein»: One freezing morning, a lone man wandering across the artic ice caps is rescued from starvation by a ship's captain. Victor Frankenstein's story is one of ambition, murder and revenge. As a young scientist he pushed moral boundaries in order to cross the final scientific frontier and create life. But his creation is a monster stitched together from grave-robbed body parts who has no place in the world, and his life can only lead to tragedy. «Sexing the Cherry»: «Sexing the Cherry» follows the adventures of Jordan, an explorer, and his mother, the gigantic and violent 'Dog Woman'. Jeanette Winterson's stunning novel celebrates the power of the imagination as it juggles with our perception of history and reality; love and sex; lies and truths; and 12 dancing princesses who lived happily ever after, but not with their husbands.» |
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Of all John Fowles' novels The French Lieutenant's Woman received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, his book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England. Not only is it the epic love story of two people of insight and imagination seeking escape from the cant and tyranny of their age, The French Lieutenant's Woman is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom. |
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Whether for the loo or bedside entertainment or as a work of reference or self-improvement The Funniest Thing You Never Said is the biggest and best humorous quotation book there is — a complete one-stop shop of witty one liners. Quotations are ordered not by A-Z, but by thematic categories: love; business; religion; celebrity, you name it, every category is covered. The collection includes all the classics from Oscar Wilde to Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker to Groucho Marx but also mines many new hidden gems from lesser lights and includes many contemporary quotes by everyone from Jilly Cooper to Jonathan Ross. A standard companion for new collectors, and a fresh perspective for serious quotation addicts. |
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«Fury» is a wickedly brilliant and pitch-black comedy about a middle-aged professor who finds himself in New York City in the summer of 2000. Not since, the Bombay of «Midnight's Children» have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel. «Fury» opens on a New York living at breakneck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik Solanka, a Cambridge-educated self-made millionaire originally from Bombay, arrives looking, perversely, for escape. This former philosophy professor is the inventor of the hugely popular doll, Little Brain, whose multiform ubiquity — as puppet, cartoon and masked woman — now rankles with him. He becomes frustratingly estranged from his own creation. At the same time, his marriage is disintegrating: it escalates into a rage-filled battle, and Solanka very nearly commits an unforgiveable act. Horrified by the fury within him, he flees home and family and becomes a sort of spiritual mendicant — except that he has a credit card and a duplex on the Upper West Side. Solanka discovers that he has come to a city roiling with anger, where cab drivers spout invective and a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete, a metropolis whose population is united by petty spats and bone-deep resentment. His own thoughts, emotions and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild.» |
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Joe Lassiter is an ex-FBI investigator bent on revenge. His sister and young nephew have been murdered and the killer hospitalised. Despite warnings from the police Lassiter will stop at nothing to discover why. His search leads him to uncover an attempt by the Vatican to destroy all traces of a discovery that has sent them into such an alarm, that they have charged a right-wing fundamentalist hit-squad to rid the world of all evidence of it. The discovery originates from a confession in a remote village in Italy. A confession that sends the local priest into a panic and the Vatican into an uproar. The confession belongs to the late Dr Franco Baresi, and concerns the work at his fertility clinic — a fertility clinic that Lassiter's sister attended and, as he horrifyingly discovers, all the other victims in a recent series of murders that have swept the world. Women who were infertile until they attended the clinic. Lassiter must discover the remaining mothers before the hit men, and meanwhile his sister's killer is on the loose... |
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«Glue» is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences — and the secrets — that hold them together into their thirties. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer: driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally — who has one less skin than everyone else and seems to find catastrophe at every corner. As we follow their lives from the seventies into the new century — from punk to techno, from speed to Es — we can see each of them trying to struggle out from under the weight of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure and their parents' hopes that maybe their sons will do better than they did. What binds the four of them is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both; their loyalty fused in street morality: back up your mates, don't hit women and, most importantly, never grass — on anyone. Despite its scale and ambition, «Glue» has all Irvine Welsh's usual pace and vigour, crackling dialogue, scabrous set-pieces and black, black humour, but it is also a grown-up book about growing up — about the way we live our lives, and what happens to us when things become unstuck.» |
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«A novel about people, their pleasures, pains and perversions, and money. It is a satire on insanity — a millionaire's private lunacy, the inherited obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness that grips a whole nation. The author's other novels include «Slaughterhouse 5».» |
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It is 1963 in New York, and things have never been better for the Corleones. They've taken out their Mafia rivals, and legitimised the Family. Outside the fortified building owned by Michael Corleone, newly undisputed Boss of Bosses, a parade of people — among them former mob rivals and an emissary from the Mayor of New York — wait to ask the great man for favours. Only one thing remains to be done. Traitorous former Corleone capo Nick Geraci has powerful friends and far too much to say, and needs to be brought in. But then everything changes. As fireworks explode over First Avenue, news arrives that Jimmy Shea, President of the United States and an old friend of the Corleone's, has been assassinated... |
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The Godfather is the Mafia leader Vito Corleone, a benevolent despot who stops at nothing to gain and hold power. Set in Long Island, Hollywood and Sicily, this is a story of a feudal society within society which does not hesitate to consolidate its power. |
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«Vintage Satire» is a limited edition gift pack which consists of beautifully designed separate volumes of «Gulliver's Travels» by Jonathan Swift and Michel Houellebecq's controversial bestseller «Atomised.» «Vintage Satire» is just one of ten «Vintage Classic Twins» to collect. Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought-provoking combination. In the course of his famous travels, «Gulliver's Travels»: In the course of his famous travels, Gulliver is captured by miniature people who wage war on each other because of religious disagreement over how to crack eggs, is sexually assaulted by giants, visits a floating island, and decides that the society of horses is better than that of his fellow man. Swift's tough, filthy and incisive satire has much to say about the state of the world today and is presented here in its unexpurgated entirety. «Atomised»: Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections. A dissection of modern lives and loves, it is by turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.» |
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Cold-blooded murder just isn't Thomas Lang's cup of tea. Offered a tidy sum to assassinate an American industrialist, he opts to warn the intended victim instead — a good deed that soon takes a bad turn. Quicker than he can down a shot of his favourite whiskey, Lang is bashing heads with a Buddha statue, matching wits with evil billionaires, and putting his life (among other things) in the hands of a bevy of femmes fatales. Up against rogue CIA agents, wanna-be terrorists, and an arms dealer looking to make a high-tech killing, Lang's out to save the leggy lady he has come to love...and prevent an international bloodbath to boot. |
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«26-year-old Vadim hates his job in the PR department of Latvia's biggest bank. He spends his time playing his favourite shoot-em-up computer game, 'Headcrusher', and composing insulting emails about his bosses. When his manager catches him writing one such email, Vadim is so overcome with rage that he kills him. Then he kills the bank's security guard too, because he has seen him disposing of the body. Bumping people off comes to seem as easy as playing a computer game (or moving money between bank accounts) and Vadim embarks on a killing spree, putting paid to anyone who annoys him. But, as he becomes embroiled in the murky activities of the corrupt bank, which is laundering money for Mafia criminals, he starts to lose touch with reality. Where does truth end and fantasy begin — and is life just one big computer game? This high-octane debut novel has the energy of a Tarantino film, the game-playing of «The Matrix» and the philosophical quirkiness of «Fight Club». Nothing quite like it has come out of Russia before. It has been a major bestseller there, and has been picked up by publishers around the world.» |
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He is one of the most haunting characters in all of literature. At last, the evolution of his evil is revealed. Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck. He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him. Hannibal's uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki. Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal.With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. But Hannibal's demons visit him and torment him.When he is old enough, he visits them in turn. He discovers he has gifts beyond the academic, and in that epiphany, Hannibal Lecter becomes death's prodigy. |
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«This is a narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, «Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World» is the tour de force that expanced Haruki Murakami's international following, tracking one man's descent into the kafkaesque underworld farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy. The result is a wildly inventive fantasy and a meditation on the many uses of the mind.» |
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«Tiffany Aching, a hag from a long line of hags, is trying out her witchy talents again as she is plunged into yet another adventure when she leaves home and is apprenticed to a «real» witch. This time, will the thieving, fighting and drinking skills of the Nac Mac Feegle — the Wee Free Men — be of use, or must Tiffany rely on her own abilities? This is the third novel in the junior Discworld series that started with the enormously popular tale: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.» |
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Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanising, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too. Fired from his newspaper, months behind on his alimony payments and disgusted with a world that undervalues him, Ted seeks a few months repose and free drink at Swafford Hall, the country mansion of his old friend Lord Logan. But strange things have been going on at Swafford. Miracles. Healings. Phenomena beyond the comprehension of a mud-caked hippopotamus like Ted... |
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Meet Lydia Albright, one of Hollywood's hottest movie producers; Lydia's best friend and tinseltown's favourite celebrity Celeste Solange; Ueber-agent to the stars Jessica Caulfield, who knows everything and everyone that matters; and script writer Mary Anne Meyers, who can't believe her luck at having escaped the slush pile and signed on for Lydia's new blockbuster, Seven Minutes Past Midnight. When Seven Minutes Past Midnight falls prey to her boss' petty jealousies, Lydia needs all hands on deck. And with Celeste's dear husband casting his latest arm candy in the lead of his next film, instead of, as promised, Celeste herself, she's more than happy to help out an old friend. The same goes for Jessica, who could do with a project to take her mind off the new hot-shot in her agency, whose sole intent seems to be sabotaging her career. In Hollywood, no vicious deed goes unpunished, not if the four have anything to say about it at least, and there is no reason why they shouldn't see the movie through on their own — especially if it means settling a few old scores along the way... |
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World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov shares the powerful secrets of strategy he has learned from dominating the world’s most intellectually challenging game for two decades – lessons about mastering the strategic and emotional skills to navigate life’s toughest challenges and maximise success no matter how tough the competition. Drawing on a wealth of revealing and instructive stories, not only from his finest games, but also from a wide-ranging and perceptive knowledge of current affairs, Kasparov reveals the strategic ways of thinking that always give a player – in life as in chess — the edge. With a raconteur’s engaging charm, a great chess strategist takes us inside a brilliant strategic mind. As Sun Tzu distilled the secrets of the art of war and Machiavelli unveiled the lessons to be learned from courtly intrigue, Garry Kasparov – a player whose record is likely never to be rivalled – reveals how and why the game of chess is a fitting and powerful teacher, of how to be prepared for, and how to win in, even the most competitive situations. |
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When Tiro, the confidential secretary of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning, he sets in motion a chain of events which will eventually propel his master into one of the most famous courtroom dramas in history. The stranger is a Sicilian, a victim of the island's corrupt Roman governor, Verres. The senator is Cicero, a brilliant young lawyer and spellbinding orator, determined to attain imperium — supreme power in the state. This is the starting-point of Robert Harris' most accomplished novel to date. Compellingly written in Tiro's voice, it takes us inside the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, to describe how one man — clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable — fought to reach the top. |
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Once again, the setting d Piemburgem, the deceptively peaceful-looking capital of Zululand, where Kommondant van Heerden, Konstabel Els and Luitenant Vekramp continue to terrorise true Englishman and even truer Zulus in their relentless search for a perfect South Africa. While that great Anglophile, Kommondant van Heerden, gropes his way towards attaining true 'Englishness' in the company of the eccentric Dornford Yates Club, Luitenant Vekramp, whose hatred of all things English is surpassed only by his fear of sex, sets in motion an experiment in mass chastity, with the help of the redoubtable lady psychiatrist, Dr. Von Bliminstein, which has remarkable and quite unforseen results. The Kommondant, hunting the fox in the Aardvark Mountains, succumbs to the bizarre charms of Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon, as Luitenant Verkramp's essays in counter espionage backfire in a bird sanctuary. Once more, Konstable Els, homicidal to the last, saves the day — or what's left of it — in one of the most savage hunts ever chronicled in fiction. |
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