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Random House, Inc.
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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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Early one September three friends spend the weekend at a remote cabin by Dead Water Lake. With only a pale moon to light their way, they row across the water in the middle of the night. But only two of them return. When the body of the third friend is discovered, Inspector Sejer is put in charge of the investigation. He is troubled by the apparent suicide and has an overwhelming sense that the surviving pair has something to hide. Weeks pass without further clues and then, in a nearby lake, the body of another teenage boy floats to the surface... |
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Lee Langley's bewitching story of lost hope and thwarted love opens where Puccini's opera ends; with Madame Butterfly — Cho-Cho-San — handing over her beloved son to his American father before killing herself. In America Joey grows up torn between two cultures, haunted, like his parents, by their memories of what really happened on that fateful day. But just as Joey's fate is inextricably linked with the country of his birth, so too is the fate of America, and both of their paths will ultimately lead to Nagasaki. |
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My Michael is a beautiful work of great depth and lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story. (Arthur Miller). 1950s Jerusalem. Hannah Gonen has just married and is thrilled and pained by her young well-meaning husband, Michael. Haunted by her dreams of two boys who disappeared from Jerusalem after the establishment of the state of Israel, Hannah gradually withdraws from her husband into a private world of fantasy and suppressed desires. A remarkable, precipient picture of the nature of women. |
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Alex Horne loves words. He loves them so much, in fact, that he's gone on a mental safari and invented some of his own... all he needs to do now is get them into the dictionary. But, as Alex discovers, gaining entry into the official lexicon takes more than just a gentle word in the ear of the editor. Evidence is required — Alex needs what the dictionary authorities call a 'corpus' of examples, hard data showing that his new words are in widespread and long-term usage by people other than just him and his mum. So a corpus he resolves to create, no matter what obstacles he might meet on the way. This is the ridiculous story of one man's struggle to break into the dictionary. From covert word-dropping on Countdown to willfully misinforming young schoolchildren, Alex tries it all in his quest for word-based stardom. Does he succeed? Exactly what is a 'mental safari'? And are you already using one of Alex's words without realising it? You won't regret spending your hard-earned honk on this hugely entertaining book. |
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