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Random House, Inc.
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This book contains the first ever selection of her stories, from her earliest published work in 1968 to her latest in 1994. Her star is in the ascendant — winner of the 1994 W. H. Smith Award, shortlisted for the second time in 1995 for the Irish Times International Fiction Award. This wonderful selection of the greatest stories will demonstrate her genius, her versatility, her extraordinary humanity, and will delight new readers as well as her fans. |
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Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him. Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id. He's a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivor-style reality show. Along the way, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, is forced to re-enact the 'Angry Dance' from the movie Billy Elliot and finds himself at the centre of a nuclear war. We also meet Raymond's upwardly failing sidekick, Neal, as well as Raymond's ex-wife, Fiona, herself 'an atomic bomb of pain'. Even though he really puts the 'anti' in anti-hero, you may find Raymond Gunt an oddly likeable character. |
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«You've never seen tarot cards quite like these. Imagine the celebrated Rider Deck infused with the horrors of «Night of the Living Dead», and the result is «The Zombie Tarot» — a crazy, campy interpretation of a classic divination system. In this zombified parallel universe, wands become limbs, pentacles are biohazard symbols, and the Major Arcana is full of shambling corpses. Along with the 78-card deck, readers will receive instructions in a 96-page full-color book; its contents explain how to survive the zombie apocalypse and forecast your future using one of three different card layouts. The secrets of «The Zombie Tarot» await you!» |
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In 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparently simple errand for a British special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its agony in 'the black years'. Here is the full range of collaboration, from the tacit to the enthusiastic, as well as examples of extraordinary courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien, Charlotte meets his father, a Jewish painter whose inspiration has failed him. In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is delineated, Faulks brings the story to a resolution of redemptive love. In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and its powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte Gray is a worthy successor to Birdsong. |
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Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows and aspirations. |
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Completely revised and updated, the Doctor Who Encyclopedia is the ultimate fan's guide to all things Doctor Who. Packed with photos, concept drawings, illustrations and artwork, and including the Christopher Ecclestone, David Tennant, and Matt Smith incarnations of the Doctor, learn every fact and discover every figure from every episode. |
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Donna Noble is back home in London, catching up with her family and generally giving them all the gossip about her journeys. Her grandfather is especially overjoyed — he's discovered a new star and had it named after him. He takes the Doctor, as his special guest, to the naming ceremony. But the Doctor is suspicious about some of the other changes he can see in Earth's heavens. Particularly that bright star, right there. No not that one, that one, there, on the left... The world's population is slowly being converted to a new path, a new way of thinking. Something is coming to Earth, an ancient force from the Dark Times. Something powerful, angry, and all-consuming...Featuring the Doctor and Donna as played by David Tennant and Catherine Tate in the hit series from BBC Television. |
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From a lipstick at the dawn of creation to a fob watch at the end of time, these 100 objects tell the story of the universe and the most important man in it: the Doctor. Along the way, civilizations will rise at the stroke of a match and fall to a sneeze. Scarves will be knitted by the wives of prophets, and ray guns will be built by royalty. This fascinating book also explains the real-world history of the various objects — from the invention of the Loch Ness Monster legend in the 1930s to how long it would really take to send a message of universal domination. It uncovers the hidden history of the Time Lords, presents an illustrated guide to invisible monsters, and explores the Rani's wardrobe. Containing full-color photographs and exclusive artwork, A History of the Universe in 100 Objects is the essential guide to the most iconic items ever seen in Doctor Who. |
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When the Tardis materialises in medieval Worcester, the Doctor finds the city seemingly deserted. He soon discovers its population are living in a state of terror, afraid to leave their homes after dark, for fear of meeting their doom at the hands of the legendary Devil's Huntsman. For months, people have been disappearing, and the Sheriff has imposed a strict curfew across the city, his militia maintaining control over the superstitious populace with a firm hand, closing the city to outsiders. Is it fear of attack from beyond the city walls that drives him or the threat closer to home? Or does the Sheriff have something to hide? After a terrifying encounter with a deadly Krillitane, the Doctor realises the city has good reason to be scared. Featuring the Tenth Doctor as played by David Tennant in the hit Doctor Who BBC Television series. |
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When Earth is destroyed to make way for a Hyperspatial express route, Arthur Dent discovers that space is big, as he is taken on a hair-raising tour of the Galaxy and its very strange inhabitants, by his friend Ford Perfect. This is a new edition which incorporates the fifth part of the trilogy. |
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Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are. Jacques Rebiere and Thomas Midwinter, both sixteen when the story starts in 1876, come from different countries and contrasting families. They are united by an ambition to understand how the mind works and whether madness is the price we pay for being human. As psychiatrists, they travel on a quest from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. Their search is made urgent by the case of Jacques' brother Olivier, for whose severe illness no name has yet been found. Thomas' sister Sonia becomes the pivotal figure in the volatile relationship between the two men. It threatens to explode with the arrival in their Austrian sanatorium of an enigmatic patient, Fraulein Katharina von A, whose illness epitomises all that divides them. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the novel rises to a climax in which the value of being alive is called into question. This is Sebastian Faulks' most ambitious novel yet, with scenes of emotional power recalling his most celebrated work, yet set here on an even larger scale. |
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A gloriously witty novel from Sebastian Faulks using P.G. Wodehouse's much-loved characters, Jeeves and Wooster, fully authorised by the Wodehouse estate. Due to a series of extenuating circumstances, Bertie Wooster, recently returned from a very pleasurable sojourn in Cannes, finds himself at the home of Sir Henry Hackwood. Bertie is, of course, familiar with the set-up at a country house. He can always rely on Jeeves, his loyal butler to have packed the correct number of trousers and is a natural at cocktail hour. But this time, it is Jeeves who can be found in the drawing room, while Bertie finds himself below stairs. As is so often the case, love is the cause of the confusion. You see, Bertie met Georgiana, Georgiana liked Bertie, the feeling was mutual. Though he could be said to suffer from a reputation for flirtations, it looks as though this is the real deal. However, Georgiana is a ward of Sir Henry Hackwood and, in order to maintain his beloved Melbury Hall, Hackwood has already struck a deal would see Georgiana becoming Mrs Rupert Venables. Meanwhile, Peregrine 'Woody' Beeching is trying to regain the trust of his fiancee Amelia. But why would this necessitate Bertie having to pass himself off as a valet when he has never so much as made a cup of tea? Could it be that every loyal, self-effacing, Kant loving, Jeeves has an ulterior motive? But future happiness is not the only thing at stake: there is a frightfully important cricket match and the loaded question of who one fancies for Ascot. Evoking the sunlit days of a time gone-by, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is a delightfully witty story of love, reputation and mistaken intentions. |
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These dazzling and utterly satisfying stories explore varieties and degrees of love — filial, platonic, sexual, parental and imagined — in the lives of apparently ordinary folk. In fact, Munro's characters pulse with idiosyncratic life. Under the polished surface of these unsentimental dispatches from the small-town and rural front lies a strong undertow of violence and sexuality, repressed until something snaps, with extraordinary force in some of the stories, sadly and strangely in others. |
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The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this dazzling new collection. At its centre are three stories connected into one marvellously rich narrative about Juliet — who escapes from teaching at a girls' school and throws herself into a wild and passionate love match. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes these stories more powerful and compelling than anything she has written. |
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This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the facade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable. |
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Brilliantly paced, lit with sparks of danger and underlying menace, these are dazzling, provocative stories about Svengali men, and radical women who outmanoeuvre them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments which change or haunt a life. Alice Munro takes on complex, even harrowing emotions and events, and renders them into stories that surprise, amaze and shed light on the unpredictable ways we accommodate to what happens in our lives. A wife and mother, whose spirit has been crushed, finds release from her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely place. The young victim of a humiliating seduction (which involves reading Housman in the nude) finds an unusual way to get her own back and move on. An older woman, dying of cancer, weaves a poisonous story to save her life. Other stories uncover the 'deep holes' in marriage and their consequences, the dangerous intimacy of girls and the cruelty of children. The long title story follows Sophia Kovalevsky, a late nineteenth-century Russian emigree and mathematical genius, as she takes a fateful winter journey that begins with a visit to her lover on the Riviera, and ends in Sweden, where she is a professor at the only university willing to hire a woman to teach her subject. Munro's unsettling stories turn lives into art, expand our world and our understanding of the strange workings of the human heart. |
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En el verano de 1816, el poeta Percy Bysshe Shelley y su esposa Mary se reunieron con Lord Byron y su m?dico Polidori en una villa a orillas del lago Leman. A instancias de Lord Byron y para animar una velada tormentosa, decidieron que cada uno inventar?a una historia de fantasmas. La m?s callada y reservada, Mary Shelley, dio vida as? a quien ser?a su personaje m?s famoso: el doctor Frankenstein. Al cabo de un a?o completar?a la novela, hoy d?a un cl?sico imperecedero de la literatura. La historia es de todos conocida: un cient?fico decide crear una criatura con vida propia a la que luego rechaza. Met?fora sobre la vida, la libertad y el amor, Frankenstein es una maravillosa f?bula con todos los ingredientes de los grandes mitos. |
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Ever y Damen han viajado a trav?s de incontables vidas pasadas y luchado contra los m?s temibles enemigos s?lo para poder al fin estar juntos. Pero el amor eterno tiene un alto precio: Roman les ha lanzado una poderosa maldici?n para que no puedan tocarse. Y, con una simple caricia o un suave roce de labios, Damen podr?a hundirse en el inh?spito abismo de las almas perdidas. Desesperada por salvar Damen, Ever se sumerge en la magia y recibe ayuda de una fuente inesperada… Jude Knight. Aunque se acaban de conocer, Jude — un atractivo chico de ojos verdes con grandes poderes m?gicos y un misterioso pasado — le resulta extra?amente familiar. Ever siempre pens? que Damen era su alma gemela, pero mientras ?l se aleja de ella para protegerla de las tinieblas que habitan en su alma, la relaci?n de Ever y Jude se hace cada vez m?s fuerte — y pone a prueba su amor por Damen como nunca antes. |
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This rhymed retelling of the hit PBS Kids holiday special The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About Christmas! is bound to become a cherished keepsake. Written in a style reminiscent of Clement Moore's 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, the book retells the story from the Cat's Christmas Eve Party through his various mishaps while attempting to return young reindeer Ralph home in time to pull Santa's sled. Along the way, readers are introduced to a herd of elephants with an uncanny ability to smell water; a pod of dolphins who can communicate across far distances; and a single-minded army of Christmas Island crabs — all of whom demonstrate how working together is the best way to solve a problem, and how being home for the holidays is the best place to be. A perfect gift for fans of the hit PBS Kids TV show The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! — and an ideal choice for reading aloud — this is a book the whole family can enjoy together! |
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Bring your child's classroom with the wonderfully imaginative Step-Ahead series. Proven educational methods reinforce what is taught in preschool through the elementary grades. Simple instructions, delightful graphics, and fun-to-do activities, such as this book with peel-and-stick stickers, motivate your child to master skills and turn the page for more. |
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