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At the foot of a chalk hill a stream rises in a silent copse, and is soon lost under the car parks and streets of the town its waters once gave life to.
In an attempt to further her career, Jola is determined to land the lead role in a new film about underwater photographer and model Lotte Hass. To improve her chances, the couple travel to Lanzarote and hire diving instructor Sven, paying him a large sum for exclusive tuition.
This collection of Vonnegut's letters is the autobiography he never wrote - from the letter he posted home upon being freed from a German POW camp, to notes of advice to his children: 'Don't let anybody tell you that smoking and boozing are bad for you.
Translated by Peter ConstantineEdited and with an new introduction by Leo Damrosch'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains' is the dramatic opening line of The Social Contract, published in 1762.
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY IAN RANKIN'In a class by himself...the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety' William GoldingIn a small continental country civil war is raging.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD FLANAGANIn this fascinating journey Claudio Magris, whose knowledge is encyclopaedic and whose curiosity limitless, guides his reader from the source of the Danube in the Bavarian hills through Austro-Hungary and the Balkans to the Black Sea.
It is Christmas Eve, and John Rivers is thinking about the past; about his sheltered upbringing; about an extraordinary time spent as a lab assistant to the great physicist Henry Maartens; about Maartens' beautiful wife, Katy, and about a love affair which shook Rivers to the core and caused him to question everything he once revered.
Aesthete, sensualist, bookworm, politician of Machiavellian cunning: Francois Mitterrand was a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional flaws who, during his fourteen years as President, strove to drag his tradition-bound and change-averse country into the modern world.
Beginning with the Norman Conquest of England, these tumultuous centuries and their invasions shaped the languages and political geography of present-day Britain and Ireland. Tracing the political, religious and material cultures of the period, the author seeks to define the ways in which lives changed during these turbulent times.
Their lovemaking throughout the book forms a recurring lietmotif, a counterpoint to the examination of the spiritual death of the characters. In a South London environment of pub and fairground, home and work, the wounds of 20th century experience are evoked in prose which is both lyrical and precise.
Most of the other residents in the cavernous Victorian house - and the friends and acquaintances Al meets in tow local pubs, the bohemian and relaxed crowd at the Nevern and the slightly more ambiguous and dangerous crowd at the Knacker's - are Londoners by adoption, some temporary exiles, some permanent.
Once America's capitalist dream town, the Silicon Valley of the Jazz Age, Detroit became the country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the furthest.
Winner of the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, this title shows the author's fascination with human experience. It explores the shared human continuum of bodily longing - from the Prehistoric maker of a wooden fertility fetish, to a modern-day couple wading through summer pollen - and the timeless cycles of conception, birth and child-rearing.
And what, exactly is 'this'. In On the Road Bike, Ned Boulting asks how Britain became so obsessed with cycling.
In this miscellany of villainy, our unconventional sleuth must contend with misbehaving debutantes, sinister smuggling rings, a Dowager Countess who's not all that she seems, an SOS message daubed in lipstick, a beleaguered New York socialite, and an elderly Egyptologist indulging in some bad behaviour...
A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERYWhen song-and-dance star Jimmy Sutane falls victim to a string of malicious practical jokes, there's only one man who can get to the bottom of the apparent vendetta against the music hall darling - Albert Campion.
Fanny Price's rich relatives offer her a place in their home so that she can be properly brought up. However, Fanny's childhood is a lonely one as she is never allowed to forget her position. Her only ally is her cousin Edmund.
What do you do when your wife disappears in the middle of the bloodiest massacre in European history? This book reveals the story of Mattias Tannhauser who rides into town, on Saint Bartholomew's Eve, whose only intention is to find his wife and take her home.
And with the small inheritance left her by her mother, she's bought herself a home, an old canal boat. They are below the eyeline, a sort of halfworld, a good place to hide for a community of curious outsiders, all with their own stories to tell, stories which might help a certain young lady to think differently about life.
Yael trains marksmen, Avishag stands guard watching refugees throw themselves at barbed-wire fences and Lea, posted at a checkpoint, imagines the stories behind the familiar faces that pass by her day after day.
Manuel Rivas delivers a literary masterpiece about three young friends growing up in a community which is bound by a conspiracy of silenceFins and Brinco are best friends, and they both adore the wild and beautiful Leda.
For Priscilla, pre-war Paris was an exciting carousel of suitors, soirees and heartbreak, and eventually a lavish wedding to a French aristocrat. But the arrival of the Nazi tanks signalled the end of life as a Vicomtesse, and the beginning of a precarious existence under German Occupation.
This book brings together three major studies from Isaiah Berlin's central intellectual project - to explain the opposition to the excessively scientistic French Enlightenment by getting under the skin of its critics and giving a sympathetic account of their views.
It's a journey that follows the arc of Western culture, from Dante Alighieri, Rembrandt van Rijn and Claude Monet to Marcel Proust, Neil Young and Assassin's Creed, to show how one boy's fate has been shaped by history.
Whether making versions of Cavafy or elegising fellow poet Mick Imlah, or writing how a father hands on a piece of marble to his son, Robert Crawford shows in Testament how poetry can communicate from generation to generation aspects of what makes us most vulnerably and engagingly human.
One man, one bike, two Mongoose cricket bats, one tropical disease, 16,000 miles and a lot of dead kangaroos ... Oli Broom loves cricket.
Recognising that our attitudes to other creatures human and non-human; cause too much damage and hurt, that 'we've been going at this for years: a steady delete or of anything that tells us what we are', these poems celebrate the fleeting, charged moments where, through measured and gracious encounters with other lives, we find our true selves.
Yumiko is a young Japanese woman who has made London her home. She has a job, a boyfriend; Japan seems far away. Then, out of the blue, her brother calls to tell her that her father has died in a mountaineering accident.
The honesty with which he wrote about the horror, the boredom, and the futility of war inspired Ernest Hemingway to read the novel every year, 'to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them.
In a godforsaken barn, Presidents Eisenhower, John Adams and Rutherford B Hayes are bemused to find themselves reincarnated as horses. Clyde and Magreb - he a traditional capes-and-coffins vampire, she the more progressive variety - settle in an Italian lemon grove in the hope that its ripe fruit will keep their thirst for blood at bay.
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