Anthony Farrant has always found his way, lying to get jobs and borrowing money to get by when he leaves them in a hurry. His twin sister Kate persuades him to move and sets him up with a job as bodyguard to Krogh, her lover and boss, an all-powerful Swedish financier. But Farrant does have a sense of decency, and when Krogh gives orders that offend him, he leaks information to Minty, a downtrodde...
The ideal introduction to the genius of Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories contains ten of Hemingway's most acclaimed and popular works of short fiction. Selected from Winner Take Nothing, Men Without Women, and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, this collection includes "The Killers," the first of Hemingway's mature stories to be accepted by an...
Evoking the Jazz-Age world that would later appear in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, this essential Fitzgerald collection contains some of the writer’s most famous and celebrated stories. In “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” an extraordinary child is born an old man, growing younger as the world ages around him. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” a fable of excess and greed, shows two boar...
One of America’s greatest women writers, Willa Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel—the first of her books set on the Nebraska frontier. A tale of the prairie land encountered by America’s Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrants, as well as a story of how the land challenged them, changed them, and, in some cases, defeated them, Cather’s novel is a...
Fascinated by Patagonia ever since an early childhood lust for his Grandma's scrap of hairy Giant Sloth skin, Bruce Chatwin is intrigued by odd miners, Darwin, the Welsh and the log cabin built by Butch Cassidy. From Rio Negro to the southernmost town of Ushuaia, Chatwin depicts all in writing as spare as the Patagonian desert and as vibrant as the purple clouds off Last Hope Sound.
A Lost Lady is the portrait of a frontier woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them. To the people of Sweet Water, a fading railroad town on the Western plains, Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat, at once gracious and comfortably remote. To her aging husband she is a treasure whose value increases as his powers fail. To Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her as...
In a prison in Occupied France one in every ten men is to be shot. The prisoners draw lots among themselves - and for rich lawyer Louis Chavel it seems that his whole life has been leading up to an agonising and crucial failure of nerve. Hysterical with panic, fear, and a sense of injustice, he offers to barter everything he owns for someone to take his place.
The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid's secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This is a world where people emerge from cheap l...
Considered by Graham Greene to be Maugham's best work, DON FERNANDO is a paean to a golden age of enormous creative energy. It discusses the writings of St Teresa and the paintings of El Greco, and comments with sagacity and wit on such illustrious figures as Cervantes, Velazquez and the creator of Don Juan. This vibrant assessment of a great people at their greatest hour is full of happy sur...
In June 1940 France fell to the Nazis. The effects of this event on the lives of ordinary Parisians and the inhabitants of a small rural community under occupation are brilliantly explored in Irene Nemirovsky's heartbreaking novel. Nemirovsky herself was a tragic victim of the Nazi regime but she left behind her this exceptional masterpiece. In Suite Frangaise she conjures up a vivid cast of...
«Полет ворона», вторая книга трилогии, — это, главным образом, история трех замужеств. Поскольку платить нужно даже за правильный выбор, а выбор каждой из героинь по-своему ошибочен, то и расплата оказалась серьезной. Пережитое очень изменило наших Татьян. В то, что они обе откровенно и не щадя себя поведали мне о не самых лучших временах своей жизни и не возражали против публикации этих глав, явн...
Willa Cather’s novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to a new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind. In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a p...
Willa Cather’s lyrical and bittersweet novel of a middle-aged man losing control of his life is a brilliant study in emotional dislocation and renewal. Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden, and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comfortable house, s...
MARCOVALDO is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems.
Henry David Thoreau’s account of his adventure in self-reliance on the shores of a pond in Massachusetts—part social experiment, part spiritual quest—is an enduringly influential American classic. In 1845, Thoreau began building a cabin at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. The inspiring and lyrical book that resulted is both a record of the two years Thoreau spent in withdrawal from soci...
Far Eastern Tales is a collection of short stories born of Maugham's experiences in Malaya, Singapore and other outposts of the former British Empire. Whether portraying a ship-borne flight from a lover's curse, murder in the jungle, or a marriage shattered by a past indiscretion, they all reveal Maugham at his best - sometimes caustic, sometimes gently comic, but always the shrewd and h...
The tale of identical twin brothers who toil on the family farm in the wild and vibrant land of Wales and experience the oddities, wonders, and tragedies of human experience.
Грэм Грин — автор богатейшего мемуарного наследия, в которое входит его автобиографические книги "Часть жизни" и "Пути спасения", путевые записки "Путешествие без карты", литературные дневники "Дороги беззакония", "В поисках героя", огромное количество статей и очерков "Как редко романист обращается к материалу, который находится у него под рукой!" — сокрушался Грин, но сам в поисках этого матер...
Led by the reliably underinsightful Binder, a team of seven British men—including Dr. Prone (constantly ill), Jungle the route-finder (constantly lost), Constant the diplomat (constantly arguing), and 3,000 Yogistani porters—set out to conquer the highest peak in the Himalayas. Though a parody, it has become one of the most famous and celebrated books of mountaineering literature.
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FENTON. Subtitled 'An education in the twenties', this work blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious public school boy to Cambridge drop-out at large in London’s Bohemia. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Isherwood’s contemporaries Auden, Upward, and Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebe...
The First World War is over. Eric Vernon is on the cusp of adulthood. Tall, bony and awkward he finds himself torn between a desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice, and resentment toward his father's roguish friend Edward Blake, who survived the war only to throw himself into gay life in Berlin. With subtle wit and trademark irony, Isherwood's second novel...
So writes Graham Greene, describing his childhood love of reading and how it grew into a passion for writing. Collected Essays contains nearly eighty essays, reviews and occasional pieces composed between novels, plays and travel books over four prolific decades. From Henry James and Somerset Maugham to Ho Chi Minh and Kim Philby, the range of subjects is eclectic and stimulating, and the characte...
Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial familes, a new and powerful political and social elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family - members of the waning aristocracy - but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and confused by his feelings...
The decline of religion and ever increasing influence of science pose acute ethical issues for us all. Can we reject the literal truth of the Gospels yet still retain a Christian morality? Can we defend any 'moral values' against the constant encroachments of technology? Indeed, are we in danger of losing most of the qualities which make us truly human? Here, drawing on a novelists insight into ar...
One September, the writer and explorer Peter Matthiessen set out with field biologist George Schaller to journey 250 miles through the Himalayas to the Crystal Mountain on the Tibetan plateau. They wanted to study the wild blue sheep, the bharal, but also hoped to see the snow leopard, a creature so rarely spotted as to be nearly mythical. "The Snow Leopard" is not only an exquisite book of natura...
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