Modern Talking In The Garden Of Venus (CD)

The perfect quirky nostalgic crime read – a tale of steam trains, giant squid, missing screenplays, missing mothers and a quest for the truth, from the inimitable Malcolm Pryce • It's the winter of 1948. The four great railway companies have just been nationalised and Jack Wenlock – the last of a fabled cadre of railway detectives – is thrown out onto the street • Penniless, with new bride Jenny to support, and hiding from a murderous organisation called Room 42, Jack's prospects look bleak • But then a letter arrives from a mysterious Cornish Countess revealing that Jack's mother – long believed to be dead – may have survived a shipwreck off the coast of Java. Seizing the opportunity to track down his only remaining family member, Jack and Jenny board a boat heading East

1919: Sir Edward Horner, the most celebrated artist of his day, destroys his world-famous painting, The Little Birds, shortly before his death. But why? • The new novel by Sunday Times bestseller Harriet Evans is the unputdownable tale of a family torn apart and the house they lived in. Harriet writes the most delicious, epic stories from the heart since Maeve Binchy and Kate Morton • Millions around the world once queued up to see the painting that captured a perfect moment: Horner's two children, John and Eliza, playing in the garden of their magical, mysterious Nightingale House, the family home he and his wife created deep in the heart of the English countryside • But such moments cannot last for ever • Almost a century later, Horner's great-granddaughter Juliet inherits Nightingale House, now weighed down with unspoken secrets

In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength. First published in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is considered one of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man’s will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.Includes an Introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenkoand an Afterword by Eric Bogosian

The Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West. This is due to the accounts of many witnesses, but most of all to the publication, in 1962, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the novel that first brought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to public attention. His story of one typical day in a labour camp as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sufficient to describe the entire world of the Soviet camps