Picador In the Skin of a Lion Ондатже Майкл

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unravelling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London home. He struggles to place the dishevelled figure carrying a backpack, until he recognizes a friend from his student days, a brilliant man who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power • Theirs is the age-old story of the bond between two men and the betrayal of one by the other. As the friends begin to talk, and as their room becomes a world, a journey begins that is by turns exhilarating, shocking, intimate and strange. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, and moving between Kabul, New York, Oxford, London and Islamabad, In the Light of What We Know tells the story of people wrestling with unshakeable legacies of class and culture, and pushes at the great questions of love, origins, science, faith and war

Книга «Fans» предлагает читателю путешествие по созвездию фандомов, а также ряд фундаментальных истин о натуре человека • Сочетая в себе познавательные и развлекательные элементы, эта книга рассказывает историю сообществ, изучает наше взаимодействие с людьми, которые разделают наши интересы. Человеческий мозг настроен на установление контактов, а наша общинная природа, с одной стороны, может вызывать раздор (религиозная нетерпимость, расизм, войны и т. д.), с другой – служить источником удовлетворения и радости • Пребывание в фандоме имитирует ощущение клановости: дарит чувство принадлежности к общей культуре, осмысленности и цели, улучшает ментальное состояние, убеждает, что кто-то воспринимает всерьёз даже наши самые диковинные увлечения, и, наконец, позволяет ощутить себя в роли (и костюме) нашего героя

Этот том - триумфальное завершение «Истории Англии» Питера Экройда. В нем Экройд переносит читателей с конца Англо-бурской войны и воцарения Эдуарда VII до конца двадцатого века, когда его правнучка Елизавета II находилась на троне почти пять десятилетий. Столетие огромных перемен, включающее в себя две мировые войны, четырех монархов (Эдуарда VII, Георга V, Георга VI и Королеву), упадок аристократии и подъем Лейбористской партии, избирательное право женщин, рождение Национальной службы здравоохранения, марш пригородов и зачистка трущоб. Это был период, который ознаменовался работой Группы Блумсберри и Т.С. Элиота, Кингсли Эмиса и Филипа Ларкина, время конца послевоенного спада и техниколора 1960-х годов, свободной любви и панк-рока, от Тэтчер до Блэра

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

The path to achieving Zen (a balance between the body and the mind) is brilliantly explained by Professor Eugen Herrigel in this timeless account • This book is the result of the author's six year quest to learn archery in the hands of Japanese Zen masters. It is an honest account of one man's journey to complete abandonment of 'the self' and the Western principles that we use to define ourselves. Professor Herrigel imparts knowledge from his experiences and guides the reader through physical and spiritual lessons in a clear and insightful way • Mastering archery is not the key to achieving Zen, and this is not a practical guide to archery. It is more a guide to Zen principles and learning and perfect for practitioners and non-practitioners alike

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 latest in the hugely popular 44 Scotland Street series from the worldwide bestselling author, Alexander McCall Smith • Life for Bertie seems to be moving at a pace that is rather out of his control. Upstairs, at 44 Scotland Street, his father Stuart is powerless to stop over-bearing Irene and her determination that Bertie will travel to deepest, coldest Aberdeen on a three-month sojourn. Can his friend Ranald Braveheart Macpherson save the day? And can the boys execute a great escape? Meanwhile, further up in the New Town, Bruce Anderson's property development plans are thwarted by a sudden crisis of conscience that leads to a shocking revelation. And, in Big Lou's cafe, it seems that love might blossom at last • Warm hearted, humorous and always wonderfully wise, Love in the Time of Bertie offers philosophical insight as well as sartorial elegance

Award-winning author of The Nowhere Men, Living on the Volcano and No Hunger in Paradise returns with his magnum opus on the state of modern football • First he revealed the extraordinary lives of football scouts in The Nowhere Men • Next he unearthed the pressures on football managers in Living on the Volcano • Then he chronicled the hardships of young players striving to make it in No Hunger in Paradise • Now in State of Play, in what marks the pinnacle of a career investigating the human stories of football, award-winning writer Michael Calvin turns his eye to the biggest story of all - the game itself • From mental health to money, concussion to Champions league, fan-owners to oligarchs, women's football to world cups, Calvin gets under the skin of the beautiful game, and reveals why it is truly the game of our lives

'They won't know you, the you that's hidden somewhere in the castle of your skin' • Nine-year-old G. leads a life of quiet mischief crab catching, teasing preachers and playing among the pumpkin vines. His sleepy fishing village in 1930s Barbados is overseen by the English landlord who lives on the hill, just as their 'Little England' is watched over by the Mother Country. Yet gradually, G. finds himself awakening to the violence and injustice that lurk beneath the apparent order of things. As the world he knows begins to crumble, revealing the bruising secret at its heart, he is spurred ever closer to a life-changing decision. Lyrical and unsettling, George Lamming's autobiographical coming-of-age novel is a story of tragic innocence amid the collapse of colonial rule

Bringing into harsh focus the daily struggle for existence in a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is translated by Ralph Parker in Penguin Modern Classics • This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of bread or an extra bowl of soup, the incredible luxury of a book, the ingenious possibilities of a nail, a piece of string or a single match in a world where survival is all. Here safety, warmth and food are the first objectives. Reading it, you enter a world of incarceration, brutality, hard manual labour and freezing cold - and participate in the struggle of men to survive both the terrible rigours of nature and the inhumanity of the system that defines their conditions of life

Conjuring up the past in all its complexity, horror and pleasures, In The Name of the Family confirms Sarah Dunant's place as the leading novelist of the Renaissance and one of the most acclaimed historical fiction writers of our age • In the Name of the Family - as Blood and Beauty did before - holds up a mirror to a turbulent moment of history, sweeping aside the myths to bring alive the real Borgia family; complicated, brutal, passionate and glorious. Here is a thrilling exploration of the House of Borgia's doomed years, in the company of a young diplomat named Niccolo Machiavelli • It is 1502 and Rodrigo Borgia, a self-confessed womaniser and master of political corruption is now on the Papal throne as Alexander VI. His daughter Lucrezia, aged twenty-two, already thrice married and a pawn in her father's plans, is discovering her own power

There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of 71 and a man of 78 ascend a gangplank and begin one of the greatest adventures in modern literature. The man is Florentino Ariza, President of the Carribean River Boat Company; the woman is his childhood sweetheart, the recently widowed Fermina Daza. She has earache. He is bald and lame. Their journey up-river, at an age when they can expect 'nothing more in life', holds out a shimmering promise: the consummation of an amor interruptus spanning half a century. Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the most uplifting romances of our times. An epiphany to late-flowering love, it holds out the subversive promise that you can have what you wish for: you may just have to wait