Vintage books Between Friends Оз Амос

Unto Death contains two beautiful short novels linked by death and destruction • Crusade is set in 1096 - a year of sinister omens. Count Guillaume of Touron sets out on a crusade to Jerusalem and on the way he serves his God by killing any Jews he meets. But will the Count find the peace of mind he seeks when he faces the terrible realities of war in the Holy Land? • In Late Love Oz portrays an elderly professor living alone in Tel Aviv, a man neither loving nor loved. His last mission is to expose the plight of his fellow Russian Jews and alert the people of Israel to the conspiracy that threatens them. But nobody wants to listen

One of Amos Oz's earliest and most famous novels, My Michael was a sensation upon its initial publication in 1968 and it has an enduring power to surprise and mesmerize • 1950s Jerusalem • Hannah Gonen has just married and is thrilled and pained by her young well-meaning husband, Michael. Haunted by her dreams of two boys who disappeared from Jerusalem after the establishment of the state of Israel, Hannah gradually withdraws from her husband into a private world of fantasy and suppressed desires

The Kibbutz of Metsudat Ram lies in the valley of Jordan, close to the border. Old and young, happy and discontented, the settlers go about their lives as the artillery rumbles in the distance and the war planes shriek overhead • Among them are Reuven, the school teacher whose true calling is poetry, his teenaged daughter, the capricious Noga, and Ezra, the Kibbutz’s truck-driver • As the seasons pass, so too do storms of love and passion, conflict and misunderstanding, gossip and scandal – all threatening to tear apart a community held together by necessity and idealism

В Пойнз-холле, принадлежащем семейству Оливер, должен состояться ежегодный летний праздник. Постановкой пьесы об истории Англии занимается эксцентричная мисс Ла Троб • В последнем романе «Между актов» Вирджинии Вулф искусство переплетается с жизнью, а прошлое и настоящее сливаются воедино. Произведение было опубликовано посмертно • Книга на английском языке • A village pageant is to take place at Pointz Hall, the country home of the Oliver family for time beyond memory. Written and directed by the energetic Miss La Trobe, the pageant will take in the history of England from the Middle Ages. The past blends with the present and art blends with life in a narrative full of invention, affection and lyricism • Between the Acts was Virginia Woolf's final novel, and this edition contains the original text that she was working on when she died

London, 1941. The city is in blackout and an enemy is hiding in plain sight • Jack Hoste has become entangled in a national treachery. His mission: to locate the most dangerous Nazi agent in the country • He soon receives a promising lead in Amy Strallen, whose life is a world away from the machinations of Nazi sympathisers. But when Hoste pays a visit to Amy’s office, the dangerous game he is playing becomes even more lethal

Set against the backdrop of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, Birds Without Wings traces the fortunes of one small community in south-west Anatolia - a town in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully for centuries • When war is declared and the outside world intrudes, the twin scourges of religion and nationalism lead to forced marches and massacres, and the peaceful fabric of life is destroyed. Birds Without Wings is a novel about the personal and political costs of war, and about love: between men and women; between friends; between those who are driven to be enemies; and between Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty, and Ibrahim the Goatherd, who has courted her since infancy. Epic in sweep, intoxicating in its sensual detail, it is an enchanting masterpiece

Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach • Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous

Reunion is a little-known novel. But it is also a universal story of friendship. It is a book of great power, waiting to be discovered • On a grey afternoon in 1932, a Stuttgart classroom is stirred by the arrival of a newcomer. Middle-class Hans is intrigued by the aristocratic new boy, Konradin, and before long they become best friends. It's a friendship of the greatest kind, of shared interests and long conversations, of hikes in the German hills and growing up together. But the boys live in a changing Germany. Powerful, delicate and daring, Reunion is a story of the fragility, and strength, of the bonds between friends

Between 1943 and 2003 nine people have been stabbed to death with a most unusual weapon: a trident. In each case, arrests were made, suspects confessed their crimes and were sentenced to life in prison. One slightly worrying detail: each presumed murderer lost consciousness during the night of the crime and has no recollection of it • Commissaire Adamsberg is convinced all the murders are the work of one person, the terrifying Judge Fulgence. Years before, Adamsberg's own brother had been the principal suspect in a similar case and avoided prison only thanks to Adamsberg's help • History repeats itself when Adamsberg, who is temporarily based in Quebec for a training mission, is accused of having savagely murdered a young woman he had met. In order to prove his innocence, Adamsberg must go on the run from the Canadian police and find Judge Fulgence

In the summer of 1989, at Tel-Kedar, a small settlement in the Negev Desert, the long time love affair between Theo, a sixty-year-old civil engineer, and Noa, a much younger school teacher, is slowly disintegrating. When a pupil of Noa's dies under difficult circumstances, the couple and the entire town are thrown into turmoil • With characteristic subtlety and brilliance, Amos Oz tells a wry and tender story of frustrated ambition and love which is never quite fulfilled - bringing together stormy intrigue in a small community with gentle humour and an intimate anatomy of a relationship

Eleven years old and on the cusp of puberty, Aron Kleinfeld is precocious, imaginative - the leader of his gang of friends. But his bar mitzvah is looming, his friends are all hitting puberty and Aron, terrified and revolted by what he sees around him, enters a state of arrested development. He stops growing, retreats from the world, and is imprisoned in the body of a child for three long years. While Israel inches towards the Six-Day War, and his friends cross the boundary between childhood and adolescence, Aron remains in his child's body, spying on the changes that adulthood wreaks as, like his hero Houdini, he struggles to escape the trap of growing up

The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart on stage; an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave, or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovaleh G, a veteran stand-up comic – charming, erratic, repellent – exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him • A Horse Walks into a Bar is a shocking and breathtaking read. Betrayals between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt demanding redress. Flaying alive both himself and the people watching him, Dovaleh G provokes both revulsion and empathy from an audience that doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry – and all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why he’s been summoned to this performance