Vintage books Coming Through Slaughter Ондатже Майкл

Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of a bloody civil war. Enter Anil Tissera, a young woman and forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka but educted in the West, sent by an international human rights group to identify the victims of the murder campaigns sweeping the island • When Anil discovers that the bones found in an ancient burial site are in fact those of a much more recent victim, her search for the terrible truth hidden in her homeland begins. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity - a story driven by a riventing mystery

'A very funny, bitterly intelligent novel...do read it' Malcolm Bradbury • Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, defiantly unappreciative of beer, nature and organised games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure - morbidly, in his own case, gloatingly, in that of his contemporaries - so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject • In the meantime he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalisation can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another's success

Майкл Бут жил среди скандинавов более десяти лет, и был озадачен многими странными парадоксами и чертами характера, и в равной степени ошеломлен безоговорочным энтузиазмом ко всему скандинавскому • Он покидает свой дом в Дании и отправляется в путешествие по всем пяти северным странам, чтобы узнать, кто такие эти любопытные племена, секреты их успеха и, что самое интригующее, что они думают друг о друге. Результатом этого путешествия стала книга "Почти идеальные люди. Миф о скандинавской утопии" • Книга на английском языке • The Danes are the happiest people in the world, and pay the highest taxes • 'Neutral' Sweden is one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world • Finns have the largest per capita gun ownership after the US and Yemen • 54 per cent of Icelanders believe in elves

Through every family run memories which bind it together - despite everything • The Tulls of Baltimore are no exception. Abandoned by her salesman husband, Pearl is left to bring up her three children alone - Cody, a flawed devil, Ezra, a flawed saint, and Jenny, errant and passionate • Now, as Pearl lies dying, stiffly encased in her pride and solitude, the past is unlocked and with it its secrets

Through a series of mishaps, Henry Warren, a recently divorced City financier, ends up in hospital in a Northern town ruined by the closure of its shipyard. Moved by the fate of the town's inhabitants, Warren risks his fortune and reputation to save the shipyard and restore the town to its former prosperity. In seeking to change the fate of the town, he radically changes his own

An elegiac novel set in post-WW2 London about memory, family secrets and lies, from the internationally acclaimed author of The English Patient • It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women all who seem determined to protect Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel journeys through recollection, reality and imagination to uncover all he didn’t know or understand in that time, to piece together a story that feels something like the truth

London, 1945. The capital is still reeling from the war. 14 year old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents who leave the country on business, and are left in the dubious care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. Nathaniel is introduced to The Moth's band of criminal misfits and is caught up in a series of teenage misadventures, from smuggling greyhounds for illegal dog racing to lovers trysts in abandoned buildings at night • But is this eccentric crew really what and who they claim to be? And most importantly, what happened to Nathaniel's mother? Was her purported reason for leaving true? What secrets did she hide in her past? Years later Nathaniel, now an adult, begins to slowly piece together using the files of intelligence agencies - and through reality, recollection and imagination - the startling truths of puzzles formed decades earlier

A dark and mesmerising story, at once lyrical and terrifying • The pogrom that swept through Poland was interpreted as a sign of the Coming of the Lord. In the little town of Goray, laid waste by murder and famine, grief becomes joy as good news arrives of the second coming of the Messiah. Once the town's pious rabbi is usurped, the townspeople are free to look forward to the End of Days, when they will wear golden jackets and dine on marzipan candy. But such perilously high hopes pave the way to hysteria, and a panic which could threaten the very existence of Goray

A witty, inventive read with anyone for a passion for travel • Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over fifty years at his mother's funeral. Soon after, she persuades Henry to abandon Southwood, his dahlias and the Major next door to travel her way, through Brighton, Paris, Istanbul, Paraguay... Accompanying his aunt, Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society: mixing with hippies, war criminals, CIA men; smoking pot, breaking all the currency regulations and eventually coming alive after a dull suburban lifetime

I'm not a portrait painter. If I'm anything, I have always been an autobiographer • In Self-Portrait, Celia Paul reveals a life truly lived through art. She moves effortlessly through time, in words and images, from her arrival at the Slade School of Fine Art at sixteen, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practices of her present-day studio. This intimate memoir is, at its heart, about a young woman navigating the path to artistic freedom, with all the sacrifices and complications that entails

The remarkable story of Bess of Hardwick, her ascent through Elizabethan society and the houses she built that shaped British architectural history • Born in 1521, Bess of Hardwick, businesswoman, money-lender and property tycoon, lived an astonishing eighty-seven years. Through canny choices, four husbands and a will of steel she rose from country squire's daughter to Dowager Countess, establishing herself as one of the richest and most powerful women in England, second only to Queen Elizabeth • Bess forged her way not merely by judicious marriage, but by shrewd exploitation of whatever assets each marriage brought. Wealth took concrete form in her passion for building and she oversaw every stage of the construction of her four houses including Hardwick New Hall, her sole surviving building, which stands as a celebration of one woman's triumphant progress through Elizabethan England

‘A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey.’ Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland • An idiosyncratic history of our island story told through five iconic fish • On these rain-swept islands in the North Atlantic man and fish go back a long way. Fish are woven through the fabric of the country’s history: we depend on them – for food, for livelihood and for fun – and now their fate depends on us in a relationship which has become more complex, passionate and precarious in the sophisticated 21st Century • In Silver Shoals Charles Rangeley-Wilson travels north, south, east and west through the British Isles tracing the histories, living and past, of our most iconic fish – cod, carp, eels, salmon and herring – and of the fishermen who catch them and care for them