Vintage books Italian Shoes Манкелль Хеннинг

One frozen January morning at 5am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath • An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, it unleashes a tide of racism • Wallander's life is a shambles. His wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, and even his ageing father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly, and drinks his nights away. But now Wallander must forget his troubles and throw himself into a battle against time and against mounting racial hatred

How does Italy really work? • When Valeria travels from hot, dusty Basilicata to begin her studies in a northern university town, she has little idea of the kind of education she will find there. Italian Life is her story, and that of the students and professors around her: a story of power and corruption, influence and exclusion, and the workings of a society where your connections are everything • Written with flair and insight, Italian Life joins Tim Parks' bestselling books about his beloved and paradoxical adopted country. It is a gripping, entertaining, behind-the-scenes account of how Italy actually happens, and the ways it can surprise those who know it inside out

'I recommend his book to all those who are fed up with accounts of roughing it agreeably in Tuscany and similar junk that scarcely scratches the surface of the real Italy' - Daily Telegraph • "Am I giving the impression that I don't like the Veneto? It's not true. I love it. But like any place that's become home I hate it too." • How does an Englishman cope when he moves to Italy - not the tourist idyll but the real Italy? When Tim Parks first moved to Verona he found it irresistible and infuriating in equal measure; this book is the story of his love affair with it. Infused with an objective passion, he unpicks the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Italian culture with wit and affection. Italian Neighbours is travel writing at its best

In 1981 Tim Parks moved from England to Italy and spent the next thirty years alongside hundreds of thousands of Italians on his adopted country’s vast, various and ever-changing networks of trains • Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians – conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants – Tim Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive. He explores how trains helped build Italy and how the railways reflect Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond

'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times • 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

A witty, elegant comedy of errors to rival any of Shakespeare's • Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he finds himself involved in the old, awful problems, together with some new ones. One by one his relatives reveal their secrets to a reluctant Edmund: illicit affairs, hidden passions, shameful scandals. And the heart of all, there is, as always, the family's loyal servant, the Italian girl

The Italian Renaissance shaped Western culture - but it was far stranger and darker than many of us realise. We know the Mona Lisa for her smile, but not that she was married to a slave-trader. We revere Leonardo da Vinci for his art, but few now appreciate his ingenious designs for weaponry. We visit Florence to see Michelangelo's David, but hear nothing of the massacre that forced the republic's surrender. In fact, many of the Renaissance's most celebrated artists and thinkers emerged not during the celebrated 'rebirth' of the fifteenth century but amidst the death and destruction of the sixteenth century • The Beauty and the Terror is an enrapturing narrative which includes the forgotten women writers, Jewish merchants, mercenaries, prostitutes, farmers and citizens who lived the Renaissance every day

Travels around Italy in search of illusion, national character and goals • 'Delves into the very essence of being a fan, while seamlessly exploring Italian history, politics, culture and society,' Guardian • Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities? • Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of Hellas Verona football club, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world's most beautiful cities. This is a highly personal account of one man's relationship with a country, its people and its national sport. A book that combines the pleasures of travel writing with a profound analysis of one country's mad, mad way of keeping itself entertained

If you love Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes,you’ll adore The Bell Family • 'Well, little people, what's the news?’ • Meet the big, happy Bell family who live in the vicarage at St Marks. Father is a reverend, Mother is as kind as kind can be. Then there's all the children – practical Paul, dancing Jane, mischievous Ginnie, and finally the baby of the family, Angus, whose ambition is to own a private zoo (he has already begun with his six boxes of caterpillars). And not forgetting Esau, a surefire competitor for the most beautiful dog in Britain • Follow their eventful lives from tense auditions to birthday treats; from troubled times to hilarious escapades • Includes exclusive material: In the Backstory you can find out which one of the Bell children you most resemble! • Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives

An enjoyable 19th century read following doomed happenings and grisly, secret premonitions • An eminent doctor is visited by a desperate woman with a question: am I evil, or insane? • When the letters from Italian servant to his wife in London suddenly cease, she is convinced he has been murdered • In the darkened bedroom of a mouldering palazzo by the Grand Canal, an English lord sickens and suddenly dies • How are these little mysteries connected? Spend the night in Room 14 of Venice’s finest hotel, and find out the truth – if you dare…

Reno mounts her motorcycle and sets a collision course for New York • In 1977 the city is alive with art, sensuality and danger. She falls in with a bohemian clique colonising downtown and the lines between reality and performance begin to bleed • A passionate affair with the scion of an Italian tyre empire carries Reno to Milan, where she is swept along by the radical left and drawn into a spiral of violence and betrayal • The Flamethrowers is an audacious novel that explores the perplexing allure of femininity, fakery and fear. In Reno we encounter a heroine like no other

An awkward teen with a terrible haircut has a reversal of fortune when he finds artefacts from the future lining a seagulls’ nest • In a godforsaken barn, Presidents Eisenhower, John Adams and Rutherford B. Hayes are bemused to find themselves reincarnated as horses • Clyde and Magreb – he a traditional capes-and-coffins vampire, she the more progressive variety – settle in an Italian lemon grove in the hope that its ripe fruit will keep their thirst for blood at bay