Vintage books Life. A User's Manual Perec Georges

Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war • Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece

Life Before Man explores the lives of three people imprisoned by walls of their own construction and in thrall to the tragicomedy we call love • Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality and suppressed rage, has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men. Hanging over them all is the ghost of Elizabeth's dead lover, and the dizzying threat of three lives careening inevitably towards the same climax

Three generations. More than a century of famine, war, violence and love • At sixteen Nancy, the only member of her family to survive the Great Famine, leaves her small island for the mainland. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she feels irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair that soon throws her into a fight for her life • In 1920, Nancy's son Jer has lived through battles of his own as a soldier in the Great War. Now drunk in a jail cell, he struggles to piece together where he has come from, and who he wants to be • And in the early 1980s, Jer's youngest child Nellie is nearing the end of her life in a council house, moments away from her childhood home; remembering the night when she and her family stole back something that was rightfully theirs, she imagines what lies in store for those who will survive her

Love and marriage, children and family, death and grief. Life touches everyone the same, but living under lockdown? It changes us alone • A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret. Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness and the shifting of history underneath our feet

Пронзительную, безысходную правду о жизни людей и мира рассказал в романе-эпопее "Жизнь и судьба" безжалостный и отважный писатель Василий Гроссман • Лучшие герои этой книги неизбежно попадают между двух огней: сражаясь с фашизмом, защищают сталинскую систему, но существенно ли различаются немецкий лагерь и Лубянка?.. Из последних сил люди воюют за свободу и справедливость, но наступят ли они после победы? • История об освободительной войне ради нового рабства вышла из-под пера Гроссмана вопреки осторожности и инстинкту самосохранения: полвека назад роман арестовали, и это укоротило автору жизнь. Сегодня его книга, получившая мировую известность, читается как суровый гимн подлинной свободе - свободе духа, сохранение которой составляет основу человеческого бытия, а утрата означает неизбежную смерть

В Южной Африке, раздираемой на части гражданской войной, Михаэл К хочет вернуть свою мать к ней домой, в сельскую местность. По пути туда она умирает, и её сын остаётся один в этом охваченном анархией царстве жестоких кочующих армий. Михаэл попадает в плен, но не выносит заточения и сбегает, преисполенный решимости сохранить своё достоинство. Книга "Жизнь и время Михаэла К" посвящена ядру человеческих переживаний - нашей потребности во внутренней, духовной жизни, в связи с окружающим нас миром и незамутнённом видении нашего в нём места • "Это поистине потрясающий роман... "Жизнь и время Михаэла К" привели меня в восторг, хоть эта книга и полна несчастий и страданий. У меня не хватает слов, чтобы описать, насколько она заслуживает внимания" - Evening Standard

Life...is shapeless, it does not point to and gather round anything, it does not cohere. Artistically, it's dead. Life's dead • So begins a love letter to life, a resuscitation of sorts, encountering vibrant characters from Saul Bellow, to Philip Larkin to Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and to the person who captivated Amis' twenties, the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps • Amis addresses our burning questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die?

"Вещи: История шестидесятых" - это история молодой пары, которая хочет наслаждаться жизнью, и единственный известный им способ сделать это - владеть "вещами". Этот роман Джорджа Перека получил премию Рено и стал культовой книгой для целого поколения • В "Спящем человеке" повествование от второго лица следует за 25-летним студентом, который однажды решает быть безразличным к миру • Книга на английском языке • Things: A Story of the Sixties is the story of a young couple who want to enjoy life, but the only way they know how to do so is through ownership of 'things'. Perec's first novel won the Prix Renaudot and became the cult book for a generation • In A Man Asleep, a young student embarks upon a disturbing and exhaustive pursuit of indifference, following his experience in non-existence with relentless logic

Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood, tells two parallel tales, in two parts. One is a story created in childhood and about childhood. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. As the two tales move in and out of focus, the disturbing truth about the island of W reveals itself • Perec combines fiction and autobiography in unprecedented ways, allowing no easy escape from these stories, or from history

Beautifully illustrated, Seed to Dust is a reflective and restorative account of a life lived in harmony with nature • Marc Hamer has nurtured the same twelve acres of garden for decades. It's rarely visited so he is the only person who fully knows its secrets. But it's not his garden, and his relationship with its owner is at once distant and curiously intimate • In Seed to Dust, Marc takes us month-by-month through his experiences both working in the garden and outside it. We encounter new plants and wildlife, gardening folklore and the joys of manual work; we learn, too, about Marc's path from homelessness to family contentment, and the cycles of change that run through both the garden's life and our own

From the Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestseller Anne Tyler. A Patchwork Planet is now re-jacketed along with the rest of Tyler's books in striking new backlist style • Barnaby Gailtin has less in life than he once had • His ex-wife Natalie left him and their native Baltimore several years ago, taking their baby daughter Opal with her, and he has acquired an unalterably fixed position as the black sheep of the family in a family where black sheep aren't tolerated. Then the angelic Sophia enters his life and it seems as if all this is set to change. But can he shake off his past? • **ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 1 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** • 'One of my favourite authors' Liane Moriarty • 'She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan • 'Anne Tyler has no peer' Anita Shreve • 'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks

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