Vintage books One Step Behind Манкелль Хеннинг

The final novel from the bestselling author of the Inspector Wallander mysteries • Fredrik Welin is a seventy-year-old retired doctor. Years ago he retreated to the Swedish archipelago, where he lives alone on an island. He swims in the sea every day, cutting a hole in the ice if necessary. He lives a quiet life. Until he wakes up one night to find his house on fire • Fredrik escapes just in time, wearing two left-footed wellies, as neighbouring islanders arrive to help douse the flames. All that remains in the morning is a stinking ruin and evidence of arson. The house that has been in his family for generations and all his worldly belongings are gone. He cannot think who would do such a thing, or why. Without a suspect, the police begin to think he started the fire himself

Every morning Hakan von Enke takes a walk in the forest near his apartment in Stockholm. Then, one day he fails to come home • Detective Kurt Wallander is not officially involved but Hakan's son is engaged to his daughter Linda. A few months earlier Hakan was eager to talk to Kurt about a controversial incident from his past. Could this be connected to his disappearance? • When Hakan's wife also goes missing, Wallander is determined to uncover the truth but the investigation will force him to look back over his own past, as he comes to the unsettling realisation that even those we love the most can remain strangers to us

Four nuns and a fifth woman are killed in a savage night-time attack in Africa. A year later, Inspector Kurt Wallander investigates the disappearance of an elderly birdwatcher and discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder - a body impaled in a trap of sharpened bamboo poles. Then, another man is reported missing • Once again Wallander's life is put on hold as he and his team work tirelessly to find a link between the series of vicious murders

In 1992, in peaceful Southern Sweden, Louise Akerblom, an estate agent, pillar of the Methodist church, wife and mother, disappears. There is no explanation and no motive. Inspector Wallander and his team are called in to investigate • As Inspector Wallander is introduced to this missing person's case he has a gut feeling that the victim will never be found alive, but he has no idea how far he will have to go in search of the killer. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela has made his long walk to freedom, setting in train the country's painful journey towards the end of the apartheid. Wallander and his colleagues find themselves caught up in a complex web involving renegade members of South Africa's secret service and a former KGB agent, all of whom are set upon halting Mandela's rise to power

A Treacherous Paradise sees Henning Mankell turn his talents for writing gripping thrillers to a world where power and powerlessness meet and passion is a dangerous commodity • Hanna Lundmark escapes the brutal poverty of rural Sweden for a job as a cook onboard a steamship headed for Australia. Jumping ship at the African port of Lourenco Marques, Hanna decides to begin her life afresh • Stumbling across what she believes to be a down-at-heel hotel, Hanna becomes embroiled in a sequence of events that lead to her inheriting the most successful brothel in town. Uncomfortable with the attitudes of the white settlers, Hanna is determined to befriend the prostitutes working for her, and change life in the town for the better, but the distrust between blacks and whites, and the shadow of colonialism, lead to tragedy and murder

This is the inside story of twelve years at the helm of Britain’s greatest theatre • It is a story of lunatic failures and spectacular successes such as The History Boys, War Horse and One Man, Two Guvnors; of opening the doors of the National Theatre to a broader audience than ever before, and changing the public’s perception of what theatre is for. It is about probing Shakespeare from every angle and reinventing the classics. About fostering new talent and directing some of the most celebrated actors of our times. Its cast includes the likes of Alan Bennett, Maggie Smith, Mike Leigh, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren • Intimate, candid and insightful, Balancing Acts is a passionate exploration of the art and alchemy of making theatre

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

Snow is falling in the exclusive alpine ski resort of Saint Antoine, as the shareholders and directors of Snoop, the hottest new music app, gather for a make or break corporate retreat to decide the future of the company. At stake is a billion-dollar dot com buyout that could make them all millionaires, or leave some of them out in the cold • The clock is ticking on the offer, and with the group irrevocably split, tensions are running high. When an avalanche cuts the chalet off from help, and one board member goes missing in the snow, the group is forced to ask - would someone resort to murder, to get what they want?

'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

От автора книги «В тишине», лауреата премии Сэмюэля Джонсона в области научной литературы • В 1941 году Ричард Эванс Шультес взял отпуск в Гарвардском университете и исчез в Северной Амазонии Колумбии • Ведущий мировой специалист по галлюциногенам и лекарственным растениям этого региона, он вернулся после двенадцати лет путешествия по Южной Америке на каноэ, картографируя неизведанные реки, живя среди местных племен и документируя знания шаманов • Тридцать лет спустя его ученик Уэйд Дэвис приземлился в Боготе, чтобы пойти по стопам своего наставника, создав таким образом эпический рассказ о бесстрашных приключениях, захватывающий труд по естествознанию и свидетельство духа научных исследований • язык издания: Английский • From the author of Into The Silence, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction • In 1941, Richard Evans Schultes took a leave of absence from Harvard University and disappeared into the Northern Amazon of Colombia

Jenna is a wife, a mother, a doctor. She's also the victim of a stalker • Every time she leaves her house, she sees him. Disturbing gifts are left at her door. Cruel emails are sent to her colleagues. She has no idea who this man is but she feels powerless against him • Until the day he is brought into her hospital after a serious accident, and Jenna is given the chance to find out once and for all why this man is tormenting her. Now, the power is all hers • But how many lines is she willing to cross to take back control of her life?

Sweden, winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead • The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea, to Riga in Latvia, where he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies • Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues, only Wallander's obstinate desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light