Vintage books Ordinary People Evans Diana

The great Icelandic novel by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Halldor Laxness • 'There are good books and there are great books and there may be a book that is something still more: it is the book of your life' New York Review of Books • First published in 1946, this is a humane, epic novel set in rural Iceland. Bjartus is a sheep farmer determined to eke a living from a blighted patch of land. Nothing, not merciless weather, nor his family, will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. As she grows up, keen to make her own way in the world, Bjartus's obstinacy threatens to estrange them forever • Written by the Nobel prize-winner dubbed the 'Tolstoy of the North', this is a magnificent portrait of the eerie Icelandic landscape and one man's dogged struggle for independence

'Other People had me purring with pleasure' The Times • Like a ghost or a fugitive, Mary roams through London - pursuing and pursued by memory and forgetting, by the compelling Amy Hide and the charming Mr Wrong • Martin Amis sustains an unnervingly high degree of suspense as Mary and the reader yearn to grasp what has happened to Mary's past and ponder what its loss has gained her. Unfolding is a metaphysical thriller where jealousy guarded secrets jostle with startling insights. Other People is ambitious and accomplished, heralding for Amis an unexpected new direction as a novelist and for the rest of us an experience not to be missed

Why We Drive is a rebellious and daring celebration of the human spirit and the competence of ordinary people by the bestselling author of The Case for Working with Your Hands • Once we were drivers on the open road • Today we are more often in the back seat of an Uber • As we hurtle toward a 'self-driving' future, are we destined to become passengers in our own lives too? • In Why We Drive, the philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford celebrates the risk, skill and freedom of driving. He reveals what we are losing to technology and government control in the modern world, and speaks up for play, dissent and occasionally being scared witless

A wonderfully original book about contemporary Russia as seen on journeys in search of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Chekhov, Gogol and Turgenev • Shortlisted For The Edward Standford Travel Writing Award 2020 • With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides - Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev, among others - Wheeler travels the length and breadth of Russia to make connections between then and now. On the Trans-Siberian railway, at sail on the Black Sea, or while watching television with her hosts in Soviet apartment blocks, Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news - a Russia of humanity and daily struggles • At a time of deteriorating relations between Russia and the West, Wheeler gives a voice to the 'ordinary' people of Russia and discovers how the writers of the past continue to represent their country today

Australia celebrated one hundred years as a nation in 2001. This book - part history, part travelogue, part memoir - tells the inspiring story of how a one-time British colony of convicts turned itself into a prosperous and confident country. Through the eyes of ordinary people, Phillip Knightley describes Australia's journey, from federation and the trauma of the First World War, the desperate poverty of the Depression, with its attendant spectres of secret armies and near-civil war, the threat of invasion in the Second World War and the immigration that followed it, and the slow but steady decline in the relationship with Britain, the 'Mother Country', as Australia forged its own unique identity

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humour

Lisbon, late-1940s. The inhabitants of an old apartment block are struggling to make ends meet. There’s the elderly shoemaker and his wife who take in a solitary young lodger; the woman who sells herself for money and jewellery; the cultivated family come down in the world; and the beautiful typist whose boss can’t keep his eyes off her • Poisonous relationships, happy marriages, jealousy, gossip and love – Skylight brings together the joys and grief of ordinary people. One of his earliest novels, it provides an entry into Saramago’s universe but was lost for decades and published, as per his wishes, after his death

Своим первым сборником "Не мог бы ты, пожалуйста, помолчать, пожалуйста?" Карвер вдохнул новую жизнь в жанр рассказа. В сдержанном стиле, который с тех пор стал его визитной карточкой, Карвер показал, как юмор и трагедия живут в сердцах обычных людей, и завоевал читательскую аудиторию, которая росла с каждым последующим блестящим сборником рассказов, стихов и эссе, появлявшихся за последние одиннадцать лет его жизни • Книга на английском языке • With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story. In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed how humour and tragedy dwell in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life

A lieutenant writes of digging through bodies that have the consistency of Camembert cheese; a mother sends flower seeds to her son at the Front, hoping that one day someone may see them grow; a nurse tends a man back to health knowing he will be court-martialled and shot as soon as he is fit. Edited by the bestselling author of Birdsong and Dr Hope Wolf, this is an original and illuminating non-fiction anthology of writing on the First World War • Diaries, letters and memories, testaments from ordinary people whose lives were transformed, are set alongside extracts from names that have become synonymous with the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence. A Broken World is an original collection of personal and defining moments that offer an unprecedented insight into the Great War as it was experienced and as it was remembered

Студенты и журналисты, фермеры и орнитологи, бывшие жены, влюбленные подростки и танцовщицы. Все они – самые обычные люди…или нет? «Пожирательница грехов» – это сборник коротких рассказов Маргарет Этвуд. В произведениях канадской писательницы раскрываются все сложности человеческих взаимоотношений, а их персонажи вызывают у читателей широкий спектр эмоций – от смеха и сострадания до страха и уважения • Книга на английском языке • Students and journalists, farmers and birdwatchers, ex-wives, adolescent lovers - and dancing girls. All ordinary people - or are they? In this splendid collection of short stories, Margaret Atwood maps the human motivation we scarcely know we have in a startlingly original voice, full of rare intensity and exceptional intelligence

Студенты и журналисты, фермеры и орнитологи, бывшие жены, влюбленные подростки и танцовщицы • Все они – самые обычные люди…или нет? • «Пожирательница грехов» – это сборник коротких рассказов Маргарет Этвуд, автора бестселлеров «Рассказ служанки» и «Заветы». В произведениях канадской писательницы раскрываются все сложности человеческих взаимоотношений, а их персонажи вызывают у читателей широкий спектр эмоций – от смеха и сострадания до страха и уважения • Книга на английском языке • From the international bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale, Dancing Girls and Other Stories showcases Margaret Atwood's masterly skill for storytelling • Students, journalists, farmers, birdwatchers, ex-wives, adolescent lovers - and dancing girls. All ordinary people

People are going missing. Only one thing links their cases • They all disappear on the hill • A woman vanishes in the fog up on the Hill in Lafferton. The police have one lead - a pair of expensive cuff-links found in her flat, with a mysterious note attached to them • Then a young girl, an old man and even a dog disappear in quick succession in exactly the same place • Young policewoman Freya Graffham and Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler are given the task of unravelling the mystery. But can they find the Hill killer before he strikes again?