Vintage books Speedy Death Митчелл Глэдис

Unto Death contains two beautiful short novels linked by death and destruction • Crusade is set in 1096 - a year of sinister omens. Count Guillaume of Touron sets out on a crusade to Jerusalem and on the way he serves his God by killing any Jews he meets. But will the Count find the peace of mind he seeks when he faces the terrible realities of war in the Holy Land? • In Late Love Oz portrays an elderly professor living alone in Tel Aviv, a man neither loving nor loved. His last mission is to expose the plight of his fellow Russian Jews and alert the people of Israel to the conspiracy that threatens them. But nobody wants to listen

'As good as anything Tolstoy ever wrote... Self-assured, vital, unforgettable' Guardian • The title story of this collection is about a man battling a mysterious illness. His family visit his bedside, their faces masks of concern. His colleagues pay their respects but only think of the advantages created by his death. This intensely moving story of Ivan Ilyich's lonely end is one of the masterpieces of Tolstoy's late fiction

Simon and David - a tall ten-year-old - are in a new land, together with a woman named Ines. The small family have found a home in which David can thrive • But David is spotted by Julio Fabricante, the director of a local orphanage, playing football with his friends. He shows unusual talent. When David announces that he wants to live with Julio and the children in his care, Simon and Ines are stunned. David is leaving them, and they can only love him and bear witness • The Death of Jesus is the completion of an incomparable trilogy in which J. M. Coetzee explores the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions

Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his life with painful honesty. He writes about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father, and his bewilderment and grief on his father's death • When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. Knausgaard has created a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives. A profound and mesmerizing work, written as if the author's very life were at stake

When Harriet Westaway receives an unexpected letter telling her she's inherited a substantial bequest from her Cornish grandmother, it seems like the answer to her prayers. She owes money to a loan shark and the threats are getting increasingly aggressive: she needs to get her hands on some cash fast • There's just one problem - Hal's real grandparents died more than twenty years ago. The letter has been sent to the wrong person. But Hal knows that the cold-reading techniques she's honed as a seaside fortune teller could help her con her way to getting the money. If anyone has the skills to turn up at a stranger's funeral and claim a bequest they're not entitled to, it's her • Hal makes a choice that will change her life for ever. But once she embarks on her deception, there is no going back

When sixteen-year-old Portia is orphaned she is plunged into the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother's home. There she encounters the attractive cad Eddie. To him, Portia is at once child and woman, and he fears her gushing love. To her, Eddie is the only reason to be alive. But when Eddie follows Portia to a sea-side resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a stunning romantic betrayal - and sets in motion one of the most moving and desperate flights of the heart in modern literature

Откройте для себя заново Глэдис Митчелл – одну из «большой тройки» писательниц криминальных романов наряду с Агатой Кристи и Дороти Л. Сэйерс • Ноэл Уэллс, священник из тихой деревни Солтмарш, любит проводить время, танцуя в кабинете с племянницей викария, пока однажды недоброжелательная жена викария не обнаруживает, что ее незамужняя горничная беременна, и начинаются проблемы • Ноэлю приходится обратиться за помощью к миссис Брэдли, бывшей детективом, а также штатному психоаналитику, которая приступает к пугающе неортодоксальному расследованию загадочной беременности, расследованию, в котором также участвуют контрабандистка, деревенский сумасшедший, пропавший без вести труп, публичный позорный столб, эксгумация и, конечно, убийца • Миссис Брэдли – одна из самых запоминающихся личностей в криминальной литературе, и в этом классическом детективе она доказывает, что некоторые английские деревни могут быть убийственно мирными

Rediscover Gladys Mitchell – one of the 'Big Three' female crime fiction writers alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers • Psychoanalyst and detective Mrs Bradley advises her highly-strung friend, Hannibal Jones, to retreat to a quiet, rustic village to find rest and inspiration for his writing. Saxon Wall seems the perfect rural retreat, and Jones is quickly intrigued by the odd characters among the villagers, their pagan beliefs, and by the mystery surrounding Neot House, where a young couple died soon after the birth of their first child • But when disagreements between the villagers and their vicar grow more malevolent, and a man is found bludgeoned to death, Jones calls in Mrs Bradley, who proceeds to root out the devil of Saxon Wall by her own unorthodox methods

Nothing experienced in human history, before or since, eclipses the terror, tragedy and scale of the Black Death, the disease which killed millions of people in Medieval Europe • The Scourging Angel tells the story of Britain immediately before, during and after this catastrophe. Against a backdrop of empty homes, half-built cathedrals and pestilence-saturated cities, we see communities gripped by unimaginable fear, shock and paranoia. By the time it completed its pestilential journey through the British Isles in 1350, the Black Death had left half the population dead. Despite the startling toll of life, physical devastation and sheer human chaos it inflicted, Britain showed an impressive resilience. Amid disaster many found opportunity, and the story of the Black Death is ultimately one of survival

In an unnamed country, on the first day of the New Year, people stop dying. There is great celebration and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Soon, though, the residents begin to suffer. Undertakers face bankruptcy, the church is forced to reinvent its doctrine, and local 'maphia' smuggle those on the brink of death over the border where they can expire naturally • Death does return eventually, but with a new, courteous approach – delivering violet warning letters to her victims. But what can death do when a letter is unexpectedly returned?

In Falling Out of Time, David Grossman has created a genre-defying drama - part play, part prose, pure poetry - to tell the story of bereaved parents setting out to reach their lost children. It begins in a small village, in a kitchen, where a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son.The man - called simply the 'Walking Man' - paces in ever-widening circles around the town. One after another, all manner of townsfolk fall into step with him (the Net Mender, the Midwife, the Elderly Maths Teacher, even the Duke), each enduring his or her own loss. The walkers raise questions of grief and bereavement: Can death be overcome by an intensity of speech or memory? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to call to the dead and free them from their death? Grossman's answer to such questions is a hymn to these characters, who ultimately find solace and hope in their communal act of breaching death’s hermetic separateness

One cold autumn night, a woman is found hanging from a beam at her holiday cottage. At first sight, it appears like a straightforward case of suicide; Maria had never recovered from the death of her mother two years previously and she had a history of depression. But then the friend who found her body approaches Detective Erlendur with a tape of a seance that Maria attended before her death and his curiosity is aroused • Driven by a need to find answers, Erlendur begins an unofficial investigation into Maria's death. But he is also haunted by another unsolved mystery - the disappearance of two young people thirty years ago - and by his own quest to find the body of his brother, who died in a blizzard when he was a boy. Hypothermia is Indridason's most compelling novel yet