Vintage books Three Assassins Isaka Kotaro

Their Mission is Murder. His is Revenge • Suzuki is just an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. When he discovers the criminal gang responsible he leaves behind his life as a maths teacher and joins them, looking for a chance to take his revenge. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of unusual professional assassins, each with their own agenda • The Whale convinces his victims to take their own lives using just his words • The Cicada is a talkative and deadly knife expert • The elusive Pusher dispatches his targets in deadly traffic accidents • Suzuki must take each of them on, in order to try to find justice and keep his innocence in a world of killers

28 June 1389, the Field of the Blackbirds. A Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians confront an Ottoman army. In ten hours the battle is over, and the Muslims possess the field; an outcome that has haunted the vanquished ever since • 28 June 1989, the Serb Leader Slobodan Milosevic launches his campaign for a fresh massacre of the Albanians, the majority population of Kosovo • In three short narratives Kadare shows how legends of betrayal and defeat simmered in European civilisation for six hundred years, culminating in the agony of one tiny population at the end of the twentieth century

Two tigers cannot share the same mountain - Chinese proverb • Despite geographical proximity, cultural similarities, and shared status as highly powerful nations, China, Korea and Japan love to hate each other. Why? • In search of an answer, Michael Booth journeys across East Asia to explore the mutual animosity that frequently threatens to draw the world into all-out war. From misjudged cake decorations to electoral meddling, contradictory origin myths to territorial disputes, this deeply researched and hugely entertaining book shows that no conflict is too small to keep the fires of neighbourly hostility burning

Что может быть более расслабляющим, чем освежающий отдых на реке с двумя вашими лучшими друзьями и верной собакой-компаньоном Монморанси? Однако, как обнаруживает Джей, жизнь на волнах - это нечто большее, чем кажется на первый взгляд, включая проблемы с навигацией, кулинарные катастрофы и героические сражения с лебедями, чайниками и банками ананасов. Джером К. Восхитительный роман Джерома долгие годы заставлял читателей улыбаться, а его проза нашла идеального партнера в великолепных и остроумных иллюстрациях Вика Ривза • Книга на английском языке • What could be more relaxing than a refreshing holiday on the river with your two best friends and faithful canine companion, Montmorency? However, as J. discovers, there is more to life on the waves than meets the eye - including navigational challenges, culinary disasters, and heroic battles with swans, kettles and tins of pineapple

Three lives collide, not one of them will emerge unchanged - the exhilarating new novel from the author of the Patrick Melrose series • When Olivia meets a new lover, Francis, just as she is welcoming her dearest friend Lucy back from New York, her life expands dramatically. Her connection to Francis, a committed naturalist living off-grid, is immediate and startling. Eager to involve Lucy in her joy, Olivia introduces the two - but Lucy has news of her own that binds the trio unusually close • Over the months that follow, Lucy's boss Hunter, Olivia's psychoanalyst parents, and a young man named Sebastian are pulled into the friends' orbit, and not one of them will emerge unchanged

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

Three times a day in a Parisian square, a curious modern-day crier announces the news items that are left in his box. Over the course of a few days he receives a number of disturbing and portentous messages of malicious intent, all of them referring to the Black Death. Strange marks have also appeared on the doors of several buildings: symbols once used to ward off the plague. Detective Commissaire Adamsberg begins to sense a connection, even a grotesque menace. Then charged and flea-bitten corpses are found. The press seizes on their plague-like symptoms, and the panic sets in

Meet the three women who helped shape the course of modern Chinese history; a gripping story of sisterhood and betrayal from the bestselling author of Wild Swans • They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled seismic transformations these three women left an indelible mark on history • Red Sister rose to be Mao's vice-chair • Little Sister became first lady of pre-Communist Nationalist China • Big Sister made herself one of country's richest women • Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister takes us on a sweeping journey from exiles' quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. By turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China

The opera singer Sophia Simeonidis wakes up one morning to discover that a tree has appeared overnight in the garden of her Paris house. Intrigued and unnerved, she turns to her neighbours: Vandoosler, an ex-cop, and three impecunious historians, Mathias, Marc and Lucien - the three evangelists. They agree to dig around the tree and see if something has been buried there. They find nothing but soil • A few weeks later, Sophia disappears and her body is found burned to ashes in a car. Who killed the opera singer? Her husband, her ex-lover, her best friend, her niece? They all seem to have a motive • Vandoosler and the three evangelists set out to find the truth

In the ninety-ninth district of a sprawling labour camp, the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian and Technician - and hundreds just like them - are undergoing Re-education, to restore their revolutionary zeal and credentials. In charge of this process is the Child, who delights in draconian rules, monitoring behaviour and confiscating treasured books • But when bad weather arrives, followed by the ‘three bitter years’, the intellectuals are abandoned by the regime and left on their own to survive. Divided into four narratives, The Four Books tells the story of the Great Famine, one of China’s most devastating and controversial periods

In the autumn of 1502 three giants of the Renaissance period - Cesare Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli - set out on one of the most treacherous military campaigns of the period. Cesare Borgia was a ferocious military leader whose name was synonymous with brutality and whose reputation was marred with the suspicion of incest. Niccolo Machiavelli was a witty and subversive intellectual, more suited to the silken diplomacy of royal courts than the sodden encampments of a military campaign. And Leonardo da Vinci was a visionary master and the most talented military engineer in Italy. What led him to work for the monstrous Borgia? And what attracted him to the cunning Machiavelli? • In his extraordinary new book acclaimed historian Paul Strathern ingeniously focuses on this improbable collusion of three iconic figures of the Italian Renaissance to unite three mighty strands of the period - war, politics and art

From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, across two continents and fourteen countries - this epic journey is nothing to swallows, they do it twice a year. But for Horatio Clare, writer and birdwatcher, it is the expedition of a lifetime • Along the way he discovers old empires and modern tribes, a witch-doctor's recipe for stewed swallow, explains how to travel without money or a passport, and describes a terrifying incident involving three Spanish soldiers and a tiny orange dog. By trains, motorbikes, canoes, one camel and three ships, Clare follows the swallows from reed beds in South Africa, where millions roost in February, to a barn in Wales, where a pair nest in May