'[The writer] in whose company the prison walls fell down' - Nelson Mandela. After a long silence Achebe published in 1987 what many see as his greatest work - an acrid, frightening look at oil-boom Nigeria, a world of robberies, road blocks and intimidation in which those who are meant to be protecting a country's citizens are in reality supervising the looting.
'This is a biography of a nobody that offers a window into an otherwise closed world. It is a life which manages to touch us all...' Empire Made MeShanghai in the wake of the First World War was one of the world's most dynamic, brutal and exciting cities - an incredible panorama of nightclubs, opium-dens, gambling and murder. Threatened from within by communist workers and from without by Chinese warlords and Japanese troops, and governed by an ever more desperate British-dominated administration, Shanghai was both mesmerising and terrible.Into this maelstrom stepped a tough and resourceful ex-veteran Englishman to join the police. It is his story, told in part through his rediscovered photo-albums and letters, that Robert Bickers has uncovered in this remarkable, moving book.
Medea/Hecabe/Electra/HeraclesFour devastating Greek tragedies showing the powerful brought down by betrayal, jealousy, guilt and hatredThe first playwright to depict suffering without reference to the gods, Euripides made his characters speak in human terms and face the consequences of their actions. In Medea, a woman rejected by her lover takes hideous revenge by murdering the children they both love, and Hecabe depicts the former queen of Troy, driven mad by the prospect of her daughter's sacrifice to Achilles. Electra portrays a young woman planning to avenge the brutal death of her father at the hands of her mother, while in Heracles the hero seeks vengeance against the evil king who has caused bloodshed in his family.Translated with an Introduction by PHILIP VELLACOTT
From the author of The Power, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017Naomi Alderman's Disobedience is an insightful and witty novel on the search for love, tolerance and faith.By the age of 32, Ronit has left London and transformed her life. She has become a cigarette-smoking, wise-cracking, New York career woman, who is in love with a married man.But when Ronit's father dies she is called back into the very different world of her childhood, a world she thought she had left far behind. The orthodox Jewish suburb of Hendon, north London is outraged by Ronit and her provocative ways. But Ronit is shocked too by the confrontation with her past. And when she meets up with her childhood girlfriend Esti, she is forced to think again about what she has left behind.
Wentworth is in Yorkshire and was surrounded by 70 collieries employing tens of thousands of men. It is the finest and largest Georgian house in Britain andbelonged to the Fitzwilliam family. It is England's forgotten palace which belonged to Britain's richest aristocrats. Black Diamonds tells the story of its demise: family feuds, forbidden love, class war, and a tragic and violent death played their part. But coal, one of the most emotive issues in twentieth century British politics, lies at its heart. This is the extraordinary story of how the fabric of English society shifted beyond recognition in fifty turbulent years in the twentieth century.
Prosperous, good-looking and empty inside, 28-year-old advertising executive David Bell appears on the surface to have everything. But he is a man on the brink of losing his sanity. Trapped in a Manhattan office with soulless sycophants as his only company, he makes an abrupt decision to leave New York for America's mid-west. His plan: to film the small-town lives of ordinary people and make contact with the true heart of his homeland. But as Bell puts his films together in his hotel room, he grows increasingly convinced that there is no heart to find. Modern America has become a land that has reached the end of its reel...
The untold story behind one of the most sensational chapters in the history of the House of Windsor. Paul Burrell fought to clear his own name. Now he reveals new truths about Princess Diana and presents for the first time as faithful an account of her thoughts as we can ever hope to read. He was the favourite footman who formed a unique relationship with the Queen. He was the butler who the Princess of Wales called my rock and the only man I can trust . He was accused of theft, then acquitted following the historic intervention of the monarch. He was the Princess most intimate confidante and is the only person able to separate the myth from the truth of the Diana years. Now at last Paul Burrell cuts through the gossip and the lies and takes us closer to the complex heart of the Royal Family then ever before.
A cultural storm swept through the 1960s -- Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, underground movies -- and at its centre sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody (from the cultural commissioner of New York to drug-driven drag queens) and everybody knew Andy. His studio, the Factory, was the place: where he created the large canvases of soup cans and Pop icons that defined Pop Art, where one could listen to the Velvet Underground and rub elbows with Edie Sedgwick and where Warhol himself could observe the comings and goings of the avant-guarde.
Weathering critical scorn, LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET quickly established Mary Elizabeth Braddon as the leading light of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, sharing the honour only with Wilkie Collins. Addictive, cunningly plotted and certainly sensational, LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET draws on contemporary theories of insanity to probe mid-Victorian anxieties about the rapid rise of consumer culture. What is the mystery surrounding the charming heroine? Lady Audley's secret is investigated by Robert Audley,aristocrat turned detective, in a novel that has lost none of its power to disturb and entertain.
Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. 'Disappearances', inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; 'Lois the Witch', a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in 'The Old Nurse's Story' a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors. Whether darkly surreal, such as 'The Poor Clare', where an evil doppelg nger is formed by a woman's bitter curse, or mischievous like 'Curious, if True', a playful reworking of fairy tales, all the stories in this volume form a stark contrast to the social realism of Gaskell's novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITHKatherine Mansfield's clear, sparkling and perceptive short stories revolutionized the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving, resonant, full of light and colour, they range from short sharp studies to longer, richer tales, encompassing her three major volumes Bliss, The Garden Party and In a German Pension, and fifteen tantalizing fragments of unfinished stories published after her tragic death, including 'Honesty', an intriguing tale of two bachelors, and 'The Doves' Nest', an exquisite story of a widowed mother and her daughter in the Riviera who receive a mysterious gentleman caller. Graceful, delicate and quietly devastating, they observe apparently trivial incidents to create sensitive, often painful revelations of her characters' inner lives.
When her family becomes impoverished after a disastrous financial speculation, Agnes Grey determines to find work as a governess in order to contribute to their meagre income and assert her independence. But Agnes's enthusiasm is swiftly extinguished as she struggles first with the unmanageable Bloomfield children and then with the painful disdain of the haughty Murray family; the only kindness she receives comes from Mr Weston, the sober young curate. Drawing on her own experience, Anne Bront 's first novel offers a compelling personal perspective on the desperate position of unmarried, educated women for whom becoming a governess was the only respectable career open in Victorian society.
Composed during a critical time in the evolution of European intellectual life, the works of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) are some of the most powerful medieval attempts to achieve a synthesis between ancient Greek thought and the Christian faith. Writing with great rhetorical brilliance, Eckhart combines the neoplatonic concept of oneness - the idea that the ultimate principle of the universe is single and undivided - with his Christian belief in the Trinity, and considers the struggle to describe a perfect God through the imperfect medium of language. Fusing philosophy and religion with vivid originality and metaphysical passion, these works have intrigued and inspired philosophers and theologians from Hegel to Heidegger and beyond.
Josephus account of a war marked by treachery and atrocity is a superbly detailed and evocative record of the Jewish rebellion against Rome between AD 66 and 70. Originally a rebel leader, Josephus changed sides after he was captured to become a Rome-appointed negotiator, and so was uniquely placed to observe these turbulent events, from the siege of Jerusalem to the final heroic resistance and mass suicides at Masada. His account provides much of what we know about the history of the Jews under Roman rule, with vivid portraits of such key figures as the Emperor Vespasian and Herod the Great. Often self-justifying and divided in its loyalties, The Jewish War nevertheless remains one of the most immediate accounts of war, its heroism and its horrors, ever written.
***Special anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Erin Kelly***You have an affair. You finish it. You think it's over. You're dead wrong . . . Miranda Cotton thinks she's put boyfriend Brendan out of her life for good. But two weeks later, she discovers that he's intimately involved with her sister. What began as an embarrassment becomes threatening - then utterly terrifying.Because Brendan will stop at nothing to be part of Miranda's life - even if it means taking it from her . . . 'Too few novelists can combine this level of page-turning suspense with character care and pin-sharp prose' Erin Kelly, bestselling author of He Said/She Said
'Twilight of the Idols', an attack on all the prevalent ideas of his time, offers a lightning tour of his whole philosophy. It also prepares the way for 'The Anti-Christ', a final assault on institutional Christianity. Both works show Nietzsche lashing out at self-deception, astounded at how often morality is based on vengefulness and resentment. Both reveal a profound understanding of human mean-spiritedness which still cannot destroy the underlying optimism of Nietzsche, the supreme affirmer among the great philosophers.
In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as pranksterish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army. The Wild Boys shows why Burroughs is a writer unlike any other, able to make captivating the explicit and horrific.
'One of the great writers of the twentieth century' GuardianIt is June in 1939, and the inhabitants of a country house prepare to host the annual village pageant in its grounds. It will tell the stories of English history, as it does every year. Yet the coming of war broods over the whole community, changing the meaning of past and present, and heralding a new act. Through her characters' passionate musings and private dramas, and through the enigmatic figure of the pageant's author, Miss La Trobe, Virginia Woolf's playful final novel both celebrates and mocks Englishness, and re-creates the elusive role of the artist.Edited by Stella McNichol with an Introduction and Notes by Gillian Beer
A hugely satisfying and romantic novel, in Consequences Penelope Lively plots the lives of three generations of twentieth-century women.In 1935, privileged misfit Lorna meets the love of her life. Falling for a pennyless and bohemian artist, Matt, she abandons her stuffy Kensington existence in London and moves to a rustic cottage in Somerset. A baby, Molly, is born, but the coming war takes Matt - and Lorna's dreams - away. Lorna's decisions and their unforeseeable consequences come to shape the stories first of her daughter, Molly, and then her granddaughter, Ruth. Consequences tells of three generations of women in their own twentieth-century times united by their shared experiences of love, pain, fate and happiness . . . 'A flawlessly constructed mini-epic that will delight' Daily Telegraph 'Nourishing fare from a writer on sparkling form' Daily MailPenelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.
Everyone has known the feeling of being present. Babies and toddlers live there almost constantly. Great performers work in this state. Great athletes win in it. Great teachers teach in it. Every great communicator speaks from this place. It is when fully present that we do our best work and make our deepest impression on others. In her years as an acting coach, Patsy Rodenburg has discovered the secrets to that elusive quality actors call 'it'. There are three basic ways human energy moves between people and you can be in any one of the 'three circles' in any situation. In the first, your focus is purely inward, in the third, all your energy is moving outward. In the second you are focused, you give energy out and you receive it. You communicate spontaneously and listen well, you are generous and people are generous in return. And by working on your breath, posture, voice, language, listening skills, focus, courage and trust you can access the second circle on a daily basis. Your work, relationships, spirituality and passions will all benefit.
How to Fish is an unabashed, unashamed celebration of the joys of fishing. It is about contentment, calm and solitude, rivers and river banks, losing track of time and, of course, the fish themselves. For those who already enjoy fishing it is a love letter to their art and for those who don t yet! it is an insight into a life spent getting up at the crack of dawn and, armed with rod and line, heading for water
For millennia, humankind has exploited the Earth without counting the cost. Now, as the world warms and weather patterns dramatically change, the Earth is beginning to fight back. James Lovelock, one of the giants of environmental thinking, argues passionately and poetically that, although global warming is now inevitable, we are not yet too late to save at least part of human civilization. This short book, written at the age of eighty-six after a lifetime engaged in the science of the earth, is his testament.
Started to worry about just how hot our world is going to get, and whether you can do anything about it? As the effect of climate change grows by the day, so does the amount of hot air and bluster spouted by politicians and businessmen on what we should do about it. What with the excuses, the lies, the fudged figures, the PR greenwashing and the downright misinformation on the power of everything from wind turbines to carbon trading, when it comes to saving the world, most people don't know what they're talking about. Luckily, George Monbiot - scourge of big business, riler of governments, arch-enemy of climate change deniers everywhere - does. Packed with killer facts and inspiring ideas, shot through with passion and underlined by brilliant investigative journalism, with a copy of Heat you really can protect the planet. 'I defy you to read this book and not feel motivated to change' The Times
For decades the British and Irish had 'got used to' a situation without parallel in Europe: a cold, ferocious, persistent campaign of bombing and terror of extraordinary duration and inventiveness. At the heart of that campaign lies one man: GerryAdams. From the outbreak of the troubles to the present day he has been an immensely influential figure. The most compelling question about the IRA is: how did a man who condoned atrocities that resulted in huge numbers of civilian deaths also become the guiding light behind the peace process? Moloney's book is now updated to encompass the anxious and uneasy peace that has prevailed to 2007.
Jay Griffiths describes an extraordinary odyssey, courageous and sometimes dangerous, to wildernesses of earth and ice, water and fire. A poetic consideration of the tender connection between human society and wild lands, Wild is by turns funny, touching and harrowing. It is also a journey into that greatest of uncharted lands - wild mind - as Griffiths explores the words and meanings which shape our ideas and our experience of our own wildness. Part travelogue, part manifesto, this is a one-of-a-kind book from a one-of-a-kind author.
From the Number One bestselling author of Then She Was Gone, comes a romance about neighbours brought together by fate . . .31 Silversmith Road.For years, Toby has opened his door to the people who needed his help.For years, Leah has watched the house across the street, wondering who the unusual assortment of occupants might be.They've never met - until one day, they're brought together by a letter. A letter which makes Toby realize he needs to move on with his life - and help his tenants move on with theirs, too.Leah offers to help them each find a new way to be happy. But can she make Toby's dreams come true, too?'Another jewel from Lisa' Heat'A big warm-hearted book' Marie Claire'A life-affirming tale studded with Jewell's trademark warmth and humour' Red
Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it contains a large cast of characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation by Stanley Mitchell conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.
Numbers in the Dark is a collection of short stories covering the length of Italo Calvino's extraordinary writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. They include witty allegories and wise fables; a town where everything has been forbidden apart from the game of tip-cat; a pitiable tribe watching the flight paths of guided missiles from outside their mud huts; a computer programmer considering the possible sequence of a series of brutal acts; and dialogues with Henry Ford, a Neanderthal and the gloomy, overthrown Montezuma ...Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in1985, of a brain hemorrhage.
'It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.'After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. Brilliantly combining tragedy, comedy and savage irony, A Handful of Dust captures the irresponsible mood of the 'crazy and sterile generation' between the wars.
The abridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Marian Keyess thoroughly entertaining Anybody Out There, read by the actress Niamh Daly. I had to go back to New York and try to find him. There was a chance he mightnt be there but I had to give it a go because there was one thing I was certain of: he wasnt here. Anna Walsh is officially a wreck. Shes covered in bandages and shes lying in her parents Good Front Room dreaming of leaving Dublin and getting back to New York. To her friends. To The Most Fabulous Job in the World. And most of all, back to her husband, Aiden. But her family have other ideas (not to mention the usual problems that beset the Walsh sisters). And Aiden, for some reason, seems unwilling to get in touch. What happened to Anna to send her so far from all that she loves? And what happened to her marriage that her husband wont talk to her? It takes real talent to make a reader laugh and cry ... the story will stay with you long after youve read the last page Heat
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