In the topsy-turvy years between the dawn of the twentieth century and the dark days of 1939, the Moskat family battled on. But like many Jewish families in Poland they can no longer turn a blind eye to the dwindling of their fortunes. In Warsaw, where saints mingle with swindlers, tough Zionists argue with mystic philosophers, and medieval rabbis rub shoulders with ultra-modern painters, life is inexorably changing. Secularism and war inch nearer and the family Moskat clings on.
The pogrom that swept through Poland was interpreted as a sign of the Coming of the Lord. In the little town of Goray, laid waste by murder and famine, grief becomes joy as good news arrives of the second coming of the Messiah. Once the town’s pious rabbi is usurped, the townspeople are free to look forward to the End of Days, when they will wear golden jackets and dine on marzipan candy. But such perilously high hopes pave the way to hysteria, and a panic which could threaten the very existence of Goray.
In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This memoir evokes with deep feeling the sense of uprootendess and exile created by this disruption, something which has been the experience of tens of thousands of people this century.Her autobiography is profoundly personal but also tells one of the most universal and important narratives of twentieth century history: the story of Jewish post-war experience and the tragedies and discoveries born of cultural displacement.
A powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin''s Russia and Hitler''s Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944.In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today''s Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, as a result of deliberate policies unrelated to combat. In this book Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us to re-examine one of the greatest tragedies in European history and re-think our past.
Prizewinning Yan Lianke returns with a campus novel like no other following a young Buddhist as she journeys through worldly temptation
Yahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom.
Her days are measured out making elaborate religious papercuts, taking part in highly charged tug-of-war competitions between the faiths and trying to resist the daily temptation to return to secular life and abandon the ascetic ideals that are her calling. Everything seems to dangle by a thread. But when she meets a Daoist student called Mingzheng, an inexorable romance of mythic proportions takes hold of her.
A woman's weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for survival.
A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.
This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.
HOLD THE POWER AND GLORY OF ANCIENT ROME IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND.
A wild she-wolf tenderly nurses infant twins Romulus and Remus.
Marcus Junius Brutus looks out over chaos and conflict, flaunting the bloodied daggers with which he murdered Julius Caesar.
Trumpets blare, crowds roar, gladiators enter the grand Colosseum. Let the games begin.
Frescoes fade and books vanish, but the story of Rome’s epic rise and fall survives in scenes struck in gold, silver and bronze. Told through the lives of twelve remarkable coins, this is ancient Rome as you’ve never seen it before.
* A Financial Times Book of the Year * A Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday Summer Read *
A husband and wife each write in their diary, never knowing if it is being read by the other.
Ikuko and her husband are deeply in love but have grown physically apart, each unsure of the other’s desires. When Ikuko finds the key to her husband’s diary she ignores it, but she does begin to keep a diary of her own. Both parties start to set down in writing the evolution of their sex life and their deepest, most private desires. Who is reading whose diary? Who knows what? So begins an extended erotic game of lust, jealousy and manipulation.
‘A story about sex and marriage that is as explicit as any novel on the theme since Lady Chatterley's Lover’ The Times
'Sensational and serious' New York Times
"Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?"
From this moment, almost against his conscious will, Guy Haines is trapped in a nightmare of shared guilt and an insidious merging of personalities. The psychologists would call it folie a deux...
Strangers on a Train was Patricia Highsmith's first novel, and adapted into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock.
'A true original in crime fiction' The Times
She’s living a perfect life – so why does Laurence feel so torn?
Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – Laurence’s life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office.
All her life she has strived to meet the expectations of others. But when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world, Laurence must finally grapple with a life that prizes image over truth.
Slim but powerful, this is a classic story of womanhood and its oppressors, parents and their children, and the quest for personal truth – by the iconic feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
Stop trying to sort your life out. Start living.
Our lives can feel defined by the struggle with overwhelm, endless decisions and striving to be productive. Wouldn’t it be good to stop doing all that? What if we could find freedom – and get more of the important things done – by embracing our limitations, and by letting things happen instead of forcing them?
Meditations for Mortals begins with the reality in which we actually find ourselves, not with fantasies of an ideal existence. Reflecting on ideas from philosophy, religion, psychology and self-help, it offers us a powerful and practical new way to do what counts: a guiding outlook Oliver Burkeman calls ‘imperfectionism’.
This book is a profound and liberating crash course in living more fully. It overturns much familiar advice and opens a gateway to a saner, freer and more enchantment-filled life.
One day at a time.
A brief visit to a Swiss sanatorium becomes a life-altering seven-year odyssey.
Hans Castorp arrives at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, intending to stay for just three weeks. But when he falls ill, he remains and is drawn in by the introspection and erudition that define life in the mountains. As his stay extends to seven transformative years, Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War.
'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian
'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Poe's most macabre and irresistible stories with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon.
Edgar Allan Poe's stories uncover the deeply unnerving strangeness lurking within us all. His genius for horror and suspense went on to influence the world, from Freud to Hollywood. This complete collection of his best short stories contains the well-known works 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart' alongside a wide range of delightfully terrifying tales to unsettle and enthrall.
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon.
As an orphan, Jane's childhood is full of trouble, but her stubborn independence and sense of self help her to steer through the miseries inflicted by cruel relatives and a brutal school. A position as governess at the Thornfield Hall promises a kind of freedom. But Thornfield is a house full of secrets, its master a passionate, tormented man, and before long Jane faces her greatest struggle in a choice between love and self-respect.
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Jane Austen's beloved novel with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon.
Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances' love affairs. Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, lead her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance.
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.
A masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
Adrian Leverkühn is a young man destined for success. He is a composer - creative and brilliant, but he will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Intentionally contracting syphilis in order to deepen his creative potential through madness, Adrian makes his pact with nature. Mann's interpretation of the Faustian legend is a story of madness and sanity, genius and corruption, intellectual attainment and Germany's moral fall.
'Arguably the great German novel' New York Times
THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATION BY H. T. LOWE-PORTER
TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BY DAVID LUKE
Death in Venice is a story of obsession. Gustave von Aschenbach is a successful but ageing writer who travels to Venice for a holiday. One day, at dinner, Aschenbach notices an exceptionally beautiful young boy who is staying with his family in the same hotel. Soon his days begin to revolve around seeing this boy and he is too distracted to pay attention to the ominous rumours that have begun to circulate about disease spreading through the city.
Discover Mann's Nobel Prizewinning semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic.
The Buddenbrook clan is everything you'd expect of a nineteenth-century German merchant family - wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth-century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the Buddenbrooks built their success.
In this, Mann's first novel, his astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic, he portrays the transition of genteel Germanic stability to a very modern uncertainty.
'Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' New York Times
After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.
A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence' - Edmund Wilson
An impatient phone call from the temperamental Austrian director, Friedrich Bergmann, introduces a young Christopher Isherwood to the film industry. Isherwood's job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. In the real Vienna of 1934 the Austrian Right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught and his prophecy of the coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project.
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