As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future.
Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba.
Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, The House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution.
The bullet enters Tia’s thigh close to where her brother will look for the star-shaped mole when asked to identify her body.
The green carpet is moving towards her. Flung onto her side, Tia lands hard on her left arm. Pop pop pop sounds bounce between her ears. Flashbangs. The force of the grenades is knocking artwork to the floor. The heavy frames could be falling onto someone but it’s too dark, or too bright, to see properly, and there’s probably nothing she can do to help them. On the ground, Tia feels her way to the wall, any wall. A palm goes to each thigh: no wound. That was her own thumb which drove into her skin. The firearms team are in the room now, but the bullet was her imagination. She will not bleed out, and these aren’t her final breaths. Relief comes, but it isn’t much, because she has been thinking about dying all day. Death no longer frightens her. Fear requires energy and Tia is too tired for it now. They all must be.
Her hand finally hits something solid. She’s made it to the side of the room. Tia stands and leans against the plaster, making herself as flat as she can. She’s safe here, and now she has some sense of direction: the windows out onto the road are to her right, and the doors to the rest of the museum to her left. That’s where the specialist officers are coming from. Through the smoke in front of her, human shapes start to take form. There are bodies on the carpet. Alive? She cannot just wait here for it to be over and help to collect the dead. Back on all fours, Tia leaves the wall and crawls to the nearest hostage. Broken glass crunches underneath her knees. The noise of the police boots, the guns, the shields, everything, is so intense, her teeth gnaw into her cheeks.
Tia reaches someone – there’s a pulse. They’re shaking but they’re okay. She sees more human shadows. There is no real furniture in here and nowhere to shelter. When the police burst in, everyone dropped in place, and the unlucky were stood near the doors, or in the centre of the room, exposed. The white haze meant to disorient the gunman is stopping Tia from working out who is who. But it’s those hostages in the middle of the room who are most in need. Tia rises to her feet. Keeping as low as possible, she moves quickly. She sees two bodies lying in the path of the entering police. She’ll go to them.
Are they hurt? She won’t drag them out of the danger zone in case it makes their injuries worse. The pop, pops continue. The two hostages are about ten yards apart. She can’t get to them both. Suddenly it’s obvious who they are, and she must choose. Pick one hostage, shield them. The only thing she can give now is herself.
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.
Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up, coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives from the First World War to Greenham Common and beyond.
This is the ‘edited’ diary of an individual woman, born in 1901, and a story of the twentieth century. On the eve of the Great War, Millicent King begins keeping her journal, vividly recording the drama of everyday life. From bohemian London to Rome in the 1920s, through social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London, this is a story both fictional and true. Full of the texture of life, beautifully observed and evocative, it tells the story of an ordinary woman’s life against the huge canvas of the last century.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.
'Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter’ New York Times As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood.
Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is a story of fear – the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend.
Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula is a woman of uncompromising power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down. ‘What a force her thoughts have been and how grateful we must be that they were offered to us in this extremely challenging age’ Alice Walker, Guardian BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
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