When Margaret's fiancé, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings-the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec-struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.

Nuvelă.

Bestseller 1993 roku, tłumaczony na całym świecie. Imperium to bodaj najwybitniejsze dokonanie indywidualnego, pełnego inwencji stylu reportażu Kapuścińskiego, niemożliwego do naśladowania, a będącego niedościgłym wzorem dla największych dziennikarzy dzisiejszych czasów. Uchwycony na gorąco, w pełnych znaczeń przybliżeniach i detalu proces rozpadu Związku Radzieckiego – ostatniego imperium kończącego się stulecia

Это книга о власти. Рим… Республика народа и Сената, императорский Рим – матрица современного мира. Это голографическое изображение мира.

Michael Pinson – jeden z tanatonautów – w wyniku katastrofy samolotowej zmienia się w… anioła stróża. Musi odtąd zajmować się trzema „klientami”, jednocześniej starając się zgłębić zagadkę istot i rajów pozaziemskich. Jego nowe zajęcie to praca na pełny etat.Miejsce zatrudnienia: Raj. Gdy mija pierwszy szok, Michael uświadamia sobie, że bycie aniołem to nie tylko przyjemności, tym bardziej że odpowiada za trzech dość upartych śmiertelników: Venus, amerykańską aktorkę cierpiącą na uporczywe migreny; Igora, rosyjskiego żołnierza i króla pokera; oraz wiecznie zatrwożonego Jacques’a. Co więcej, jego mentor, Edmond Wells, wyraźnie daje mu do zrozumienia, że jego anielskim obowiązkiem jest spełnianie wszystkich, nawet najbardziej bezsensownych życzeń podopiecznych.

Faktem jest, że cywilizacja mrówek jest niedościgniona, jeśli chodzi o budowę i organizację miast. Nie wszyscy zdajemy sobie jednak sprawę, jak potężne królestwa zdołała przez wieki stworzyć, jak zadziwiające technologie opracować i jaką sztukę wojenną posiąść. Bernard Werber swoją bestsellerową powieścią otwiera przed nami drzwi do alternatywnej rzeczywistości pełnej niezgłębionych do tej pory tajemnic i zagadek. To zaproszenie do świata, po którym co dzień stąpamy, a którego zdajemy się nie dostrzegać. Pozwala spojrzeć na człowieka spojrzeniem nie-człowieczym, z perspektywy stworzeń dużo mniejszych. Bo kim my, ludzie, jesteśmy dla mrówek? Siostrzeniec słynnego entomologa Jonatan Wells dostaje w spadku po wuju kamienicę oraz pisemny zakaz schodzenia do piwnicy. Choć bardzo się cieszy z przeprowadzki, z dnia na dzień coraz bardziej intryguje go zagadkowa prośba zmarłego. Jakie sekrety kryć może zamknięta piwnica? Werber w mistrzowski sposób wplótł w fabułę swojej powieści fascynujące teorie naukowe oraz rozważania filozoficzne na temat ludzkich społeczeństw. Nic dziwnego, że czytelnicy na całym świecie oszaleli na punkcie jego książek.

Na przełomie wieków, w odległym zakątku Indii, angielski urzędnik służby cywilnej poznaje młodą hinduskę podczas wyjątkowo ciężkiej ulewy. Dziewięć miesięcy później, rodzi się dziecko. Jego przyszłość jawi się niepewnie. Jasny kolor skóry Prana Natha jest odbierany jako symbol szlachetnego urodzenia, jednakże, gdy jego prawdziwe pochodzenie wychodzi na jaw zostaje wyrzucony z domu ojca. Sprzedany parze eunuchów, trafia do zaściankowego Pendżabu i staje się przynętą w dynastycznych intrygach rozwiązłego dworu hinduskiego. W końcu ucieka do Bombaju, gdzie odnajduje się w roli Pretty Boba (Ślicznego Boba), księcia dzielnicy czerwonych świateł. Gdy przypadkiem poznaje pewnego pijanego Anglika, w jego życiu dochodzi do niezwykłego przełomu. IMPRESJONISTA jest historią chłopca, którego życie zbudowano na kłamstwie. Autor stworzył niezwykle sugestywną opowieść, w sposób mistrzowski operując wyobraźnią. W swej pierwszej powieści przedstawił bohatera, jakiego można by długo szukać we współczesnej prozie. (Za tę pozycję, jej trzydziestoletni autor otrzymał już rekordową kwotę 1,8 miliona dolarów.)

One of our most gifted writers of fiction returns with a bold and piercing novel about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them. Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three-month stint at Rikers Island, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honorable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a cigarette smuggling scheme, across state lines, where he could risk violating probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four-year-old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them. A novel that examines conviction, connection, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us.

Steve Tomasula is a novelist like no other; his experiments in narrative and design have won him a loyal following. Exemplifying Tomasula’s style, IN & OZ is a heady, avant-garde book, rooted in convincing characters even as it simultaneously subverts the genre of novel and moves it forward.IN & OZ is a novel of art, love, and auto mechanics. The story follows five different characters — an auto designer, photographer, musical composer, poet/sculptor, and mechanic — who live in two very different places: IN, a back-alley here and now; and OZ, which reflects the desire for somewhere better. The men and women who populate Tomasula’s landscape desperately hope to fill a void in their lives through a variety of media: music, language, dirt, light, and automobiles. As the plot moves forward, the story of the residents of INand that of their counterparts in OZconverge. A fanciful allegory that tackles class relations, art, commerce, and language, IN & OZ is a tale of the human condition that is as visually compelling as it is moving.A novel not only for fiction lovers, but also for artists of all stripes, IN & OZ creates a fantasy that illumines our own world as it lucidly builds its own.

No relationship is more charged than that between a psychotherapist and her patient — unless it is the relationship between a mother and her daughter. This disturbing literary thriller explores what happens when the line between those relationships blurs.Jody Goodman enters psychotherapy with questions of career and love on her mind. But Claire Roth, her therapist, keeps changing the focus of their sessions to Jody's parentage — Jody was adopted; Claire gave up a baby for adoption who would now be exactly Jody's age. As the two women become increasingly involved, speculation turns into certainty, fantasy into fixation. Until suddenly it is no longer clear just which of them needs the other more — or with more terrifying consequences.

Winner of 1971 Booker Prize«V. S. Naipaul tells stories which show us ourselves and the reality we live in. His use of language is as precise as it is beautiful.» – The London Times«A Tolstoyan spirit…The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist.» – John Updike, The New Yorker«The coolest literary eye and the most lucid prose we have.» – The New York Review

When they sent Garnet Montrose to Vietnam they told him he’d go out a boy and come back a man. But he comes back a freak, so hideously scarred that no one can stand to look at his face. The explosion which destroyed his company has skinned him alive.Living as a recluse on a storm-battered Virginia farm, he dreams of the days when he was eighteen and king of the local dance hall, kept alive by his obsession with the untouchable Georgina Rance. It seems this half-life will never end – until the arrival of Daventry, offering him total love or total destruction…‘A marvellous tour-de-force. A novel that engages as it entertains, draws the reader in as it draws something out of him. In other words, a very impressive book’ – Publishers Weekly.‘Mr Purdy writes like an angel, with accuracy, wit and freshness, but a fallen angel, versed in the sinful ways of men’ – The Times.

The second collection of short stories.Call them transcripts of dreams or deadly accurate maps of the tremor zones of the psyche, the seven stories in this collection engage and implicate us in the most fearful ways imaginable. A two-timing pornographer becomes an unwilling object in the fantasies of one of his victims. A jaded millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress and plunges into a hell of jealousy and despair. And in the course of a weekend with his teenage daughter, a guilt-ridden father discovers the depths of his own blundering innocence.At once chilling and beguiling, and written in prose of lacerating beauty, In Between the Sheets is a tour de force by one of England’s most acclaimed practitioners of literary unease.Review“McEwan proves himself to be an acute psychologist of the ordinary mind.”—The New York Times Book Review“A writer in full control of his materials… In [his] short stories, the effect acheived by McEwan’s quiet, precise and sensual touch is that of magic realism—a transfiguration of the ordinary that has a … strong visceral impact.” —Robert Towers, The New York Review of Books

An account of the senseless murder of a Kansas farm family and the search for the killers.

"[A] translucent novel of passion, illusion and social class….slyly witty and luminous."— Francine Prose in O, The Oprah MagazineDuring working hours, Mario is a dutiful bureaucrat, scrupulously earning his paycheck as an employee of the provincial Spanish town where he lives. But when he walks through the door of his apartment, he is transformed into the impassioned lover of Blanca, the beautiful, inscrutable wife he saved from the brink of personal crisis. For the love of Blanca, Mario eats sushi and carpaccio, nods in feigned understanding at experimental films, sits patiently through long conversations with her avant-garde friends, and conceals his disgust at shocking art exhibits.Then, little by little, a strange and ominous threat begins to weigh on the marriage.How can love survive its own disappearance? The desperate answer that Antonio Muñoz Molina proposes in this short, circular novella is a model of literary strategy and style, a splendid homage to Flaubert.

A tale of love, heroism and resistance set against the stunning backdrop of 1930s Florence, In Love and War weaves fact and fiction to create a sweeping portrait of a city under siege. The novel is told through the eyes, letters and journals of Esmond Lowndes, who comes to Italy a lonely young man in the shadow of his politician father. On the cobbles of Florence’s many-storied streets, he deepens his appreciation of art and literature, and falls in love.With the coming of war, Esmond finds himself drawn into the Tuscan Resistance, hunted by the malevolent Mario Carità, head of the Fascist secret police. With his lover, Ada, at his side, he is at the centre of assassination plots, shoot-outs and car chases, culminating in a final mission of extraordinary daring.In Love and War is a novel that will take you deep into the secret heart of history. It is a novel of art and letters, of bawdy raconteurs and dashing spies. With Esmond Lowndes you will see the beauty of Florence and the horror of war as it sweeps over the city’s terracotta rooftops. In Love and War is both epic and intimate, harrowing and heartwarming.

An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.

In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a “sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of “terminal cases,” The World According to Garp.His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving’s In One Person is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.”* * *“This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic, and funny—it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. The unfolding of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the ’80s was the defining moment for me as a physician. With my patients’ deaths, almost always occurring in the prime of life, I would find myself cataloging the other losses—namely, what these people might have offered society had they lived the full measure of their days: their art, their literature, the children they might have raised. In One Person is the novel that for me will define that era. A profound truth is arrived at in these pages. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best.”— ABRAHAM VERGHESE“In One Person is a novel that makes you proud to be human. It is a book that not only accepts but also loves our differences. From the beginning of his career, Irving has always cherished our peculiarities—in a fierce, not a saccharine, way. Now he has extended his sympathies—and ours—still further into areas that even the misfits eschew. Anthropologists say that the interstitial—whatever lies between two familiar opposites—is usually declared either taboo or sacred. John Irving in this magnificent novel—his best and most passionate since The World According to Garp—has sacralized what lies between polarizing genders and orientations. And have I mentioned it is also a gripping page-turner and a beautifully constructed work of art?”— EDMUND WHITE

Passing from the mannered drawing rooms of Pakistan s cities to the harsh mud villages beyond, Daniyal Mueenuddin s linked stories describe the interwoven lives of an aging feudal landowner, his servants and managers, and his extended family, industrialists who have lost touch with the land. In the spirit of Joyce s Dubliners and Turgenev s A Sportsman s Sketches, these stories comprehensively illuminate a world, describing members of parliament and farm workers, Islamabad society girls and desperate servant women. A hard-driven politician at the height of his powers falls critically ill and seeks to perpetuate his legacy; a girl from a declining Lahori family becomes a wealthy relative s mistress, thinking there will be no cost; an electrician confronts a violent assailant in order to protect his most valuable possession; a maidservant who advances herself through sexual favors unexpectedly falls in love. Together the stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders make up a vivid portrait of feudal Pakistan, describing the advantages and constraints of social station, the dissolution of old ways, and the shock of change. Refined, sensuous, by turn humorous, elegiac, and tragic, Mueenuddin evokes the complexities of the Pakistani feudal order as it is undermined and transformed.

The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United States’s greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation bearing certain similarities to Hungary — and whose rise and fall might be said to parallel the strange contortions taken by Western political and literary thought over the course of the twentieth century. More than twenty years in the making, and containing a cast of characters, breadth of insight, and degree of stylistic legerdemain to rival such staggering achievements as William H. Gass’s The Tunnel, Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, or Péter Nádas’s Parallel Lives, In Partial Disgrace may be the last great work to issue from the generation that changed American letters in the ’60s and ’70s.