Содержание нового романа Андрея Кучаева укладывается в семь больших глав. Суть его – бритвенно точный анализ действительности. В том же, что такое «Sex Around The Clock», почему это такое, откуда взялось и какие головокружительные события натолкнули автора на написание нижеприведённого эротико-приключенческого романа, читатель разберется сам, прочтя без отрыва написанное.

‘Poker night had started off as a legitimate monthly card game; it was Frans who’d turned it into “poke-her” night. He’d been going to a gentleman’s club in the city for quite some time. It was he who had suggested that they spice up their regular boys’ night, assuring everyone that it was discreet and upmarket; at a price, of course. They were wealthy enough to buy discretion and they were all keen to bring some excitement into their lives. Being in a group somehow made it more acceptable, should their wives ever find out. So, poke-her night it became. It was, as most of these clubs were, at an undisclosed address in Cape Town.’Sex, Lies & Stellenbosch uncovers what really goes on behind closed doors in the seemingly upstanding community of Stellenbosch, one of South Africa’s wealthiest small towns, home to 3 400 dollar millionaires (before they invested in Steinhoff shares).Written as fiction to protect the innocent, the book exposes the explosive dark truths of the Winelands’ elite. All is revealed through Jen, wife of John Pearce, a renowned wine farmer and businessman. Jen stumbles upon her playboy husband in a compromising position with his sexy wine rep, Patty. Jen is forced to choose between leaving her marriage, jeopardising her standing and stability in the community or turning a blind eye to his infidelity.On the day of the discovery, Jen books herself into a luxurious spa, using her cheating husband’s credit card, and serendipitously meets Claudia, a psychologist. This chance meeting helps Jen make sense of her crumbling world. She is betrayed by friends and bolstered by unlikely allies.

В запутанный клубок сплетаются судьбы героев — братьев Саймона и Давида, родившихся в солнечном городке Испании. Жизнь приготовила им массу сюрпризов и неожиданных поворотов: переезд в СССР, первый заработок, убийство, бездомная жизнь во Франции, тернистый путь к успеху в Украине. О том, как люди бывают одиноки, счастливы и богаты; о цене дружбы, предательства и силе Любви; о том, как заработать миллион и стать знаменитым; о сексе, мечтах и незабываемых приключениях — «Sex. Убийство. Миллион» никого не оставит равнодушным.

2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERPeter Matthiessen's great American epic-Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone-was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision.Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson's wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."Peter Matthiessen's lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more."

The classified experiment is the brainchild of renowned scientist Peter Whitney and his brilliant daughter, Lily. Created to enhance the psychic abilities of an elite squadron, it can transform their natural mental powers into a unique military weapon. But something goes wrong. In the isolated underground labs, the men have been dying-victims of bizarre accidents. Captain Ryland Miller knows he is next. When Dr. Whitney himself is murdered, Ryland has only one person left to trust: the beautiful Lily. Possessed of an uncanny sixth sense herself, Lily shares Ryland's every new fear, every betrayal, every growing suspicion, and every passionate beat of the heart. Together, they will be drawn deeper into the labyrinth of her father's past…and closer to a secret that someone would kill to keep hidden.

A novel of the deep roots of the clash between Islam and the West.The savagery of the Reconquest tore apart the world of the Banu Hudayl family. For the doomed Muslims of late-fifteenth-century Spain, the approaching forces of Christendom bring not peace but the sword. Capturing the brutality of a war both military and cultural — and the price paid by the innocent — Tariq Ali opens his Islam Quintet with a harrowing and profound historical fiction.

The Man Booker Prize (nominee)Whitbread Prize (nominee)International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards (nominee)Los Angeles, 1991. Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, one of the makers of the modern world, is murdered in broad daylight on his illegitimate daughter India's doorstep, slaughtered by a knife wielded by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, a myscerious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown. The dead man is a World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability and much erotic appeal, a former US ambassador to India and subsequently America's counter-terrorism chief. The murder looks at first like a political assassination, but turns out to be passionately personal. This is the story of Max, his killer, and his daughter – and of a fourth character, the woman who links them, whose story finally explains them all. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, France and England, and back to California again. Along the way there are tales of princesses lured from their homes by demons, legends of kings forced to defend their kingdoms against evil. There is kindness and magic, capable of producing miracles, but there is also war, ugly, unavoidable, and seemingly interminable. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous. Everything is unsettled. Everything is connected. Lives are uprooted, names keep changing – nothing is permanent. The story of anywhere is also the story of everywhere else. Spanning the globe and darting through history, Rushdie's narrative captures the heart of the reader and the spirit of a troubled age.

Cocó cive con su novio, Tiantian, un joven de una sensibilidad extraordinaria que tiene un grave problema de impotencia y que, a pesar de amar intensamente a Cocó, no puede satisfacerla sexualmente.En una fiesta, Cocó conoce a Mark, un alemán casado con quien iniciará una aventura basada en la mutua atracción sexual pero que, inevitablemente, se irá desplazando hacia el centro mismo de sus ser. En medio del caos emocional, la voz de Cocó nos muestra cómo el amor y el deseo tienen a menudo caminos separados y nos transmite una inesperada y conmovedora sensación de verdad.Shangai Baby es también el retrato de la fascinante ciudad de Shangai en la actualidad. Después de varios libros de éxito que nos han transportado al Oriente de las geishas y sus tradiciones, esta novela nos habla de la vida en la China de hoy.

From Publishers WeeklyAlthough it caused an uproar in the author's native China, Western readers will find 27-year-old Wei Hui's semiautobiographical offering reminiscent of fiction by the brat pack writers of the '80s, though more clich‚d and less edgy. Waitress Nikki "but my friends call me Coco after Coco Chanel" is in love with Tian Tian, a melancholy and impotent artist who falls prey to narcotics. Coco loves him madly, but not so madly that she wants to give up sex, and this is why she's also been seeing Mark, a married German businessman. Coco's deceptions, Tian Tian's problems with his wealthy mother (who he suspects killed his father) and the intertwining worlds of art and fashion are all fodder for Coco's upcoming slice-of-lifestyle novel, in which Shanghai 's privileged 20-somethings are shown in their natural habitat of clubs and coffeehouses. Beneath the techno beat, though, the sore subject of Western imperialism its avatars, this time, multinational managers still lurks. Among Coco 's friends, one known as Madonna stands out in particular: she earned a fortune first as a madam and then as the widow of a rich man. Wei Hui evidently wants to imitate her heroes, the beats and Henry Miller, and relishes observations like "our bodies were already tarnished, and our minds beyond help." But she spends more time analyzing people by the brands they use and the cars they drive, thus giving the book an odd air of beat fluff, as if Jack Kerouac had mated with Judith Krantz. The book is as alluring as a gossip column, but, alas, as shallow as one, too. (Sept. 11)Forecast: Forty thousand copies of Shanghai Baby were burned by the Chinese government. Proving censors make the best publicists, rights were subsequently sold in 19 countries 200,000 copies are in print in Japan alone. U.S. media curiosity is already high, but the resulting sales bounce may be minor.From Library JournalWei Hui's debut novel, which was banned in China, delves deep into the dark and glittering heart of Shanghai, as experienced by a hopeful and hedonistic young novelist, Nikki (better known to her friends as Coco, after the also irrepressibly glamorous Coco Chanel). Although deeply in love with her impotent artist boyfriend Tian Tian, the frustrated Coco takes a successful German businessman as a lover. What follows is the painful and explicit sexual and vocational journey of a young woman in search of her true self, attempting to gain control of her own trajectory as nefarious forces work on her from both within and without. Indeed, it seems almost as if the city's over-the-top materialism drives its inhabitants toward adultery and dark passions, forcing them at once into the dual role of victim/accomplice. It is just such paradoxes that make Wei Hui's novel so complex and thought-provoking: she deftly explores the intimate relationships that belie the seeming oppositions of East and West, love and desire, the natural and the artificial, hedonism and spiritualism. Haunting and resonant, Shanghai Baby proves the existence of the sacred in the profane. For all Chinese literature and contemporary fiction collections. Tania Barnes, "Library Journal"***Wei Hui's SHANGHAI BABY is the poetic, bittersweet and subtly spiritual tale of one woman's quest for personal fulfillment and drive for creative expression. The diverse and cultured city of Shanghai is more than the backdrop for the novel; it is a character itself. The city is celebrated by Hui, and its busy pace and natural sensuality contribute to the postmodern tone of the book. The most interesting character, however, is 25-year-old Nikki, the "baby" of the title. Nikki, known as Coco to her friends, is a writer. Unapologetic in her desire for both emotional and sexual satisfaction, Coco becomes involved with two very different men, all the while trying to write her first novel.But more important than the details of Coco 's exploration of sex is the novel's examination of life, freedom, love, and death. Each man Coco is involved with offers a different path for that examination and different answers to the same philosophical questions.Coco 's live-in boyfriend, Tien Tien, is a fragile and beautiful artist. The love between Coco and Tien Tien is sensual and spiritual. Obsessed by death, Tien Tien awakens in Coco an awareness of life and the importance of love. However, his impotence, physical but often emotional as well, leads her to a fierce and passionate affair with a married man. Strong, assertive Mark, a German businessman temporarily living in Shanghai, is the opposite of sensitive Tien Tien in every way. Coco 's fragile balance of juggling two lovers while writing her novel is upset as both men eventually become unavailable to her and she is faced with tragedy.SHANGHAI BABY is a beautiful novel. The language is poetic and sensual yet funny and brutally honest. Coco is frank in her confusions, frustrations, elations, and joys. She is joined by a bevy of interesting characters, including a former madam, a computer hacker, a bisexual fashion stylist, an avant-garde filmmaker, drug addicts, and artists, not to mention her parents who must overcome their traditional expectations in order to understand and support her artistic and personal choices. Each character is faced with the same issues as Coco and each attempts to make sense of relationships, sexuality, family, and life in a changing Chinese culture. While Hui implies the struggle between tradition and modernity is lessening (at least in cosmopolitan Shanghai) her forecast for a woman's chance to find both sexual and emotional fulfillment is less optimistic.We have been taught that through novels we can witness the changes and ultimately the growth of characters. As we read, they ideally become better people. Hui's novel is more challenging in that Coco does not fundamentally change and her growth is not overtly apparent. Hui's honest portrayal of Coco is both frustrating and refreshing and is thus an accurate reflection of the human condition. Coco 's vanity and selfishness (or confidence and trueness to her own needs) can verge on annoying; she is not always likable. However, she is capable of great insight.This view into contemporary Chinese culture and the issues of female independence and sexuality is worthwhile. Coco's controversial publication of short stories mirror Hui's own experience -- the sex and sexuality described by Hui in SHANGHAI BABY doomed the novel to condemnation, banning, and public burnings in China, where it was originally published. However, American readers may be disappointed to find that what is scandalous in China is more commonplace in Western literature. Although a fairly easy read, it is not a light one. The themes of death, sadness, and loneliness balance the themes of romance and passion.– - Reviewed by Sarah Egelman

For readers of the phenomenal bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love-a stunning new novel from Lisa See about two sisters who leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles.May and Pearl, two sisters living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, are beautiful, sophisticated, and well-educated, but their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Hoping to improve their social standing, May and Pearl ’s parents arrange for their daughters to marry “ Gold Mountain men” who have come from Los Angeles to find brides.But when the sisters leave China and arrive at Angel’s Island (the Ellis Island of the West)-where they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months-they feel the harsh reality of leaving home. And when May discovers she’s pregnant the situation becomes even more desperate. The sisters make a pact that no one can ever know.A novel about two sisters, two cultures, and the struggle to find a new life in America while bound to the old, Shanghai Girls is a fresh, fascinating adventure from beloved and bestselling author Lisa See.

Maxi, a middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires's shantytown, attracts the attention of a corrupt, trigger-happy policeman who will use anyone — including two innocent teenage girls — to break a drug ring that he believes is operating within the slum. A strange new drug, a brightly lit carousel of a slum, the kindness of strangers, gunplay… no matter how serious the subject matter, and despite Aira's "fascination with urban violence and the sinister underside of Latin American politics" (The Millions), Shantytown, like all of Aira's mesmerizing work, is filled with wonder and mad invention.

May 4th, 1970. A week earlier President Nixon has ordered American ground forces into Cambodia to pursue the Vietcong. By the end of the day four students will be shot dead by the National Guards in the grounds of Kent State University. On the other side of the Atlantic, it's a brilliant sunny morning after an April of heavy rain, and at the "Concept House" therapeutic community he has set up in the London suburb of Willesden, maverick psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner has been tricked into joining a decidedly ill advised LSD trip with several of its disturbed residents. Five years later, sitting in a nearby cinema watching Steven Spielberg's Jaws, Busner realizes the true nature of the events that transpired on that dread-soaked day, when a survivor of the worst disaster in the US Navy's history — the sinking of the USS Indianapolis — came face-to-face with the British Royal Air Force observer on the Enola Gay's mission to bomb Hiroshima.Set a year before the action of his Booker-shortlisted Umbrella, Will Self's new novel Shark continues its exploration of the complex relationship between human psychopathology and human technological progress.

Forensic sculptor Toni Sullivan's job takes her to crime scenes to put faces to victims. Shaping the clay always gives her a sense of purpose and order, but that all changes when she feels a mysterious connection to the victim found on Red Bud Isle.When Toni accepts another assignment that may officially prove an old friend is dead, memories of her nursing days in Vietnam begin to haunt her.Suddenly, her calm professionalism is gone. To find peace, she'll do whatever it takes to unmask a murderer. But where will she find the strength to handle the traumatic legacy of the past?

A luminous fiction debut: the tumultuous history of modern Vietnam as experienced by a young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before reunification — and with the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead.At the peak of the war in Vietnam, a baby girl is born on the night of the full moon along the Song Ma River. This is Rabbit, who will journey away from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. Here is a Vietnam we've never encountered before: through Rabbit's inexplicable but radiant intuition, we are privy to an intimate version of history, from the days of French Indochina and the World War II rubber plantations through the chaos of postwar reunification. With its use of magical realism — Rabbit's ability to "hear" the dead — the novel reconstructs a turbulent historical period through a painterly human lens. This is the moving story of one woman's struggle to unearth the true history of Vietnam while simultaneously carving out a place for herself within it.

Why should a man care for his parents when they failed to take care of him as a child?One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of the Year (Selected by Edan Lepucki)Kyung Cho is a young father burdened by a house he can’t afford. For years, he and his wife, Gillian, have lived beyond their means. Now their debts and bad decisions are catching up with them, and Kyung is anxious for his family’s future.A few miles away, his parents, Jin and Mae, live in the town’s most exclusive neighborhood, surrounded by the material comforts that Kyung desires for his wife and son. Growing up, they gave him every possible advantage — private tutors, expensive hobbies — but they never showed him kindness. Kyung can hardly bear to see them now, much less ask for their help. Yet when an act of violence leaves Jin and Mae unable to live on their own, the dynamic suddenly changes, and he’s compelled to take them in. For the first time in years, the Chos find themselves living under the same roof. Tensions quickly mount as Kyung’s proximity to his parents forces old feelings of guilt and anger to the surface, along with a terrible and persistent question: how can he ever be a good husband, father, and son when he never knew affection as a child?As Shelter veers swiftly toward its startling conclusion, Jung Yun leads us through dark and violent territory, where, unexpectedly, the Chos discover hope. Shelter is a masterfully crafted debut novel that asks what it means to provide for one's family and, in answer, delivers a story as riveting as it is profound.

In these stories, we see the breathtaking range of Mo Yan's vision-which critics have compared to those of Tolstoy and Kafka. The stories range from the tragic to the comic, though Mo Yan's humor is always tinged with a shade of black. They embody, too, the author's deep and abiding love of his fellow man, equaled only by his intense disdain of bureaucracy and repression-despite which his fiction is never didactic. Satire, fantasy, the supernatural, mystery: all are present in this remarkable and intensely enjoyable volume.— The release of award-winning director Zhang Yimou's major film adaptation of the title story (Happy Times) in summer 2002 heightened the visibility of both the author and this collection.— This paperback is being published simultaneously with the author's mangum opus, Big Breasts and Wide Hips-a return to the sweep and ambition of his bestelling Red Sorghum-which will receive major critical acclaim and further raise Mo Yan's profile in the States.— One of the stories in the volume serves as a companion piece to the author's hugely popular Red Sorghum.

Want to receive a free physical copy of Shine? Simply pre-order Jodi Picoult's new novel Small Great Things in hardback and go to www.jodipicoult.co.uk to enter your details.Jodi Picoult introduces characters from her new novel SMALL GREAT THINGS in this original short story.Dalton is the school of the rich and famous, and it's eight-year-old Ruth Brooks's first day. Growing up in Harlem she never dreamed she'd be given this opportunity, and she's determined not to waste it.But right from her first lesson Ruth is treated differently. The harder she tries, the clearer it becomes that to some people it's not the similarities that matter, but the differences – and there are plenty of those between Ruth and her new classmates.As the days pass, she has a difficult lesson to learn: being in this new world is not the same as becoming a part of it – and becoming a part of it is starting to feel impossible.Ruth's eye-opening story continues in Jodi Picoult's astounding new novel Small Great Things.

A novel about the complicated world of a family in California over years to come, after the sudden death of the father.Opening in 1962 with the fatal heart attack of forty-three-year-old Michael Gannon, a WWII veteran and former POW in the Pacific, SHINING SEA plunges into the turbulent lives of his widow and kids over subsequent decades, crisscrossing from the beaches of southern California to the Woodstock rock festival, London’s gritty nightlife in the eighties to Scotland’s remote Inner Hebrides islands, the dry heat of Arizona desert to the fertile farmland of Massachusetts. Beautifully rendered and profoundly moving, SHINING SEA by Anne Korkeakivi is a family story, about the ripple effects of war, the passing down of memory, and the power of the ideal of heroism to lead us astray but also to keep us afloat.

1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in "The Littoral Zone," two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, "science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material" (Boston Globe).