David Malouf4.5 In this rich and compelling novel, written in language of astonishing poise and resonance, one of Australia's greatest living writers gives and immensely powerful vision of human differences and eternal divisions. In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old British cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later he moves back into the world of Europeans, among hopeful yet terrified settlers who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place. To them, Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge: he is a force that at once fascinates and repels. His own identity in this new world is as unsettling to him as the knowledge he brings to others of the savage, the aboriginal.
Бхарати Мукерджи0.0 This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, "a person undreamed of in Puritan society." Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, "translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja.
It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an "asset hunter" who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with "sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography...."
William T. Vollmann0.0 The latest installment of Vollmann's seven-part epic chronicling the clash of Europeans and Native Americans in the New World. Volume six focuses on the white explorers of the mid-1800s, desperately dreaming of forging a Northwest passage.
Марк Зальцман0.0 As a child, Renne showed promise of becoming one of the world's greatest cellists. Now, years later, his life suddenly is altered by two events: he becomes a juror in a murder trial for the brutal killing of a Buddhist monk, and he takes on as a pupil a Korean boy whose brilliant musicianship reminds him of his own past.
Дэвид Ливитт0.0 Leavitt has earned high praise for his empathetic portrayal of human sexuality and the complexities of intimate relationships. In While England Sleeps, available for the first time in two years, he moves beyond precisely controlled domestic drama to create a historical novel, set against the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, that tells a story of love and the violent chaos of war.
Джордж Чонси0.0 The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New Yorkforever changed how we think about the history of gay life in New York City, and beyond.
Микал Гилмор0.0 Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a blacksheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates a murder tale "from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave." Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin. Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged.
Генри Киссинджер4.3 В своей книге "Дипломатия" Генри Киссинджер стремится проанализировать историю дипломатических отношений между государствами, начиная с Вестфальского договора 1648 года и до конца ХХ века. Перед читателем предстает ряд политических деятелей "всех времен и народов" — от Ришелье до наших современников. Но больше внимания автор уделяет тем событиям Новейшего времени, в которых он участвовал сам, рассматривая их как вехи становления так называемого "нового мирового порядка", складывающегося на рубеже XX-XXI веков.
Кэролин Форше0.0 Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. These poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.
Джонатан Уэйнер0.0 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
On a desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent twenty years proving that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. For among the finches of Daphne Major, natural selection is neither rare nor slow: it is taking place by the hour, and we can watch.
In this dramatic story of groundbreaking scientific research, Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself. The Beak of the Finch is an elegantly written and compelling masterpiece of theory and explication in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould.
Мартин Милан Шимечка0.0 Set in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in the 1980s, Martin Simecka's stunning first novel, "The Year of the Frog, portrays a young man struggling to come to terms with his circumstances in the last days of communist dictatorship. Milan, the son of a former party official now imprisoned for dissident activities, is barred from the university despite the fact that he is a brilliant student and an extraordinary runner. Forced to work, Milan takes a series of menial jobs -- first as a surgical orderly in a hospital, next as a clerk in an under-stocked hardware store, lastly as an assistant in a maternity hospital for both births and abortions -- all of which serve to break open his life. Two great passions save him from the bleakness of his everyday existence: long-distance running, and his love for Tania, a beautiful university student from whom he seeks salvation and ultimately marries. "The Year of the Frog is a coming-of-age story, a romance, and a novel which poses important questions about life and death, about love and freedom, faithfulness and infidelity.
