The information contained in this book or books is provided for informational purposes only and includes the book title, author name, and a brief description or abstract. For the full text of the book, please contact the author or publisher.
Feliks came to London to commit a murder that would change history. He had many weapons at his command, but his most dangerous were the love of a innocent woman, and the passion of a lady demanding satisfaction. Against him were ranged the English police, a lord, and Winston Churchill himself.
A story of passion and idealism, which describes a group of men and women in the Middle Ages whose destinies are fatefully linked with the building of a cathedral. In a country torn by civil war, two generations struggle to rise above their primitive circumstances and create something beautiful.
***
“KEN FOLLETT TAKES A GIANT STEP!” – San Francisco Chronicle
“With this book Follett risks all and comes out a clear winner… a historical novel of gripping readability, authentic atmosphere and memorable characterization… Beginning with a mystery that casts its shadow… the narrative is a seesaw of tension… suspense… impeccable pacing… action, intrigue, violence and passion… ambition, greed, bravery, dedication, revenge and love… A NOVEL THAT ENTERTAINS, INSTRUCTS AND SATISFIES ON A GRAND SCALE.” – Publishers Weekly
“An extraordinary epic buttressed by suspense… a mystifying puzzle involving the execution of an innocent man… the erection of a magnificent cathedral… romance, rivalry and spectacle… A MONUMENTAL MASTERPIECE… A TOWERING TRIUMPH FROM A MAJOR TALENT.” – ALA Booklist
Na przyjęciu u profesora Oksfordu spotyka się trzech studentów – Żyd, Palestyńczyk i Rosjanin. Ich kolejne spotkanie ma miejsce 20 lat później. Są agentami zwalczających się tajnych służb – Mossadu, KGB i egipskiego wywiadu cywilnego. Kto ma bombę atomową? Czy uda się zdobyć uran konieczny do kontynuacji wyścigu zbrojeń? I czy zakochana córka jednego z nich może pokrzyżować misterne plany?
Jeannie Ferrami, psycholog prowadząca na Jones Falls University badania naukowe w dziedzinie genetyki, dokonuje zaskakującego odkrycia. Przeglądając bazy danych, natrafia na parę jednojajowych bliżniaków, urodzonych w odstępie kilku tygodni przez dwie różne matki. Jeden z nich jest odsiadującym wyrok mordercą i sadystą, drugi Steven Logan, sprawia wrażenie wzorowego obywatela. Nieoczekiwanie Steven zostaje oskarżony o brutalny gwałt, zeznania ofiary nie pozostawiają wątpliwości, że to on jest sprawcą przestępstwa. Przekonana o niewinności Stevena Jeannie podjmuje wysiłki, by rozwiązać zagadkę i oczyścić go z zarzutów. Poszukiwania naprowadzają ją na ślad tajnych eksperymentów medycznych z okresu "zimnej wojny". W eksperymenty zamieszane są bardzo wpływowe osoby, a nawet jej sponsor na uniwersytecie. Gra toczy się o wysoką stawkę: miliony dolarów i ambicje prawicowych polityków, którzy pragną przywrócić "integralność rasową" Ameryki. Czy Jeannie uda się odnaleźć trzeciego bliźniaka – klucz do wyjaśnienia tajemnicy – zanim padnie sama ofiarą zabójcy?
Rok 1982. Do Afganistanu okupowanego przez wojska sowieckie przybywa Jean-Pierre Debout, francuski lewicowy ideowiec, by pod przykrywką pracy lekarza na bieżąco informować KGB o dostawach broni i leków z terenu Pakistanu. Wskutek jego donosów dochodzi do masakry jednego z oddziałów partyzanckich. O pracę dla Rosjan nie podejrzewa go nikt oprócz żony – Angielki Jane. Sytuacja zmienia się, gdy w ten sam rejon trafia z misją szkolenia rebeliantów niegdysiejszy przyjaciel Jean-Pierre'a, kiedyś kochanek Jane, agent CIA Ellis Thaler. Dawna miłość wybucha z nową siłą, a rozgrywka polityczna między mężczyznami staje się również rywalizacją o uczucie pięknej kobiety.
Human betrayal, medical terror and a race against time…
Jealousies, distrust, and hidden rivalries uncover dark secrets, then a dozen vials of a deadly virus go missing.
As a blizzard whips out of the north on Christmas Eve, several people converge on a remote family house. Stanley Oxenford, director of a pharmaceutical research company, has everything riding on a drug he is developing to fight a lethal virus. Several others are interested in his success too: his children, at home for Christmas with their offspring, have their eyes on the money he will make; Toni Gallo, head of his security team and recently forced to resign from the police, is betting her career on keeping it safe; an ambitious local television reporter sniffs a story, even if he has to bend the facts to tell it; and a violent trio of thugs is on their way to steal it, with a client already waiting.
As the storm worsens and the group is laid under siege by the elements, the emotional sparks crackle and dark secrets are uncovered threaten to drive Stanley and his family apart for ever.
Filled with startling twists, Whiteout is the ultimate knife-edge drama from an international bestselling author who is in a class by himself.
Ken Follett has 90 million readers worldwide. The Pillars of the Earth is his bestselling book of all time. Now, eighteen years after the publication of The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett has written the most-anticipated sequel of the year, World Without End.
In 1989 Ken Follett astonished the literary world with The Pillars of the Earth, a sweeping epic novel set in twelfth-century England centered on the building of a cathedral and many of the hundreds of lives it affected. Critics were overwhelmed-"it will hold you, fascinate you, surround you" (Chicago Tribune)-and readers everywhere hoped for a sequel.
World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroad of new ideas-about medicine, commerce, architecture, and justice. In a world where proponents of the old ways fiercely battle those with progressive minds, the intrigue and tension quickly reach a boiling point against the devastating backdrop of the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the human race-the Black Death.
Three years in the writing, and nearly eighteen years since its predecessor, World Without End breathes new life into the epic historical novel and once again shows that Ken Follett is a masterful author writing at the top of his craft.
Gabrielle Cody has accepted her destiny as God's warrior, charged to destroy all evil, but she wasn't prepared to see Detective Luther Cross ever again. He's the beacon of reality in her life, the one thing that makes her feel human, like a real woman.
But Gaby must resist involvement with Luther now, for she is protecting streetwalkers. Her life of retribution is far too dangerous, and this time, it's not just their hearts that won't come out unscathed.
Gabrielle Cody is a paladin—God's enforcer on earth. But she's not sure she can endure the life of a holy warrior. Her relationship with Detective Luther Cross is under constant strain already, and its going to get worse.
There is a monster feeding off of human blood, flesh, and souls and Gaby must stop him. But her passion for Luther distracts her from the terrible connection she has with her quarry—and the creature's desire to devour her.
Usually, this is where the rhapsody would begin; strings would swell; breasts would be clasped with great feeling: The short story isn't dead; it lives!
I will abstain. If you're interested in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 at all, you're already an adherent of short prose, and know that it's alive and flourishing (as long as you can track it down on the smaller and smaller presses to which it's often relegated).
If the short story's cachet has evinced some decline over the course of the past century, it's a decline in public exposure and lucrative potential, not in quality. In terms of sales and public profile, the short story collection can't keep apace with the novel or pop nonfiction, but it's still absolutely kicking poetry's ass on all fronts, and, like poetry, remains in general more adventurous, fluid, and vitally modern than its novelistic big brother.
To review these stories in terms of their quality seems redundant – that they're terrific is a no-brainer. Entering its eighty-fifth year, The O. Henry Prize Stories consistently collects – I won't say the finest short fiction, but it collects inarguably exquisite short fiction published in the U.S. and Canada. We'll concede that there may be better stories out there, simmering under the radar or even (gasp!) unpublished, which does nothing to detract from the eminence of the ones collected here. This is a damn good read.
This year's edition was edited and introduced by Laura Furman, with a jury consisting of celebrated writers Cristina Garcia, Ann Patchett and Richard Russo. It's dedicated to Chekov upon the centenary of his death, which is forgivably predictable, given his pervasive influence on the short form. Besides illuminating notes from the writers on their work, the 2005 edition contains an essay by each of the judges on their favorite story, and a glossary of literary journals big and small that will be a valuable resource for writers and readers alike.
If quality is a given, it seems the best utility a review of the The O. Henry Prize Stories can have is to pick out the affinities between them and see (a) what writers were compelled to write about in the past year, (b) what editors were compelled to publish, and (c) which literary organs are currently in vogue. Word to the wise: If you'd like to win an O. Henry Prize, relentlessly submit to the New Yorker, which originally published no less than six of the twenty stories here, comfortably vanquishing silver-medallists The Kenyon Review and Zoetrope, who clock in with an admirable (if measly by comparison) two stories apiece.
No less than four stories in the volume revolve around music, all of which are deeply appreciative, none entirely trusting. Michael Palmer's atmospheric tale, "The Golden Era of Heartbreak", is haunted by a lovelorn trucker's song that carries everywhere in a town flattened by the departure of the narrator's wife. "My house filled to the eaves with this song," he states in his spare, lyrical tone, and the story is filled with it as well: The prose, like the town, is "flat as an envelope," and the trucker's song stretches spectrally across it.
A personal favorite of mine, Ben Fountain's "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers", is an elliptical, richly detailed character sketch in the vein of Millhauser or Hemon, about the intertwined destinies of two eleven-fingered pianists in nineteenth century Vienna, steeped in all the paranoia, political and ethnic tensions, and obsolete superstitions of the day.
In Timothy Crouse's "Sphinxes", a remarkably confident and unclassifiable tale, piano lessons, love affairs and subtle emotional maneuvering are braided together with increasing complexity until they become indistinguishable. In each of these stories, music is salvation and undoing, pure force and calculated metaphor: a paradox, a chimera, a sphinx.
And Gail Jones's "Desolation" is about a primal, alienating sexual encounter at a Death in Vegas concert, although it cross-references with the second type of story that heavily informs this year's volume, the community / exile story, which we're coming to just now.
Many stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 revolve around issues of community, but not the traditional, fixed community – these stories are about the provisional communities that arise in times of crisis, and the communities forged by travelers, strangers, souls in spiritual and physical exile.
Judge favorite "Mudlavia", a coming of age tale by Elizabeth Stuckey-French, finds a young boy and his mother in a health resort filled with questionable, exciting characters of colorful mien and shady provenance – slowly, away from their domineering father and husband, we watch them come alive to their own desires, desires that this alien context was necessary to draw out.
Another judge favorite, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's period piece "Exile in London", evokes the faded aura of postwar London by way of the young narrator's recollections of the ragged diaspora in her aunt's boarding house. And Nell Freudenberger's "The Tutor" details the tensions, both sexual and cultural, between a prototypically American teenager in Bombay and her native Indian tutor.
But the finest story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 has to be Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem", which describes the plight of a homeless, admittedly "crazy" Spokane Native American as he embarks on a day-long quest to raise one-thousand dollars to buy back his Grandmother's tribal regalia from a pawn shop. That the story's themes are large and poignant is obvious; what's remarkable is that it manages funny, hopeful, angry, and redemptive at once. The narrator's refusal to lapse into self-pity or misanthropy at his pathetic plight is counterintuitive yet rings true, and by the time the story reaches its conclusion, not-at-all inevitable and uncommonly generous of spirit, one feels every inch of his joy.
In the end, this is the short-story function that trumps all the others: The ability to vault the reader into realms of unanticipated joy. While not all the stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 achieve this as viscerally as Alexie's fable, each one loudly debunks any nonsense about the short story's obsolescence.
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 contains twenty unforgettable stories selected from hundreds of literary magazines. The winning tales take place in such far-flung locales as Madagascar, Nantucket, a Midwestern meth lab, Antarctica, and a post-apocalyptic England, and feature a fascinating array of characters: aging jazzmen, avalanche researchers, a South African wild child, and a mute actor in silent films. Also included are essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.
Desde Rusia con amor es la quinta novela de James Bond escrita por Ian Fleming. La inteligencia soviética planea un golpe contra la inteligencia occidental, para esto han escogido como blanco al agente 007 de MI6. La agente Tatiana Romanova es inducida por la coronel Rosa Klebb para que le ofrezca a Bond un decodificador soviético a cambio de que él la lleve a Inglaterra. El agente Grant se asegurará de que no falle la misión. Bond será ayudado por Kerim Bey, un musulmán que se encubre bajo la identidad de un vendedor de tapetes. El desenlace final será que Kerim Bey morirá a manos de Grant en el Expreso de Oriente, Grant será eliminado por Bond y Rosa Klebb será arrestada, no sin antes herir a Bond con un cuchillo escondido en su zapato. El desenlace de esto se ve en la novela Dr. No, en donde Bond se cura.
Fairstein, former chief of the Sex Crimes Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, returns with her ninth legal thriller starring prosecutor Alexandra Cooper. The author's own expertise again adds to the credibility of her fiction, in terms of courtroom banter, pacing, and those small "you couldn't make this up" details, such as the fact that shopping carts are the current favored receptacles for attorneys' case files. Her plotting is steady if formulaic. The big flaw in Fairstein's writing is that she has a tin ear when it comes to how people talk; her dialogue, often progressing in parallel phrases and clauses that are highly unlikely to occur in normal speech, is weighed down with backstory. Because she wants dialogue to do the work of narrative, she puts all manner of improbable words in her characters' mouths, thereby revealing motive and emotions. This tale starts with the trial of an upscale Manhattanite accused of murdering his wife. An explosion in the tunnels underneath the city interrupts the trial. Not surprisingly, the defendant is connected to the disaster. Again not surprisingly, Cooper must search within the tunnel system to find the answers. What works about this overly manipulative plot device, however, is that it gives Fairstein the opportunity to present some genuinely fascinating historical and engineering facts about the "city of death" far below Manhattan. Clunky in style but strong on procedural detail and background material.
Reunited with fellow Manhattan crime scene investigators Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, brazen, outspoken Alexandra Cooper, assistant DA for the sex crimes prosecution unit, tackles the case of a murdered dancer with the Royal Ballet. While it was no secret that "world-renowned" Russian ballerina Natalya Galinova had a bad attitude and a cuckolded husband, that she was tossed, undetected, into the cooling unit at the Metropolitan Opera House still comes as a shock, even to a whole slew of suspects, among them her agent, Rinaldo; Broadway kingpin and voyeur Joe Berk; Berk's shady niece Mona; and the Met's slippery artistic director, Chet Dobbis. Varied clues paired with the fascinating theatrical spadework involved in the opera business lead to a sidewalk electrocution and several sabotaged stage sets. As additional suspects are tacked on, concurrent evidence and motives surface and the stage becomes increasingly deadly for everyone involved, especially Alex. Running alongside is a rape subplot involving an elusive Turkish doctor, and an unsolved urban assault case. Despite the overcrowded plot, this whodunit manages to pirouette to a satisfying climax just as the curtain drops. Fairstein (Entombed) fans will undoubtedly demand an encore.
We use cookies to understand how you use our site, to personalize content and to improve your experience. By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of cookies and you agree with Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
All languages
English
Español
Deutsch
Français
Bulgaria
Netherlands
Italiano
Hungary
Spanish
România
Українська
Catalonia
Polski
Belarus
Lithuania
Latvia
Serbian
Czech
Esperanto
Portugal
Swedish
Slovensko
Hrvatski
Србија
Latine
Chinese
Ελληνική(Greece)
Uzbek
Norsk
Turkish
Việt Nam
Denmark
Azerbaijan
Qazaqstan
Galician
Chuvashia
Indonesian
Other Languages
