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Paperback. Condizione: New. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITINGIn this penetrating exploration of contemporary Russia, Joshua Yaffa meets a variety of Russians - from politicians and entrepreneurs to artists and historians - who have built their careers and constructed their identities in the shadow of the Putin system. Torn between their own ambitions and the omnipresent demands of the state, each has found that compromise is essential for survival and success. Between Two Fires is an intimate and probing portrait of a nation much discussed but little understood, and an urgent lesson about the nature of modern authoritarianism.

Paperback. Condizione: New. John Philips introduces the Marquis de Sade's highly original and thoroughly subversive depiction of human sexuality and the philosophical and political thinking that underpins it. He shows how, though Sade's work continues to shock, it can also be seen as the logical conclusion of eighteenth-century materialism. As the only writer of his time who dared to put the body at the centre of philosophy, Sade has a unique place in the history of modern thought. Extracts are taken form the whole range of Sade's writings, including The 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Boudoir, Juliette and his Last Will and Testament.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Intrigued by reports of increasing poverty and despair within America's white-collar corporate workforce, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to infiltrate their world as an undercover reporter and learn about the problems facing middle-class executives at first hand. Thinking she had set herself an easy challenge, the author was quite unprepared for what happened next. Ehrenreich found herself entering a shadowy world of Internet job searches, lonely networking events and costly career-coaching sessions, a world in which 'professional' mentors and trainers offer pop-psychology and self-help mantras to desperate would-be employees. Her story is an important one - poignant and blackly funny - that delivers a stark warning about the future that faces corporate employees everywhere and calls for collective action to guard against it.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'The world has enough for everybody's need, but not enough for one person's greed' GandhiGreens are driven by a concern with the fate of future generations and the natural world on which we all depend. They argue that theirs is the only way of ensuring the survival of a sustainable planet. The case they make is powerful, emotive, urgent and politically controversial. In the space of a couple of decades, Greens have shaped an influential movement. Issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss are now familiar and widely accepted.The challenge for Greens today is to turn mainstream rhetoric into meaningful action.In this readable and wide-ranging introduction, Joe Smith summarizes the historical roots of the Green movement and some of the main intellectual building blocks of Green thinking. He goes on to consider whether they have the appetite and potential to 'change the world'.

Paperback. Condizione: New. There is a story about a Jew who travels from Israel to the United States. When he returns, he tells his friend some of the amazing things he has seen. 'I met a Jew who had grown up in a yeshiva and knew large sections of the Talmud by heart. I met a Jew who was an atheist. I met a Jew who owned a large business and I met a Jew who was an ardent communist.' 'So what's so strange?' the friend asks. 'America is a big country and millions of Jews live there.' 'You don't understand,' the man answers. 'It was the same Jew.'Judaism is not simply a series of beliefs. It is a practice and a way of life. What Do Jews Believe? explores the variety of ways Jews live their lives: religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, Jews in Israel and Jews who live in the Diaspora. It asks what Judaism means and what it means to be a Jew. It also asks how and why such a small number of people, totalling no more than 20 million worldwide, have played such a significant role in our history.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Things You Should Know is a collection of dazzling stories by one of the most talented and daring young American writers, whose distinctive narratives demonstrate how extraordinary the ordinary can be. A woman pursues an unconventional strategy for getting pregnant; a former First Lady shows despair and courage in dealing with her husband's Alzheimer's; a teacher's list of 'things you already should know but maybe are a little dumb, so you don't' becomes an obsession for someone who wasn't at school the day it was given out; and adult tragedy intrudes into a childhood friendship. The stories are full of magic and strangeness and humour, but also demonstrate an uncanny emotional accuracy and compassion.

Paperback. Condizione: New. He disappeared. That's all she really knew.In search of her father Andreas, whom she has never met, Lena travels with her small son from Australia to Greece. On the island of Naxos she finds him, a wary, tormented man living in self-imposed exile and haunted by what happened to him under the rule of the Colonels in the 1960s. Slowly Lena unlocks the secrets of her father's past, and in getting to know him begins to understand the dark realities of contemporary Greek history.To the Island is a book about the impact of larger political events on the lives of ordinary people, and how political and personal betrayals reverberate across generations, beautifully evoking the currents and cross-currents between individuals, within families and in broader society. And in Lena and Andreas's stories, it shows how difficult it is to confront our personal and collective pasts - and the terrible consequences of being unable to do so.

Paperback. Condizione: New. The story of the overcoat began with a chance meeting - between an obsessive book collector, Jacques Guérin, and his physician, Dr Robert Proust, brother of the late writer. Guérin immediately glimpsed the possibility of acquiring the novelist's personal effects, but it would be decades before he finally came to possess the relic he had most coveted: Proust's moth-eaten otter-lined overcoat.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Every new mother has a story to tell - and this is Jane de la Rochefoucault's. It's a story that contains all the familiar yet magical landmarks of feeding, teething, toddling, and measuring stuff in and out of Tupperware. But, as an expat living in Paris, Jane also faces some challenges they never mention in the handbooks. Such as, how to juggle a new baby with the demands of an aristocratic husband, a competitive nursing circle, an artisan plumber, and a formidably French (and possibly law-breaking) mother-in-law. Swiftly plotted, linguistically playful and sparkling with wit, The Baby of Belleville will draw you into its unique imaginative universe and make you reluctant to leave.

Paperback. Condizione: New. When he turned sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the day's events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. The Smoking Diaries was the result, in which one of Britain's most beloved and original writers reflected on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and love. Few diarists have been as frank about themselves, and even fewer as entertaining.

Paperback. Condizione: New. When Eva's mother abandons her on Iris's front porch, the girls don't seem to have much in common - except, they soon discover, a father. Thrown together with no mothers to care for them and a father who could not be considered a parent, Iris and Eva become one another's family. Iris wants to be a movie star; Eva is her sidekick. Together, they journey across 1940s America from scandal in Hollywood to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island, stumbling, cheating and loving their way through a landscape of war, betrayals and big dreams.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Like his father before him, Octavio runs the Notre Dame bakery and knows the secret recipe for the perfect Parisian baguette. But, also like his father, Octavio has never mastered the art of reading and his only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his own imagination. Just a few streets away, Isabeau works out of sight in the basement of the Louvre, trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores and the stories she reads. The two might never have met, but for a curious chain of coincidences involving an impoverished painter, a jaded bookseller, and a book of fairytales, lost and found. Evocative, romantic, and wise, this is a magical novel about the power of stories - to help us find enchantment, freedom, and sometimes even love.

Paperback. Condizione: New. As an infant, Jon Mosher tragically lost his older brother to a freak accident - something that could have happened to any family. There's nothing he could have done to prevent it, but there it is anyway, that loss echoing in every room and painted on the faces of his parents - German Jews who'd escaped the war - as if to say: you weren't, and aren't, enough. Saddled with this absence, Jon's life has been defined by what's missing and what he lacks; that is, until in high school he befriends wisecracking Ray, a reckless boy with a volatile father. Against the backdrop of the Summer of Love and the encroaching Vietnam War, Jon dreams of ultimately leaving his grey, blue-collar town, but is set on an irrevocable course as the escalating violence of Ray's home life threatens to shatter their bright-eyed plans to escape. Torn between obligation and desire, Jon's faced with the impossible decision of whether to help, or run.In this magnificent, haunting novel, Slouka brilliantly captures the polarising forces of a working class, hardscrabble ethos and the hopeful vibrancy of the sixties and early seventies. With concise, wise prose, Slouka weaves together a tapestry of family, fate, friendship, and the impossibility of ever, really, leaving home.

Paperback. Condizione: New. When Elena falls in love with Riccardo, she also falls in love with the idea of a world beyond her sheltered life in rural Italy. And when she loses him, she gives up her hopes for the future and her expectations of happiness, filling the sudden void in her life with her son and brother-in-law. It is only when the young Marco rejects the role his mother has created for him and flees to Paris, with its migrant populations, political protests and romantic possibilities, that all three come to realize how tightly they have been bound within a triangle of conspiracy and how much they must risk to break free from the secrets of the past.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A young woman struggles to come to terms with her friend's murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the most unlikely of places; a daughter returns to her hated father's house to care for him in his final days and discovers an unexpected bond; and, in a set of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves irresistibly sexually drawn to one another. In this sensuous, funny and heartbreaking new book, Amy Bloom explores the unexpected patterns that love, and its absence, weave into our lives. With her generous and clear-eyed understanding of human complexity and contrariness, the award-winning author introduces us to some of her most unforgettable characters yet.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Yesterday Morning is a vivid recollection of Diana Athill's joyful beginnings. It is also a remarkable insight into a now vanished world; this is England in the 1920s, seen with a clear and unsentimental eye from the vantage point of the 21st century. Growing up in a Norfolk country house with servants, Athill's upbringing was rich and loving: filled with the pleasures of horse riding and the unfolding secrets of adults and sex. However, here, she probes these foundations, asking: does privilege equate to happiness?

Paperback. Condizione: New. Once the elegant second city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Budapest, the 'Queen of the Danube', is now being rediscovered as one of the liveliest and most attractive destinations in Europe. Equipped with Michael Jacob's guide, you will be able to get the most out of this fascinating city, whether you're on a weekend break or a longer visit. It will help you discover: the distinct characters of the city's 'two halves' - Buda, set on gently rolling hills, and across the river energetic, modern Pest; the best of its almost 100 thermal springs and 12 medicinal baths; Margaret Island, a leafy park in the centre of the Danube where you can cycle or play tennis; the city of artists, architects and writers; and, its cafes and restaurants, many of them redolent of the city's days of imperial splendour. The book takes the visitor on six walks arranged by district, featuring all the major sites and a personal selection of less well known, often neglected ones.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 1st. Published as a standalone on International Woman's Day, the essay that became a touchstone of the feminist movement and inspired the term 'mansplaining', with an afterword on its originsThis famous and influential essay, which describes the time when, at a party, a man explained to Rebecca Solnit the argument of her own book, inspired the term 'mansplaining' and established Solnit as a vital figure of the feminist movement, and one of the leading thinkers of our time. Fierce, incisive and funny, it exposes the inherent sexism of our patriarchal culture.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'A great novel of New York'- Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs To YouThe new novel from the New York Times-bestselling author of High DiveThe 'Father of Greater New York' is dead. Shot outside his Park Avenue mansion in the year of our Lord, 1903. In the hour of his death, will the truth of his life finally break free?Born to a struggling farming family in 1820, Andrew Haswell Green was a self-made man who reshaped Manhattan, built Central Park and turned New York into a modern metropolis. Now, at eighty-three, when he thought the world could hold no more surprises, he is murdered. As the detective assigned to the case traces his ghost across the city, other spectres appear: a wealthy courtesan; a broken-hearted man in a bowler hat; and an ambitious politician, Samuel, whose lifelong friendship was a source of joy and frustration.In a life of industry and restraint, where is the space for love? As restlessly inventive and absorbing as its protagonist, The Great Mistake is the story of a city, and a singular man, transformed by longing.'Jonathan Lee has taken the bare facts of a nearly forgotten life and turned them into a rich and unforgettable story'- Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13'A meditation on the meaning of success, and a magical escape from the twenty-first century that sent me back feeling wiser and more hopeful'- Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens'A wonder and a delight'- Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'Jefferson's eye for details yields some devastatingly honest and painful insights' The Times'Captivating. Charm is this book's watchword' Colin Grant, Guardian The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the limits and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. 'Negroland is a sharp-eyed cultural commentary on an era of America that has often been too simply told' Aminatta Forna, Guardian 'Jefferson writes with piercing clarity of a childhood which was full of love and opportunity at home, but also saturated by contradictions, confusions and a racism which corrodes, like rust, to the heart's core' Observer 'Utterly compelling. a remarkable achievement' Sunday Times.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In 1933, President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt took up residence in the White House. With them went the celebrated journalist Lorena Hickok - Hick to friends - a straight-talking reporter from South Dakota, whose passionate relationship with the idealistic, patrician First Lady would shape the rest of their lives. Told by the indomitable Hick, White Houses is the story of Eleanor and Hick's hidden love, and of Hick's unlikely journey from her dirt-poor childhood to the centre of privilege and power. Filled with fascinating back-room politics, the secrets and scandals of the era, and exploring the potency of enduring love, it is an imaginative tour-de-force from a writer of extraordinary and exuberant talent.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A father and his boys have won 'the war': the father's term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave Kansas and drive through the night to their new apartment in Albuquerque. Settled in new schools, the brothers join basketball teams, make friends. Meanwhile their father works from home, smoking cheap cigars to hide another smell. Soon his missteps - the dead-eyed absentmindedness, the late-night noises, the comings and goings of increasingly odd characters - become sinister, and the boys find themselves watching him transform into someone they no longer recognize.Set in the stark landscape of New Mexico and the family's cramped apartment, One of the Boys delivers a superbly nuanced portrait of a violent and menacing man, manipulating the world around him that it might service his idea of himself. Brutal and urgent, this masterful debut is a story of survival: two brothers driven to protect each other from the father they once trusted.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This Living and Immortal Thing inhabits a world of medicine, research, cancer and death. Its disillusioned and often darkly funny narrator is an Irish oncologist, who is searching for a scientific breakthrough in the lab of a New York hospital while struggling with his failing marriage and his growing alienation within the city's urban spaces. Tending to the health of his laboratory mice, he finds comfort in work that is measurable, results that are quantifiable.But life is every bit as persistent as the illness he studies. As he starts a new treatment on his mice, he meets a beautiful but elusive Russian translator at the hospital, his estranged wife gets in touch and his supervisor pressures him to push ahead professionally. And always there is the pull of family, of the place he considers home.Shot through with Duffy's haunting, beautiful descriptions of the science underlying cancer, which starkly illustrate the paradox of an illness with a persistent and deadly life force at its heart, This Living and Immortal Thing shows how the cruelty of the disease is a price we pay for the joy and complexity of being in the world.

Paperback. Condizione: New. It is 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down. Jonathan Fabrizius, a journalist living in West Germany, is asked to travel to the contested lands of former East Prussia - where the Nazi legacy lives on in buildings and fortifications - to write about the route for a car rally. It's a plum job, but his interest is piqued by a personal connection. Here, among the refugees fleeing the advancing Russians in 1945, he was born.Homeland is a nuanced work from one of the great modern European storytellers, in which an everyday German comes face to face with his painful family history, and devastating questions about ordinary Germans' complicity in the war.

Paperback. Condizione: New. "Stylish, mordant, and pitch-perfect - I read it in one sitting. If Rachel Cusk or Sally Rooney had been junior doctors they might have come up with something like this" - Gavin Francis, author of Recovery---Intravenous lines, catheters, bodies in distress, wounds: three young surgical interns working the night shift must care for - and keep alive - the influx of patients, while frightened and uncertain about what the night will throw at them.The Night Interns beautifully conjures the alien space of the hospital wards and corridors through the viewpoint of one of the interns, as he comes to terms with the bodily reality of the patients and the bizarre instruments of healing. Equally unsettling for the inexperienced junior staff are the dysfunctional hierarchies of the hospital workplace. Under intense pressure and with very little sleep, the interns become inured to their encounters with sickness, all the while searching for the meaning in their work.By turns moving, shocking, and darkly funny, The Night Interns fizzes with nervous energy, forensic insight and moral tension, as it evokes life and death on the frontline.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital. She has learned to say this flatly and without emotion, the way she says her name (Marina), her doll's name (also Marina) and her age (seven). Her parents were killed in a car crash and now she lives in the orphanage with the other little girls. But Marina is not like the other little girls.In the curious, hyperreal, feverishly serious world of childhood, Marina and the girls play games of desire and warfare. The daily rituals of playtime, lunchtime and bedtime are charged with a horror; horror is licked by the dark flames of love. When Marina introduces the girls to Marina the Doll, she sets in motion a chain of events from which there can be no release.With shades of Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro and Mariana Enríquez, Such Small Hands is a beautifully controlled tour-de-force, a bedtime story to keep readers awake.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'Many years ago there lived in Zuchnow, in Russia, a man named Mendel Signer. He was pious, God-fearing and ordinary, an entirely commonplace Jew.'So Roth begins his novel about the loss of faith and the experience of suffering. His modern Job goes through his trials in the ghettos of Tsarist Russia and on the unforgiving streets of New York. Mendel Singer loses his family, falls terribly ill and is badly abused. He needs a miracle.

Paperback. Condizione: New. An astonishing debut novel of motherhood and loss in the dying days of the Second World War'Moving, graceful. Violets has a compelling, quiet power all the way to its exquisitely affecting end' Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy and The End We Start From'Stunning and original. Written in pristine prose, it reminded me of the possibilities of language' Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll FactoryA young woman, Violet, lies in a hospital bed in the closing days of World War Two. Her pregnancy is over and she is no longer able to conceive. With her husband deployed in Burma and her friends caught up in transitory love affairs, she must find a way to put herself back together.In a small, watchful town in the Welsh valleys, another Violet contemplates the fate she shares with her unborn child. Unwed, an overseas posting offers a temporary way out. Plunged into the heat and disorder of Naples, her body begins to reveal the responsibility it carries even as she is drawn into the burnished circle of a charismatic new friend, Maggie.Between these two Violets, sung into being like a babe in a nursery rhyme: a son. As their lives begin to intertwine, a spellbinding story of women's courage emerges, suffused with power, lyricism and beauty, from an exhilarating new voice in British fiction.'Beautiful, inventive and deeply moving' Liz Berry'A novel of taut symmetry and dissonance. Alex Hyde's prose is rhythmically acute and emotionally layered. This is a subtle and daring book' Margo Jefferson.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Ireland is flooded, derelict. It never stops raining. The Kid in Yellow has stolen the babba from the Earlie King. Why? Something to do with the King's daughter, and a talking statue, something godawful. And from every wall the King's Eye watches. And yet the city is full of hearts-defiant-sprayed in yellow, the mark of the Kid. It cannot end well. Can it? Follow the Kid, hear the tale. Roll up! Roll up!

Paperback. Condizione: New. What do the English think? Every country has a dominant set of beliefs and attitudes concerning everything from how to live a good life, how we should organize society, and the roles of the sexes. Yet despite many attempts to define our national character, what might be called the nation's philosophy has remained largely unexamined until now. Philosopher Julian Baggini pinpointed postcode S66 on the outskirts of Rotherham as England in microcosm - an area that reflected most accurately the full range of the nation's inhabitants, its most typical mix of urban and rural, old and young, married and single. He then spent six months living there, immersing himself in this typical English Everytown, in order to get to know the mind of a people. It sees the world as full of patterns and order, a view manifest in its enjoyment of gambling. It has a functional, puritanical streak, evident in its notoriously bad cuisine. In the English mind, men should be men and women should be women (but it's not sure what children should be). Baggini's account of the English is both a portrait of its people and a personal story about being an alien in your own land. Sympathetic but critical, serious yet witty, Welcome to Everytown shows a country in which the familiar becomes strange, and the strange familiar.