Black Swan (139 kníh )
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Stephen Clarke 1000 Years of Annoying the French ENWas the Battle of Hastings a French victory? Non! William the Conqueror was Norman and hated the French. Were the Brits really responsible for the death of Joan of Arc? Non! The French sentenced her to death for wearing trousers. Was the guillotine a French invention? Non! It was invented in Yorkshire.
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Stephen Clarke 1000 Years of Annoying the FrenchWas the Battle of Hastings a French victory? Non! William the Conqueror was Norman and hated the French. Were the Brits really responsible for the death of Joan of Arc? Non! The French sentenced her to death for wearing trousers. Was the guillotine a French invention? Non! It was invented in Yorkshire. Ten centuries' worth of French historical 'facts' bite the dust as Stephen Clarke looks at what has really been…
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Milton Crane 50 Great Short Stories EN50 Great Short Stories is a comprehensive selection from the world's finest short fiction. The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan and O'Connor. The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common - the enduring quality of the…
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Stephen Clarke A Brief History of the FutureWhat if teleportation was really possible? Englishman Richie Fisher is about to find out...Richie and his wife Clara have won a weekend in New York in a newspaper competition. While Clara is off blowing their spending money, Richie wanders aimlessly, ...
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Joanne Harris A Cat, a Hat and a Piece of String ENStories are like Russian dolls; open them up, and in each one you’ll find another story. Come to the house where it is Christmas all year round; meet the ghost who lives on a Twitter timeline; be spooked by a newborn baby created with sugar, spice and lashings of cake. Conjured from a wickedly imaginative pen, here is a new collection of short stories that showcases Joanne Harris’s exceptional talent as a teller of…
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Madeleine Wickham A Desirable Residence ENLiz and Jonathan Chambers were in trouble. Mortgage trouble. They'd stretched themselves to busting with their new exciting project - well, Liz thought it exciting - buying and managing the Silchester Tutorial College, and now couldn't sell their old house. Here they were, stuck with two mortgages, mounting debts and a miserable adolescent daughter who hadn't wanted to move anyway.Then Marcus Witherstone came into…
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Kate Atkinson A God in RuinsA God in Ruins relates the life of Teddy Todd – would-be poet, heroic World War II bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather – as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have. This gripping, often deliriously funny yet emotionally devastating book looks at war – that great fall of…
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John Boyne A History of Loneliness ENOdran Yates enters Clonliffe Seminary in 1972 after his mother informs him that he has a vocation to the priesthood. He goes in full of ambition and hope, dedicated to his studies and keen to make friends. Forty years later, Odran's devotion has been challenged by the revelations that have shattered the Irish people's faith in the church. He has seen friends stand trial, colleagues jailed, the lives of young…
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John Boyne A Ladder to the SkyYou’ve heard the old proverb about ambition, that it’s like setting a ladder to the sky. It can lead to a long and painful fall. If you look hard enough, you will find stories pretty much anywhere...
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John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany ENEleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball gane in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn’t believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying. At moments a comic, self-deluded victim, but in the end the principal, tragic actor in a divine plan, Owen Meany is…
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Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything ENThe legions of fans who buy Bill Bryson's travel books and voted him a favourite author for World Book Day won't quite know what to make of the amiable traveller's latest offering. Transworld has dubbed it for all those who couldn't understand A Brief History of Time (and on that basis, if they all buy a copy it will be an instant bestseller). Bryson applies his naturally enquiring mind and his way with words which…
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Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods ENThe funniest travel writer in the world takes a hike. The longest continuous footpath in the world, the Appalachian Trail stretches along the East Coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine, through some of the most arresting and celebrated landscapes in America. At the age of forty-four, in the company of his friend Stephen Katz (last seen in the bestselling Neither Here nor There), Bill Bryson set off to…
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Nick Polson, James Scott AIQTwo leading data scientists offer an up-close and user-friendly look at artificial intelligence: what it is, how it works, where it came from and how to harness its power for a better world. Dozens of times per day, ...
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Monica Ali Alentejo Blue ENFor some, Mamarrosa is a place you merely pass through. For others it is somewhere from which you want to escape. Some people come here to disappear. A small town in rural Portugal, it is on the way to other places, but you rarely stop there.And those who do usually have a reason. Men and women, children and old people all tell their stories, piece by piece, locals, expatriates, tourists alike, and in so doing…
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Sue Black All That RemainsThe incredible memoir from the Sunday Times Bestseller. Professor Sue Black breathes new life into the subject of death. Sue Black confronts death every day...
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Bill Bryson At Home ENIn At Home, Bill Bryson applies the same irrepressible curiosity, irresistible wit, stylish prose and masterful storytelling that made A Short History of Nearly Everythingone of the most lauded books of the last decade, and delivers one of the most entertaining and illuminating books ever written about the history of the way we live.
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S.J. Watson Before I Go to Sleep ENMemories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love - all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may only be telling you half the story. Welcome to Christine's life.
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Marc Elsberg Blackout ENTomorrow will be too late. A cold night in Milan, Piero Manzano wants to get home. Then the traffic lights fail. Manzano is thrown from his Alfa as cars pile up. And not just on this street – every light in the city is dead. Across Europe, controllers watch in disbelief as electricity grids collapse. Plunged into darkness, people are freezing. Food and water supplies dry up. The death toll soars. Former hacker and…
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Ben Elton Blind Faith ENAs Trafford Sewell struggles to work through the usual crowds of commuters, he is confronted by the intimidating figure of his priest, full of accusatory questions. Why has Trafford not been streaming his every moment of sexual intimacy onto the community website like everybody else? Does he think he's different or special in some way? Better than his fellow man and woman? Does he have something to hide? Imagine a…
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Andrea Busfield Born Under a Million Shadows ENThe Taliban have disappeared from Kabul’s streets, but the long shadows of their brutal regime remain. In his short life eleven-year-old Fawad has known more grief than most: his father and brother have been killed, his sister has been abducted, and Fawad and his mother, Mariya, must rely on the charity of family to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence. Then Mariya finds a position as housekeeper for a charismatic…
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John Boyne Boy in the Striped Pyjamas ENThe Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a truly unforgettable emotional story about life in Nazi-occupied Germany. Nine year-old Bruno knows nothing of the horrors of the Final Solution and the Holocaust, and is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from his comfortable home and life in Berlin to a desolate area where there is no…
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Monica Ali Brick Lane ENAt the tender age of nineteen, Nazneen's life is turned upside down. After an arranged marriage to a man twenty years her elder she exchanges her Bangladeshi village home for a block of flats in London's East End. In this new world, where poor people can be fat and even dogs go on diets, she struggles to make sense of her existence - and to do her duty to her husband. A man of inflated ideas (and stomach), he sorely…
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Monica Ali Brick LaneStill in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man who is twenty years older. Away from the mud and heat of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a ...
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Markus Zusak Bridge of ClayA lost typewriter — A dead dog — The bones of the snake that killed it. Matthew Dunbar, eldest of five brothers, is on a journey to find them all. Only then can he tell the astonishing story of his family, rocked by tragedy and a long-buried secret...