Portobello Books (13 kníh )

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  Kapka Kassabova, Kapka Kassabova A Street without a Name EN

  After years on the outside, Bulgaria has finally made it into the EU club, but beyond the cliches about undrinkable plonk, cheap property, and assassins with poison-tipped umbrellas, the country remains a largely unknown quantity. Born on the muddy outskirts of Sofia, Kapka Kassabova grew up under Communism, got away just as soon as she could, and has loved and hated her homeland in equal measure ever since. In this…

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  Ian Wright Brilliant Maps

  Which nations have North Korean embassies? What percentage of young people live with their families? Which country lists volleyball as its national sport? How much does it cost to get a pint around the world? And where can you find lions in the wild?Revel

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  Katherine Russell Rich Dreaming in Hindi EN

  Having survived a serious illness and now at an impasse in her career, Rich spontaneously accepts a freelance assignment to go to India, where she finds herself utterly overwhelmed by the place and the language. Before she knows it she is on her way to Udaipur, a city in Rajasthan, to live with a local family and join a special language school offering 'total immersion'. What follows is a year of linguistic…

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  James Patterson Get Me Out of Here! EN

  Hi I'm Rafe and this is my latest tale of middle school madness! I get to move to the Big City but we live in the world's dinkiest house. I'm accepted into an amazing school where all the kids are super-smart snobs. My first assignment is to create drawings based on my awesome life experiences but I can't think of one.

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  Yoko Tawada Memoirs of a Polar Bear

  Three bears. The first, a diligent memoirist whose unlikely success forces her to flee Soviet Russia. The second, her daughter, a skilled dancer in an East Berlin circus. The third, Knut, a baby bear born and raised in Berlin Zoo at the beginning of ...

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  Lars Husum My Friend Jesus Christ EN

  When Nick is 13, he loses his parents in a car-crash. His sister, seven years his elder, is left to look after him. As he grows up, she longs to lose this brotherly millstone around her neck, but he cannot bear the thought of losing her protection. So Nick goes to extremes to retain her care and attention, putting himself, his girlfriend and others in harm's way, striking up with a gang, and administering violence…

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  Rose George Nine Pints

  Most humans contain between nine and twelve pints of blood. Here Rose George, who probably contains nine pints, tells nine different stories about the liquid that sustains us, discovering what it reveals about who we are...

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  Hiromi Kawakami Strange Weather in Tokyo EN

  An award-winning novel from one of Japan's most exciting literary voices: a short, simple and touching story of an unlikely love that blossoms across generations, and between seasons. Tsukiko is in her late 30s and living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, 'Sensei', in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired and, she presumes, a widower. After this initial…

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  Herta Müller The Appointment EN

  'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp'. So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her…

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  Charlie English The Snow Tourist EN

  In The Snow Tourist, Charlie English writes: Snow is rarely, if ever, merely white. The angles and surfaces of snow crystals reflect and refract the different colours of sunlight that play upon them like the glass in a chandelier. The book has something of this, too: like individual sparkles in a homogenous whole, each chapter is a self-contained travelogue with a distinct destination and a linked snow-related…

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  Han Kang The Vegetarian EN

  Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more 'plant-like' existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are…

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  Han Kang The White Book

  From the author of The Vegetarian and Human Acts comes a book like no other. The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a list of white things. It is a book about mourning, rebirth and the tenacity of the human spirit. It is as stunning investigation of the fragility, beauty and strangeness of life.

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  Václav Havel To the Castle and Back EN

  This is the paperback edition of the intimate final memoirs from the great dissident-turned-politician who, along with Walesa and Gorbachev, will always be an icon of the magnificent, bloodless collapse of Soviet Bloc Communism. As president first of Czechoslovakia and then of the nascent Czech Republic, Havel led central Europe out of communism and into the twenty-first century before stepping down 5 years ago, in…