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Faber and Faber
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When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with two local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand. The town seems to grow darker each night. Fate comes calling and before the summer is out his quiet life is the focus of public hysteria. Meanwhile a religious war is unfolding on his doorstep... Be Near Me is a brilliantly moving story of art and politics, love and change and the way we live now. |
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When Nikos, a detective in the final years of his career, is persuaded back to his home town he is faced with the gory murder of a young boy near the old monastery. Echoing two murders committed 33 years previously in the exact same spot, and a mass cult suicide, it brings back a part of the island`s history that it has tried hard to forget. There is a lot at stake — the island`s lucrative tourist trade and the open secret of the drugs trade that goes hand in hand with the hordes of mainly young British holidaymakers. |
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This novel, by the author of Oscar and Lucinda, tells the story of a man who, recovering from death, is convinced that he is in hell. For the first time in his life, Harry Joy sees the world as it really is, and takes up a notebook to explore and note down the true nature of the Underworld. |
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The discovery of an unidentified, decomposed corpse in a railway wagon marks the beginning of Zen's most difficult and dangerous case. Set against the backdrop of the 3000-year-old city of Catalina, in the shadow of Mount Etna, Blood Rain finds Aurelio Zen at his most desperate and driven. |
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Aurelio Zen is posted to Calabria, where in the heart of a tight-knit traditional community there has been a brutal murder. Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth. But his mission is complicated by another secret which has drawn strangers from the other side of the world — a hunt for buried treasure launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing his bizarre and deadly obsession. |
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Precious stones pass through the hands of many people, hands that leave no apparent trace. But traces are there all the same — impressions, like the atoms of hydrogen drawn to the surface of a diamond. This story charts three lives linked by one such jewel. |
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«This work is set in Scotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley — the wide-eyed Irish heroine of «The Observations» — takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella. Bessy is intrigued by her new employer, but puzzled by her increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts. And it seems that Arabella has a few secrets of her own — including her near-obsessive affection for Nora, a former maid who died in mysterious circumstances. Then a childish prank has drastic consequences which throw into jeopardy all that Bessy has come to hold dear. Caught up in a tangle of madness, ghosts, sex and lies, she is determined to remain devoted to Arabella. But who is really responsible for what happened to her predecessor Nora? As her past threatens to catch up with her and complicate matters even further, Bessy begins to realise that she has not quite landed on her feet. «The Observations» is a brilliantly original, funny and endlessly intriguing story of one woman's journey from a difficult past into an even more disturbing present.» |
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Mixing fiction and nonfiction, Skinner breathes new imaginative life into the story of a twentieth century icon. Bewitched by the beauty of a troupe of native dancers and the strange music of the gamelan, Margaretha changes her name to Mata Hari and goes to Paris, where she is drawn into a web of espionage resulting in her death by firing squad. |
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Opens in 1944, as the women of a small Welsh farming community wake one morning to find that their husbands have gone. Soon after that a German patrol arrives in their valley. |
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Fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble, and it has something to do with the recent massacre of 16 students at his high school. Soon, the quirky backwater of Martirio, barbecue capital of Texas, is flooded with wannabe CNN hacks, eager for a scapegoat. |
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«The third book in Jason Goodwin's celebrated series takes Yashim from the winding alleyways of Istanbul to the decaying grandeur of Venice. Charged by the Sultan to find a stolen painting by Bellini, he enlists the help of his friend Palewski, the Polish Ambassador, and goes undercover. Venice in 1840 is a city of empty palazzos and silent canals, and Palewski starts to mingle with Venetian dealers — self-made men, faded aristocrats and the hedonistic Contessa. But when two bodies turn up in the canal, he realises that art in Venice is a deadly business. And meanwhile, what has happened to Yashim? «The Bellini Card» is a thrilling adventure in which a quest for a lost painting turns into dangerous game of cat and mouse that threatens to destroy the Ottoman throne and overturn the balance of power in Europe.» |
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«Che is raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, precocious son of radical Harvard students in the sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long haired teenage neighbour who predicts they will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here. Soon Che too is an outlaw, fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, as he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippy commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely, confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems. «His Illegal Self» is an achingly beautiful and emotional story of the love between a young woman and a little boy, and a wonderful journey of self-discovery.» |
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«Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, «Invisible» opens in New York City in the spring of 1967 when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story, as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island in a story of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, authorship and identity to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers.» |
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Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope. |
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