Category Archives: Travel Guides
Thousand Cranes
Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father. He is shocked to find there the mistress`s rival and successor, Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arranged for him to meet his potential future bride. But he is most shocked to be drawn into a relationship
Beauty and Sadness
The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before, and discovers that she is now a painter, living with a younger woman as her lover. Otoko has continued to love Oki
In America
A true modern classic, Susan Sontag`s “In America” is inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland`s most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son, Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim,
Arrow of God
Ezeulu, headstrong chief priest of the god Ulu, is worshipped by the six villages of Umuaro. But he is beginning to find his authority increasingly under threat – from his rivals in the tribe, from those in the white government and even from his own family. Yet he still feels he must be untouchable –
The Volcano Lover
Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover is a novel of complexity, expression and passion set in late nineteenth century Naples, which re-imagines the real life events of the story of Horatio Nelson, Emma Hamilton and her husband, the British Ambassador at the court of Naples, Sir William Hamilton.The British Ambassador has only two passions in life
Berlin Alexanderplatz
The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb new translation by Michael HofmannFranz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car;
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
`Big Daddy` Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer
Tales fron 1,001 Nights
This is the essential one-volume edition of “Tales from 1,001 Nights”, drawn from the acclaimed landmark translation published in 3 volumes by “Penguin Classics” in 2008. It contains “Aladdin”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, “Sindbad the Sailor” and many others of the most enjoyable and beloved tales from the “Arabian Nights”. This new translation
Journey into Fear
It is 1940 and Mr Graham, a quietly-spoken engineer and arms expert, has just finished high-level talks with the Turkish government. And now somebody wants him dead. The previous night three shots were fired at him as he stepped into his hotel room, so, terrified, he escapes in secret on a passenger steamer from Istanbul.
Epitaph for a Spy
Josef Vadassy, a Hungarian refugee and language teacher living in France, is enjoying his first break for years in a small hotel on the Riviera. But when he takes his holiday photographs to be developed at a local chemists, he suddenly finds himself mistaken for a Gestapo agent and a charge of espionage is levelled
Cause for Alarm
Nicky Marlow needs a job. He`s engaged to be married and the employment market in Britain in 1937 is pretty slim. So when his fiancee points out the position with an English armaments manufacturer in Italy, he jumps at the chance. Soon after he arrives, however, he learns the sinister truth about his predecessor`s departure
The Mask of Dimitrios
English crime novelist Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul when he makes the acquaintance of Turkish police inspector Colonel Haki. It is from him that he first hears of the mysterious Dimitrios – an infamous master criminal, long wanted by the law, whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Fascinated by the
Uncommon Danger
Kenton`s career as a journalist depends on his facility with languages, his knowledge of European politics and his quick judgement. Where his judgement sometimes fails him, however, is in his personal life. When he travels to Nuremberg to investigate a story about a top-level meeting of Nazi officials, he inadvertently finds himself on a train
Tarka the Otter
In the wild there is no safety. The otter cub Tarka grows up with his mother and sisters, learning to swim, catch fish – and to fear the cry of the hunter and the flash of the metal trap. Soon he must fend for himself, travelling through rivers, woods, moors, ponds and out to sea,
Man`s Fate
Shanghai, 1927, and revolution is in the air. As the city becomes caught up in violence and bloodshed, four people`s lives are altered inexorably: idealist and intellectual Kyo Gisors, one of the leaders of the Communist insurrection, who is also trying to deal with his own marital strife; Ch`en Ta Erh, an assassin and terrorist
The Spider`s House
Fez, 1954, and American ex-pat Stenham reluctantly accepts a guide for his night-time walk home through the streets of the Medina. A nationalist uprising is transforming the country, much to the annoyance of Stenham, who enjoys the trappings of the old city. His path soon crosses with the young, illiterate son of a healer, another
Up Above the World
A chance encounter while holidaying in Central America leads an American couple, the Slades, to befriend the charming, handsome Grove Soto and his young Cuban mistress. But as the Slades` trip becomes prolonged and they grow increasingly dependent on their new acquaintances, an undercurrent of cruelty begins to disturb the comfort and niceties to which
The Haunting of Hill House
The best-known of Shirley Jackson`s novels, and the inspiration for writers such as Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, `The Haunting of Hill House` is a chilling story of the power of fear. Four seekers have arrived at the rambling old pile known as Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson`s masterpiece: the deliciously dark and funny story of Merricat, tomboy teenager, beloved sister – and possible lunatic. “Her greatest book …at once whimsical and harrowing, a miniaturist`s charmingly detailed fantasy sketched inside a mausoleum…Through depths and depths and bloodwarm depths we fall, until the surface is only an eerie gleam high above, nearly
The Orwell Diaries
George Orwell was an inveterate keeper of diaries. The Orwell Diaries presents eleven of them, covering the period 1931-1949, and follows Orwell from his early years as a writer to his last literary notebook. An entry from 1931 tells of a communal shave in the Trafalgar Square fountains, while notes from his travels through industrial
