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Just
in for August 2008
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The Post
Office Girl
Stefan Zweig
PB
£7.99
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The
post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and
toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after
the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official
forms and stamps, a telegraph
arrives addressed to
her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in
America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her
husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train ride, Christine finds
herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege
that she had never imagined.
But Christine’s aunt drops
her as abruptly as she picked her up, and soon the young woman is
back at
the provincial post
office, consumed with disappointment and bitterness. Then she meets Ferdinand,
a wounded but eloquent war veteran who is able to
give voice to the disaffection of his generation. Christine’s and Ferdinand’s lives spiral
downward, before Ferdinand comes up with a plan which will be either
their salvation or their doom.
Never before published in English, this extraordinary book is
an unexpected and haunting foray into noir fiction by one of the
masters of the psychological novel
.
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Humiliated and
Insulted
Fyodor
Dostoevsky (trans. Ignat Avsey)
PB £9.99 |
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Oscar Wilde claimed that "Humiliated
and Insulted" is not 'at all inferior to that other great
masterpiece';
Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over
it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel
interwoven with eternally topical themes. There is a new
take on jealousy, radically different from Shakespeare's; and the reader is
plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma and above all of
unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story is a
young struggling author, a traumatised orphaned teenager, and
a depraved aristocrat, who not
only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later
fiction but is a powerful and original presence in his
own right. This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the
original, which itself - in concept and execution - affords a
refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author. In structure it
is more ordered, in plot and characterisation, more succinct and balanced
than most of his later novels. The reader throughout is moved, shocked and above
all - entertained, but never for a moment
wearied.
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Marjorie Morningstar
Herman Wouk
PB £7.99
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A new edition, finally in print again in the
UK. In 1930 sixteen-year-old Marjorie Morgenstern lives with her
family
on the
edge of Central Park. She has just come out into New
York society. Her mother hopes for a glittering marriage to
a good man, but Marjorie has other ideas. Spending the summer
working as a drama coach, she falls desperately in love twice over:
with Noel Airman, a musician, as reckless as he is
talented; and with a dream to defy her
destiny as a Jewish wife and mother and become a
star of the stage. Why should she settle with
being another Mrs Morgenstern, if she can succeed in the heady
world of show business as Marjorie Morningstar?
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The Last Jews of Kerala
Edna Fernandes
HB £16.99
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Separated by a narrow stretch of swamp-like waters, and
distinguished by the colour of their
skin, the Black Jews and the White Jews have been locked in
a rancorous feud for centuries. Only now, when their combined number
has diminished to less than 50 and they are on the threshold of extinction, have
the two remaining Jewish communities in south India begun to realise that
their destiny, and their undoing, is the same. Living in
Cochin alongside this last generation, Edna Fernandes tells their story from the illustrious
arrival of their ancestors from the court of King Solomon,
through their long heyday of wealth, tolerance and privilege to their
present twilit existence, as synagogues crumble into disuse and weddings disappear,
leaving only funerals.
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The
Family Mashber
Der Nister
PB
£12.99
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At long last back in
print. A protean work: a tale of a divided family and divided
souls, a panoramic picture of an Eastern European town, a social
satire, a kabbalistic allegory, an innovative fusion of modernist
art and traditional storytelling, a tale of weird humour and
mounting tragic power, embellished with a host of uncanny and
fantastical figures drawn from daily life and the depths of the
unconscious. Above all, the book is an account of a world in crisis,
torn between the competing claims of family, community, business,
politis, the individual conscience, and an elusive
God.
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The Jews in South Africa
Richard Mendelsohn &
Milton Shain
HB £25.00 |
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Spanning the past two centuries, The
Jews in South Africa explores the fascinating role played by this
small but highly significant community in the economic, political,
social and cultural life of this country. This illustrated story -
the first comprehensive history to appear in over 50 years -
includes a wide range of historically important photographs, many
long unseen, and encompasses a broad swathe of Jewish life, from the
bimah and the boardroom to the bowling green. Beginning with the
first Jewish immigrants to South Africa,
and depicting the fragility of the early foundations and the shifting fortunes of
this infant community, the title traces its development to robust maturity amidst
turbulent social and political currents. These include the strident antisemitism of
the 1930s, the moral dilemmas of the apartheid
era, the subsequent turbulent transition towards a non-racial democracy,
the birth of the New South Africa and
the fresh challenges and promise that have followed in
its wake up to the present day.Included are such personalities as
Barney Barnato, Helen Suzman, Joe Slovo, Sol Kerzner
and Rabbi Cyril Harris, as well as many others who have made
an important mark in their fields.
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Sea
of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh
HB £18.99
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At the heart of this epic saga, set just
before the Opium Wars, is
an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its
destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the
Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and
convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a
truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt
Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to
a mulatto American freedman. As their old family
ties are washed away they, like their
historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers.
An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents,
races and generations. The vast sweep of this
historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the
rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it
is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history
of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly
alive -- a masterpiece from one of the world's finest
novelists.
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My Father's Roses
Nancy
Kohner
HB £18.99
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Nancy Kohner spent two
decades piecing together her
familys history from the vast quantity of diaries, letters and
photographs that her father brought out of Prague before the Second
World War. The result is the extraordinary and touching record of a Jewish
family caught up in the tumult of two world
wars. Nancys grandparents and their three children find their sanctuary
in the garden of the small town where they live between Prague and the
German border called Podersam.
There they have their happiest
times at the reunion when the eldest son returns from the
trenches of World War 1, when their youngest son joins them in the
family linen business, and when their daughter gives birth
to their first grandchild. But instability and danger are the
permanent backdrop. When the Nazi Storm Troopers march into Podersam their lives will never
be the same again.
The daughter commits suicide while the
two sons escape to England and Ireland. The last batch
of letters from the grandmother make it poignantly clear that her fate is the
death camp of Treblinka.
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The
Discovery of France
Graham
Robb
PB £9.99
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Illuminating, engrossing and full of surprises, "The Discovery of
France" is a literary exploration of a country few will recognize; from
maps and migration to magic, language and landscape, it's a book that reveals
the 'real' past
of France to tell the whole story
- and history - of this remarkable nation. 'With gloriously apposite facts and
an abundance of quirky anecdotes and thumbnail
sketches of people, places and customs, Robb, on brilliant form,
takes us on a stunning journey through the historical landscape of France' - "Independent".
'Certain books strain the patience of those close to
you
.
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The Pornographer of
Vienna
Lewis Croft
PB
£7.99
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The son of a railway inspector,
Schiele rejects his bourgeois upbringing and flees in pursuit of
artistic fulfilment. When he gains admission to the prestigious
Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, it seems that a glittering career
lies ahead of him. But Schiele's talent drives him to portray the
moral and physical squalor of the Habsburg capital, and he is
rejected by an indignant and hypocritical art world. Forced to
endure acute poverty and even imprisonment, Schiele continues to
pursue his artistic mission, and in the last months of his life
finally finds acclaim with those who had shunned him. In a lavish
first novel of rare descriptive power and empathy, fuelled by a
blend of research and literary imagination, Crofts succeeds in
evoking the man as well as the artist. The result is a masterful, at
times heartbreaking portrayal of Austria's most decadent and most
misunderstood painter, and of the city which both inspired and
destroyed him.
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