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Just
in for July 2008
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The Ministry of Special Cases Nathan Englander PB £7.99 |
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Kaddish Poznan chips
the names off gravestones for a living, removing traces of
disreputable ancestors for their more respectable kin. His wife Lillian
works in insurance, earning money when people live longer than they fear. As
Argentina's Dirty War unfolds around them, their sometimes hilarious misadventures are soon
replaced by something much darker.A visit to the dreaded Ministry of Special Cases
is only the start of Englander's stunning vision of a nation in the
hold of corruption and torture, a place where absurdity, despair and
hope are the end products of a bureaucracy run out of
control. | |
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Until the early 1990s, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, travelling behind the iron curtain was never easy. In undertaking his new journey through Eastern Europe, breathing in its rich history, and exquisite sights and talking to its diverse peoples, Michael fills what has been a void in his own experience and that of very many others. NEW EUROPE is very much a voyage of discovery, from the snows of the Julian Alps to the beauty of the Baltic sea, he finds himself in countries he'd barely heard of, many unfamiliar and mysterious, all with tragic histories and much brighter futures. During his 20-country adventure Palin meets Romanian lumberjacks, drives the 8.58 stopping train from Poznan to Wolsztyn, treads the catwalk at a Budapest fashion show, learns about mine-clearing in Bosnia and watches Turkish gents wrestling in olive oil. As with all his bestselling books, in his uniquely entertaining style, Palin opens up a new and undiscovered world to millions of readers. | |
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"The Uncommon Reader" is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely ( JR Ackerley, Jean Genet, Ivy Compton Burnett and the classics) and intelligently. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advisers. She comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with much that she has to do. In short, her reading is subversive. The consequence is, of course, surprising, mildly shocking and very funny. | |
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Inflated egos, corporate insanity, slave labour, sexual excess, dazzling genius. Welcome to the world of classical recording. "Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness" is a sparkling expose of the strange truth and sheer brilliance behind the classical music recording industry. Leading music critic Norman Lebrecht charts its rise since the great Caruso's first gramophone bestseller of 1902 and predicts the industry's imminent doom in the face of schmaltzy crossover albums and new technology. From the imperious Karajan to the perfectionist Toscanini and charismatic Bernstein, the leading figures are all here, depicted in witty, incisive pen portraits. Including Lebrecht's own selections of 100 recorded masterpieces and twenty that should never have been made, this is a compelling story of flamboyant maestros, lifelong alliances, disastrous personality clashes and entrepreneurial masterstrokes. | |
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Britain's former prime minister is holed up in a remote, ocean-front house in America, struggling to finish his memoirs, when his long-term assistant drowns. A professional ghostwriter is sent out to rescue the project - a man more used to working with fading rock stars and minor celebrities than ex-world leaders. The ghost soon discovers that his distinguished new client has secrets in his past that are returning to haunt him - secrets with the power to kill. Robert Harris is once again at his gripping best with the most controversial new thriller of the decade. | |
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In 1612, Shakespeare gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster - it is the only occasion his spoken words are recorded. The case seems routine - a dispute over an unpaid marriage-dowry - but it opens up an unexpected window into the dramatist's famously obscure life-story. Charles Nicholl applies a powerful biographical magnifying glass to this fascinating episode in Shakespeare's life. Marshalling evidence from a wide variety of sources, including previously unknown documentary material on the Mountjoys, he conjures up a detailed and compelling description of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked, and in which he wrote such plays as "Othello", "Measure for Measure" and "King Lear". | |
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'I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me.' Thus begins 'Strung Out', Woody Allen's hilarious application of the laws of the universe to daily life. "Mere Anarchy", Woody Allen's first new collection in over 25 years, features eighteen witty, wild and intelligent comic pieces - eight of which have never been in print before. Surreal, absurd, rich in verbal play, bitingly satirical and just plan daft in the mode we have grown to love from his finest films, this flight-of-fancy collection includes tales of a body double who, mistaken for the film's star, is kidnapped by outlaws; a pretentious novelist forced to work on the novelisation of a Three Stooges film; a nanny secretly writing an expose of her Manhattan employers; crooks selling bespoke prayers on eBay; and how to react when you're asked to finance a Broadway play about the invention and manufacture of the adjustable showerhead. | |
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Michael Chabon's sparkling first book of nonfiction is a love song in 16 parts — a series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy. Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection. His own fiction, meanwhile, is explored from the perspective of personal history: post-collegiate desperation sparks his debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; procrastination and doubt reveal the way toward Wonder Boys; a love of comics and a basement golem combine to create the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; and an enigmatic Yiddish phrasebook unfurls into The Yiddish Policeman's Union . | |
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Martin Dean spent his entire life analyzing absolutely everything - from the benefits of suicide to the virtues of strip clubs - and passing on his self-taught knowledge to his son, Jasper. But now that his father's dead, Jasper can fully reflect on the man who raised him in intellectual captivity, and the irony is this: theirs was a great adventure. As he recollects the extraordinary events that led to his father's demise, Jasper recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and shocking discoveries - about his infamous criminal uncle, his mysteriously absent mother, and Martin's constant battle to leave his mark on the world. From the Australian bush to the cafes of Paris; from the highs of first love to the lows of failed ambition, this is an unforgettable, rollicking and deeply moving family story . | |
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In the spring of 1939, six-year-old Eva Unger (later Figes) came to settle in London. Born in Berlin, her middle-class Jewish family managed to get out of Nazi Germany, leaving behind friends, relatives and their penniless, orphan housemaid, Edith. Ten years later, with Eva assimilated into post-war British society, word arrived from Edith in Palestine, asking for her old job back in the bosom of the only family she ever knew. At the kitchen table, Edith told the curious schoolgirl Eva of her miraculous survival in wartime Berlin, and her post-war life in the city's ruins, until she was persuaded to go to Palestine. Here she found herself treated with bitter contempt as a despised German Jew, and at the centre of another war, between Arab and Jew.Through Edith's story, Figes argues that continuing anti-Semitism at the end of the century's worst catastrophe led to the creation of Israel. Part memoir, part polemic "Journey to Nowhere" is a highly charged and profoundly moving account of post-war displacement and a fierce attack on America's role in the Middle East. Arrivals for June
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