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A charming, witty, and deliciously spooky mystery, inspired by the work of Agatha Christie, following a bored socialite who becomes Cracow's most cunning amateur sleuth.
“An ingenious marriage of comedy and crime” (Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel laureate): when amateur sleuth and cunning socialite Zofia Turbotyńska’s beloved maid goes missing, she dives deep into Cracow’s web of crime, with only her trusted cook for company. Cracow, 1895. Zofia and her maid Franciszka have their hands full organizing Easter festivities, especially with the household short one servant—where has the capable Karolina disappeared to? Shortly after, Zofia hears that the body of a young woman, violated and stabbed, has washed up on a bank of the River Vistula. Domestic work can wait—Zofia must go investigate. Shockingly, the body turns out to be none other than Karolina. Worki...
A beautifully illustrated meditation on the fullness of life for readers of all ages by by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk. "Olga Tokarczuk’s The Lost Soul, an experimental fable illustrated by Joanna Concejo and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, resonates with our current moment. . . . What a striking, and lovely, material object it is." —New York Times "The Lost Soul, by Olga Tokarczuk and illustrator Joanna Concejo, is a quiet meditation on happiness, following a busy man who loses his soul. . . It pours a childlike sense of wonder into a once-upon-a-time tale that is already resonating with adults around the world." —The Guardian The Lost Soul is a deeply moving reflec...
"A Grain of Truth, like every great crime novel, digs up more unsettling questions than it does answers; it also demonstrates the seemingly endless possibilities of the form itself to serve as smart social criticism." --Maureen Corrigan, on NPR's Fresh AirPraise for the first novel in the Teodor Szacki series:"In Entanglement Miloszewski takes an engaging look at modern Polish society in this stellar first in a new series starring Warsaw prosecutor Teodor Szacki. Readers will want to see more of the complex, sympathetic Szacki."—Publishers WeeklyIt is spring 2009, and prosecutor Szacki is no longer working in Warsaw—he has said goodbye to his family and to his career in the capital and m...
The ancient Greeks used the term catharsis for the cleansing of both the body by medicine and the soul by art. In this inspiring book, internationally renowned cardiologist Andrzej Szczeklik draws deeply on our humanistic heritage to describe the artistry and the mystery of being a doctor. Moving between examples ancient and contemporary, mythological and scientific, Catharsis explores how medicine and art share common roots and pose common challenges. The process of diagnosis, for instance, belongs to a world of magic and metaphor; the physician must embrace it like a poem or painting, with particular alertness and keen receptivity. Speculation on ways to slow aging through genetics, meanwh...
'The most fun I've had with a book this year. Every page is a delight' Stuart Turton, author of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle They were a band of mysterious private detectives who lived beneath the streets of London... London, 1958. Elaborately disguised and hidden deep beneath the city's streets lies the world of Miss Brickett's, a secret detective agency. From traversing deceptive escape rooms, to engineering almost magical mechanical gadgets, apprentice detectives at Miss Brickett's undergo rigorous training to equip them with the skills and knowledge they will need to solve the mysteries that confound London's police force. But nothing can prepare 23-year-old apprentice Marion La...
A student pedals an old Ukraina bicycle between striking factories, delivering bulletins, in the tumultuous first days of the Solidarity movement... A shepherd watches, unseen, as a strange figure disembarks from a pirate ship anchored in the cove below, to bury a chest on the beach that later proves empty... A prisoner in a Berber dungeon recounts his life s story the failed pursuit of the world s very first language by scrawling in the sand on his cell floor... The characters in Pawel Huelle's mesmerising stories find themselves, willingly or not, at the heart of epic narratives; legends and histories that stretch far beyond the limits of their own lives. Against the backdrop of the Baltic...
"In this electrifying graphic novel debut, Polish animator and cartoonist Wojtek Wawszczyk uses magical realism to tell a moving tale of finding light in a life full of darkness."--Provided by publisher.
'One of the truest and most beautiful things I've read.’ Tim Flannery I used to bottle-feed my father’s two bears. When my son was born, they were kept together. There were plenty of times when I got it wrong—the baby drank from the bear’s bottle, and the bear from his. So when they fired me from the collective farm, I knew one thing: if I wanted to go on living, I had to find a bear. A brilliant, funny and heartbreaking account of people in formerly Communist countries who are nostalgic for how they used to live. For hundreds of years, Bulgarian Gypsies trained bears to dance, welcoming them into their families and taking them on the road to perform. In the early 2000s, after the fa...
Twelve stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, nine of them never before published in English. Of these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first "new" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are th...