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Each year, the flowering of cherry blossoms marks the beginning of spring. But if it weren’t for the pioneering work of an English eccentric, Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram, Japan’s beloved cherry blossoms could have gone extinct. Ingram first fell in love with the sakura, or cherry tree, when he visited Japan on his honeymoon in 1907 and was so taken with the plant that he brought back hundreds of cuttings with him to England. Years later, upon learning that the Great White Cherry had virtually disappeared from Japan, he buried a living cutting from his own collection in a potato and repatriated it via the Trans-Siberian Express. In the years that followed, Ingram sent more than 100 varieties of cherry tree to new homes around the globe. As much a history of the cherry blossom in Japan as it is the story of one remarkable man, The Sakura Obsession follows the flower from its significance as a symbol of the imperial court, through the dark days of the Second World War, and up to the present-day worldwide fascination with this iconic blossom.
*PRE-ORDER HARUKI MURAKAMI’S NEW NOVEL, THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS, NOW* Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle - one of many which combine to create an elegant and dreamlike masterpiece. *Murakami's new book Novelist as a Vocation is available now* 'Wonderful... Magical and outlandish' Daily Mail 'Hypnotic, spellbinding' The Times 'Cool, fluent and addictive' Daily Telegraph
In This Stunning, Terrifying New Novel From The Phenomenally Successful Anne Rice, Lestat, Her Vampire Hero, Makes A Faustian Pact With Memnoch, The Fallen Angel And Devil. When The Novel Opens, Lestat Is Being Stalked Through The Squalor And Opulence Of New Orleans, Sensing For The First Time What It Must Be Like To Be One Of His Own Victims. The Dramatic Plot Hurtles Through Space And Time From The New Orleans Underworld In The 1990S To The First Century Ad, The Fourth Crusade, And An Apocalyptic Denouement In Hell. Lestat Brings Back The Shroud Imprinted With The Face Of Christ, And Is Saved From Damnation Only By Will Of Dora, The Saintly Nun Whose Blood He Desires But Whom He Could Not Bring Himself To Harm. Blind In One Eye, And Weak, He Returns To Earth And The Present As A Captive Of His Own Kind And Dora'S Charge, Uncertain Whether He Will Ever Be Able To Kill Again. . . .
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