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Can a self-confessed murderer become a priest? What would the church - or the bible - say about that? And what if his crime was a most unusual crime indeed...
No writer has ever been as famous as Sir Walter Scott once was; and no writer has ever enjoyed such huge acclaim followed by such absolute neglect and outright hostility. But Scotland would not be Scotland except for Scott. All the icons of Scottishness have their roots in Scott's novels, poems, public events and histories. It's a legacy both inspiring and constraining, and just one of the ironies that fuse Scott and Scotland into Scott-land. In this book Stuart Kelly reveals Scott the paradox: the celebrity unknown, the nationalist unionist, the aristocrat loved by communists, the forward-looking reactionary. Part literary study, part biography, part travelogue, part surreptitious autobiography, Scott-land unveils a complex, contradictory man and the complex contradictory country he created. Insightful, accessible, witty and melancholy, this is a 'voyage around my fatherland' like no other.
The Book of Lost Books is a book of stories involving kings, heretics, untimely interruptions and back room deals, falling tortoises and fairy princesses, train crashes and war atrocities, bravery, cowardice, rent boys, chamber maids, love, quests, puzzles and a crocodile. From Homer to Jane Austen, Shakespeare to Ernest Hemingway, this is an account of books destroyed, misplaced, never finished, or never even begun. With academic shaggy dog stories, swashbuckling historical fables, wry ironies and imaginative fantasia, The Book of Lost Books is the perfect read for all bibliophiles. Hilarious, insightful, endlessly fascinating, sometimes shocking - The Book of Lost Books is a wonderfully quirky but utterly romantic saga of our love affair with books.
A bold and brilliant short work by the author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny. Madrid. Unfinished. Man Dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed. Max Porter translates into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind.
In Echoes of Success, Ian Stuart Kelly uses new information about late Victorian Scottish Highland battalions to provide new insights into how groups identify themselves, and pass that sense on to successive generations of soldiers. Kelly applies concepts from organisational theory (the study of how organisations function) to demonstrate how soldiers’ experiences create a ‘blueprint’ of expected behaviours and thought patterns that contribute to their battalion’s continued success. This model manages the interplay between public perception and actual life experiences more effectively than current approaches to understanding identity. Also, Kelly’s primary research offers a more certain description of soldiers’ life, faith, education, and discipline than has previously been available.
On a winter's night in July 2012, Kathy and Ralph Kelly received a phone call no parent should ever have to answer. It was the Emergency department of a Sydney hospital, telling them that their eldest son Thomas had been in an altercation and that they were to come at once. Thomas had been coward punched by a total stranger within two minutes of getting out of a taxi in Kings Cross, on his way to a private 18th birthday party of a friend. Two days after that first phone call Kathy and Ralph were told that their son had suffered catastrophic head injuries resulting in brain death. They were advised that there was no other option but to switch off his life support. He was 18 years old. In the ...
Once there was a street in Paris and it was called the Street of Tailors. This was years back, in the blue mists of memory. Now it’s the 1950s and Henri is the last tailor on the street. With meticulous precision he takes the measurements of men and notes them down in his leather-bound ledger. He draws on the cloth with a blue chalk, cuts the pieces and sews them together. When the suit is done, Henri adds a finishing touch: a blue Tekhelet thread hidden in the trousers somewhere, for luck. One day, the renowned French artist Yves Klein walks into the shop, and orders a suit. Set in Paris, this atmospheric tale delicately intertwines three connected narratives and timelines, interspersed with observations of the colour blue. It is a meditation on truth and lies, memory and time and thought. It is a leap of the imagination, a leap into the void.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice New York Times Notable author María Gainza, who dazzled critics with Optic Nerve, returns with the captivating story of an auction house employee on the trail of an enigmatic master forger In the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentinean high society. But who is this absurdly gifted creator of counterfeits? What motivates her? And what is her link to the community of artists who congregate, night after night, in a strange establishment called the Hotel Melancólico? On the trail of this mysterious forger is o...
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, am...
ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE'S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR FICTION, THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE FOR THE PANOPTICON and THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2021 'One of the most stunning literary experiences I've had in years' Irvine Welsh 'Dazzlingly ambitious' Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain 'A gloriously transgressive novel' Ian Rankin 1910, Edinburgh. Jessie, the devil's daughter, arrives on the doorstep of an imposing tenement building and knocks on a freshly painted wooden door. She has been sent by her father to bear a child for a wealthy couple, but, when things go wrong, she places a curse on the building and all who live there - and it lasts a century. Caught in the crossfire are the residents of 10 Luckenbooth Close, and they all have their own stories to tell. While the world outside is changing, inside, the curse creeps up all nine floors and through each door. Soon, the building's longest kept secret - the truth of what happened to Jessie - will finally be heard.