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Gorsky
A captivating tale of big money, Russian beauty and good books. London dances to the tune of Gorsky's billions. The most enigmatic of oligarchs, Gorsky has been led to the city by his love for Natalia, whom he first knew in Russia. That she is now married to an Englishman is an inconvenient detail. Gorsky desires and gets the best of everything. His mansion by the Thames is set to make Buckingham Palace look like an ungainly box by a roundabout. At its heart will be a grand library, denoting taste and breeding. Now he just needs the books. When Gorsky's armour-plated car halts in front of a down-at-heel bookshop, the startled young man behind the till receives the commission of a lifetime. The bookseller suddenly gains privileged access to the wealthy and the beautiful; a world filled with delectable books but fraught with danger.
Iron Curtain
'A piercingly evocative East-West love story' The Times This is a story of East and West. A story of love, betrayal, and lost illusions... The end of the Cold War seems unimaginable for Milena, a Red Princess trapped in a lifetime of limitless luxury. Yet when she meets Jason, a confident British poet, it's not long before she's secretly planning her escape to Britain. 1980s London defies her privileged expectations. And when she discovers Jason's concept of freedom confronts her deepest-held beliefs, the very ideas of family and state come into question... 'A wonderful, perfectly-pitched novel: full of delightful intrigue and wry insight about the human predicament and its unique tensions' William Boyd 'Witty, poignant and full of surprises - every detail of this cross-cultural story of love and disillusionment rings true' Clare Chambers
Monsieur Ka
'A beautiful haunting novel... looking at a familiar London through a frosty, snowy lens. Wonderful' Caryl Phillips The London winter of 1947 is as cold as St Petersburg during the Revolution. Albertine, the wife of a British army officer often abroad on covert government business, finds herself increasingly lonely. Eager to distract herself with work, she takes a job as companion to the mysterious 'Monsieur Ka', a Russian émigré. As she is drawn into Ka’s dramatic past, her own life is shaken to its foundations. For in this family of former princes, there are present temptations which could profoundly affect her future.
Chernobyl Strawberries
"Exceptional. If there has been a more honest, calm, and profoundly moving memoir written in the last few years, then I've missed it."— Times Literary Supplement How would you make sense of your life if you thought it might end tomorrow? In this captivating and best-selling memoir, Vesna Goldsworthy tells the story of herself, her family, and her early life in her lost country. There follows marriage, a move to England, and a successful media and academic career, then a cancer diagnosis and its unresolved consequences. A profoundly moving, comic, and original account by a stunning literary talent.
Inventing Ruritania
Published more than a decade ago, Inventing Ruritania has become a standard study of the West's attitude toward the Balkans -- the "Wild East" of Europe. With its Western and Oriental influences, the Balkans have both attracted and repelled outsiders, offering a tantalizing alternative to familiar society. Completely different from "us" yet exactly what "we" used to be, the Balkans have particularly provided Western European and American writers and filmmakers with a wealth of images, characters, and ideas. In her prodigiously researched volume, Vesna Goldsworthy explores the entertainment industry's lucrative exploitation of Balkan history and geography and its affect on Western conceptions of the region. She traces the national, religious, and sexual fears foreign observers project onto Balkan lands and the use of Balkan archetypes. The work of an Anglo-Serbian writer and former BBC journalist turned academic, Inventing Ruritania maps an imaginary geography that has had palpable consequences in the practical world.
Street Without a Name
After years on the outside, Bulgaria has finally made it into the EU club, but beyond the clichés about undrinkable plonk, cheap property, and assassins with poison-tipped umbrellas, the country remains a largely unknown quantity. Born on the muddy outskirts of Sofia, Kapka Kassabova grew up under Communism, got away just as soon as she could, and has loved and hated her homeland in equal measure ever since. In this illuminating and entertaining memoir, Kapka revisits Bulgaria and her own muddled relationship to it, travelling back to the scenes of her childhood, sampling its bizarre tourist sites, uncovering its centuries' old history of bloodshed and blurred borders, and capturing the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of her own and her country's past. Also available as an eBook
The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group
Provides a comprehensive guide to the storied Bloomsbury Group, a social circle of prominent intellectuals active during the interwar period.
Crazy
'One of the best novels I've read in years: obsessive, intimate and very funny' Blake Morrison, Author of Two Sisters 'Stunning . . . it almost feels transgressive' Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail 'One of the most startling novels I've read this year' Frances Wilson, TLS 'This book is brilliant - brave, truthful and intelligent' Wendy Cope 'Funny, philosophical, sobering and wise, Crazy is crammed with insight and laced with great sentences' Claire Kilroy, Guardian 'I will break him; he will break me, and when we are broken, we will be even, and then we can be put back together again' Jane has been accustomed to clever, undemonstrative men. So when, as a young woman, she meets Ardu, she is instantly bewitched by his intellect and detachment. What starts as a crush turns into something far darker, an all-consuming obsession, from which, years later, she is still reeling. Crazy is a work of autofiction, a startling story of obsessive love, addiction, motherhood and work. It is a reckoning with fiction and with truth: how these things play out on the body; what it takes for a woman to write out her own life.
Loved and Missed
With her daughter in the throes of drug addiction, a mother takes over the care of her granddaughter—and is transformed by the bond that forms between them—in this warm, sharp-witted, and psychologically acute story of familial love by a praised British novelist. Ruth is a woman who believes in and despairs of the curative power of love. Her daughter, Eleanor, who is addicted to drugs, has just had a baby, Lily. Ruth adjusts herself in ways large and small to give to Eleanor what she thinks she may need—nourishment, distance, affection—but all her gifts fall short. After someone dies of an overdose in Eleanor's apartment, Ruth hands her daughter an envelope of cash and takes Lily home with her, and Lily, as she grows, proves a compensation for all of Ruth's past defeats and disappointment. Love without fear is a new feeling for her, almost unrecognizable. Will it last? Love and Missed is a whip-smart, incisive, and mordantly witty novel about love's gains and missteps. British writer Susie Boyt's seventh novel, and the first to be published in the United States, is a triumph.
Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Imagining New Europe provides a comprehensive study of the way in which contemporary writers, filmmakers, and the media have represented the recent phenomenon of Eastern European migration to the UK and Western Europe following the enlargement of the EU in the 21st century, the social and political changes after the fall of communism, and the Brexit vote. Exploring the recurring figures of Eastern Europeans as a new reservoir of cheap labour, the author engages with a wide range of both mainstream and neglected authors, films, and programmes, including Rose Tremain, John Lanchester, Marina Lewycka, Polly Courtney, Dubravka Ugrešić, Kapka Kassabova, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Mike Phillips, It’s a Free World, Gypo, Britain’s Hardest Workers, The Poles are Coming, and Czech Dream. Analyzing the treatment of Eastern Europeans as builders, fruit pickers, nannies, and victims of sex trafficking, and ways of resisting the stereotypes, this is an important intervention into debates about Europe, migration, and postcommunist transition to capitalism, as represented in multiple contemporary cultural texts.
