He has also published two novels which cover the. It was followed in 1991 with Russka: The Novel of Russia. His first book Sarum: The Novel of England was published in 1987. A writer of historical novels, he has also found success with multigenerational epics. Tracing historical moments from the Ice Age through to the present day, all set against the backdrop of an ever-changing England, Sarum is a novel of breathtaking scope, perfect for fans of Ken Follett and Diana Gabaldon. About the author (1987) Edward Rutherford is a pseudonym for Francis Edward Wintle. The landscape - as old as time itself - shapes the destinies of the five families. In a novel of extraordinary richness, the whole sweep of British civilization unfolds through the story of one place, Sailsbury, from beyond recorded time to the present day. Edward Rutherfurd was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and educated at Cambridge University and Stanford University in California. Sarum weaves an enthralling saga of five families - the Wilsons, the Masons, the family of Porteus, the Shockleys, and the Godfreys - who reflect the changing character of Britain. 'A richly imagined vision of history' SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE 'Supremely well crafted and a delight to read' CHICAGO TRIBUNE 'A high-speed cavalcade of our island story' DAILY EXPRESS
0 Comments
Published on the 700th anniversary of Boccaccio's birth, Wayne A. The Decameron is a joyously comic book that has earned its place in world literature not just because it makes us laugh, but more importantly because it shows us how essential laughter is to the human condition. Witty, earthy, and filled with bawdy irreverence, the one hundred stories of The Decameron offer more than simple escapism they are also a life-affirming balm for trying times. The result, called by one critic the greatest short story collection of all time (Leonard Barkan, Princeton University) is a rich and entertaining celebration of the medley of medieval life. At their leisure in this isolated and bucolic setting, they spend ten days telling each other stories-tales of romance, tragedy, comedy, and farce-one hundred in all. Ten young Florentines-seven women and three men-escape the plague-infested city and retreat to the countryside around Fiesole. The Black Death has begun to ravage Europe. "Do I look very pale?" said Tweedledum, coming up to have his helmet tied on. "You know," he added very gravely, "it's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle-to get one's head cut off." Alice laughed aloud: but she managed to turn it into a cough, for fear of hurting his feelings. Alice said afterwards she had never seen such a fuss made about anything in all her life-the way those two bustled about-and the quantity of things they put on-and the trouble they gave her in tying strings and fastening buttons-"Really they'll be more like bundles of old clothes than anything else, by the time they're ready!" she said to herself, as she arranged a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, "to keep his head from being cut off," as he said. Read this excerpt from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. The vessel carried 1,040 litres of drinking water in 56 water cans, as well as a number of sealed bamboo rods. This was set-of-the-pant navigation and a leap of faith into the deep end. There was no backup plan, no one to help them if they were to run into trouble, no documented guidelines to learn from. The crew would rely on the natural ocean currents and the prevailing winds to ferry a primitive craft across an endless sea, with the hope of landing onto the Polynesian islands – mere specks of land in the middle of nowhere. In line with the expedition’s main goal to prove that a similar sea voyage may have occurred in ancient times, Thor and his team built a raft with balsa tree trunks up to 14 m (45 ft) long, 60 cm (2 ft) in diameter, lashed together with 30 mm (1 1⁄4 in) hemp ropes. The year was 1947, and the communication methods at that time were primitive as compared to modern-day technology. Imagine the odds and the degree of difficulty (and uncertainty) the crew faced. What is incomprehensible is the sheer bravado and daring of the crew who embarked on this three-month-long voyage, in the face of certain failure. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance.Īnd so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Date: 2019ĭescription: Ships Within 24 Hours M-F-Satisfaction Guaranteed! Has a publisher overstock mark. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority! Date: 2019ĭescription: Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. Both Michael Hulse and Simon Rae are published poets and winners of the National Poetry Competition. Simon Rae is a playwright, novelist and broadcaster (he presented Radio 4's 'Poetry Please' for several years). Michael Hulse teaches poetry at Warwick University and regularly does reading tours in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. Michael Hulse and Simon Rae (Translators) This historical novel is especially recommended for British history buffs and those curious about the country. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling permanently in England in 1970. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps, in 1944. Everything about her feels wrong, from her clothes to her hobbies to her complete lack of pop culture knowledge. However, starting at a conventional school is much harder than Amelia imagined, and her anxiety makes meeting new friends extra challenging. So when her parents decide to temporarily move to Colorado Colorado, Amelia's delighted by the chance to settle down. She's also desperate for the chance to attend a regular school and make real friends. She's terrified of heights and would give anything to be reading instead of careening down a mountain. There's just one problem - Amelia didn't inherit the family's daredevil gene. She and her brothers are homeschooled by their adventurous parents, and the family travels around the country in an RV, scaling mountains, rappelling down canyons, and skiing down double black diamond slopes. a herd of adorable alpacas To some kids, Amelia's life sounds like the ultimate fantasy. When anxiety threatens to derail a homeschooled girl's attempt to make new friends, she finds support in an unlikely source. And she appeared in 2017’s La Belle Sauvage, the first volume in The Book of Dust, which took place before the events of His Dark Materials, but in that book she was a baby. Lyra Silvertongue - tough, tricky, tragic Lyra Lyra who is at the center of Pullman’s beloved His Dark Materials trilogy Lyra who lies brilliantly but has a magic instrument that will always tell the truth - is back at the center of a full-length novel for the first time since The Amber Spyglass came out in 2000.īetween then and now, Pullman has given Lyra a starring role in a couple of novellas, slight little things that mostly existed as a chance to revisit the rich mythology of the world of dæmons and witches in which she lives. That’s the first and most important thought that swept through me when I opened up The Secret Commonwealth, the second volume in Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy. IT WAS ORIGINALLY INTENDED AS A MINISERIES. “Whenever there was a day when I didn't want to get up anymore, Curtis tipped the bed and rolled me out on the floor." 2. "He would turn down other jobs I would be doing drafts for free,” Helgeland said. Their passion for the material was clear, but it took two years to get the script done, with a number of obstacles. When he learned that Hanson already had it, the two met, and bonded over their mutual admiration of Ellroy’s prose. Meanwhile, Brian Helgeland-originally contracted to write an unproduced Viking film for Warner Bros.-was also a huge Ellroy fan, and lobbied hard for the studio to give him the scripting job. Confidential, and the characters in that particular Ellroy novel really spoke to him, so he began working on a script. Writer-director Curtis Hanson had been a longtime James Ellroy fan when he finally read L.A. Confidential, a film so complex that its creator (legendary crime writer James Ellroy) thought it was “unadaptable.” In the end, it was one of the most acclaimed movies of the 1990s, a film noir classic that made its leading actors into even bigger stars, and which remains an instantly watchable masterpiece to this day. On this day 20 years ago, a rising star director, a writer who thought he’d never get the gig, and a remarkable cast got together to make a film about the corrupt underbelly of 1950s Los Angeles, and the men and women who littered its landscape. |