Историческая литература - скачать книги или читать онлайн. Страница 164

A wonderful new novel from Liverpool’s best-loved author. A tale of loss and love set in post-Second World War England and France.This is the story of a young Liverpool woman widowed in the Second World War before she can know the happiness of having a family. With the blessing of her mother, with whom she runs a B&B, she goes to Normandy to see where her husband was killed in the D-Day landings. Once she is there, she meets an impoverished French poultry farmer, now reduced to driving a beaten up (and still rare) taxi and looking after his old mother and dying brother. Will these two find happiness together?A touching love story, a compelling portrayal of the aftermath of war and above all a testament to the courage and endurance of oridinary people, Madame Barbara will delight Helen Forrester’s countless fans.

[b]Short novella from the internationally bestselling author of Jake and Maggie, each fleeing a failed marriage, meet and fall in love, but their pasts throw up obstacles.Jake Cantrell is suave, charming and a brilliant electrical engineer saddened by the failure of his marriage to Amy. Maggie Sorrell is a bright and elegant interior designer. She, too, has suffered a broken marriage.Jake and Maggie meet – but despite a blossoming relationship, some of the obstacles seem insurmountable: the fifteen-year difference in their ages, Amy’s sudden illness, her reluctance to divorce Jake, and Maggie’s own inner turmoil.But together they overcome the odds and find the ultimate: love in another town.

A stunning novel set in the wake of the Second World War, Little Exiles tells the extraordinary story of the forced child migration between Britain and Australia that took place after World War II and how this flight from home shaped the identity of a generation of children.Jon Heather, proud to be nearly nine, knows that Christmas is a time for family. But one evening in December 1948, no longer able to cope, his mother leaves him by a door, above which the legend reads Chapeltown Boys’ Home of the Children’s Crusade. Several weeks later, still certain his mother will come back, Jon finds himself on a boat set for Australia. Promised paradise, Jon soon realizes the reality of the vast Australian outback is very different; its burnished desert becoming the backdrop for a strict regime of hard work and discipline.So begins an odyssey that will last a lifetime, as Jon Heather and his group of unlikely friends battle to make their way back home.

Leninsky Prospekt is an enthralling novel about conflicting allegiances, to family, friends, nations, ideals, at a time of legendary international tension.In October 1962, Nikita Krushchev and John Kennedy confronted each other over the deployment of Russian missiles in Cuba, and world came as close as it has ever been to nuclear holocaust. During the crisis, the New York City Ballet, led by the Russian-born choreographer, George Balanchine, was performing in Moscow. And the dissident movement was taking hold among certain members of the Soviet intelligentsia. Nina Davenport, the lonely bride of a gifted, increasingly, preoccupied American diplomat, struggled to come to terms with her new circumstances.Raised in Moscow, once a ballet student at the Bolshoi, Nina made an unprecedented escape to the West in the 1950s – by tricking the authorities. Ties to the past were severed, but never resolved. Her return to the Soviet Union is reckless at best; now, at the height of a world crisis, she confronts the demons of her traumatic girlhood. Hemmed in by official diplomatic restraints, followed everywhere by spies, longing to make contact with old friends, she becomes the tool of figures within the American Embassy who have a surprising agenda of which the world knows nothing.Leninsky Prospekt brings vividly to life a period of anxieties that resonates with our own fraught times, as the characters, both real and imaginary, are stretched to the breaking point by political events. Katherine Bucknell's first novel, Canarino, was richly praised; her second is explosive, psychologically astute and deeply moving.

If you like The Artist you’ll love Daisy Waugh’s Last Dance with Valentino.As Rudolph Valentino fights for his life, barricades keep the swarming fans at bay. Adored by millions of women, but loved by only one…Will she be able to reach him in time?August 1916Fleeing war-ravaged London, Jenny Doyle sets sail for New York. As she draws near the soaring skyscrapers her dreams are dashed when she learns she is to be sent to work for the wealthy de Saulles family. Known as ‘the Box’, their home is Gatsby-like in elegance yet rife with malice and madness. Only her friendship with dancer Rodolfo offers Jenny a glimpse of escape…until a tragic day when the household is changed forever.August 1926America booms, prohibition rules and one man’s movie is breaking box office records. Rodolfo has taken his place on the silver screen as Rudolph Valentino when a chance arises for he and Jenny to meet again. Will the world’s most desired film star and his lost love have their Hollywood happy ending, or will the tragic echoes of their past thwart them one last time?

The extraordinary new novel from David Flusfeder chronicles a pilgrimage to Rome made by three young men with a secret burden. But they will meet with temptation along the way…‘John the Pupil’ is a medieval road movie, Umberto Eco seen through the eyes of Quentin Tarrantino, recounting the journey taken from Oxford to Viterbo in 1267 by John and his two companions, at the behest of the friar and magus Roger Bacon, carrying a secret burden to His Holiness Clement IV. As well as having to fight off ambushes from thieves hungry for the thing of power they are carrying, the holy trio are tried and tempted by all sorts of sins: ambition, pride, lust – and by the sheer hell and heaven of medieval life.Erudite and earthy, horrifying, comic, humane, David Flusfeder’s extraordinary novel reveals to the reader a world very different and all too like the one we live in now.

A gripping account of both an individual caught on the horns of an excruciating moral dilemma and a continent at a turning point.When Michela Wrong's Kenyan friend John Githongo appeared one cold February morning on the doorstep of her London flat, carrying a small mountain of luggage and four trilling mobile phones he seemed determined to ignore, it was clear something had gone very wrong in a country regarded until then as one of Africa's few budding success stories.Two years earlier, in the wave of euphoria that followed the election defeat of long-serving President Daniel arap Moi, John had been appointed Kenya's new anti-corruption czar. In choosing this giant of a man with a booming laugh, respected as a longstanding anti-corruption crusader, the new government was signalling to both its own public and the world at large that it was set on ending the practices that had made Kenya an international by-word for sleaze.Now John was on the run, having realised that the new administration, far from breaking with the past, was using near-identical techniques to pilfer public funds. John's tale, which has all the elements of the political thriller, is the story of how a brave man came to make a lonely decision with huge ramifications. But his story transcends the personal, touching as it does on the cultural, historical and social themes that lie at the heart of the continent's continuing crisis.Tracking this story of an African whistleblower who started out as a pillar of the establishment, Michela Wrong seeks answers to the questions that have puzzled outsiders for decades. What is it about African society that makes corruption so hard to eradicate, so sweeping in its scope, so destructive in its impact? Why have so many African presidents found it so easy to reduce all political discussion to the self-serving calculation of which tribe gets to «eat»? And at what stage will Africans start placing the wider interests of their nation ahead of the narrow interests of their tribe?

Their love crossed the class divide, but will it survive the ravages of war?When Lucy’s father dies and her family is plunged into poverty, she is forced to take a job in service as a housemaid at Windthorpe House, home to the aristocratic Hetherington’s, who lost three of their four sons in the Great War.When their only remaining son, Clive, returns home from university, he and Lucy strike up an immediate bond, which only deepens as Lucy becomes indispensible to the family. Clive, much to his family’s alarm, decides to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, though when he returns, he is injured and full of rage at the hated Fascists.As Lucy tends his wounds, the two fall in love and Clive is determined that the class difference won’t keep them apart. But Hitler’s troops are gathering and fate has something very different in store for both of them…

A critically acclaimed, Booker long-listed novel that is reminiscent of Pat Barker’s ‘Regeneration Trilogy’.Clarice Pike and Vic Warren are from completely different backgrounds. An impossible affair has already driven them thousands of miles apart. 1939 finds Clarice in Malaya where her father is an obscure company doctor, and Vic in East London, an unemployed shipwright badly married to Phylis, Clarice’s cousin. As their feelings conspire to draw the lovers back together, the world erupts with a terrible violence. It is the relentlessness of male brutality that forces Vic to grope towards what real manhood might be.‘If the Invader Comes’ combines themes from Derek Beaven’s previously acclaimed ‘Newton’s Niece’ and ‘Acts of Mutiny’ to portray a wartime England where human relationships are threatened as much from within the family as from occupied Europe. Exciting, moving and ultimately optimistic, Derek Beaven’s new novel represents a daring leap in British fiction.

The astonishing Orange Prize-shortlisted debut from the author of ‘Flying Leap’ and ‘Nice Big American Baby’.This is a truly strange and striking tale that begins in the deep, and deeply magical, European forest, in the world depicted in Chagall’s paintings and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and proceeds to tell the story of four generations of women from one fated family.Budnitz builds her book with wit and art somewhere in the gaps between magic realism, family saga and female bildungsroman. She marries great technical skill to quirky humour and dizzying metaphor. She has an uncanny knack for the destabilizing and indelible image, but does not abandon sense for sensibility. She is always readable, albeit strangely so. She might yet be an Americanized heir to the throne left vacant by Angela Carter.