Александра Харрис4.0 In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops.
Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately,
wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern”
need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.
A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen,
and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.
Надифа Мохамед3.0 For fans of Half of a Yellow Sun, a stunning novel set in 1930s Somalia spanning a decade of war and upheaval, all seen through the eyes of a small boy alone in the world.
Aden, Yemen, 1935; a city vibrant, alive, and full of hidden dangers. And home to Jama, a ten year-old boy. But then his mother dies unexpectedly and he finds himself alone in the world.
Jama is forced home to his native Somalia, the land of his nomadic ancestors. War is on the horizon and the fascist Italian forces who control parts of East Africa are preparing for battle. Yet Jama cannot rest until he discovers whether his father, who has been absent from his life since he was a baby, is alive somewhere.
And so begins an epic journey which will take Jama north through Djibouti, war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, to Egypt. And from there, aboard a ship transporting Jewish refugees just released from German concentration camps, across the seas to Britain and freedom.
This story of one boy's long walk to freedom is also the story of how the Second World War affected Africa and its people; a story of displacement and family.
Ned Beauman0.0 Kevin "Fishy" Broom has his nickname for a reason: he has a rare genetic condition that makes him smell markedly like rotting fish. Consequently, he rarely ventures out of the London apartment where he deals online in Nazi memorabilia. But when Fishy stumbles upon a crime scene, he finds himself on the long-cold trail of a pair of small-time players in interwar British history. First, there's Philip Erskine, a fascist gentleman entomologist who dreams of breeding an indomitable beetle as tribute to Reich Chancellor Hitler's glory, all the while aspiring to arguably more sinister projects in human eugenics. And then there's Seth "Sinner" Roach, a homosexual Jewish boxer, nine-toed, runtish, brutish--but perfect in his way--who becomes an object of obsession for Erskine, professionally and most decidedly otherwise. What became of the boxer? What became of the beetle? And what will become of anyone who dares to unearth the answers?
Ned Beauman spins out a dazzling narrative across decades and continents, weaving his manic fiction through the back alleys of history. Boxer, Beetle is a remarkably assured, wildly enjoyable debut.
Мэйл Чепмен0.0 A brilliant and unnerving debut novel about the mysteriously ill patients at a remote hospital in Finland
In a remote, piney wood in Finland stands a convalescent hospital called Suvanto, a curving concrete example of austere Scandinavian design. It is the 1920s, and the patients, all women, seek relief from ailments real and imagined. On the lower floors are the stoic Finnish women; on the upper floors are foreign women of privilege — the "up-patients". They are tended to by head nurse Sunny Taylor, an American who has fled an ill-starred life only to retreat behind a mask of crisp professionalism. On a late-summer day a new patient arrives on Sunny's ward — a faded, irascible former ballroom-dance instructor named Julia Dey. Sunny takes it upon herself to pierce the mystery of Julia's reserve. Soon, Julia's difficulty, her tightly coiled anger, places her at the center of the ward's tangled emotional life. This fraught dynamic animates Maile Chapman's ambitious first novel. As summer turns to fall, and fall to a long, dark winter, the patients hear rumors about changes being implemented at Suvanto by an American obstetrician, Dr. Peter Weber, who is experimenting with a new surgical stitch. Their familiar routine threatened, the women are not happy (they were not happy before), and the story's escalating menace builds to a terrifying conclusion.
Кэтрин Шульц4.5 In the tradition of The Wisdom of Crowds and Predictably Irrational, Being Wrong explores what it means to be in error, and why homo sapiens tend to tacitly assume (or loudly insist) that they are right about most everything. Kathryn Schulz argues that error is the fundamental human condition and should be celebrated as such. Guiding the reader through the history and psychology of error, from Socrates to Alan Greenspan, Being Wrong will change the way you perceive screw-ups, both of the mammoth and daily variety, forever.
Кэтрин Тауэрс0.0 Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers’ poems exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man, Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of the light, or the grace-notes of memory. Music expresses the things we cannot say, but Towers recruits its power to bring the beyond-words into the realm of speech. The result is a debut of great originality and subtlety.
Дэниел Свифт0.0 One night in June 1943 James Swift, along with the Lancaster bomber he piloted, vanished. In Bomber County, his grandson Daniel seeks to discover what happened. At the same time he tries to understand the men who took part in these dangerous raids, as well as their devastating impact on the civilians below. In examining the life of one pilot, Daniel Swift also investigates why it is we have tried to forget what was then a new, shocking form of warfare, and why literature and poetry exploring these terrible losses have not found the recognition they deserve.
Стивен Амстердам0.0 It’s the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions.
The ensuing journey spans decades and offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love, larceny, and a new sexual order, he must avoid capture and imprisonment, starvation, pandemic, and some particularly bad weather.
In Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always has one eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shifts more drastically and more often than anyone would like to imagine.
Ребекка Хант0.0 July, 1964. In bed at home in Kent, Winston Churchill is waking up. There?s a visitor in the room, someone he hasn?t seen for a while, a dark, mute bulk, watching him with tortured concentration. It?s Mr Chartwell. In her terraced house in Battersea, Esther Hammerhans, young, vulnerable and alone, goes to answer the door to her new lodger. Through the glass she sees a vast silhouette the size of a mattress. It's Mr Chartwell. He is charismatic and dangerously seductive, and Esther and Winston Churchill are drawn together by his dark influence. But can they withstand Mr Chartwell?s strange, powerful charms and strong hold? Can they even explain to anyone who or what he is? Or why he has come to visit? For Mr Chartwell is a huge, black dog. In this utterly original, moving, funny and exuberant novel, Rebecca Hunt explores how two unlikely lives collide as Mr Chartwell's motives are revealed to be far darker and deeper than they seem.
