Dedalus sep 2024 (9 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A bitter January day on the outskirts of a small Irish university town, and Fox, a reclusive researcher, has just received a phone call. His former girlfriend Clara has brought word that his mentor and love rival Stoyte is gravely ill and, what's more, the dying man has some final things he needs to say. Now Fox must set out through the snow and ice to reckon with the ghosts of the past. Poignant, haunting, and absurdly comic, A Mind of Winter is a tale of lost lives, guilt, punishment, and the cruelties we inflict upon ourselves and others.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This is the story of a story that plays out in real life. Tom is a stock controller. Though management of the shelves kept him busy in the daytime, his nights were frightful. Again and again he dreamt of guns, conjuring tricks, car chases, burials, disinterments, Martian landscapes and Molly. Tom is new to the Story as it was known to the sinister crew who first appeared in The Runes Have Been Cast. They make their reappearance in this new novel. Molly is a hoplophiliac, Quentin is the sort of person who knows what a hoplophiliac is (someone who likes the use of guns in sex), Lancelyn is terrified of women, Jaimie has committed murder in order to understand what it is like to be evil, Ferdie is a conjuror with bad breath, Bernard is an expert on ghost stories, Mortimer is a thug who works at the The Times Literary Supplement. But Tom is just so ordinary (apart from his visions of Fairyland). Hovering in the background are the ghostly presences of St Ignatius of Loyola, St Joseph of Copertino, Robert Louis Stevenson and M.R. James. Tom's Version is a lament for the sixties and then a mad race towards old age and death. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A young man plunges into student life, in flight from an overbearing father, in search of an identity of his own making. He is like everyone else in his quest for a future he cannot yet understand. His experiences, often comic, always innocently human, are an exploration of the concept of boundaries. But in choosing to study in Trieste, a city of many-layered histories and ethnicities, a city of brilliant sunshine and ferocious gales, he finds that life, and love, throw him more questions than answers. It is a tale of Everyman, but more than that: in the hands of Diego Marani, author of the celebrated New Finnish Grammar, this wry and affecting novel leads the reader on a nostalgic and thought-provoking journey made wholly individual by its evocation of place - the celestial city of Trieste. 'I did not think that one could weep for a city. But at that time I did not know that cities are women, one can fall in love with them and never forget them.'.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In the mid 1990s, with the Taliban poised to take over Afghanistan, young NGO worker Gwen is posted in a remote mountain village. Foreign NGOs begin to recall their workers, fearing for their safety, but Gwen refuses to leave. She's full of ideas to empower the women and bring new income to her impoverished community. When she meets and falls for the opium trafficker Syed, she begins to look on the cultivation of poppy in a new light. Together they formulate a plan. Fifteen years later, Gwen is working for a charity helping migrants in the UK. Her teenage daughter Nadia has never met her Afghan father and is frustrated by life with her opinionated mother. When Gwen's past catches up with her, mother and daughter must negotiate the clash of two worlds. 'Sublime in its rawness, elegant in its outrage and compassionate in its fury.' Ece Temelkuran, Author of The Time of Mute Swans.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - While the radio announcer reports new conflicts and atrocities every day and beggars line the pavements outside her comfortable apartment, the old woman struggles to maintain her grip on life. It is a ridiculous age, she tells an acquaintance. Almost everyone she used to know and love is dead. Only her ancient cat and her best friend Malvina are left, and Malvina is rapidly sliding into senility. But the old woman's real and constant grief is the loss of her lover, Nora, ten years ago. In this disintegrating world, her lifeline is an immigrant worker, Gabriela, the home help. But Gabriela is being hounded for money by her dysfunctional family, which includes the self-styled 'terrorist' Dorin. How far can an elderly and cultivated woman, still feisty if increasingly world-weary and prickly, allow herself to be drawn into the affairs of a young woman she does not entirely trust A brilliant evocation of the challenges of old age, Margherita Giacobino's caustic and funny novel is a tragi-comedy whose unexpected and dramatic conclusion will leave the reader gasping.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'The overall effect is like a brilliantly well-informed 200-year history of philosophy, science, music and mysticism, touched with an edge of Da Vinci Code hocus pocus, in the sense of an alternative 'sub rosa' world history never quite revealed. To say so, though, is to miss the sheer fun and narrative energy of Crumey's writing, the skill and insight with which he conjures up each of his narrators from the repellent to the poignant, and the huge ingenuity with which he interweaves their stories, including that of Adam Crouch, a failed writer and memorably seedy 21st century buffoon, who enters the story by accident, and becomes its final boozed-up witness to timeless tragedy. There's something profoundly post-modern about the dense cultural references, and the complex patchwork of fact and fiction, that make up Crumey's narrative; and in that sense it continues in a vein he has been mining for the last 25 years and more. The intensity with which the story questions the very nature of time, though - and follows its central voice, Robert Coyle, through the strange reality-shifting nightmare of the pandemic - seems entirely of this moment; as if Crumey were leading us into a terminal vortex of history and thought, music and culture, parallel universes and competing realities, where all things sparkle and implode with extraordinary vividness, on the edge of oblivion.' Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Multiple allusions from literary classics are woven into his postmodern narrative as he sends up digimodernism and the shallowness of the desire for fame. Dante, Conan Doyle, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell and other literary heavyweights rebel against the author. As a maverick publishing person, I relished the way Bestseller pokes fun at literary pretentiousness, humbug and bookish aspirations. 'The earth rotated around PR and everything could be sold including me, you, him, her, it, us and them.' Pierre jumps from the 147th floor of a building in Dubai ('the city built out of almost nothing'), and is welcomed into Literary Hell by Dante and Ceberus. He achieves what he could not in his life: his books fly off the shelves, critics pontificate and readers go wild on social media. He is deified. Hell turns out to be a surprising place. Writers are punished in myriad ways, especially 'for the clichés with which they tortured their readers'. Balzac is forbidden from drinking coffee. James Joyce writes footnotes about his own footnotes. Samuel Beckett waits endlessly for Godot to show up. Kerouac 'walks and walks all day long.' Plagiarists prowl though Sherwood Forest robbing classic writers of their plots and metaphors for distribution among novices and hacks. 'The narrow streets were paved with pages of books burned or torn to pieces by readers'. Escorted to a room, Pierre finds messages left for him by a runaway stranger, including The Decanon: a parody of Elmore Leonard's rules for writing, and he goes on to be interviewed by Big Brother. We meet Lucy -- 'a hipster and a retrophile' -- who has a soft spot for unknown writers. She had been of the dozen readers who attended the presentation of Pierre's last book. What Pierre's punishment will be remains a mystery until the eleventh hour. ' Georgia de Chamberet in BookBlast. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Pat Gray's Kafkaesque fantasy presents a bureaucratic landscape which is both sinister and comic. Mr Narrator leads an obscure neo-colonial existence in Goughly, where he is an export agent for a firm of Rotherham engineers and shares a flat and a mistress with Murphy, a post-modernist writer. An upset to one of his business deals plunges him into a bizarre cross-desert journey to the capital, where, social, political and sexual humiliation descend on him in ever increasing number. Pat Gray's novel portrays with documentary accuracy a Morocco which has never existed but one which has now been colonised by surrealism.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Lyrical and blackly comic, A Provincial Death is a startlingly original meditation on solitude and perseverance, the consolations of art and philosophy, and the capacity of human beings to endure catastrophe. It is a hot, summer morning and Smyth, a struggling writer and academic, wakes to discover he is stranded alone on a rock in the Irish Sea. As he clings on in hope of salvation, he is assailed by broken memories and the failures of his past. Fragmented images of the previous day come to him: a mysterious research institute, a dead forest, a rickety boat captained by a gruff old fisherman, an eccentric academic named McGovern who believed that the Moon was about to crash into the Earth, destroying everything. Confused, weary and sore, and with the tide rising inexorably and strange sea creatures circling, Smyth tries to make sense of an arbitrary world in a desperate bid for survival.…