Envelopebooks gb (14 Ergebnisse)

Paperback. Zustand: New. AN IMPORTANT NEW NOVEL FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSIn late 1994, The New York Times sends a group of American journalists and Rwandan guides to a small village in Northern Rwanda to cover the atrocities that have killed nearly a million during the spring and summer. Some know each other already; others become acquainted as the assignment proceeds.They all need to get along, but the more they're together, the more their expectations of each other change, not least during a trek that takes them across the border to the gorilla forests of Uganda and the volcanoes of Zaire.Maggie Bawden: "Deft plotting that offsets culturally different definitions of violence and sexual conflict.".…

Paperback. Zustand: New. Will Baami ever stop beating up his wife and become a commissioner? Will Ezinne ever go on a date with Chibuzor, Segun's answer to Cristiano Ronaldo? Will Oladayo always be bullied by Benjamin, the corrupt politician's son? Will Musa's friends Maryam and Kabiru survive Boko Haram's attack on their village?The life of the underprivileged is always desperate and provisional, whether in urban Lagos or in the countryside in northern Nigeria. In this energetic collection of twelve short stories, Tunde Ososanya exposes the challenges of daily life and the efforts of ordinary people to aspire in the face of overwhelming odds.There are distractions. Humour is one, observed in the audacity of conmen who ride the yellow danfo buses. Magic is another, in the spirit world that Mr Benson asks his Literature-in-English students to write about. But the most immediate is always sex, the ultimate escape.Twelve stories about invisible heroes, each fighting the tragedy of modern Nigeria in their own way.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. WRY TALES FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSIn France, Mattie feels twenty again. In Poland, Magda revisits her impoverished family. In Uzbekistan, Diana lets a fellow tourist kiss her. In Germany, Lynn loses her luggage on the Dusseldorf train.The Hopeful Traveller is a collection of short stories about-and told by-single women who have put the past behind them but are still looking for their anchor in the present. The stories include bitter-sweet accounts of the freedoms of postwar life, foreign travel, the rekindling of old friendships and the search for new ones. They speak of cosmopolitan, self-confident, well-heeled characters, in an era just before the birth of feminism, conventional in their expectations of men, always just a step away from displacement and alienation.Set variously in Paris, Kalisz, Samarkand, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Erfurt, Singapore and London, these stories, from a much-admired veteran writer, offer a teasing mix of realism and fantasy, wish-fulfilment and regret. Some of these stories have appeared in translation in overseas annuals and collections.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. In neutral Ireland in 1940, where wartime combatants live side by side, an Englishman and a German each need the other to betray his country. And if the nationalist firebrands get their way, they may have to fight to the death.But hang on! Just a few months ago, Flight Lieutenant Oliver Carmichael and Baron Julius von Stulpnagel were living together in Berlin, trying to sell forged paintings. So what are they doing in rundown Ballingore, and how will ex-convent-girl Mary Collins and her devoted red-headed sidekick Niamh Slattery play into their hands?A hilarious Irish farce, with all the slapstick flavour of an Ealing Studios comedy.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. Chris Hilton went to Havana in the early 2000s to escape the drudgery of life in England?and found himself mixed up with a variety of gangland chancers, all living on the edge of legality.There was always the risk of their moneymaking schemes getting rumbled by the police but that's what made it so compelling. And then there was Jamilia?a refugee from rural poverty, who'd come to the big city as a teenager, and been rescued from the streets by a terrifying family of small-time criminals."A little crazy is good," Jamilia tells Chris? and a little crazy they become, living hard, loving hard and downing a deal of Cuban rum.But how long can craziness last? And what happens when you need to escape from escapism.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. An hilarious caper through Regency Bath - wherein justice and bigotry collide with a bumpFollowing on from Belle Nash and the Bath Soufflé, this second adventure in The Gay Street Chronicles sees our hero return to Bath overcome by love and confusion, only to learn how great is the suffering of others.At the end of his last adventure, Belle was banished for four years to the island of Grenada. It is now 1835, and he is back in the city he grew up in and adores, but misses the love he left behind in the Caribbean.His heartache leads to personal mishaps when he meets Pablo Fanque, the Black equestrian acrobat from Norfolk who longs to set up his own circus. As a well-loved figure in Bath, Belle uses his influence to try and help, but has to run the gauntlet of Lord Servitude, the most hated man in England and a die-hard supporter of slavery.As ever, William Keeling's whimsical tale brings Belle, his gay hero, into a situation where comedy does not obscure stark moral issues of prejudice and bigotry that are as alive today as they were in Regency times.…

Hardback. Zustand: New. BIBLICAL POLEMIC FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSThe Book of Esther (the Megillah) is the last book in the Bible and one of only two biblical works that makes no mention of God (The Song of Songs is the other). Why is that? Why would the editors of the Bible include a story about the survival of the Jewish people in the face of almost certain destruction and not publicly attribute it to divine providence?In this new and revelatory analysis, the designer and critic Stephen Games looks closely at the curiosities of the book as a piece of literature-at its changes of style and tone, at its inconsistencies and redundancies, and at the discrepancies in its writing-and identifies two different authors with two agendas and not a lot of common ground.One is terse and businesslike, the other garrulous and detailed. Games calls the first of these M and the second of them E, and speculates that they can be equated with the two principal characters, Mordecai and Esther, even if Mordecai and Esther cannot be shown to be the actual authors.In a dynamic introductory essay, he argues that from the very start of the book we see two separate stories diverge. Then, as the heroes of the story fight to save the Jewish people from the prospect of genocide, their literary avatars become locked in a battle to tell their own tale, claim that they and not the other played the more decisive role in orchestrating Jewish survival, and either reinforce or challenge gendered structures of power.Apart from being an account of an existential threat to the Jews living under Xerxes's rule, the Book of Esther is shown to be a playing out of a literary struggle exactly contemporary with Aeschylus's earliest surviving play nearly 2,500 years ago (alsoi about Persians) and fifty years before Aristophanes's political comedy (Lysistrata) about another woman's efforts to end a war.Games offers a radical new reading of the Megillah and a startlingly original way of representing the text's literary conflicts in visual form. The book includes his notes and also the Septuagint (Old Greek) text for comparison, with its six extra sections, rejected by the Jewish establishment 2,000 years ago.…

Hardback. Zustand: New. On her deathbed, Charles Dickens's wife asked her daughter to give his letters to the British Museum "so the world may know he loved me once".That the world might doubt it is not a surprise. In his later years Dickens built a wall in their bedroom to keep her out, forced her to visit his teenage mistress to silence gossip, and even tried to have her confined to an asylum. He went on to ban her from their home and children, and publicly destroyed her reputation to protect his own.For nearly two centuries this version of their marriage-crafted by Dickens himself-has gone unchallenged. Yet his letters reveal another truth: Catherine was once his "ever-dearest Kate", the object of a love "which no alteration of time or circumstance can ever abate".In her revelatory new book, Annie Elliot lets Kate speak at last. Set in the twenty-four hours after Dickens's death in 1870, Mr and Mrs Charles Dickens follows her as she revisits their life together, reliving its joys and betrayals, and reclaiming her voice.Based on extensive research, it fulfils Kate's last wish-restoring her to history as more than Dickens's wronged wife, and revealing the woman behind the myth.…

Hardback. Zustand: New. NEW FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSDavid Tereshchuk leapt from a bleak childhood in a small town on the English-Scottish borders to a precocious high-flying career as a TV reporter, first in London, then in New York. During his years as a journalist, he managed to elicit revealing statements from tyrants and the oppressed, but there was one person he never persuaded to open up to him-his mother.He wanted to know just one thing: who his father was. It wasn't until he was in his 50s that she confided to having been raped, aged 15, by a priest - and even then, not all her information was reliable.Alongside his career, the search for his mother's abuser has haunted him, adding further layers of stress to a life already marked by alcoholism and insecurity.This is his astonishing story, one that deserves to sit alongside those of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and David Brinkley.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. Should bakers' daughter want to marry princes? (Lucinda's father didn't think so.)Should kings and queens let princesses play with dragons?Should Orpheus have made so much of a fuss about his wife?Should Ben rely on Magic Eye creatures to help him find his mother in Brazil?Should Father Christmas retire and let us give presents to him for a change?So many questions-but these are the burning questions of the day, if you live in storyland.  With children's writers inventing new formats every day, Janina David has gone back to traditional forms-Grimms' fairy tales and ancient legend-and matched classic themes and modern sensibilities to produce stories that feel as if they've always been around, just waiting for us to discover them. The Princess and the Baker's Daughter: Five Stories for Five Children is a collection of captivating tales intended for readers of different ages and different interests, but all linked by a common love of make-believe. Some have appeared in translation in overseas annuals and collections. One has been staged, to great success.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. Princess Raine is a bright kid?a very bright kid. And that's her problem. No one likes smart kids, especially when they're unaware of the effect they have on other people. Even her Dad (that's the king) finds her too much. To make things worse, she has two funny, silly, younger brothers?twins?both as dumb as a bar of soap?whom everyone loves. It's not fair.So when the kingdom of Rainland is threatened by a massive and abnormal heatwave, the reason has to be a natural phenomenon, like global warming?right? It couldn't be the arrival of some magical, mythical, firebreathing monster. Could it?The king wants Raine to go and investigate but she refuses; let him send his younger son, if he's so sure there's a monster: it's always the youngest who slays the dragon in fairytales. And then something totally unexpected happens to her and everything changes. But how. …

Paperback. Zustand: New. How do we understand the heritage of the Levant? In the last few hundred years, the centre of cultural innovation has moved inexorably westwards, leaving us with too small a grasp of the turmoil out of which our own civilisation grew. In 2003 Rupert de Borchgrave set off on a journey of ideas that took him to the much-disputed grounds where the ancient world constructed the philosophical, religious, mathematical and artistic thinking that continues to shape our lives today. This book is the product of that journey and the musing that it gave rise to.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. An hilarious caper through Regency Bath - wherein justice and bigotry collide with a bumpFollowing on from Belle Nash and the Bath Soufflé, this second adventure in The Gay Street Chronicles sees our hero return to Bath overcome by love and confusion, only to learn how great is the suffering of others.At the end of his last adventure, Belle was banished for four years to the island of Grenada. It is now 1835, and he is back in the city he grew up in and adores, but misses the love he left behind in the Caribbean.His heartache leads to personal mishaps when he meets Pablo Fanque, the Black equestrian acrobat from Norfolk who longs to set up his own circus. As a well-loved figure in Bath, Belle uses his influence to try and help, but has to run the gauntlet of Lord Servitude, the most hated man in England and a die-hard supporter of slavery.As ever, William Keeling's whimsical tale brings Belle, his gay hero, into a situation where comedy does not obscure stark moral issues of prejudice and bigotry that are as alive today as they were in Regency times.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. NEW FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSAn anguished memoir of one man's political struggle and physical resilience.The Romanian artist George Tomaziu must have anticipated being imprisoned for monitoring German troop movements through Romania during the Second World War.He may also have imagined that if the Allies won, and if he somehow survived the brutalisation of captivity and torture, his personal fight against Fascism would be acknowledged by his liberated compatriots.It wasn't. Under the Communist government that came to power in late 1947, he was sent back to prison and stranded there, for 13 years, in the most inhuman conditions.Against the odds, he survived. This is his story, translated from the French by Jane Reid, whose husband at the British Embassy in Bucharest managed to persuade the Romanians to allow Tomaziu, his wife and child to leave the country. Tomaziu settled in Paris, where he wrote this account but could not find a publisher for it. He died in 1990.…