Книги издательства Penguin Group
Название: The Widows of Eastwick
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2009
Рейтинг:
Описание:
More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorcées — Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie — have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows do: they travel the world, to such foreign lands as Canada, Egypt, and China, and renew old acquaintance. Why not, Sukie and Jane ask Alexandra, go back to Eastwick for the summer? The old Rhode Island seaside town, where they indulged in wicked mischief under the influence of the diabolical Darryl Van Horne, is still magical for them. Now Darryl is gone, and their lovers of the time have aged or died, but enchantment remains in the familiar streets and scenery of the village, where they enjoyed their lusty primes as free and empowered women. And, among the local citizenry, there are still those who remember them, and wish them ill. How they cope with the lingering traces of their evil deeds, the shocks of a mysterious counterspell, and the advancing inroads of old age, form the burden on Updike’s delightful, ominous sequel.
Название: Tell Me Something
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2009
Рейтинг:
Описание:
Elizabeth has wanted two things her entire life to keep her happy and fulfilled — an Italian husband and lots of rosy-cheeked bambini. The first is ticked off now she's bagged dark and sexy Roberto, the second is proving harder to achieve. But when Roberto loses his job and decides to leave London for Italy and the family business, Elizabeth hopes the change in lifestyle might help her relax and boost her chances of conceiving. Except, no matter how much ice cream she eats in the sun-drenched piazza, it's impossible to relax when her wily mother-in-law (the original black widow) seems hellbent on destroying her marriage.The language barrier is tricky, as is Roberto's beautiful, significant ex who practically lives next door. Is Elizabeth's desire for a baby enough to hold her marriage together or is it ripping it apart? And why is she suddenly craving the company of a gorgeous, blond American stranger? Her filthy, flirty thoughts about him are totally inappropriate. Yet undeniably temperatures are rising ...and it's nothing to do with the Mediterranean sun.
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2009
Рейтинг:
Описание:
Adrian Mole has entered early middle age and is now 'the same age as Jesus was when he died' (33). Father to the grammatically challenged Glenn, and William, who takes a 'Big Boy Arouser' condom to nursery school as his innocent contribution to a hot air balloon project, Adrian is a single parent who has an on/off relationship with his housing officer, Pamela Pigg. Will she help him to move from the notorious Gaitskell estate before William joins the Mad Frankie Fraser fan club? In the meantime, Adrian continues to be scandalised by his irresponsible parents who are conducting a matrimonial square-dance with the Braithwaites — the parents of the beautiful but unobtainable Pandora, who is ruthlessly pursuing her ambition to be New Labour's first woman P.M. — and to confide in his diary. His current worries include: indestructible head-lice; his raging jealousy when his accomplished half-brother Brett arrives on his doorstep; moral decline in «The Archers»; his desperate attachment to two therapists; his mild addiction to Starburst (formerly Opal Fruits); a small earthquake in Leicester; and, perhaps most significantly, the dawn of a new millennium.
Название: Moscow Rules
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2009
Рейтинг:
Описание:
The violent death of a journalist leads secret agent Gabriel Allon to Russia. Not to the grim Moscow of Soviet times, but a modern Moscow awash with oil wealth and in thrall to a new generation of rich Stalinists plotting to challenge an old enemy: the United States. One such man is Ivan Kharkov, a former KGB colonel, whose global empire is built on a lucrative and deadly business. Kharkov is an arms dealer – and he's about to sell Russia's most dangerous weapon to al-Qaeda. Unless Allon can learn the time and place of the delivery, the world will suffer its deadliest terror attacks since 9/11. The countdown to Armageddon has begun...
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2008
Рейтинг:
Описание:
At the heart of this sprawling, dizzying debut from a quirky, assured Australian writer are two men: Jasper Dean, a judgmental but forgiving son, and Martin, his brilliant but dysfunctional father. Jasper, in an Australian prison in his early 20s, scribbles out the story of their picaresque adventures, noting cryptically early on that [m]y father's body will never be found. As he tells it, Jasper has been uneasily bonded to his father through thick and thin, which includes Martin's stint managing a squalid strip club during Jasper's adolescence; an Australian outback home literally hidden within impenetrable mazes; Martin's ill-fated scheme to make every Australian a millionaire; and a feverish odyssey through Thailand's menacing jungles. Toltz's exuberant, looping narrative—thick with his characters' outsized longings and with their crazy arguments—sometimes blows past plot entirely, but comic drive and Toltz's far-out imagination carry the epic story, which puts the two (and Martin's own nemesis, his outlaw brother, Terry) on an irreverent roller-coaster ride from obscurity to infamy. Comparisons to Special Topics in Calamity Physics are likely, but this nutty tour de force has a more tender, more worldly spin.
Жанр: Разное
Год: 2009
Рейтинг:
Описание:
In 1933, a crime wave blazed across America. Fuelled by cheap liquor and fast cars, gangs of chancers, bank robbers, gunslingers and their molls cut a murderous, cash-snatching dash through the US — and became legends. Among them were homicidal Baby Face Nelson, outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, cranky hillbilly Ma Barker and, most deadly of all, the suave gentleman criminal John Dillinger. This is the breakneck story of America's most wanted, and their nemesis: J. Edgar Hoover and his strong-arm law enforcers, the agents of the FBI. Using shocking secret files and eyewitness accounts, «Public Enemies» reveals the facts about the crime spree that shook America.
Название: The Minotaur
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2009
Рейтинг:
Описание:
Kerstin Kvist enters crumbling Lydstep Old Hall to live with the Cosways and to act as nurse to John: a grown man fed drugs by his family to control his lunatic episodes. But John's strangeness is grotesquely mirrored in that of his four sisters who roam the dark, mazy Essex country house under the strict gaze of eighty-year-old Mrs Cosway. Despite being treated as an outsider, Kerstin is nevertheless determined to help John. But she soon discovers that there are others in the family who are equally as determined that John remain isolated, for sinister reasons of their own…
Название: Lucky Jim
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2000
Рейтинг:
Описание:
Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.
Название: Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2000
Рейтинг:
Описание:
'It is the history of a revolution that went wrong — and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine', wrote Orwell for the first edition of «Animal Farm» in 1945. Orwell wrote it at the end of 1943, but it almost remained unpublished. Its savage attack on Stalin, at that time Britain's ally, led to it being refused by publisher after publisher. Orwell's simple, tragic fable, telling what happens when the animals drive out Mr Jones and attempt to run the farm themselves, has since become a world-famous classic.
Название: Put Out More Flags
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2000
Рейтинг:
Описание:
'Basil needed a war. He's not meant for peace '... Upper-class scoundrel Basil Seal, mad, bad and dangerous to know, creates havoc wherever he goes, much to the despair of the three women in his life — his sister, mother and mistress. And when Neville Chamberlain declares war on Germany, it seems the perfect opportunity for more action and adventure. So Basil follows the call to arms and goes forth to have his finest hour — as a war hero. His instincts for self-preservation come to the fore in such spheres of opportunity as the Ministry of Information and a little-known section of Military Security. But, with Europe frozen in the 'phoney war', when will Basil's big chance to fight finally arrive? Based on Evelyn Waugh's own time as a soldier, «Put Out More Flags» is a painfully funny satire on the military establishment.
Название: Down and Out in Paris and London
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2001
Рейтинг:
Описание:
George Orwell's first published work, «Down and Out in Paris and London», is a vivid, sensitive account of the time he lived as one of the poor in the late twenties. In a bug-infested hotel, surviving only between the pawnbroker and a little teaching and writing, Orwell shocked the middle-class establishment with his observation of the misery, the hopelessness and the despair of the poor of a previously unexplored Paris and London.
Название: Work Suspended and Other Stories
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2000
Рейтинг:
Описание:
In his elegant, malicious prose, Evelyn Waugh satirizes British society as he saw it over three decades. From «Work Suspended», where Plant, a writer of detective fiction, puts his incomplete novel in a drawer until such time as he can finish it (that is to say after the war), to Basil Seal Rides Again, in which the hero of Black Mischief defeats the children of the Sixties, these stories encompass much of the social milieu of the twentieth century. The volume also includes the fragment Charles Ryder's Schooldays, which sketches the background to the narrator of Brideshead Revisited.
Название: Officers and Gentlemen
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2008
Рейтинг:
Описание:
Guy Crouchback is now attached to a commando unit undergoing training on the Hebridean isle of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely and HM forces have to show respect for the laird. But the comedy of Mugg is followed by the bitterness of Crete.
Название: The Grapes of Wrath
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2006
Рейтинг:
Описание:
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied'. Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic, The Grapes of Wrath, remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel west in search of the promised land. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and broken dreams, yet out of their suffering Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human, yet majestic in its scale and moral vision; an eloquent tribute to the endurance and dignity of the human spirit.
Название: The Autobiography of Alice B: Toklas
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2001
Рейтинг:
Описание:
For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and ‘it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’. Picasso was there with ‘his high whinnying spanish giggle’, as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it – ‘The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me’. A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein’s own autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic and characteristically self-confident, this is a definitive account by the American in Paris.
Название: Men at Arms
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2001
Рейтинг:
Описание:
Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade which seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. «Men at Arms» is the first book in Waugh’s brilliant trilogy, «Sword of Honour», which chronicles the fortunes of Guy Crouchback. The second and third volumes, «Officers and Gentlemen» and «Unconditional Surrender», are also published in Penguin. «Sword of Honour» has recently been made into a television drama series, with screenplay by William Boyd.
Название: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2007
Рейтинг:
Описание:
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal
Название: The Driver's Seat
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2006
Рейтинг:
Описание:
Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants' office for sixteen years. So she leaves everything behind her, transforms herself into a laughing, garishly-dressed temptress and flies abroad on the holiday of a lifetime. But her search for adventure, sex and the obsessional experience takes on a far darker significance as she heads on a journey of self-destruction. Infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in an unnamed southern city, as she meets her fate.
Название: The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2008
Рейтинг:
Описание:
A man of devilish charm and enterprising spirit, Dougal Douglas is employed to revitalize the ailing firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley. He succeeds, but not quite in the way his employer intended. Strange things begin to happen as Dougal exerts an uncanny influence on the inhabitants of Peckham Rye and brings lies, tears, blackmail and even murder into the lives of all he meets, from Miss Merle Coverdale, head of the typing pool, to Beauty, the resident femme fatale, and even Mr Druce, the unsuspecting Managing Director himself.
Название: The Man with the Golden Gun
Жанр: Penguin Group
Год: 2006
Рейтинг:
Описание:
A brainwashed James Bond has tried — and failed — to assassinate M, his boss. Now Bond has to prove he is back on form and can be trusted again. All 007 has to do is kill one of the most deadly freelance hit men in the world: Paco «Pistols» Scaramanga, the Man with the Golden Gun. But despite his license to kill, 007 is no assassin, and on finding Scaramanga in the sultry heat of Jamaica, he decides to infiltrate the killer’s criminal cooperative — and realizes that he will have to take him out as swiftly as possible. Otherwise 007 might just be the next on a long list of British Secret Service numbers retired by the Man with the Golden Gun...
