Vintage books Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Anappara Deepa

Говоря о Первой мировой войне, всегда вспоминают одно произведение Эриха Марии Ремарка • "На Западном фронте без перемен" - это рассказ о немецких мальчишках, которые под действием патриотической пропаганды идут на войну, не зная о том, что впереди их ждет не слава героев, а инвалидность и смерть… • Каждый день войны уносит жизни чьих-то отцов, сыновей, а газеты тем временем бесстрастно сообщают: "На Западном фронте без перемен..." • Эта книга - не обвинение, не исповедь • Это попытка рассказать о поколении, которое погубила война, о тех, кто стал ее жертвой, даже если сумел спастись от снарядов и укрыться от пули • Книга на английском языке • One by one the boys begin to fall • In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'

Three times a day in a Parisian square, a curious modern-day crier announces the news items that are left in his box. Over the course of a few days he receives a number of disturbing and portentous messages of malicious intent, all of them referring to the Black Death. Strange marks have also appeared on the doors of several buildings: symbols once used to ward off the plague. Detective Commissaire Adamsberg begins to sense a connection, even a grotesque menace. Then charged and flea-bitten corpses are found. The press seizes on their plague-like symptoms, and the panic sets in

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs. The Astounding Interconnectedness of the UniverseThe most thrilling, genre-busting, unlikely science book you’ll ever read, from the world-renowned, multi-award-winning, superstar physicist Lisa Randal • 66 million years ago, a ten-mile-wide object from outer space hurtled into the Earth at incredible speed. The impact annihilated the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. But what if this catastrophe was the sign of something greater: an opening vista onto the interconnectedness of the universe itself? • This is the story of the astounding forces that underpin our existence; a horizon-expanding tour of the cosmos that unifies what we know about the universe with new thinking. From the far-flung reaches of space, the makeup of the universe and our solar system's place within it, to the mysterious and elusive stuff of dark matter and how it affects life here on Earth

Even in an age of soaring skyscrapers and cavernous sports stadiums, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence still retains a rare power to astonish. Yet the elegance of the building belies the tremendous labour, technical ingenuity and bitter personal strife involved in its creation. For over a century after work on the cathedral began in 1296, the proposed dome was regarded as all but impossible to build because of its enormous size. The greatest architectural puzzle of its age, when finally completed in 1436 the dome was hailed as one of the great wonders of the world. It has gone down in history as a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture • This book tells the extraordinary story of how the cupola was raised and of the dome's architect, the brilliant and volatile Filippo Brunelleschi

We have to learn to live as part of nature, not apart from it. And the first step is to start looking after the insects, the little creatures that make our shared world go round • Insects are essential for life as we know it - without them, our world would look vastly different. Drawing on the latest ground-breaking research and a lifetime's study, Dave Goulson reveals the long decline of insect populations that has taken place in recent decades and its potential consequences • Eye-opening and inspiring, Silent Earth asks for profound change at every level and a passionate argument or us to love, respect and care for our six-legged friends

The Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West. This is due to the accounts of many witnesses, but most of all to the publication, in 1962, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the novel that first brought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to public attention. His story of one typical day in a labour camp as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sufficient to describe the entire world of the Soviet camps

Ambitious and groundbreaking, Electric Shock tells the story of popular music, from the birth of recording in the 1890s to the digital age, from the first pop superstars of the twentieth century to the omnipresence of music in our lives, in hit singles, ringtones and on Spotify • Over that time, popular music has transformed the world in which we live. Its rhythms have influenced how we walk down the street, how we face ourselves in the mirror, and how we handle the outside world in our daily conversations and encounters. It has influenced our morals and social mores; it has transformed our attitudes towards race and gender, religion and politics • From the beginning of recording, when a musical performance could be preserved for the first time, to the digital age, when all of recorded music is only a mouse-click away; from the straitlaced ballads of the Victorian era and the ‘coon songs’ that shocked America in the early twentieth century to gangsta rap, death metal and the multiple strands of modern dance music: Peter Doggett takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the history of music

Berlin, the Greek Islands, London and California. 1928, 1932, 1938 and 1940. Four portraits, four settings, four narrators, all known as 'Christopher Isherwood'. Often regarded as the best of his novels, Down There on a Visit tells the vivid stories of Isherwood's life that, together with The Berlin Novels, were to have comprised his great unfinished epic novel

A thrillingly original, labyrinthine journey through myth, art, literature, history, archaeology and memoir • The tale of how the hero Theseus killed the Minotaur, finding his way out of the labyrinth using Ariadne's ball of red thread, is one of the most intriguing, suggestive and persistent of all myths, and the labyrinth - the beautiful, confounding and terrifying building created for the half-man, half-bull monster - is one of the foundational symbols of human ingenuity and artistry • Charlotte Higgins, author of the Baillie Gifford-shortlisted Under Another Sky, tracks the origins of the story of the labyrinth in the poems of Homer, Catullus, Virgil and Ovid, and with them builds an ingenious edifice of her own. Along the way, she traces the labyrinthine ideas of writers from Dante and Borges to George Eliot and Conan Doyle, and of artists from Titian and Velazquez to Picasso and Eva Hesse

In 1981 Tim Parks moved from England to Italy and spent the next thirty years alongside hundreds of thousands of Italians on his adopted country’s vast, various and ever-changing networks of trains • Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians – conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants – Tim Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive. He explores how trains helped build Italy and how the railways reflect Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond

Nevil Shute wrote this prophetic novel just before the start of the Second World War. In it he describes the devastation that results from an aerial bomb attack on Southampton that destroys the city's infrastructure and leaves the inhabitants at the mercy of cholera and further assaults. The story follows the trials and tribulations of the Corbett family as they try to get to safety

Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his life with painful honesty. He writes about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father, and his bewilderment and grief on his father's death • When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. Knausgaard has created a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives. A profound and mesmerizing work, written as if the author's very life were at stake