Author: Melanie Hudson Publisher: HarperCollins UK ISBN: 0008420920 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
‘A mesmerising story of love and hope...the best book that I have read this year’ Penny, Reader Review The most heartbreaking historical fiction novel you will read this year from the USA Today bestseller!
Author: Margaret de Rohan Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd ISBN: 1785895745 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
‘Are you going to Scarborough Fair?’ This is the question a stranger asks a woman at Les Invalides in Paris. She spontaneously replies, ‘parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,’ because she knows it is the next line of the English folk song, and the man walks away without a further word.
Author: Andrew Martin Publisher: Profile Books ISBN: 1782832122 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
Night trains have long fascinated us with the possibilities of their private sleeping compartments, gilded dining cars, champagne bars and wealthy travellers. Authors from Agatha Christie to Graham Greene have used night trains to tell tales of romance, intrigue and decadence against a rolling background of dramatic landscapes. The reality could often be as thrilling: early British travellers on the Orient Express were advised to carry a revolver (as well as a teapot). In Night Trains, Andrew Martin attempts to relive the golden age of the great European sleeper trains by using their modern-day equivalents. This is no simple matter. The night trains have fallen on hard times, and the services are disappearing one by one. But if the Orient Express experience can only be recreated by taking three separate sleepers, the intriguing characters and exotic atmospheres have survived. Whether the backdrop is 3am at a Turkish customs post, the sun rising over the Riviera, or the constant twilight of a Norwegian summer night, Martin rediscovers the pleasures of a continent connected by rail. By tracing the history of the sleeper trains, he reveals much of the recent history of Europe itself. The original sleepers helped break down national barriers and unify the continent. Martin uncovers modern instances of European unity - and otherwise - as he traverses the continent during 'interesting times', with Brexit looming. Against this tumultuous backdrop, he experiences his own smaller dramas, as he fails to find crucial connecting stations, ponders the mystery of the compartment dog, and becomes embroiled in his very own night train whodunit.
Author: Pascal Mercier Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic ISBN: 1555849237 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
The bestselling novel of love and sacrifice under fascist rule, and “a treat for the mind. One of the best books I have read in a long time” (Isabel Allende). Raimund Gregorius, a professor of dead languages at a Swiss secondary school, lives a life governed by routine. Then, an enigmatic Portuguese woman stirs his interest in an obscure, and mind-expanding book of philosophy that opens the possibility of changing Raimund’s existence. That same night, he takes the train to Lisbon to research the book’s phantom author, Amadeu de Prado, a renowned physician whose principles led him to confront Salazar’s dictatorship. Raimund, now obsessed with unlocking the mystery behind the man, is determined to meet all those on whom Prado left an indelible mark. Among them: his eighty-year-old sister, who maintains her brother’s house as if it were a museum; an elderly cleric and torture survivor confined to a nursing home; and Prado’s childhood friend and eventual partner in the Resistance. The closer Raimund comes to the truth of Prado’s life, and eventual fate, an extraordinary tale takes shape amid the labyrinthine memories of Prado’s intimate circle of family and friends, working in utmost secrecy to fight dictatorship, and the betrayals that threaten to expose them. “A meditative, deliberate exploration of loneliness, language and the human condition” (The San Diego Union-Tribune), Night Train to Lisbon “call[s] to mind the magical realism of Jorge Amado or Gabriel Garcia Marquez . . . allusive and thought-provoking, intellectually curious and yet heartbreakingly jaded,” and inexorably propelled by the haunting mystery at its heart (The Providence Journal). Night Train to Lisbon was adapted into Bille August’s award-winning 2013 film starring Jeremy Irons, Lena Olin, Christopher Lee, and Charlotte Rampling.
Author: M. M. Kaye Publisher: Minotaur Books ISBN: 1250089174 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
Set against a background of war-scarred Berlin in the early 1950s, M. M. Kaye's Death in Berlin is a consummate mystery from one of the finest storytellers of our time. Miranda Brand is visiting Germany for what is supposed to be a month's vacation. But from the moment that Brigadier Brindley relates the story about a fortune in lost diamonds--a story in which Miranda herself figures in an unusual way--the vacation atmosphere becomes transformed into something more ominous. And when murder strikes on the night train to Berlin, Miranda finds herself unwillingly involved in a complex chain of events that will soon throw her own life into peril. "Leisurely, well-plotted, affable entertainment." - Kirkus Reviews
Author: A. L. Snijders Publisher: New Directions Publishing ISBN: 0811228576 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 158
Book Description
Brevity is the soul of beauty in these tiny masterworks of short short fiction Gorgeously translated by Lydia Davis, the miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass eye: uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also extols Snijders’s “straightforward approach to storytelling, his modesty and his thoughtfulness.” Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered here—humorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homely—are something like daybook entries, novels-in-brief, philosophical meditations, or events recreated from life, but—inhabiting the borderland between fiction and reality—might best be described as autobiographical mini-fables. This morning at 11:30, in the full sun, I go up into the hayloft where I haven’t been for years. I climb over boxes and shelving, and open the door. A frightened owl flies straight at me, dead quiet, as quiet as a shadow can fly, I look into his eyes—he’s a large owl, it’s not strange that I’m frightened too, we frighten each other. I myself thought that owls never move in the daytime. What the owl thinks about me, I don’t know.
Author: M. G. Leonard Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books ISBN: 1760988693 Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
Embark on a thrilling fourth adventure in the bestselling, prize-winning Adventures on Trains series - Danger in Dead Man's Pass, from M. G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, as Harrison Beck investigates an ancient family curse high in the German mountains. Illustrated in black-and-white throughout by Elisa Paganelli. A mysterious letter from an old friend asks Hal and Uncle Nat to help investigate a spooky supernatural mystery. Legend has it the Kratzensteins, a family of rich and powerful railway tycoons, are cursed, but there is no such thing as a curse, is there . . .? Hal and Nat take the night train to Berlin and go undercover. From a creaking old house at the foot of the Harz mountains, they take the Kratzenstein family's funeral train to the peak of the Brocken Mountain. Can Hal uncover the secrets of the Brocken railway and the family curse before disaster strikes? Praise for the Series: 'A high-speed train journey worth catching . . .The best yet.' The Times on Murder on the Safari Star 'Like Murder on the Orient Express but better!' Frank Cottrell-Boyce on The Highland Falcon Thief 'A first class choo-choo-dunnit!' David Solomons on Kidnap on the California Comet
Author: Melanie Hudson
Author: Melanie Hudson
Author: Margaret de Rohan
Author: Andrew Martin
Author: David R. Pichaske
Author: Pascal Mercier
Author: Howard K. Smith
Author: M. M. Kaye
Author: A. L. Snijders
Author: M. G. Leonard