The Shadow of the Pomegranate PDF Download

Author: Jean Plaidy
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446411575
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A deliciously atmospheric, moving and evocative historical novel from multi-million copy and international bestselling author Jean Plaidy - perfect for fans of Philippa Gregory. 'Plaidy excels at blending history with romance and drama' -- New York Times 'Full-blooded, dramatic, exciting' - Observer 'Easy to read and hard to put down' -- ***** Reader review 'A compulsive, enjoyable and interesting read' -- ***** Reader review 'If you like history, and/or historical fiction, Jean Plaidy is the one for you. She has a knack for pulling you right into the story straight away' -- ***** Reader review ***************************************************** The young King Henry VIII spends his time basking in the pageants and games of his glittering court - all the while, his doting queen's health and fortunes fade. Henry's affection for his older wife soon strays, and the neglected Katherine decides to use her power as Queen to dangerous foreign advantage. Overseas battles play on Henry's volatile temper, and his defeat in France has changed the good-natured boy Katherine loved into an infamously callous ruler. With no legitimate heir yet born, Katherine once again begins to fear for her future... The Tudor saga continues in The King's Secret Matter.

Author: Tariq Ali
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480448532
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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“Tariq Ali captures the humanity and splendor of Muslim Spain . . . real history as well as fiction . . . a book to be relished and devoured” (The Independent). The savagery of the Reconquest tore apart the world of the Banu Hudayl family. For the doomed Muslims of late-fifteenth-century Spain, the approaching forces of Christendom bring not peace but the sword. Capturing the brutality of a war both military and cultural—and the price paid by the innocent—Tariq Ali opens his Islam Quintet with a harrowing and profound historical fiction.

Author: Tariq Ali
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480448583
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1701

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Book Description
Five nuanced and powerful historical novels depicting the clashes among Muslims, Christians, and Jews from the Crusades to twenty-first-century London. Celebrated British-Pakistani journalist and author Tariq Ali takes a mind-expanding journey through the ages with these five acclaimed works of fiction, available now in one collection. Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree: “Ali captures the humanity and splendor of Muslim Spain” in “an enthralling story, unraveled with thrift and verve” (The Independent). For the doomed Moors, the fall of Granada and the approaching forces of Christendom bring not peace but the sword. The Book of Saladin: After Saladin reclaims the holy city of Jerusalem from the Crusaders, he turns to a Jewish scribe to record his story, which Edward Said calls “a narrative for our time, haunted by distant events and characters who are closer to us than we had dreamed.” The Stone Woman: “Ali paints a vivid picture of a fading world,” proclaims the New York Times Book Review, as a distant descendant of an exiled Ottoman courtier suffers a stroke in Istanbul, and his family rushes to his side to hear his last stories. A Sultan in Palermo: In “a marvelously paced and boisterously told novel of intrigue, love, insurrection and manipulation,” cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi is caught between his friendship with King Roger of Sicily and the resentments of his fellow Muslims (The Guardian). Night of the Golden Butterfly: A Lahore-born writer living in London is called back to his homeland by an old friend who, at seventy-five, has finally fallen in love. “If Pakistan is a land of untold stories,” writes the New Statesman, Ali is “the country’s finest historian and critic.”

Author: Tariq Ali
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859843642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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'Ali spins a web of tales that is as inventive and fantastical as the Arabian nights.'âe"The Times.

Author: Tariq Ali
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781680035
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The Book of Saladin is the fictional memoir of Saladin, the Kurdish liberator of Jerusalem, as dictated to a Jewish scribe, Ibn Yakub. Saladin grants Ibn Yakub permission to talk to his wife and retainers so that he might present a full portrait in the Sultan’s memoirs. A series of interconnected stories follows, tales brimming over with warmth, earthy humor and passions in which ideals clash with realities and dreams are confounded by desires. At the heart of the novel is an affecting love affair between the Sultan’s favored wife, Jamila, and the beautiful Halina, a later addition to the harem. The novel charts the rise of Saladin as Sultan of Egypt and Syria and follows him as he prepares, in alliance with his Jewish and Christian subjects, to take Jerusalem back from the Crusaders. This is a medieval story, but much of it will be uncannily familiar to those who follow events in contemporary Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. Betrayed hopes, disillusioned soldiers and unrealistic alliances form the backdrop to The Book of Saladin.

Author: Sarah Gabriel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439158134
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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An intensely powerful and moving memoir about genetics, mortality, family, femininity, and the author’s battle with cancer After the grief of losing her mother to cancer when Sarah Gabriel was a teenager, she had learned to appreciate "the charms of simple happiness." With a career as a journalist, a home in Oxford, England, a husband, and two young daughters, she was content. But then at age forty-four, she was diagnosed with breast cancer—the result of M18T, an inherited mutation on the BRCA1 gene that had taken the lives of her mother and countless female ancestors. Eating Pomegranates is Gabriel’s candid and incredibly intimate story of being forced to acknowledge that while you can try to overcome the loss of a parent, you can never escape your genetic legacy. Being diagnosed with the same disease that killed her mother compelled Gabriel to write this story. In her struggle for survival, she recounts the rigors of her treatments and considers the impact of a microscopic piece of DNA on generations of her family’s dynamics. She also revisits her past in an effort to reclaim her identity and learn more about the mother who disappeared too early from her life. Beautiful and brutal, Eating Pomegranates—like the myth of Persephone and Demeter, which inspires the title—is about mothers and motherless daughters. It is about a woman so afraid of abandoning her children that she is hardly able to look at them, and about the history of breast cancer itself, from early radical surgeries to contemporary medicine. Combining passion, humor, fierce intelligence, and clinical detail, Eating Pomegranates is an extraordinary book about an all-too-ordinary disease.

Author: Tariq Ali
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168930X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The fourth novel in Tariq Ali’s ‘Islam Quintet’ charts the life and loves of the medieval cartographer Muhammed al-Idrisi. Torn between his close friendship with the sultan and his friends who are leaving the island or plotting a resistance to Norman rule, Idrisi finds temporary solace in the harem; but his conscience is troubled... A Sultan in Palermo is a mythic novel in which pride, greed, and lust intermingle with resistance and greatness. It echoes a past that can still be heard today. Praise for the Islam Quintet: “A richly woven tapestry that even before its completion meritscomparison with Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy.” Kirkus Reviews

Author: Gulī Taraqqī
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039306333X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
A collection of stories from the Iranian author includes a tale about a woman whose former maid becomes her jailer and a story about an old woman searching for her fugitive sons in Sweden.

Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143117971
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The authors describe their introspective journeys to Greece and France, during which they reconnected while Sue grappled with midlife challenges and writer's block and Ann struggled with heartbreak and post-college career questions.

Author: W. G. Sebald
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 081122130X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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"The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The Rings of Saturn—with its curious archive of photographs—records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."