Saga tveggja borga
1.290 kr.Charles Darnay er franskur aðalsmaður sem er ranglega sakaður um landráð. Sydney Carton er svallsamur lögmaður sem er fenginn til að verja hann. Báðir bera þeir ástarhug til sömu konunnar. Örlög þeirra ráðast í blóðugum átökum í upphafi frönsku byltingarinnar sem hófst með árás á Bastilluna 14. júlí 1789.
Saga tveggja borga kom út árið 1859 þegar margir óttuðust að bylting kynni að vofa yfir víða í Evrópu. Fáir skynjuðu betur en breski rithöfundurinn Charles Dickens að djúpstætt félagslegt óréttlæti gat leitt til byltingarástands. Honum var líka ljóst að háleitar hugsjónir áttu ekki samleið með ofbeldi og stjórnelysi.
Í Sögu tveggja borga lýsir Dickens með mögnuðum hætti og af einstöku innsæi þeim vonum sem margir báru í brjósti við upphaf frönsku byltingarinnar og þeim hryllingi sem hún leiddi til.
Eitt af meistaraverkum heimsbókmenntanna.
Service
4.390 kr.What’s this book about? Is there a restroom? Do you have gluten-free bagels? Do you work here? Do you have a restroom? Do I buy books or rent books or what?
Still a bookseller in his late forties, Sean knows that the worst thing about a bookshop is the customers. Then there’s the gift-wrapping, the invoicing, the Yelp reviews. The overwhelming sense of self-loathing after another day of not writing a novel yourself.
While Sean’s book remains unfinished, his city has changed around him. As have friends and acquaintances, at least the ones who keep in touch. The service industry is different, too. But what, or whom, is he serving anyway?
Biting, hilarious and self-aware, John Tottenham’s debut novel is a razor-sharp dissection of gentrification, friendship, jealousy and the role of literature in a digital age.
Disappoint Me
3.490 kr.Max didn’t mean to fall for Vincent – a corporate lawyer and hobby baker whose trad friendship group are a world away from her life as a trans woman. But after years of bad dates and dysphoria he’s a breath of fresh air. Their connection seems genuine, his care feels real.
But Vincent is carrying his own baggage. On his gap year in Thailand a decade prior, he vies for the attention of a gorgeous traveller, Alex, with secrets of her own. Is Vincent really the new face of the Enlightened Man, or will the ghosts of his past sabotage his and Max’s happiness?
Disappoint Me is an incisive reckoning with forgiveness and the complexity of modern relationships, told with Nicola Dinan’s trademark wit and heart.
The Summer Before the Dark
1.290 kr.About Doris Lessing
“Her intelligence is formidable, her integrity monumental and her operating methods wholly uncompromising. She has not spared herself and she will not spare the reader.” – John Leonard writing in The New York Times about The Four-Gated City
“She is a writer of considerable native power, a ‘natural’ writer in the Dreiserian mold, someone who can close her eyes and ‘give’ a situation by the sheer force of her emotional energy.” – Joan Didion reviewing Briefing for a Descent into Hell in The New York Times Book Review
“Of all the postwar English novelists Doris Lessing is the foremost creative descendant of that ‘great tradition’ which includes George Eliot, Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence: a literary tradition that scru- tinizes marriage and sexual life, individual psychology and the role of ideology in contemporary society.” – Richard Locke writing in The New York Times about The Temptation of Jack Orkney
“She is prophetic, but not in a vague, exhortatory, passionate mode. Her judgments are practical, based on sound observation, and her grasp of what is actually happening in the world is ministerial. She is one of the very few novelists who have refused to believe that the world is too complicated to understand.” – Margaret Drabble in Ramparts
Jamaica Inn
3.690 kr.She was a woman, and for no reason in heaven or earth she loved him. He had kissed her, and she was bound to him for ever. On a bitter November evening, Mary Yellan crosses the windswept Cornish moors to seek revenge with her Aunt Patience at Jamaica Inn.
But the crumbling inn is no safe haven, and Patience is a changed woman, cowering before her domineering husband Joss. In fear of her life, and disturbed by her powerful attraction to Joss’s younger brother, Mary is soon plunged into a brutal world of smuggling and murder in which she can trust no one – not even herself.
The Land in Winter
3.690 kr.December 1962, the West Country.
Local doctor Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore.
He’s been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that’s already faltering. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can’t leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to?
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
3.990 kr.The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself.
Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept. An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she’s loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self.
The ephemera left by their passage – a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss – make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.
Kortabók skýjanna
4.890 kr.Sex sögusvið sem skarast á sex tímaskeiðum með sex ólíkum stílbrigðum.
Þessi magnaða skáldsaga rekur sig inn í komandi aldir og aftur til baka. Á því ferðalagi tengjast sögupersónur ólíkra tíma, örlög þeirra fléttast saman, stórar siðferðilegar spurningar kvikna og við blasir næsta ógnvekjandi framtíðarsýn. Kortabók skýjanna er rómuð fyrir stílsnilld höfundar, hugmyndaríkan söguþráð, óvægna þjóðfélagsgagnrýni og hugvitssamlegan en jafnframt hjartnæman frásagnarmáta.
Helgi Ingólfsson íslenskaði.
Grasið syngur
1.990 kr.Grasið syngur er saga Mary, hvítrar konu í Rhódesíu, sem kveður tilbreytingarlaust líf í borginni og hafnar í gæfusnauðu hjónabandi með bónda nokkrum. Hún hefur andúð á lífinu í sveitinni og lítur niður á þá innfæddu. Af ofstækisfullri hörku snýst hún gegn svörtum þjóni sínum sem hún bæði laðast að og fyrirlítur, uns valdið snýst að lokum í höndum hennar.
Grasið syngur, fyrsta skáldsaga Doris Lessing, skapaði höfundi sínum skjóta frægð og hefur farið sigurför um allan heim. Grasið syngur vitnar um djúpan mannskilning og tilfinningahita þessa mikla rithöfundar. Doris Lessing lýsir sambandi hvítra og svartra af hreinskilni og vægðarleysi en einstæðri réttlætiskennd.
Meistari Jim
1.990 kr.Hann var kallaður Tuan Jim, Meistari Jim, en þá nafnbót fékk hann ekki fyrr en hann var sestur að á afskekktri eyju í Austur-Indíum. Þar var hann dáður sem friðflytjandi og réttlátur stjórnandi hinna innfæddu, en saga hans fólst ekki í þessum afrekum: hún bjó í mistökum hans, í því að hafa brugðist á hættustund. Eins og þúsundir annarra ungra manna í Evrópu hafði Jim orðið sjómaður í kaupskipaflota nýlenduveldanna, knúinn áfram af hugsýn um mikil ævintýri og stórkostlegar hetjudáðir, en þegar á hólminn kom brást hann og upp frá því var ævi hans einn samfelldur flótti undan lydduorðinu sem af honum fór.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) hét upphaflega Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, sonur pólskra landeigenda sem rússnesk yfirvöld sendu í útlegð til afskekkts bæjar þar sem foreldrar hans létust meðan hann var barn að aldri. Sautján ára fór hann á sjóinn og í nærri tvo áratugi sigldi hann um öll heimsins höf. Hann varð breskur ríkisborgari og hóf að skrifa sögur á ensku sem flestar byggjast á reynslu hans af sjómennsku og nýlenduásælni Evrópumanna, sögur sem einkennast af orðkynngi og frumlegri sögutækni.
Atli Magnússon þýddi.