James Buchan

In the early 18th century, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by centurys end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economies - all of which continues to echo loudly today. Adam Smith penned "The Wealth of Nations". James Boswell produced "The Life of Samuel Johnson". Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence.James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of an historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into being.

When mysterious loner Jim Smith moves into remote Paradise Farmhouse, he experiences some strange but wonderful midnight visits from an ethereal woman. He soon discovers that this dream-like figure is the incarnation of a 1960s beauty, immortalized in a famous nude portrait that belongs to his neighbour. Intrigued, Jim abandons his customary aloofness to find out more, and accepts a dinner invitation from his landlords - a billionaire-thug and his beautiful but mistreated wife.The dinner party - a chance for a brilliantly satirical sketch of the braying upper class hunting set - is disastrous and, soon after, Jim''s pastoral idyll disintegrates. His lambs die, cows give no milk, bees swarm. Sensing his ghostly lover has turned malevolent, Jim knows he must placate her before the circle of decay reaches those he loves - even if that means making the ultimate sacrifice. Both unsettling ghost story and intense love story, "The Gate of Air" is by turns poetic, learned, satirical and allegorical. This is a beautifully crafted novel about love and loneliness, life and death, and the indelible traces we leave behind us when we die.

1974. Eighteen-year-old drifter John Pitt leaves England with nothing more than his wits and a desire to see the world. When he reaches Iran, despite a poorly forged university degree, he lands a job teaching English. On his first day, he is struck by a veiled woman with luminous black eyes and lovely feet - the headstrong Shirin. The two fall naively and fiercely in love, without considering the consequences of a love like theirs in the Shahs Iran. As the forces of revolution begin to rip through the country, John and Shirin are brutally separated, and John finds himself alone amid a vicious and devastating conflict in a region he barely understands. Pulse-thumping and lyrical, A Good Place to Die evokes the history of a vastly complicated land and the lengths to which well go for those we love, even when faced with the truly unthinkable. Lyrical in the intensity of its writing, A Good Place to Die tells of the love of a callow British youth for a Persian girl and for her tortured, beautiful country. Its a must-read. - Donna Leon James Buchan writes like a dream . . . This novel is a rare achievement. - The Times Airy, graceful and big with truth . . . There is really no word for it but "masterpiece". - Spectator Sooner or later James Buchan will be recognised as the top adventure writer of his time. - Evening Standard

A stunning historical novel of adventure romance and skulduggery the second volume in the William Nielson series

James Buchan aparece no sólo por primera vez en nuestro catálogo, sino también en lengua española. Autor inglés ya valorado y premiado en Gran Bretaña, se ha dado a conocer en el mundo entero con El Arado de Oro, que obtuvo el Guardian Fiction Award en 1995. Apreciado y riguroso periodista, reportero y analista especializado en asuntos financieros, Buchan se inicio tambien brillantemente como novelista en 1984 con A Parish of Rich Women, que gano el Whitbread Prize de ficcion y otros cuatro importantes premios literarios. En Bonn, una mañana de abril de 1983 aparece muerto de un disparo el profesor Frank Lightner, un teorico e ideologo de la izquierda alemana y jefe de filas de los Verdes, a quien, sin embargo, algunos tachan de espia de la KGB. Richard Fisher, un agente del gobierno ingles afincado en aquella ciudad y que ejerce aparentemente de historiador y conferenciante, intenta averiguar que y quien hay detras de esa muerte. Su investigacion le conduce hasta El Arado de Oro, una peligrosa estrategia politica relacionada con el desarme, y en la que estan involucrados los gobiernos de la Union Sovietica, Gran Bretaña, Alemania y Estados Unidos. Todo se complica cuando Fisher se enamora de Polina Mertz, una enigmatica joven que parece poseer todas las claves de El Arado de Oro, y a quien alguien esta dispuesto a asesinar El Arado de Oro es mucho mas que una simple novela de espias, pues, como todas las grandes novelas, desborda el genero al que en principio podria ser adscrita. Encierra, ademas de una tragicomica historia de amor, una honda y melancolica reflexion sobre la historia y la cultura de un pais condenado a vivir en la frontera de dos mundos ideologicos.