Set in North London during the Winter of Discontent, A Partisan''s Daughter features the relationship between Chris, an unhappily-married, middle-aged Englishman and Roza, a young Serbian woman who has recently moved to London. While driving through Archway in the course of his job as a medical rep, Chris is captivated by a young woman on a street corner. Clumsily, he engages her in conversation, and he secures an invitation to return one day for a coffee. His visits become more frequent and Roza starts to tell him the story of her life, drawing him increasingly into her world from her childhood as a daughter of one of Tito''s partisans, through her journey to England and on to her more recent colourful and dangerous past in London. A Partisan''s Daughter is about the power of storytelling. It is also a beautifully wrought and unlikely love story which is both compelling and moving to read. Here is another wonderful novel from the author of the bestselling Birds Without Wings and Captain Correlli''s Mandolin.
Contemporary / British English (Available June 2008) This is a great love story set in the tragedy of war. It is 1941. The Italian officer, Captain Corelli, falls in love with Pelagia, a young Greek girl. But Pelegias fiance is fighting the Italian army Captain Corellis Mandolin is now a film, starring Nicolas Cage.
Elle se tenait au coin de la rue, comme si elle faisait mine d''attendre quelqu''un. Elle portait une minijupe et des bottes à talons, et son visage était outrageusement maquillé. Je me souviens d''u
The new novel from the acclaimed author of "Birds Without Wings" and "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" is a love story at once raw and sweetly funny, wry and heartbreakingly sad. Chris is bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. In his forties, he's a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a hooker into his car. Roza is Yugoslavian, recently moved to London, the daughter of one of Tito's partisans. She's in her twenties, but has already lived a life filled with danger, misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And though she's not a hooker, when she's propositioned by Chris, she gets into his car anyway.Over the next few months Roza tells Chris the stories of her past. She's a fast-talking Scheherazade, saving her own life by telling it to Chris. And he takes in her tales as if they were oxygen in an otherwise airless world. But is Roza telling the truth? Does Chris hear the stories through the filter of his own need? Does it even matter? This deeply moving novel of their unlikely love - narrated in the moment and through recollection, each of their voices deftly realized - is also a brilliantly subtle commentary on storytelling: its seductions and powers, and its ultimately unavoidable dangers.
Extravagant, inventive, emotionally sweeping, Captain Corelli''s Mandolin is the story of a timeless place that one day wakes up to find itself in the jaws of history. The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island''s shores in the form of the conquering Italian army. Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island. Rich with loyalties and betrayals, and set against a landscape where the factual blends seamlessly with the fantastic, Captain Corelli''s Mandolin is a passionate novel as rich in ideas as it is genuinely moving.
In the brief golden years of King Edward VII's reign, Rosie McCosh and her three sisters are growing up in an idyllic and eccentric household in Kent, with their 'pals' the Pitt boys on one side of the fence and the Pendennis boys on the other. But their days of childhood innocence and adventure are destined to be followed by the apocalypse that will overwhelm their world as they come to adulthood. For Rosie, the path ahead is full of challenges: torn between her love for two young men, her sense of duty and her will to live her life to the full, she has to navigate her way through extraordinary times. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War? Louis de Bernieres' magnificent and moving novel follows the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters as the Edwardian age disintegrates into the Great War, and they strike out to seek what happiness can be salvaged from the ruins of the old world.
En esta novela, una opera prima furiosa, los protagonistas son arrastrados por los acontecimientos incesantes provocados por un hecho trivial: la frívola y sensual Doña Constanza no soporta que su piscina esté falta de agua, por lo que hace desviar el cauce de un rio.
Set on an idyllic Greek island, the story of an Italian army captain''s love affair during World War II is a bestselling novel. The rustic charm contrasts dramatically with the horror of war in this reading by Robert Powell, first heard on BBC Radio 4''s Book at Bedtime, which won a Talkie Award for Best Abridged Modern Fiction.
FROM THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLINAt the dawn of the 1920s, Rosie and Daniel move to Ceylon with their small daughter to start a new life, attempting to put the trauma of the First World War - and its effects on their marriage - behind them. Back in England, Rosie's sisters are dealing with impossible challenges in their searches for family, purpose and happiness. These are precarious times, and they find themselves taking unconventional means to achieve what they want.Around them the world changes, and events in Germany take a dark and forbidding turn. And soon there is no going back...
In this entertaining collection of stories, Louis de Bernieres introduces us to a man who turns his life around through developing his hobby of collecting cat-food tin labels. We also meet a traveller who embarks on a confusing love affair in Colombia, a dolphin romance and, in 'Gunter Weber's Confession', we return to the much-loved characters of Captain Corelli's Mandolin.Louis de Bernieres is one of our most treasured writers and these stories show his imaginative range and unique storytelling power.
