Book three in the stunning Neyler family saga. It is 1931, and once again Europe is heading towards disaster. Life must go on however, and a new generation of the Neyler family are making their way in this turbulent world. Louis Rose, the self-confessed black sheep of the family, returns to England for his father's funeral and is greeted with more bad news: he has lost his mistress to his young nephew. Louis' son Simon, meanwhile, has matured and is embarking on his first love affair. The family hope he’ll have more luck in love that his father. Valentine Neyler, Simon's cousin, visits Berlin for the Olympics, but finds herself experiencing first-hand the prejudice which is gripping Germany. Before she knows it she is caught up in the tragedy of a Jewish family struggling to escape the Nazi horror. Dramas, joys and sorrows intertwine and unfold in this inspiring and moving saga, set against the poignant background of a world hurtling towards war, from the Sunday Times bestselling author Katie Flynn.

Set in the 1880s and '90s, As Music and Splendour tells the story of two young Irish girls who are sent to Rome for training as opera singers. Rose - red-haired, big-hearted and big-voiced - is soon on track to become a prima donna soprano; Clare, also a soprano but subtler and less glamorous, is more at home with sacred music. While Rose juggles the affections of various men, Clare embarks on a passionate affair with her fellow-student Luisa. As Music in Splendour is a thrillingly readable and romantic novel from one of the very few truly important Irish novelists of the twentieth century.

The classic, magnificent bestselling novel about Richard III, now in a special thirtieth anniversary edition with a new preface by the author In this triumphant combination of scholarship and storytelling, Sharon Kay Penman redeems Richard III—vilified as the bitter, twisted, scheming hunchback who murdered his nephews, the princes in the Tower—from his maligned place in history. Born into the treacherous courts of fifteenth-century England, in the midst of what history has called The War of the Roses, Richard was raised in the shadow of his charismatic brother, King Edward IV. Loyal to his friends and passionately in love with the one woman who was denied him, Richard emerges as a gifted man far more sinned against than sinning. With revisions throughout and a new author's preface discussing the astonishing discovery of Richard's remains five centuries after his death, Sharon Kay Penman's brilliant classic is more powerful and glorious than ever.

A comprehensive anthology of Chinese poetry from the 12th century B.C. to the present. "This magnificent collection has the effect of a complete library rather than of an anthology of poetry.... A lyric quality comes through into our own language... Every page is alive with striking and wonderful things, immediately accessible." -- Publishers Weekly "Sunflower Splendor is the largest and, on the whole, best anthology of translated Chinese poems to have appeared in a Western language." -- The New York Times Book Review "This remarkably fine anthology should remain standard for a long time." -- Library Journal ..". excellent translations by divers hands. Open to any page and listen to the still, sad music... " -- Washington Post Bookworld

This collection is the first to examine how the city is written in modern Irish fiction. Focusing on the multi-faceted, layered, and ever-changing topography of the city in Irish writing, it brings together studies of Irish and Northern Irish fictions which contribute to a more complete picture of modern Irish literature and Irish urban cultural identities. It offers a critical introduction to the Irish city as it represented in fiction as a plural space to mirror the plurality of contemporary Irish identities north and south of the border. The chapters combine to provide a platform for new research in the field of Irish urban literary studies, including analyses of the fiction of authors including James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Kate O’Brien, Hugo Hamilton, Kevin Barry, and Rosemary Jenkinson. An exciting and diverse range of fictions is introduced and examined with the aim of generating a cohesive perspective on Irish urban fictions and to stimulate further discussion in this emerging area.

For Yale University Press, which celebrates its hundredth birthday in 2008, the century has been an eventful one, punctuated with no few surprises. The Press has published more than 8,000 volumes through the years, scores of bestsellers and award-winners among them, and these books have come to fruition through the efforts of a host of colorful authors, editors, directors, board members, and others of intellectual and literary renown. With an ear always cocked for an interesting tale, one of today's best storytellers presents an anecdote-rich chronicle of the Press's first 100 years. Nicholas Basbanes, whom David McCullough has called the leading authority of books about books, quickly convinces us that the Press's history, while bookish, is also lively and fascinating. Basbanes explores the saga behind the acquisition of Eugene O'Neill's blockbuster play, the all-time Yale bestseller Long Day's Journey into Night; the controversy sparked in 1965 by publication of The Vinland Map; the origins of the groundbreaking Annals of Communism series, initiated in the wake of the Soviet Union's demise; and many more highlights from Press annals. Basbanes looks at the reasons behind the publisher's remarkable financial success, and he completes A World of Letters with a glimpse at the new initiatives that will propel the Press into a second exciting century.

Since 1973, Queen have captivated listeners through the intense sonic palette of voices and guitars, the sprawling and epic journeys of songs, and charismatic splendour of their live performances. Rock and Rhapsodies is the first book to undertake a musicological study of the band's output, with a fundamental aim of discovering what, exactly, gave Queen's songs their magical and distinct musical identity. Focusing on the material written, recorded, and released between 1973 and 1991, author Nick Braae provides readers with an in-depth and nuanced analytical account of the group's individual musical style (or "idiolect"), and illuminates the multifaceted stylistic and historical contexts in which Queen's music was created. Aspects of Queen's songs are also used as a springboard for exploring a range of further analytical and discursive issues: the nature of a musical style; the conceptual relationship between an artist, style, and genre; form in popular songs; and the character and identity of a singing voice. Following an introduction and "primer" on Queen's idiolect, Rock and Rhapsodies presents ten further chapters, each of which offers a snapshot of a particular musical element (form, the voice), a particular subset of repertoire (Freddie Mercury's large-scale 1970s songs), or a particular era (post-1991), thus painting a rich overall picture of both the band's history and their ongoing presence in popular culture. Along the way, there is an underlying focus on interrogating and substantiating the themes and ideas that emerge from the writing, documentaries and other media on Queen, using a variety of analytical tools and close readings of songs, to demonstrate how aspects of critical reception align (or not) with musical details. Rock and Rhapsodies will reward any reader who has been enchanted by the myriad and complex musical components that make up any Queen song.

Kate O'Brien (1897-1974) was one of the most important Irish writers of the twentieth century, widely read, accessible and popular in Britain, Ireland and the United States. She wrote for such respected literary journals as the Spectator, and the Irish Times; she broadcast regularly for the BBC and adapted her best-selling novels for the stage in London and on Broadway. One novel, That Lady, even became a Hollywood movie. She was a regular Book Club and Book Society choice, proof of her fame with the general reading public. In the course of a hugely productive writing life, Kate O'Brien travelled, lectured, produced novels, wrote literary essays, reviewed novels and was broadcast on the radio and on television. In this new biography by Eibhear Walshe, he traces her life from Limerick, to Spain, America London and argues that, in fact, Kate O'Brien was a subversive and a pioneer for women's writing. She created novels that were deceptively traditional in form but radical in content and thus invented a literary identity for her own Irish bourgeois class and a successfully realized fictive independence and viability for her young Irish female protagonists. Proud of her Irish middle-class origins, she was, nevertheless, antagonistic to the insular moral codes and the censorship laws of the newly emergent Irish state. Out of these contradictions, her fascinating and powerful novels were created and, as a result, her books still draw a wide readership. Drawing on original research and extensive archival sources, this biography traces the life and the writings of the most important novelist of the Irish middle class.Ã?Â?Ã?Â?