Karolina and the Torn Curtain

Karolina and the Torn Curtain
Author :
Publisher : Mariner Books
Total Pages : 411
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780358157571
ISBN-13 : 0358157579
Rating : 4/5 (71 Downloads)

Synopsis Karolina and the Torn Curtain by : Maryla Szymiczkowa

"An ingenious marriage of comedy and crime" (Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel laureate): when amateur sleuth and cunning socialite Zofia Turbotyńska's beloved maid goes missing, she dives deep into Cracow's web of crime, with only her trusted cook for company. Cracow, 1895. Zofia and her maid Franciszka have their hands full organizing Easter festivities, especially with the household short one servant--where has the capable Karolina disappeared to? Shortly after, Zofia hears that the body of a young woman, violated and stabbed, has washed up on a bank of the River Vistula. Domestic work can wait--Zofia must go investigate. Shockingly, the body turns out to be none other than Karolina. Working with the police, Zofia's investigations take her deep into the city's underbelly--a far cry from the socialite's Cracow she's familiar with. Desperate to unearth what happened to Karolina, though, she pushes her prejudice aside, immersing herself among prostitutes, gangsters, and duplicitous politicians to unravel a twisted tale of love and deceit. "Written with abundant wit and flair,"* Cracow's finest, and most iconoclastic, amateur sleuth returns in a highly politicized feminist murder mystery. *Kirkus Reviews

Karolina And The Torn Curtain

Karolina And The Torn Curtain
Author :
Publisher : HarperCollins
Total Pages : 411
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780358150961
ISBN-13 : 0358150965
Rating : 4/5 (61 Downloads)

Synopsis Karolina And The Torn Curtain by : Maryla Szymiczkowa

Praise for Karolina and the Torn Curtain "Szymiczkowa... brings Cracow vividly to life and presents the period’s views on women with sly wit. This mystery will please readers looking for an unusual amateur sleuth and a picturesque setting." —Publishers Weekly "Vividly steeped in the politics and the life and times of 1895 Cracow, this mystery, with its charming heroine and dry humor, will appeal to fans of Anne Perry’s Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series, which also weaves the social issues of the day into the story." —Booklist "Pseudonymous partners Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński bring both the do-gooders and the criminals of fin-de-siècle Cracow to entertaining life, but their deepest interest is in the unlikely detective lurking beneath “the sedate Mrs. Jekyll”: “the hidden Mrs. Hyde, the fearless stalker of criminals. A gravely decorous period piece that vividly evokes its moment while maintaining an archly amused distance from it." —Kirkus Praise for Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing “[An] exceptional debut and series launch... The translation showcases the novel’s deliciously ironic voice. Fans who like colorful locales and tongue-in-cheek mysteries will eagerly await Zofia's next outing.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review “A delightful debut whodunit written with abundant wit and flair. Pray for a series to follow.” —Kirkus Reviews “Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing an amazing Polish mystery—fascinating for its vivid portrayal of 1893 Krakow, its witty style, and for Zofia, its irrepressible sleuth. The Daily Mail called it ingenious—we call this new author ‘marvelous!’” —Charles Todd, New York Times-bestselling author of the Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries “An ingenious marriage of comedy and crime.” —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel laureate and author of Man Booker International Prize winner Flights “The unravelling of the mystery is ingenious and takes us through a social setting quivering with snobberies and dos and don’ts. It’s fun and sparky and the glimpse of turn-of-the-century Polish manners and mores is beguiling.” —Daily Mail “Charming and moreish…Conjures up the delightful books of Dorothy L Sayers . . . The perfect diversion for annoying commutes.” —Stylist “While there is a strong whiff of Agatha Christie in this book, it is much more than a pastiche . . . The story fuses high comedy with an evocative portrayal of the period . . . Ably translated.” —Sunday Express “Highly comical . . . An extremely absorbing novel.” —Kurzojady —

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing
Author :
Publisher : A Zofia Turbotynska Mystery
Total Pages : 373
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780358274247
ISBN-13 : 0358274249
Rating : 4/5 (47 Downloads)

Synopsis Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing by : Maryla Szymiczkowa

A charming, witty, and deliciously spooky mystery, inspired by the work of Agatha Christie, following a bored socialite who becomes Cracow's most cunning amateur sleuth.

The Lost Soul

The Lost Soul
Author :
Publisher : Seven Stories Press
Total Pages : 46
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781644210352
ISBN-13 : 1644210355
Rating : 4/5 (52 Downloads)

Synopsis The Lost Soul by : Olga Tokarczuk

A beautifully illustrated meditation on the fullness of life for readers of all ages by by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk. "Olga Tokarczuk’s The Lost Soul, an experimental fable illustrated by Joanna Concejo and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, resonates with our current moment. . . . What a striking, and lovely, material object it is." —New York Times "The Lost Soul, by Olga Tokarczuk and illustrator Joanna Concejo, is a quiet meditation on happiness, following a busy man who loses his soul. . . It pours a childlike sense of wonder into a once-upon-a-time tale that is already resonating with adults around the world." —The Guardian The Lost Soul is a deeply moving reflection on our capacity to live in peace with ourselves, to remain patient, attentive to the world. It is a story that beautifully weaves together the voice of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk and the finely detailed pen-and-ink drawings of illustrator Joanna Concejo, who together create a parallel narrative universe full of secrets, evocative of another time. Here a man has forgotten what makes his heart feel full. He moves to a house away from all that is familiar to him to wait for his soul to return. "Once upon a time there was a man who worked very hard and very quickly, and who had left his soul far behind him long ago. In fact his life was all right without his soul—he slept, ate, worked, drove a car and even played tennis. But sometimes he felt as if the world around him were flat, as if he were moving across a smooth page in a math book that was covered in evenly spaced squares... " —from The Lost Soul The Lost Soul is a sublime album, a rare delicacy that will delight readers young and old. "You must find a place of your own, sit there quietly and wait for your soul." Winner of the Bologna Ragazzi Award, Special Mention 2018, Prix de l'Union Internationale pour les Livres de Jeunesse (IBBY), The White Raven (IJB Munich), and the Łódź Design Festival Award.

A Grain of Truth

A Grain of Truth
Author :
Publisher : Bitter Lemon Press
Total Pages : 386
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781908524034
ISBN-13 : 1908524030
Rating : 4/5 (34 Downloads)

Synopsis A Grain of Truth by : Zygmunt Miloszewski

"A Grain of Truth, like every great crime novel, digs up more unsettling questions than it does answers; it also demonstrates the seemingly endless possibilities of the form itself to serve as smart social criticism." --Maureen Corrigan, on NPR's Fresh AirPraise for the first novel in the Teodor Szacki series:"In Entanglement Miloszewski takes an engaging look at modern Polish society in this stellar first in a new series starring Warsaw prosecutor Teodor Szacki. Readers will want to see more of the complex, sympathetic Szacki."—Publishers WeeklyIt is spring 2009, and prosecutor Szacki is no longer working in Warsaw—he has said goodbye to his family and to his career in the capital and moved to Sandomierz, a picturesque town full of churches and museums. Hoping to start a "brave new life," Szacki instead finds himself investigating a strange murder case in surroundings both alien and unfriendly.The victim is found brutally murdered, her body drained of blood. The killing bears the hallmarks of legendary Jewish ritual slaughter, prompting a wave of anti-Semitic paranoia in the town, where everyone knows everyone. The murdered woman's husband is bereft, but when Szacki discovers that she had a lover, the husband becomes the prime suspect. Before there's time to arrest him, he is found murdered in similar circumstances. In his investigation Szacki must wrestle with the painful tangle of Polish–Jewish relations and something that happened more than sixty years earlier. Zygmunt Miloszewski was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1975. His first novel The Intercom was published in 2005 to high acclaim. In 2006 he published The Adder Mountains; in 2010, the crime novel Entanglement; and this year its sequel, A Grain of Truth.

Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions
Author :
Publisher : Dial Press
Total Pages : 322
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780307567239
ISBN-13 : 0307567230
Rating : 4/5 (39 Downloads)

Synopsis Breakfast of Champions by : Kurt Vonnegut

“Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”—The New York Times In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth. “Free-wheeling, wild and great . . . uniquely Vonnegut.”—Publishers Weekly

The Truth and Other Stories

The Truth and Other Stories
Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
Total Pages : 341
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780262366656
ISBN-13 : 0262366657
Rating : 4/5 (56 Downloads)

Synopsis The Truth and Other Stories by : Stanislaw Lem

Twelve stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, nine of them never before published in English. Of these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first "new" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are thought provoking and scathingly funny. Written from 1956 to 1993, the stories are arranged in chronological order. In the title story, "The Truth," a scientist in an insane asylum theorizes that the sun is alive; "The Journal" appears to be an account by an omnipotent being describing the creation of infinite universes--until, in a classic Lem twist, it turns out to be no such thing; in "An Enigma," beings debate whether offspring can be created without advanced degrees and design templates. Other stories feature a computer that can predict the future by 137 seconds, matter-destroying spores, a hunt in which the prey is a robot, and an electronic brain eager to go on the lam. These stories are peak Lem, exploring ideas and themes that resonate throughout his writing.

Edge of Eternity

Edge of Eternity
Author :
Publisher : Penguin
Total Pages : 1122
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780698160576
ISBN-13 : 0698160576
Rating : 4/5 (76 Downloads)

Synopsis Edge of Eternity by : Ken Follett

Ken Follett's extraordinary historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion. In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll. East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he'd imagined. . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.

Cold Sea Stories

Cold Sea Stories
Author :
Publisher : Comma Press
Total Pages : 263
Release :
ISBN-10 :
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 ( Downloads)

Synopsis Cold Sea Stories by : Pawel Huelle

A student pedals an old Ukraina bicycle between striking factories, delivering bulletins, in the tumultuous first days of the Solidarity movement... A shepherd watches, unseen, as a strange figure disembarks from a pirate ship anchored in the cove below, to bury a chest on the beach that later proves empty... A prisoner in a Berber dungeon recounts his life s story the failed pursuit of the world s very first language by scrawling in the sand on his cell floor... The characters in Pawel Huelle's mesmerising stories find themselves, willingly or not, at the heart of epic narratives; legends and histories that stretch far beyond the limits of their own lives. Against the backdrop of the Baltic coast, mythology and meteorology mix with the inexorable tide of political change: Kashubian folklore, Chinese mysticism and mediaeval scholarship butt up against the war in Chechnya, 9-11, and the struggle for Polish independence. Central to Huelle s imagery is the vision of the refugee be it the Chechen woman carrying her newborn child across the Polish border (her face emblazoned on every TV screen), the survivor of the Gulag re-appearing on his friends doorstep, years after being presumed dead, or the stranger who befriends the sole resident of a ghostly Mennonite village in the final days of the Second World War. Each refugee carries a clue, it seems, or is in possession or pursuit of some mysterious text or book, knowing that only it like the Chinese Book of Changes can decode their story. What we do with this text, this clue, Huelle seems to say, is up to us.

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey
Author :
Publisher : Ips - Profile Books
Total Pages : 432
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1788164431
ISBN-13 : 9781788164436
Rating : 4/5 (31 Downloads)

Synopsis The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey by : Julia Laite

1910, Wellington, New Zealand. Lydia Harvey is sixteen, working long hours for low pay, when a glamorous couple invite her to Buenos Aires. She accepts - and disappears. London, England. Amid a global panic about sex trafficking, detectives are tracking a ring of international criminals when they find a young woman on the streets of Soho who might be the key to cracking the whole case. As more people are drawn into Lydia's life and the trial at the Old Bailey, the world is being reshaped into a new, global era. Choices are being made - about who gets to cross borders, whose stories matter and what justice looks like - that will shape the next century. In this immersive account, historian Julia Laite traces Lydia Harvey through the fragments she left behind to build an extraordinary story of aspiration, exploitation and survival - and one woman trying to build a life among the forces of history.