English books

Two detectives go undercover in Venice, Italy, in the New York Times–bestselling series by “the undisputed crime fiction queen” (The Baltimore Sun). A priest recently returned from years of missionary work has made a personal request of Commissario Guido Brunetti—but the police detective suspects the man’s motives. A new, American-style Protestant sect has begun to meet in Venice, and it’s possible the priest is merely apprehensive of the competition. But the preacher could also be fleecing his growing flock, so Brunetti and Inspector Vianello, along with their wives, decide to go undercover. In the midst of the investigation, though, the body of a Gypsy child washes up in a canal—and Brunetti finds himself haunted by both the crime and the girl . . . “No one knows the labyrinthine world of Venice or the way favoritism and corruption shape Italian life like Leon’s Brunetti . . . the thoughtful Venetian cop with a love of food, an outspoken wife, and a computer-hacker secretary.” —Time “Gorgeously written.” —The New York Times Book Review

When making routine enquiries into a possible bribery case that could embarrass the mayor - a humiliation Vice-Questore Patta is very keen to avoid - Commissario Brunetti receives a call from his wife, Paola, who is evidently very upset. To the neighbourhood he was just the 'boy' who helped out, but nobody knew much about him - not even his name.

This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been an inadvertent agent of disaster. Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times-funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound.

A special edition of E L James’s #1 New York Times bestselling novel, Fifty Shades Darker, that includes her own photos and caption commentary from the making of the film―and an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Fifty Shades Darker, As Told by Christian Grey. Daunted by the dark secrets of the tormented young entrepreneur, Christian Grey, Anastasia Steele has broken off their relationship. But desire for Grey still dominates her every waking thought, and when he proposes a new arrangement, she cannot resist. They rekindle their searing, sensual affair, and soon Ana is learning more about the harrowing past of her damaged, driven and demanding Fifty Shades than she ever thought possible. But while Christian wrestles with his inner demons, Ana must make the most important decision of her life. A decision she can only make on her own ...

The original Fifty Shades of Grey, Edith Templeton's novel Gordon has been banned, pirated and published under various names for almost fifty years. Post-war London. Louisa, a smartly dressed young woman in the midst of a divorce, meets a charismatic man in a pub, and within an hour has been sexually conquered by him on a garden bench. Thus begins her baffling but magnetic love affair with Richard Gordon. Gordon, a psychiatrist, keeps Louisa in his thrall with his almost omniscient ability to see through her, and she is equally gripped by the unexpected pleasure of complete submission. Subjecting herself to repeated humiliations at his hands, but quite unable and unwilling to free herself from his control, Louisa and Gordon sink further and further into the depths - both psychologically and sexually. An extraordinary novel of psycho-sexual entanglement that was banned for indecency in England in 1966, in Gordon, Edith Templeton captures one of the most unusual and disturbing love stories ever written. 'Templeton's characters are not passive or self-doubting. Their pleasure in sexual submission is a mark of their toughness: they can take what their men give them' The New York Times 'Sexual perversion, masochistic dependency, obsession and suicide' Telegraph 'An unsettling tale of sexual obsession' The New Yorker 'It is unlikely that any young woman will write a book as good, as honest, as provocative as Gordon' Telegraph 'Superbly written and unsettling' Beryl Bainbridge Edith Templeton was born in Prague in 1916 and spent much of her childhood in a castle in the Bohemian countryside. Her short stories began to appear in The New Yorker in the 1950s and caused a major stir because of their sexual explicitness (these stories are available in one volume entitled The Darts of Cupid as a Penguin ebook). Gordon first appeared in 1966 under the pseudonym Louise Walbrook and was subsequently banned in England and Germany; it was then pirated around the world, appearing under various titles. In 2001, Edith Templeton agreed to publish the novel, with its original title, under her own name. She died in 2006.

Alva and Irva are identical twins - but one is shy and the other very outgoing. They become obsessed with making models out of plasticine, their home city perfectly copied. They seem destined to spend their lives unknown, until an earthquake ravages the city and they become heroes. Strange and somewhat eerie, this book is definitely a challenge, but worth it. It delves into the psyche of twins, but with tenderness and understanding. Extract We spent much time in the attic looking out of the window (despite Mother's protestations) onto Veber Street, wondering about all the life there. And one day I decided, and Irva cautiously agreed, to make a model of the street, not just a quick model that would take a few hours to build, but a complex work that would take weeks and perhaps even months to finish: a highly detailed miniturisatio of exactly what was seen from our window. It was constructed entirely from red blocks of plasticine which we purchased with Grandfather from the Mison's toy shop. How we struggled to see them properly for the first time. How plasticine helped to understand.

"Nothing quite like this has ever been published before," proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance. The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women — the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up — a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable. The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.

Elena Weaver, in her skimpy dresses and bright jewellery, exuded intelligence and sexuality. A student at St Stephen's College, Cambridge, she lived a life of casual but intense physical and emotional relationships, with scores to settle and targets to achieve. Until someone, lying in wait on the bank of the River Cam, where Elena went running every morning, bludgeoned the young woman to death. Called into the rarefied world of academia, Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner Barbara Havers find a tangled skein of love, obsession and desire - a maelstrom of emotion that has claimed Elena Weaver's life.