Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. His previous books include A History of the World in 100 Objects, Shakespeare's Restless World and Germany: Memories of a Nation, all available in Penguin and now between them translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK's highest civil honour. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal and the German National Prize. In 2018 the radio series Living with the Gods received the Sandford Saint Martin Award for Religious Broadcasting.

Neil MacGregor

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Lars Gustafsson

Caldwell lives by the lakeside at Austin, Texas, with his wife of thirty years, his two children having long ago flown the nest. He is a judge in the Federal Bankruptcy Court. And the dog? A mongrel that kept upsetting his dustbins as it rooted about in them, until the judge went after it and secretly beat its brains out with the edge-trimmers. 
 
But this is not a crime story – for all that Caldwell’s lifelong mentor, the Dutchman van de Rouwers, Philosophy guru and idol of the American campuses, was fished out dead from the lake about the time his Murky Past caught up with him. No, this is a Philosophical Tale: weaving through the judge’s humdrum life between the Bench, the campus bookstore, the cocktail party circuit and his own kitchen, Great Metaphysical Questions are asked, about the reality of Good and Evil, ontological proofs of the existence of God, and the theoretical existence of the Most Intelligent Man in America. 
 
Lars Gustafsson taps a rich vein of comedy in the series of contrasts here engendered between the mundane and the highflown as reported in the judge’s maybe fanciful narrative. The Tale of a Dog has marked affinity with his last novel, translated into English as A Tiler’s Afternoon, in the clearsighted dissection of small people trying to cope with an all too complex modern world.

The Tale of A Dog

From the Diaries and Letters of a Texan Bankruptcy Judge

Torgny Lindgren

No doubt about it, Lindgren has joined the ranks of the greatest writers" Michel Crepu, La Croix 
 
The woman had come from a city in the south to lecture in a small village amid the snowbound forests of northern Sweden. She was a writer. After the lecture in the village hall an old man who had been sleeping at the back introduced himself, as she was to be his guest for the night. So it was that she moved in with Hadar, a man who lived on his own and was in the last stages of cancer. Not another house in sight, save for one just a field away; there lived Hadar's brother Olof, also on his own, and dying of heart disease. Neither brother would consent to die, the woman discovered, for that would give the other the satisfaction of outliving him. 
 
Cut off by a snow blizzard, the woman settles into Hadar's attic, leaving only to pick her way across to Olof's, and in the days that follows she acts as both nurse and confessor to each of them. She learns of the woman they shared and the son of disputed paternity, uncovering the tissue of lies and self-deceptions that keeps the ailing brothers alive in a bond of mutual loathing. Ultimately to her roles of nurse and confessor she adds a third: the hand of Providence . . . 
 
The author of The Way of a Serpent and Light is one of Sweden's outstanding practitioners of black humour. In Sweetness he has achieved a work of brilliant comic invention.

Sweetness

Madam De La Tour Du Pin

'A story of a simple but straightforward woman, caught up in the complications of the French Revolution' Economist 
 
 
Madame de la Tour du Pin was born Henrietta-Lucy Dillon in Paris in 1770. An aristocrat, she spent her youth surrounded by wealth and luxury. In regular attendance at Marie Antoinette's Sunday courts, she was, by her own account, 'outstanding in any gathering', rivalling even the Queen in beauty. 
 
At the age of 16 she is given curtseying lessons by her dancing master and is hastily married to the future Marquis de la Tour du Pin. A life of pleasure-seeking and extravagance begins, but is rudely cut short by the storming of the Bastille. 
 
Written for her only surviving child, this intimate record of her life recounts the terrible fate that awaited all those who attended the Court of Louis XVI during the years of the French Revolution. Throughout France appears the terrifying silhouette of a rival Madame - Madame Guillotine - and, because of her beauty, Madame de la Tour du Pin is frequently prey to the now deadly compliment of being mistaken for the Queen. 
 
When the king is executed, she flees Paris to travel round France, only to discover that her many properties have been plundered. When it becomes too dangerous to remain on native soil she leaves for Holland - thence to America and to England - in search of a new life, but her heart remains in Paris, whither eventually she returns, a dispossessed émigré. 
 
Written with great intelligence, compassion and wit, the Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin provide us with a uniquely female perspective on the French Revolution. It is a valuable historical document, made all the more affecting by the author's sense of a bright and beautiful world cruelly snatched away by the forces of history.

Memoirs

Laughing And Dancing Our Way to the Precipice

William Watson

In the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Acre in 1291 and the reconquest of the Holy Land by the Moslems, the last survivors of the Order of the Temple make their bloody retreat from the Middle East. Loading the treasure of their Order into a decrepit, leaky vessel, they set sail for Europe, where, unbeknownst to them, King Philip of France plots their destruction. 
 
Among their number is Beltran, a native of the Holy Land, who has led the life of a soldier-monk for the past thirty years. World-weary yet incorruptible, Beltran is guardian both of the treasure and the Rule of the Order. As his companions' loyalties waver, he struggles to keep the faith, only to witness the end of the Order as the Templars are thrown to the Inquisition and their Grand Master burned at the stake.

The Last Of The Templars

Jean Giono

Of Sailor's twin sons, the elder is dead and the younger is missing.A simple woodsman, Sailor resolves to find the boy, fearing the worst.Soon after he and his friend Antonio set off, they stumble across a blind girl giving birth. This strange circumstance proves typical of their journey into the heart of the forest. Sailor and Antonio discover that, though the lost Twin is alive, he is the target of a manhunt. As Sailor and Antonio attempt to rescue Twin, the adventures unravel at a breathtaking speed. The net tightens around the three men until one of them is trapped and killed. And only then does the real action of this remarkable picaresque novel begin. In Giono's universe, no murder shall go unavenged. 
 
This tale of primitive love and vendetta is cast in a timeless landscape of river, mountain and forest. With its taut, fast-paced story and pastoral setting, The Song of the World is another triumph from the celebrated author of The Man Who Planted Trees.

The Song Of The World

Connie Palmen

Ara and Kit, two girls in the village school, seem to have nothing in common. Ara, the elder, is large, earthy and illiterate; Kit is lean, brainy and interested in abstractions like philosophy. After they leave school Ara cannot let Kit alone - she is drawn to her as a moth to a candle flame.

The Friendship

Andrey Platonov

"Reading Platonov, one gets a sense of the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language and with each...utterance, that absurdity deepens" - Joseph Brodsky 
 
People are on the move in all ten stories in this collection, coming home as in "The Return", leaving home as in "Rubbish Wind", travelling far away from their country as in "The Locks of Epiphan", trying to improve their lives and those of others, running away, searching, fleeing. Their journeys are accompanied by two motives which characterize the writing of Andrey Platonov: optimism and faith in the goodness of humanity, and abject despair at the cruelty, randomness, and apparent senselessness of our existence. The protagonists are torn between these poles and sometimes a synthesis shines through the mists of the apparent naivety of faith and the blackness of despair: the hope against hope that a better life is still possible. 
 
Though Russian readers and critics have come to look on Platonov as among their greatest prose writers of this century, he has yet to enjoy a parallel international reputation - mainly because much of his best writing was suppressed for more than 60 years. Combining a realism inspired by his work as an engineer with poetic vision and the deceptively simple language of folk tales, Platonov sets his stories alight by using language in a way that renders it unfamiliar, makes the ordinary seem unusual and the extraordinary logical. This translation is the first to present the full range of Platonov's gift as a short story writer to an English-language readership, showing why it is that Joseph Brodsky regarded Platonov as the equal of Joyce, Kafka and Proust. 
 
"...strange, almost abrupt, a hallucinatory, nightmarish parable of hysterical laughter and terrifying silences" - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times - in reference to The Foundation Pit

The Return and Other Stories

Slobodan Selenic

A touching story of cultural difference and tested loyalties. Set in Belgrade before WWII, Fathers and Forefathers tells the story of the marriage between a Steven, a Serb, and Elizabeth, an Englishwoman.  After meeting at an English university they marry and leave England to build their life together.  Steven's narrative and Elizabeth's letters home reveal two very different personal accounts of the difficulties this involves.  Raised in Serbia their son, Mihajlo, is ashamed of his mixed parentage and rebels against his non-Serbian ancestry.  On the eve of the war, Steven's loyalties are challenged when his counsel is sought by both the Serbian king and the opposition.  He resolves to keep his distance from the conflict, but Mihajlo's more radical response forces him to become involved, and tragedy engulfs the family.

Fathers and Forefathers

Osip Mandelstam

'There is a salubrious élan about much of the book, and the fact that it is a book, not just a selection the significant poems, amplifies our sense of what Stone really means to its contemporary readers' 
 
Seamus Heaney 
 
'What makes Robert Tracy's book invaluable is his feeling for context...Another thing that comes across in these translations is the verve and immediacy of the poems' occasions, recalling the Acmeist programme of 'this-worldliness': there are poems about tennis and ice-cream and silent movies, poems that seem to jump into being on impulse' 
 
Seamus Heaney, London Review of Books 
 
'A blend of classical serenity and brash iconoclasm. This is a splendid introduction to a poet who should be known thoroughly' 
 
G.E. Murray, Chicago Sun Times 
 
'Professor Tracy has done a superb job. His introduction is excellent, his notes are very comprehensive...and his verse translations are remarkably good. All one can say is "Thank you"' 
 
Irish Times 
 
 
When Stone appeared in 1913, it marked the debut of one of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets. Precision, clarity and concreteness, a concern with form and fascination with European culture, especially architecture, were touchstones for the young poet and remained so for the rest of his extraordinary writing life. This bilingual edition, based on the most complete edition of 1928, was published, alongside The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, to mark Mandelstam's centenary in 1991.

Stone

Octavio Paz

In 1951 Octavio Paz travelled to India to serve as an attaché in the Mexican Embassy. Eleven years later he returned as Mexico's ambassador. In Light of India is Paz's celebration of that country and his most personal work of prose to date. As in all of his essays, he brings poetic insight and voluminous knowledge to bear on the subject, and the result is a series of fascinating discourses on India's landscape, culture and history. 
 
'The Antipodes of Coming and Going' is a lyrical remembrance of Paz's days in India, evoking with astonishing clarity the sights, sounds, smells and denizens of the subcontinent. 'Religions, Castes, Languages' gives a survey of Indian history and its astonishing polyglot society. 'A Project of Nationhood' is an examinatino of modern Indian politics, comparing the respective Islamic, Hindu and Western civilizations through the course of history. 'The Full and the Empty' is an exploration of what Paz calls the soul of India, its art, literature, music and philosophy. It is also an uncompromising indictment of the self-centred materialism of Western society.

In Light of India

Daniel Pennac

Benjamin Malaussène and family are far from happy when his fortune teller younger sister Thérèse marries the aristocratic Count Marie-Colbert de Roberval at a televised wedding – a ceremony from which Marie-Colbert has unceremoniously banned the madcap Malaussène clan. Two days later, Thérèse turns up in Paris’s Belleville quarter back early from their honeymoon, only to narrowly escape death as her fairground caravan is mysteriously torched to the ground. 
 
When that same day his sister Thérèse’s husband is found dead at the foot of his luxury apartment’s stairwell, Benjamin Malaussène, professional scapegoat, packs his bags ready for the police to haul him off. 
 
Only it’s Thérèse the police arrest when she refuses to disclose her whereabouts the night of her husband’s murder. Without her alibi – which might have something to do with her sudden pregnancy – it’s over to Benjamin to save the day. Family and friends join forces to leave no corner of Paris unturned in their search for the true culprit.

Passionfruit

Benjamin Malaussène, the Belleville scapegoat, and his family of half sisters and brothers are once again the target for a series of increasingly catastrophic mishaps which culminate in his imprisonment on 21 counts of murder.  Meanwhile, the real serial killer remains at large. In this sprawling novel, which brings the Belleville Quintet to a close, Pennac has allowed his unique imagination to run riot.  The result is an increasingly huge cast of unforgettable characters and a series of inter-related plot lines which curl around one another before finally unravelling.  From the art of the tattoo to cinema history, and the intricacies of cutting-edge surgery to the wonders of the wines of Jura, there is something for everyone in this extraordinary tale.

Monsieur Malaussene

Yashar Kemal

Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brought to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. 
 
It was during the anarchic days when Russian invaders had put the Turkish army to flight and filled the roads of eastern Turkey with a horde of desperate refugees that the Kurdish Ismail Agha, fleeing with his family from his village on the shores of Lake Van, picked up a child left to die by the roadside with maggot-infested wounds. 
 
Thus did Salman become the adopted son of Ismail Agha who, after many reversals of fortune, achieved wealth in his new home. Salman grew up to worship the very ground on which his "father" trod, and to stand armed guard at his gate in all weathers. Change came with the eventual birth of a son, Mustafa, to Ismail Agha, who had come to despair of ever having an heir of his own flesh from his yet too young wife. 
 
Now the green-eyed serpent, Jealousy, entered the household: Mustafa grew up to be terrified of his adoptive brother, a man of unpredictable mood-swings - and impeccable marksmanship. But Jealousy chose a different and quite unexpected target when finally the knives came into play.

Salman The Solitary

David Bellos

"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times 
 
Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994 
 
George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation. 
 
David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel A Void (1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "père", "mere", and even "George Perec". 
 
His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.He belonged to the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. He died in his mid-forties after a short illness, leaving a truly puzzling detective novel, 53 Days, incomplete. 
 
"Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's oeuvre and to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - Jonathan Romney, Literary Review

Georges Perec: A Life in Words

Julien Gracq

The great maritime state of Orsenna has long been lulled by settled peace and prosperity. It is three hundred years since it was actively at war with its traditional enemy two days' sail across the water, the savage land of Farghestan - a slumbering but by no means extinct volcano. The narrator of this story, Aldo, a world-weary young aristocrat, is posted to the coast of Syrtes, where the Admiralty keeps the seas constantly patrolled to defend the demarcation between the two powers still officially at war. His duties are to be the eyes and ears of the Signory, to report back any rumours of interest to the State. Goaded, however, by his mistress, Vanessa Aldobrandi, he takes a patrol boat across the boundary to within cannon-shot of the Farghestani coastal batteries. The age-old undeclared truce is no more than a boil ripe to be lanced.

The Opposing Shore

Edgardo Cozarinsky

Set in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest and Odessa, both before and after the Second World War, Edgardo Cozarinsky's stories belong to the spirit of Borges and to a great Argentine cosmopolitan tradition: that of the uprooted exile, the plaything of History, who, set down in a strange but proud land, looks back nostalgically to the Europe of his ancestral memories. 
 
Cozarinsky's characters are writers, lovers, scholars, artists and dreamers. An ambitious young Jew, about to marry and embark for a new life in Argentina is accosted by an unknown woman who departs with him to Buenos Aires; a pianist in a Buenos Aires nightclub finds himself drawn back to Germany in 1937; an Argentine-American Jew travels to Lisbon to unravel the threads of his grandparents' wartime affair... 
 
They are all travellers of a kind, characters who inhabit a secret land, without frontiers.

The Bride From Odessa

L Jorge

The setting of this extraordinary novel is an old farmhouse in Portugal - a house far enough from the Atlantic not to hear the breaking waves during a storm but near enough for the walls to be corroded by the salt in the air. 
 
With most members of her large family having left the hardship of life in this landscape of sand and stone for jobs in faraway places, a young woman struggles to piece together her past from the many and differing stories she is told. Left behind by a free-spirited, feckless father, a seducer with a talent for drawing, she is raised by her uncle who has married her mother. The only memories of her father's one brief visit are the echoes of his footsteps on the stairs leading to her room. The only signs of him are letters from the widest reaches of the world- letters accompanied by brilliantly coloured drawings of exotic birds: the cuckoo from India, the ibis from Mozambique, the goose from Labrador, the hummingbird from the West Indies. The daughter longs for her father and, as she grows up, she is determined to find him and uncover the truth. 
 
Beautifully written and imagined, this strikingly lyrical novel evokes the atmosphere of a rural community in a changing world and explores the timeless themes of family, independence, and the often painful experience of emigration.

The Migrant Painter of Birds

Angelo, a young Hussar colonel and expert swordsman, has had to escape into France from his native Piedmont after killing an Austrian police-spy in a duel. Travelling the roads of Provence disguised as a French workman, he falls in with an eccentric marquise, Céline de Théus, and becomes a guest at the chateau, where she lives with her elderly brother Laurent. It is in the early years of the nineteenth century, the era of seditious movements to unseat those in power and destabilise monarchies - and no one has a greater appetite for fishing in these troubled waters than Laurent, whose years are belied by his youthful energy on horseback. Now he has married a raven-haired beauty in the prime of youth, and she is not indifferent to this new Italian guest. Angelo is the archetypal novel of romance and intrigue, which Jean Giono vests with a psychological depth that transcends the genre. Readers of Angelo's and Pauline's adventurers in The Horseman on the Roof will welcome the opportunity to meet them both in this novel which first introduces them.

Angelo

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

After his expulsion from Russia in 1974 for undermining the Communist regime, Solzhenitsyn wrote a secret record, while it was still fresh in his mind, of the courageous efforts of people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West. Before the fall of Communism he could not have published Invisible Allies in conjunction with his memoir The Oak and the Calf without putting those friends in jeopardy. Now the facts may be revealed in this intimate account of the network of individuals who risked life and liberty to ensure that his works were concealed, circulated in "samizdat", and exported via illicit channels. 
 
These conspirators, often unknown to one another, shared a devotion to the dissident writer's work and a hatred of an oppressive regime of censorship and denunciation. The circle was varied enough to include scholars and fellow writers, and also elderly babushkas who acted as couriers. With tenderness, respect and humour, Solzhenitsyn speaks of these partners in conspiracy: the women who typed copies of his works under the noses of prying neighbours; the journalists and diplomats who covertly carried microfilms across borders; the friends who hid various drafts of his works from the vigilance of the secret police.

Invisible Allies

Jaan Kross

When these stories were written the Estonians were not masters of their own house: the Soviets had been the occupying Power since 1940, apart from the three years 1941-44 when the Nazis were in occupation. Young Estonians, conscripted into the armies of both belligerents, found themselves compelled to fight each other. This is the background of these six stories featuring Peeter Mirk, a young law student who is more often in than out of prison and labour camp during these years - like his creator Jaan Kross. Forever carrying a charge of guilt that he has only contributed to his friends' misfortunes, he describes two thwarted attempts at escape ("The Wound", "Lead Piping"), his own dilemma when he can save his life only by sacrificing a friend's ("The Stahl Grammar"), his hand in a practical joke perpetrated by prisoners on one of their number in Tallinn Central Jail, which goes badly wrong ("The Conspiracy"). The last two stories (" The Ashtray", "The Day Eyes Were Opened") involve train journeys, chance encounters, and the unavoidable necessity of giving Fate a run for its money. 
 
If the tone is necessarily sombre as Kross recalls the years when Hitler and Stalin determined his countrymen's destiny, a wry humour keeps slipping through at every turn, which will suggest to the reader that Peeter Mirk must be cousin to the Good Soldier Schweik.

The Conspiracy & Other Stories

C. K. Stead

"Will appeal to lovers of the wayward novel game as it is played by Lawrence Sterne or Italo Calvino" - Jackie Wullschläger, Financial Times 
 
Professor Harry Butler is obsessed with the Mind/Body problem. Unfortunately, this is not the least of his problems. Harry's wife has turned his study into a sufi shrine where she sits cross-legged and chants for hours on end: "I am not this body..." And Harry doesn't know it yet but the Drug Squad have taken up residence in his kitchen so as to observe the movements of his neighbours and their visitors. Among these visitors, photographed by the drug squad, is one of his oldest friends. And living next door is a woman Harry may have had an encounter with in Singapore. 
 
The University is no escape from these complications on the domestic front: Harry's relationship with a student is causing concern among the Philosophy Department Women's Collective. Some of his colleagues also suspect him of going astray academically. 
 
The story takes place in Auckland, New Zealand. But who is telling the story? Why is he in Europe? Why does he keep moving from one city to another, and why does he seem to require the presence of a certain Uta Haverstrom in order to write it? 
 
The Death of the Body is a delightful blend of wit, intelligence and excitement.

Death Of The Body

Elias Canetti

Auto Da Fé is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction. 
 
Manipulated by his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis... 
 
Auto Da Fé was first published in Germany in 1935 as Die Blendung (The Blinding or Bedazzlement) and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove influential', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Auto Da Fé still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling agianst the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print.

Auto Da Fé

Monika Maron

Teasing her family's past out of the fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany's greatest writers asks about the secrets families keep, about the fortitude of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it. 
 
Born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, Monika Maron grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents, she questions her mother, whose selective memory throws up obstacles to Maron's understanding of her grandparents' horrifying denouement in Polish exile. 
 
Maron reconstructs their lives from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters. In telling her family's powerful and heroic story, she has written a memoir that has the force of a great novel and also stands both as an elaborate metaphor for the shame of the twentieth century and a life-affirming monument to her ancestors.

Pavel's Letters

Nadezhda Mandelstam

'Suddently, at about one o'clock in the morning, there was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. 'They've come for Osip', I said'. 
 
In 1933 the poet Osip Mandelstam- friend to Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova- wrote a spirited satire denouncing Josef Stalin. It proved to be a sixteen-line death sentence. For his one act of defiance he was arrested by the Cheka, the secret police, interrogated, exiled and eventually re-arrested. He died en route to one of Stalin's labour camps. 
 
His wife, Nadezhda (1899-1980) was with him on both occasions when he was arrested, and she loyally accompanied him into exile in the Urals, where he wrote his last great poems. Although his mind had been unbalanced by his ordeal in prison, his spirit remained unbroken. Eager to solve 'the Mandelstam problem', the Soviet authorities invited the couple to stay in a rest home near Moscow. Nadezhda saw it as an opportunity for her husband to mend his shattered life, but it was a trap and he was arrested for the last time. 
 
'My case will never be closed', Osip once said, and it is mostly through the courageous efforts of Nadezhda that his memory has been preserved. Hope against Hope, her first volume of memoirs, is a vivid and disturbing account of her last four years with her husband, the efforts she made to secure his release, to rescue his manuscripts from oblivion, and later, tragically, to discover the truth about his mysterious death. It is also a harrowing, first-hand account of how Stalin and his henchmen persecuted Russia's literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond. 
 
Nadezhda Mandelstam spent most of the Second World War in Tashkent, living with her friend Akhmatova. Only in 1964 was she at last granted permission to return to Moscow. Here she began Hope against Hope, and later Hope Abandoned, the two memoirs of her life.

Hope Against Hope

Bernardo Atxaga

Irene is 37 years old and just out of prison after serving time for terrorist activities. Deciding to return home to Bilbao, she takes a bus journey across Spain, striking up conversations with the passengers who include two plainclothes policemen. As the journey progresses, so the tension builds.

The Lone Woman

In the white heat the sky is opaque, the air leaden and the light intense. A single cavalryman wonders at the oppressive atmosphere of the unfamiliar countryside he is entering. Exile from his Italian homeland as well as an innate, stubborn pride compel him onward, into the heart of Provence and into the acute cholera epidemic which ravaged the country in the 1830s. 
 
Giono here directs a hallucinatory, lyrical narrative in which the mortal odours, the violent contractions of those who meet with the disease and the fear of a people confronted with insuperable natural forces are palpable. Death pervades the novel, but Angelo does not cease journeying, dodging blockades and quarantine imposed by troops - even seeking temporary refuge on the roofs of one town - determined to find his childhood friend, Giuseppe. Others join him on the road, and leave him. Only the young woman, Pauline de Théus, who calmly receives the intruder who one night descends from the roofs, proves a worthy travelling companion.

The Horseman On The Roof

Henry Green

Old Mr Rock, a widower, lives in a cottage with his granddaughter Elizabeth; his household includes Daisy the pig, Ted the goose and Alice the cat, but an additional member threatens in the person of Sebastian Birt, the schoolteacher whom Elizabeth wants to marry. Birt teaches in the state institution for girls run by two authoritarian spinsters, the inseparable Misses Edge and Baker. 
 
One sunny summer's morning, the morning of the Founders' Day Ball, as Mr Rock goes up to the school to fetch his pig-swill for Daisy, it is discovered that two of the girls have gone missing in the night. As he pursues the unfolding events of this crowded day and eavesdrops on the conversations up at the school and down at the cottage, Henry Green subtly teases out all the hidden ambitions and lusts, the suspicions and jealousies that are rife just beneath the placid surface of the institution. With an unmatched ear for dialogue and an absolute mastery in the depiction of character, he imbues this apparently routine school day with a powerful charge of drama and superb comic effect.

Concluding

Ivo Andric

In the small Bosnian town of Visegrad the stone bridge of the novel's title, built in the sixteenth century on the instruction of a grand vezir, bears witness to three centuries of conflict. Visegrad has long been a bone of contention between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but the bridge survives unscathed until 1914, when the collision of forces in the Balkans triggers the outbreak of World War I. 
 
The bridge spans generations, nationalities and creeds, silent testament to the lives played out on it. Radisav, a workman, tries to hinder its construction and is impaled alive on its highest point; beautiful Fata leaps from its parapet to escape an arranged marriage; Milan, inveterate gamble, risks all in one last game on it. With humour and compassion, Andric chronicles the lives of Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Christians unable to reconcile their disparate loyalties.

The Bridge Over the Drina

Suzanne Brogger

Beginning with the great-grandfather Isidor Levin and his emigration from Poland in the 19th century, his establishment of The Royal Danish Distillery - creators of the famous Danish snaps - and the family's successful assimilation in Denmark, the story follows the children and grandchildren, as they look for successes in Denmark and abroad, in business and within the arts. 
 
Suzanne Brogger's family saga takes us from Denmark to Riga and back, through two World Wars, to India and Afghanistan, to America as it was and as it is, and it takes us through boarding schools, mental hospitals, and almshouses for the poor. At the heart of the narrative is the grandmother, Katze, and her memories. She tells the story from her patrician apartment in Copenhagen's Gammel M-nt 14, where she has lived since the 1940s, and her story is a haunting portrait of the pride, conceitedness, grandness, and despair, that has followed the Levin family while the world outside the old apartment gradually fell apart. The family remains prey to drug addiction and suicide attempts. Some escape into sex, others into evangelical politics or religion. Regn becomes a UN diplomat in the Third World, his wife tries to kill their son, while their daughter serves her sexual apprenticeship in a Thai monastery-brothel and after a brief period of social acceptability, ends her days a bag lady in Copenhagen. 
 
As diverse and uncompromising as William Styron's Sophie's Choice and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. To have conjured up a cast of grotesques and rendered them sympathetic is a challenge that Suzanne Brogger has triumphantly brought off. .

The Jade Cat

Timo von Bock's release by the Czar from nine years' incarceration does not spell the end of the Baron's troubles: he is confined to his Livonian estate to live under the constant eye of police informers planted among his own household, and is subjected to endless humiliations. It is claimed that he is a madman and in need of 'protection': a man would need to be insane, after all, to have taken a Czar at his word when asked for a candid appraisal of the state's infirmities. 
 
From the year of his release from prison and return to his wife Eeva, a woman of peasant stock to whom, with her brother Jakob, he has given a solid education, the Baron's life is recorded in a secret journal by this same Jakob, a shrewd and observant house-guest. 
 
Reconstructing the events leading up to the Baron's incarceration in 1818 and subsequent to his release in 1827, Jakob little by little brings to light mysteries surrounding the 'Czar's madman'. Was his madness genuine? What was the secret understanding between him and his boon companion Czar Alexander I, who committed him to prison? 
 
In The Czar's Madman Jaan Kross weaves together the elements of intrigue surrounding those historical characters who survived in post-Napoleonic Russia, and by a skillful shifting of chronology and viewpoints, creates a superbly rich and moving narrative. 
 
Winner of France's Best Foreign Book Award.

Showing results for: ‘Neil MacGregor’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter