In Burdett’s brilliantly cynical mystery thriller, the follow-up to Bangkok 8 (2004), Royal Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is called in by his supervisor, hard-bitten Captain Vikorn, to investigate the murder of a CIA operative, Mitch Turner, found disemboweled and mutilated. The prime suspect is a beautiful bar girl, Chanya, with whom Sonchai believes himself to be in love. When Turner’s murder turns out to be far more complicated than originally thought, Sonchai must deal with his boss’s rages and Chanya’s gradually revealed secrets, along with CIA agents who have come to investigate the crime, a Thai army general with whom Vikorn has been feuding for years, Yakuza gangsters, Japanese tattooists, Muslim fundamentalists and more. Thoroughly familiar with Thailand, Burdett does an impressive job of depicting an often romanticized society from the inside out. His characters are unforgettable, his dialogue fast-paced and perfectly pitched, his numerous asides and observations generally as cutting as they are funny.
Kapcsolódó könyvek
H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
The War of the Worlds (1898) is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. It describes the experiences of an unnamed narrator who travels through the suburbs of London as the Earth is invaded by Martians. It is one of the earliest stories that details a conflict between mankind and an alien race.
The War of the Worlds is split into two parts, Book one: The Coming of the Martians, and Book two: The Earth under the Martians. The novel is narrated by a writer of philosophical articles who throughout the narrative struggles to reunite with his wife, while witnessing the Martians rampaging through the southern English counties. Part one also features the tale of his brother, who accompanies two women to the coast in the hope of escaping England as it is invaded.
Neil Gaiman - M Is for Magic
A sinister jack-in-the-box haunts the lives of children who owned it, a stray cat does nightly battle to protect his adopted family, and a boy raised in a graveyard confronts the much more troubled world of the living in this wonderful book of short stories by master storyteller Neil Gaiman.
These eleven stories range from the scary to the whimsical, the fantastical to the humorous - each a different journey in which the reader encounters the rich and wonderful imagination of a writer who knows how to thrill and satisfy his audience.
Agatha Christie - The Hollow
Lady Angkatell, intrigued by the criminal mind, has invited Hercule Poirot to her estate for a weekend house party. The Belgian detective's arrival at the Hollow is met with an elaborate tableau staged for his amusement: a doctor lies in a puddle of red paint, his timid wife stands over his body with a gun while the other guests look suitably shocked. But this is no charade. The paint is blood and the corpse real!
Nick Hornby - About a Boy
Will is a thirty-six but acts like a teenager. He reads the right magazines, goes to the right clubs and knows which trainers to wear. He's also discovered a great way to score with women - at single parent's groups, full of available mothers, all waiting for Mr Nice. That's where he meets Marcus, the oldest twelve-year-old in the world. Marcus is a bit strange: he listens to Mozart, looks after his mum and he's never even owned a pair of trainers. Perhaps if Will can teach Marcus how to be a kid, Marcus can help Will grow up...
Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down
"The story is written in the first-person narrative from the points of view of the four main characters, Martin, Maureen, Jess and JJ. These four strangers happen to meet on the roof of a high building called Topper's House in London on New Year's Eve, each with the intent of committing suicide. Their plans for death in solitude, however, are ruined when they meet. The novel recounts their misadventures as they decide to come down from the roof alive - however temporarily that may be."
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone in feeling discontent. Harbouring an unnatural desire for solitude, and a perverse distaste for the pleasures of compulsory promiscuity, Bernard has an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress-Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece.
Nick Hornby - Slam
There was this time when everything seemed to have come together. And so obviously it was time to go and screw it all up.’ Sam is sixteen and a skater. Just so there are no terrible misunderstandings: skating = skateboarding. There’s no ice. Life is ticking along nicely for Sam: his mum’s got rid of her rubbish boyfriend, he’s thinking about college and he’s met someone. Alicia. Then a little accident happens. One with big consequences for someone just finding his way in life. Sam can’t run (let alone skate) away from this one. He’s a boy facing a man’s problems and the question is – has he got what it takes to confront them?
Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
When Laura dumps Rob (on the very first page) he is aggrieved and exhilarated, 35 and petrified. Trying to work out what went wrong, obsessed with music, and running an ailing record shop, he sets out on the road to self-discovery.
Nick Hornby's first novel, an international bestseller and instantly recognized by critics and readers alike as a classic, helps to explain men to women, and men to men. Rob is good on music: he owns a small record shop and has strong views on what's decent and what isn't. But he's much less good on relationships. In fact, he's not at all sure that he wants to commit himself to anyone. So it's hardly surprising that his girlfriend decides that enough is enough.
Dan Brown - The Lost Symbol
The most anticipated publication of the decade, The Lost Symbol is the stunning new thriller featuring Robert Langdon. Six years in the writing, it is Dan Brown's extraordinary sequel to his internationally bestselling Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code. Nothing is ever what it first appears in a Dan Brown novel. Set over a breathtaking 12 hour time span, the book's narrative takes the reader on an exhilarating journey through a masterful and unexpected landscape as Professor of Symbology, Robert Langdon, is once again called into action.
Neil Gaiman - Smoke and Mirrors
The distinctive storytelling genius of Neil Gaiman has been acclaimed by writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Stephen King. Now in this new collection of stories — several of which have never before appeared in print, and more than half that have never been collected — that will dazzle the senses and haunt the imagination. Miraculous inventions and unforgettable characters inhabit these pages: an elderly widow who finds the Holy Grail in a second-hand store...a frightened little boy who bargains for his life with a troll living under a bridge by the railroad tracks...a stray cat who battles nightly against a recurring evil that threatens his unsusupecting adoptive family. In these stories, Gaiman displays the power, wit, insight and outrageous originality that has made him one of the most unique literary artists of our day.
Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere
Under the streets of London there's a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.
Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: neverwhere.
Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Played with Fire
The electrifying follow-up to the phenomenal best seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and this time it is Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, who is the focus and fierce heart of the story.
Mikael Blomkvist - crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium - has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.
On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander.
Now, as Blomkvist - alone in his belief in her innocence - plunges into his own investigation of the slayings, Salander is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind
Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'cemetery of lost books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man brings his 10-year-old son Daniel one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book from the shelves and pulls out LA SOMBRA DEL VIENTO by Julian Carax.
But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. Then, one night, as he is wandering the old streets once more, Daniel is approached by a figure who reminds him of a character from LA SOMBRA DEL VIENTO, a character who turns out to be the devil. This man is tracking down every last copy of Carax's work in order to burn them. What begins as a case of literary curiosity turns into a race to find out the truth behind the life and death of Julian Carax and to save those he left behind. A page-turning exploration of obsession in literature and love, and the places that obsession can lead.
Dan Brown - Digital Fortress
Chillingly current and filled with more intelligence secrets than Tom Clancy, Digital Fortress transports the reader deep within the most powerful intelligence organization on earth--the National Security Agency (NSA)--an ultra-secret, multi-billion dollar agency which (until now) less than three percent of Americans knew existed.
When the NSA's most classified technological wonder--an invincible code-breaking machine--encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls in its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant and beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power.
The NSA is being held hostage... not by guns or bombs, but by a code so ingeniously complex that if released it will cripple U.S. intelligence.
Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Susan Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in. Betrayed on all sides she finds herself fighting not only for her country, but for her life, and in the end, for the life of the man she loves.
With a startling twist that leaves the agency scrambling to avert the biggest intelligence disaster in U.S. history, Digital Fortress never lets up.
From the underground hallways of power, to the skyscrapers of Tokyo, to the towering cathedrals of Spain, a desperate race unfolds. It is a battle for survival -- a crucial bid to destroy a creation of inconceivable genius... an impregnable code-writing formula that threatens to obliterate the balance of power. Forever.
Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
Barney Stinson - Matt Kuhn - The Bro Code
Everyone's life is governed by an internal code of conduct. Some call it morality. Others call it religion. But Bros in the know call this holy grail the Bro Code. Historically a spoken tradition passed from one generation to the next, the official code of conduct for Bros appears here in its published form for the first time ever. By upholding the tenets of this sacred and legendary document, any dude can learn to achieve Bro-dom.
Ismeretlen szerző - Warriors
From George R. R. Martin’s Introduction to Warriors:
“People have been telling stories about warriors for as long as they have been telling stories. Since Homer first sang the wrath of Achilles and the ancient Sumerians set down their tales of Gilgamesh, warriors, soldiers, and fighters have fascinated us; they are a part of every culture, every literary tradition, every genre. All Quiet on the Western Front, From Here to Eternity, and The Red Badge of Courage have become part of our literary canon, taught in classrooms all around the country and the world. Our contributors make up an all-star lineup of award-winning and bestselling writers, representing a dozen different publishers and as many genres. We asked each of them for the same thing—a story about a warrior. Some chose to write in the genre they’re best known for. Some decided to try something different. You will find warriors of every shape, size, and color in these pages, warriors from every epoch of human history, from yesterday and today and tomorrow, and from worlds that never were. Some of the stories will make you sad, some will make you laugh, and many will keep you on the edge of your seat.”
The stories in the first mass market volume of this book are:
Introduction: Stories of the Spinner Rack, by George R. R. Martin
Forever Bound, by Joe Haldeman
The Eagle and the Rabbit, by Steven Saylor
And Ministers of Grace, by Tad Williams
The King of Norway, by Cecelia Holland
Defenders of the Frontier, by Robert Silverberg
The Mystery Knight, by George R. R. Martin
Many of these writers are bestsellers. All of them are storytellers of the highest quality. Together they make a volume of unforgettable reading.
Kurt Vonnegut - Az ötös számú vágóhíd / Slaughterhouse-Five
6., kétnyelvű ünnepi kiadás
Van okunk ünnepelni. Kerek negyven esztendeje, 1969-ben jelent meg első ízben ez a méretében szerény, irodalomtörténeti jelentőségét illetően azonban korszakos mű.
A szerző, ez a "tisztavérű" német, 1944-ben, alig huszonkét évesen az amerikai hadsereg felderítőjeként német hadifogságba esett a belga hadszintéren. Drezdába vitték. Az ékszerdoboz-szépségű barokk kórházvárost a brit légierő nem sokkal a második világháború befejezése előtt porig égette. Bosszúból. Coventryért, Londonért. Néhány óra alatt százharmincötezer ember, csupa öreg, gyermek, asszony és hadirokkant égett szénné. Katona egy sem akadt köztük. Vonnegutnak és társainak jutott a feladat, hogy a közparkokban hatalmas piramisokat építsenek a hullákból, és elhamvasszák őket.
Tömegmészárlásról alighanem teljes képtelenség katartikus, ráadásul mulatságos könyvet írni. A szerző maga huszonöt éven át kísérletezett vele, mire végül megszületett a nevezetes "Dezda-kötet", s általa a világméretű Vonnegut-kultusz. 1969 óta millió és millió példány fogyott el a könyvből.
Az írót nemcsak a hazájában, de az egész bolygón afféle prófétaként tisztelik. A groteszk, az abszurd, a fekete humor apostola ő. Meghalt, mégis elevenebben hat, mint valaha.
E kétnyelvű kötet főhajtás a megrendítő erejű alkotás és Kurt Vonnegut géniusza előtt.
Nick Hornby - More Baths, Less Talking
"Read what you enjoy, not what bores you," Nick Hornby tells us. That simple, liberating, and indispensable directive animates each installment of the celebrated critic and author's monthly column in the Believer. In this delightful and never-musty tour of his reading life, Hornby tells us not just what to read, but how to read. Whether tackling a dismayingly bulky biography of Dickens while his children destroy something in the next room, or getting sucked into a serious assessment of Celine Dion during an intensely fought soccer match featuring his beloved Arsenal, or devouring an entire series of children's books while on vacation, Hornby's reviews are rich, witty, and occasionally madcap. These essays capture the joy and ire, the despair and exhilaration of the book-lover's life, and will appeal equally to both monocle-wearing salonnieres and people, like him, who spend a lot of time thinking about Miley Cyrus's next role.