Jack McNulty is a 'temporary gentleman', an Irishman whose commission in the British army in the Second World War was never permanent. In 1957, sitting in his lodgings in Accra, he urgently sets out to write his story. He feels he cannot take one step further, or even hardly a breath, without looking back at all that has befallen him. He is an ordinary man, both petty and heroic, but he has seen extraordinary things. He has worked and wandered around the world - as a soldier, an engineer, a UN observer - trying to follow his childhood ambition to better himself. And he has had a strange and tumultuous marriage. Mai Kirwan was a great beauty of Sligo in the 1920s, a vivid mind, but an elusive and mysterious figure too. Jack married her, and shared his life with her, but in time she slipped from his grasp. A heart-breaking portrait of one man's life - of his demons and his lost love - The Temporary Gentleman is, ultimately, a novel about Jack's last bid for freedom, from the savage realities of the pa

One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, USA Today National Bestseller A small-town newspaper columnist with old-fashioned views of the modern world. A World War II veteran grappling with his emotional and physical scars. A second-rate actor plunged into sudden stardom and a whirlwind press junket. Four friends traveling to the moon in a rocketship built in the backyard. These are just some of the stories that Tom Hanks captures in his first work of fiction: a collection of shorts that explore with great affection, humor, and insight the human condition in all its foibles. The stories are linked by one thing: in each of them, a typewriter plays a part, sometimes minor, sometimes central. To many, typewriters represent a level of craftsmanship, beauty, and individuality that is harder and harder to find in the modern world. In these stories, Hanks gracefully reaches that typewriter-worthy level. By turns whimsical, witty, and moving, Uncommon Type establishes him as a welcome and wonderful new voice in co

Martinique, 1765, and brothers Emile and Lucien are charged by their French master, Father Cleophas, with a mission. They must return to Grenada, the island they once called home, and smuggle back the 42 slaves claimed by English invaders at the hospital plantation in Fort Royal. While Lucien, barely in his teens, sees the trip as a great adventure, the older and worldlier Emile has no illusions about the dangers they will face. But with no choice other than to obey Cleophas - and sensing the possibility, however remote, of finding his first love Celeste - he sets out with his brother on this 'reckless venture'. With great characters, a superb narrative set up, and language that is witty, bawdy and thrillingly alive, Sugar Money is a novel to treasure.

Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honor de Balzac's Eug nie Grandet is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics. In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eug nie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eug nie's own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. Eug nie Grandet is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac's Com die humaine cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice. M. A. Crawford's lucid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the irony an

《地震鸟》是Susanna Jones创作的*一部精彩的获奖悬疑作品 现在被拍成了一部重要电影，由Alicia Vikander主演。 新人匕首奖年度*犯罪小说处女作得主 约翰 卢威连 莱斯文学奖得主 今天清晨，在我被捕的几个小时之前，我被一场小地震震醒了。我提起这件事并不是想说这两件事之间有联系 因为在东京，每个月我们都要经历一次这样的地震。我只是在描述事情发生的顺序。那是一个不同寻常的日子，我不想忘记任何事情 《地震鸟》的故事就这样开始了。这是一部令人难忘的，以日本为背景的小说。它在*一页就呈现了一桩谋杀案，并将读者带入了主要犯罪嫌疑人Lucy Fly 一个年轻而脆弱的英国女孩，她在东京生活和从事翻译工作 的内心世界。当Lucy被警方讯问时，她向读者诉说了她的过去。 Lucy为什么在10年前离开英国去日本隐姓埋名？到底