Beletrie v angličtině

Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously 'handcuffed to history' by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent - and whose privilege and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times. Through Saleem's gifts - inner ear and wildly sensitive sense of smell - we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast, colourful background of the India of the 20th century.

Lemuel Gulliver, ship` s surgeon and castaway, has awoken in Lilliput, where the size of the tiny inhabitants makes their concerns and quarrels seem ridiculous. A second journey takes him to the kingdom of giants, where again his size gives him new insights into human behaviour. Then, after he is cast adrift by pirates, Gulliver visits a series of islands where learning is misdirected and immortality is only misery. Gulliver`s final voyage brings him to the land of the Houyhnhms, horses with reason, who share their domain with the brutish Yahoos. He returns to England a changed man.

James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its Modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, Ulysses offers the reader a life-changing experience.

No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles – military and domestic – are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable figure in this corrupt world is Dobbin with his devotion to Amelia, bringing pathos and depth to Thackeray’s gloriously satirical epic of love and social adventure.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"—it was the tumultuous era of the French Revolution. Rich in drama and romance, this deftly plotted tale of adventure and courage by the most popular of English novelists bristles with suspense, culminating in a daring prison escape in the shadow of the guillotine.

The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens’s tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters – the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, in Oliver Twist Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.

Charles Osborne’s adapation of Agatha Christie’s classic play, Spider’s Web, features Clarissa, the wife of a Foreign Office diplomat given to daydreaming. ‘Supposing I were to come down one morning and find a dead body in the library, what should I do?’ she muses. Clarissa has her chance to find out when she discovers a body in her drawing-room. Desperate to dispose of it, she attempts to persuade her house guests to become accessories and accomplices. As the search begins for the murderer in their midst, the house party is interrupted by the arrival of a police inspector, who needs convincing there has been no murder at all. That shouldn’t be too hard for Clarissa who maintains that lies are always more believable, ‘I suppose when you’re making things up you get car

Baghdad is the chosen location for a secret superpower summit. Unfortunately the word is out, and an underground organisation in the Middle East is plotting to sabotage the talks. Into this explosive situation stumbles Victoria Jones, a girl with a yearning for adventure who gets more than she bargains for when a wounded agent dies in her hotel room. Now, if only she could make sense of his final words:'…Lucifer…Basrah…Lefarge…'

Just after midnight, a snowdrift stopped the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train was surprisingly full for the time of the year. But by the morning there was one passenger fewer. An American lay dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside.

With tension mounting, detective Hercule Poirot comes up with not one, but two solutions to the crime.

The tranquillity of a cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish and beautiful. A girl who had everything … until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: ‘I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.’ Yet in this exotic setting nothing was ever quite what it seemed …

It’s seven in the morning. The Bantrys wake to find the body of a young woman in their library. She is wearing evening dress and heavy make-up, which is now smeared across her cheeks.

But who is she? How did she get there? And what is the connection with another dead girl, whose charred remains are later discovered in an abandoned quarry?

The respectable Bantrys invite Miss Marple to solve the mystery… before tongues start to wag.

For an instant the two trains ran together, side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth witnessed a murder. Helplessly, she stared out of her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman’s throat. The body crumpled. Then the other train drew away. But who, apart from Miss Marple, would take her story seriously? After all, there were no suspects, no other witnesses… and no corpse.