Seznam produktů značky Random House (UK Division)

Z is a 23-year-old Chinese language student who has come to London to learn English. When the book begins she can barely ask for a cup of tea, but when language comes, so does love. As she gets to know British culture she also falls for an older English man who lives a resolutely bachelor life in Hackney. It's a million miles away from the small Chinese town she comes from, where her parents want nothing more for her than that she should follow them into the shoe business. Z learns about sex, humour, companionship and passion, but she also learns the painful truth that language is also a barrier and the more you know about it, the less you understand. Written in short chapters, each the definition of a word, this is a brilliantly clever book that pokes fun at England and China and expl

No one in the village of Karlstein dares to leave their homes on All Souls' Eve - the night Zamiel the Demon Huntsman comes to claim his prey. But the evil Count Karlstein has struck a terrible bargain with Zamiel, and so the lives of his two young nieces, Lucy and Charlotte, are in danger. Their only hope lies with Hildi, a castle maidservant, and her fearless brother Peter. Can they save the girls from their dreadful fate? Only one thing is certain - the Demon Huntsman will not return to his dark wood unsatisfied! A deliciously terrifying and wickedly funny Gothic tale, Count Karlstein is the first-ever children's book by Philip Pullman, winner of the Whitbread Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Fiction Award and two Smarties Awards. Originally published in 1982, this new editio

On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games-John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a cerebral feast.

Roundworld is in trouble again, and this time it looks fatal. Having created it in the first place, the wizards of Unseen University feel vaguely responsible for its safety. They know the creatures who lived there escaped the impending Big Freeze by inventing the space elevator - they even intervened to rid the planet of a plague of elves, who attempted to divert humanity onto a different time track. But now it's all gone wrong - Victorian England has stagnated and the pace of progress would embarrass a limping snail. Unless something drastic is done, there won't be time for anyone to invent spaceflight and the human race will be turned into ice-pops. Why, though, did history come adrift? Was it Sir Arthur Nightingale's dismal book about natural selection? Or was it the devastating res

Written when Hemingway was at the height of his creative powers, the stories in "Winner Take Nothing" glow with the mark of his unique talent. Hunters, wives, old men of wisdom, waiters, fighters, women loved, women lost: they are all here, living on the raw edge, making love, facing the inevitable reality of death. The characters, the dialogue, the settings, the remarkable insight could have come only from Hemingway's imagination. As an introduction to his work, or as an overview of the themes he developed at greater length in his novels, it is a stunningly successful collection.

Diego Armando Maradona needs little introduction - a poor boy from a Buenos Aires shanty-town, his genius with a ball took him to the heights of European and World football, and his struggle with the pressures of life inside and outside the game pulled him right back down again. Never before has Maradona given us his extraordinary story in his own words, until now.

When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset; a couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's; a woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden; an insomniac wife wakes up to a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible - even death. In every one of the stories that make up The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal. He has a deadpan genius for dislocating realities to uncover the surreal in the everday, the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

At the heart of Joseph Heller's bestselling novel, first published in 1961, is a satirical indictment of military madness and stupidity, and the desire of the ordinary man to survive it. It is the tale of the dangerously sane Captain Yossarian, who spends his time in Italy plotting to survive.

Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. A chance pools win enables his to capture the art student Miranda and keep her in the cellar of the Sussex house he has bought with the windfall. The situation is seen first from the collector's point of view: he thinks the chloroform pad no more vicious than his butterfly net, and patiently waits for the barriers of class and taste that inhibit their love to break down in the limbo of their isolation. She, the creator, desperate for her freedom, tries to be understanding but cannot banish her contempt for everything anti-life that the collector stands for.

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. It was The Old Man and the Sea that won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here, in a perfectly crafted story, is unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements in which he lives.