Moderní

A collection of down-to-earth essays includes reflections on life, love, and growing old.

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.

There's more than one side to every story. 'Another chart-topping blockbuster from publishing goddess Marian Keyes - packed with sound writing, wit and common-sense.' Guardian The agent: Jojo, a highflying literary agent on the up, has just made a very bad career move: she's jumped into bed with her married boss Mark ... The bestseller: Jojo's sweet-natured client Lily's first novel is a roaring success. She and lover Anton celebrate by spending the advance for her second book. Then she gets writer's block ... The unknown: Gemma used to be Lily's best friend - until Lily 'stole' Anton. Now she's writing her own story - painfully and hilariously - when supershark agent Jojo stumbles across it ... When their fortunes become entangled, it seems too much to hope that they'll all find a hap

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner prizes, THE HOURS is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Now a major motion picture, directed by Stephen Daldry (BILLY ELLIOT) and starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Clare Danes and Ed Harris. In 1920's London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940's Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990's New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exqui

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . . A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza’s impassioned advances and married Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half century, Florentino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina. Having sworn his eternal love to her, he lives for the day when he can court her again.

When Fermina’s husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love. But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?

A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; it exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how

Stricken with grief after the death of Queen Lostris, Taita becomes a hermit, devoting himself to the Occult, gradually transforming himself into a Warlock. He sees a divine purpose in his suffering when he is called upon to save the dynasty of Queen Lostris from the evil that looms over Egypt.

A novel in which a passionate affair between a French aristocrat and Michael Courtney forces her to set out and seek a future for their unborn child in Africa, but first she must brave the terrors of war, shipwreck, fever and the vastness of Namibia before finding a home.

It is 1667 and Sir Francis Courteney and his son Henry "Hal" Courteney are on patrol in their fighting caravel off the Agulhas Cape of Southern Africa. They have a letter from Charles II sanctioning them to hunt down and capture enemy ships "beyond the line".